American Thought Leaders: w/ Matt Ridley – Here’s What They Hid in Wuhan (Transcript)

Well, so another thing I know that we both zeroed in on — because from reading your work, I know we both kind of zeroed in on — was this proximal origins paper in Nature Medicine. Because some of the viewers will know I have a background in evolutionary biology. I can kind of have a better understanding than the average person of these things. This, of course, wasn’t a paper. It was kind of a letter. But when I read this, basically it argued that there’s no chance, there’s zero chance that this could be from a lab. And I thought that was astonishing, an astonishing claim, because it just simply was false. It was obviously false, right?

And it was the weirdest moment for me because this was a journal I would have given my left foot to be published in — Nature — at one point in my life, right? And they were obviously publishing something which was obviously false to me. And I checked with some friends from the past and my friends actually agreed with me there. And one of them had even written to Nature Medicine saying, “How could you publish this? This is obviously not true, right?” But this document was used extensively to justify, yes, absolutely, it has to be a natural origin. And it changed my life.

MATT RIDLEY: Me too. Me too. That was the paper I was referring to when I said that I started reassuring colleagues that this couldn’t have come out of a lab. I was lied to. I was deceived. It is disgraceful what happened with that paper. Because we now know what happened with that paper.

First of all, in its own terms, the paper is extremely unpersuasive. It has two main arguments for saying that it can rule out a lab origin. Those are the words used in a press release by Kristian Andersen, the senior author. The first argument is, it’s not a perfect fit to our receptor. If we had designed it, we’d have made it perfect.

JAN JEKIELEK: What?

MATT RIDLEY: It’s a pretty good fit. Where’d you get the idea that we would always get it right first time? That was a completely bizarre argument. And the other argument was, yes, it’s got a furin cleavage site which makes it way more infectious than any other sarbecovirus, and no other sarbecovirus has ever been found with one, but don’t worry, we’ll find one with one in it naturally. Well, six years on, we still haven’t found one, so that was a non-argument at the time and is an even weaker argument now.

So on its own terms, the paper was extremely unpersuasive. And we know it was unpersuasive because the senior author of that paper, in his private messages, said before, during, and after publishing the paper: “I still think a lab leak is frigging likely.” That’s what — those were the words he used. I’m sorry, but when I was in science, like you — I’m an evolutionary biologist by background — you do not publish papers that say the opposite of what you think. So he claims he’s changed his mind. He didn’t change his mind. He changed his line.

Now, why did he change his line? Well, we know a little bit about that too, because he had an exchange with one of his co-authors. This is a man named Kristian Andersen, and the co-author was Andrew Rambaut. They had an exchange in which Rambaut said, “I hate it when it gets political, but sometimes you have to make compromises politically.” I can’t remember the exact wording, but it was like that. And Andersen replied, “Yep, I completely agree. It’s a pity you have to get political, but we have to.” For political reasons, they published a paper that says the very opposite of what they thought in private.

The other thing that’s wrong with that paper is that it was basically commissioned by Jeremy Farrar of the Wellcome Trust and Anthony Fauci of NIAID, who were consulted throughout, who helped change the wording, and are not mentioned in the paper. And we have now got emails saying, “Please don’t mention us in the paper.” Again, that is a scientific disgrace. Yet, as you say, hundreds of us have written to the editor of Nature Medicine saying this paper must be retracted. It’s wrong. It doesn’t say what they thought. It’s left out some authors. It’s disguised its origins and it’s misled the world, right?

JAN JEKIELEK: And it’s false. I mean, it’s false on its face.

MATT RIDLEY: Yes. We have not had the courtesy of a reply from the editor of Nature Medicine. This is extraordinary.

What the New Intelligence Disclosures Reveal — and What’s Still Missing

JAN JEKIELEK: Do you think these new disclosures from the Director of National Intelligence in the U.S. might change that?

MATT RIDLEY: Well, I’d like to think that this would help, but in a sense, we already had strong enough evidence that there was a tremendously energetic cover-up of the lab leak possibility in the early months of 2020 in America, right? The American side of things we kind of knew already. It’s nice to have confirmation and some more details.

What we need now — because pretty well everybody I know of any intelligence, and who’s looked into it at all, concludes it’s a lab leak now, except Science magazine, Nature magazine, the Royal Society in London who won’t even debate it, the National Academies in America. So the scientific establishment won’t budge, and that’s a problem.

So what we need now is more intelligence about China. We can find out more about what went on in America, and that’s helpful, but we need to know: a) what experiments they did on what days, why they took their database offline, why three of them went to hospital, why the man who developed the first vaccine threw himself off the roof, and why they were suddenly in a panic about lab safety in the fall of 2019, etc., etc.

We need to know, did they fund the proposal for putting a furin cleavage site into a sarbecovirus for the first time the year before the pandemic — the DEFUSE proposal, yeah — which is as close as you can get to a precise recipe for making SARS-CoV-2. They talk about a virus that’s 20% different from SARS — that’s this one. They talk about looking for furin cleavage sites, and if they can’t find one, putting one in. And then in this virus, there appears a furin cleavage site which has the same sequence as furin cleavage sites that they’ve put into genes elsewhere in the laboratory world.

So it’s quite extraordinary that China has been allowed to get away with revealing almost nothing about what went on in that laboratory. And instead of saying, “That’s a disgrace, we can’t cooperate with you scientifically until you clear this up,” the world has said, “Oh fine, let’s go on having scientific collaborations with you as much as you want.” Doesn’t seem right to me.

The Intelligence Community, Military Labs, and Dual-Purpose Research

JAN JEKIELEK: The part that I also find confusing is — certainly the US intelligence community, which clearly is involved in this — that’s one of the things that is revealed, I think, in these DNI recently declassified documents, just that there is this kind of constant collaboration movement. The intelligence community clearly knew that this lab was a Chinese military lab.

Now, why am I saying that? Because in China, there’s a military-civil fusion doctrine. If something has a military potential, heads will roll if that military potential isn’t explored in a technology. And here we’re talking about gain-of-function research and viruses — this is bioweapons research on the other side of the coin, so to speak. So absolutely, it’s a military lab. Absolutely, the intelligence community had to know that.

I’m looking at these emails, chummy conversations between the head of the Chinese CDC and the Americans. I find that bizarre because we’re dealing with the Chinese Communist Party here, right?

MATT RIDLEY: Yeah. To be fair, I think it’s best described as a dual-purpose lab.

JAN JEKIELEK: There was no—

MATT RIDLEY: Obviously there was a military side to it. Yeah. And there was a civilian side.

JAN JEKIELEK: Yes.

MATT RIDLEY: Quite where the boundary was between them, we don’t know.

JAN JEKIELEK: It is that the military side is of importance.

Gain-of-Function Research and the Making of a Pandemic

MATT RIDLEY: Of enormous importance. Right, right. And I don’t myself think we have evidence that they were trying to make a weapon out of SARS, SARS-CoV viruses. I think it’s more likely that they thought of themselves in military terms as doing something defensive — how do we get ready to react if someone uses a sarbecovirus as a weapon against us? But that’s nearly always the excuse for bioweapons research, by the way, in the West and the East. And of course it’s a sort of self-fulfilling motion.

The basic facts are that Ralph Baric in North Carolina invented a technique for manipulating coronaviruses, and it was a brilliant technique. It meant that you could swap spike genes between coronaviruses. And the Chinese said, “Could we copy that technology?” And basically the Americans said yes, as long as you let us have access to some of your viruses. Some kind of deal like that was done, and they then got quite good at that technique, and they produced in that lab — this is not speculation, this is fact — they produced viruses that killed mice 3 times as efficiently and that increased the viral load in humanized mice 10,000 times.

Now, if one of those viruses, which by the way was being tested on humanized mice with human ACE2 receptors, if one of those viruses got out, of course it would cause a pandemic. Now the experiments we’ve seen did not happen to a virus close enough to SARS-CoV-2 to do that, but we know that in the last year they switched to looking at ones that were closer. They were doing this at biosafety level 2. I mean, that’s a gloves and a mask. You don’t even have to wear a mask in a biosafety level 2 lab. You’re not suited up. There’s no negative pressure and all that kind of thing.

And the reason — the EcoHealth Alliance, their American collaborator who was funneling US taxpayers’ money to the lab, said, “Yeah, we like doing this work in Wuhan because it’s more cost-effective, because they work at a lower biosafety level.” Get your head around that. It’s a gigantic scandal, and most of the world wants to say, “Well, yeah, probably a lab leak, but move on.” I’m sorry, we can’t move on. 20 million people are dead. A technology has just demonstrated to every terrorist on the planet that this is a really good way of bringing the world economy to its knees. And all you need do is set up a biological laboratory and start working on viruses and hire a few experts.

And do you know what? There’s no treaty, there’s no international monitoring. Nobody is saying who’s ordering the reagents, who’s working on particular kinds of viruses. This is not an academic exercise where we want to know why people died. This is something where we need to make sure it doesn’t happen again.

And by the way, I spoke to a very senior scientist in the UK at one point who had been predicting that we’d have a nasty biological accident at some point around now. And I said, “Well done, you got that right.” And he said, “No, no, no, no — it’s very important we never find out. It’s very important we never find out.”

JAN JEKIELEK: I said, “Why? Explain that to me.”

MATT RIDLEY: I said, “Why?” And he said, “Because it would disrupt relations with China.” He said, “You’re probably right, it probably did come out of a lab, but it’s better we don’t find out.”

I said, “Would you say that about a plane crash?” When a plane crashes, we now have a system in the world where the details of why that crash happened are shared. If British Airways crashes, it doesn’t say, “No, United Airlines can’t be privy to the information we found out.” We have a global agreement that says that every plane crash, the lessons from it are shared with everybody. Why don’t we have that in this case?

Western Academia’s Admiration of China

JAN JEKIELEK: Why don’t you tell me why you think this senior scientist has this view, this astonishing view?

MATT RIDLEY: There is a huge dependence of Western science on China now — collaboration with China, Chinese funding. Many of the science journals get most of their revenue from Chinese researchers — not most, but a very, very large chunk of their revenue from Chinese scientists. China actually has an arrangement where it pays upfront for publication fees in journals. It rewards scientists for publishing in high-impact journals financially, and so many of them slice and dice their results to get as many publications out as possible. So Chinese scientists in that sense are very productive, and that makes them very lucrative for Western scientific publishing. That’s an issue that needs looking into.

But there is also a general admiration of the Chinese regime in academia. We’ve seen this explicitly in all sorts of ways. Academics are very left-wing in this country and most of the Western world. Academics are, in my experience, and have been for quite a long time, people who admire top-down directive politics. They don’t think in terms of bottom-up democracy. They think it’s messy. They think, “Look, come on, whoever’s in charge should say this needs to be done. Tell people to brush their teeth twice a day. Tell people not to drink milk.” The desire to tell the world how to behave is quite strong in academia.

So when the pandemic came along, you had people from the academic world — the editor of The Lancet is one of them, he published an editorial praising Xi Jinping Thought at one point — who said, “Now look at China, they’re cracking down on this virus, they’re telling people not to leave their homes, that’s what we need.” The whole sort of authoritarianism was very appealing to a certain kind of academic, public health official, and government bureaucrat in the West.

So there is a China worship problem here that doesn’t see the harsh side of that kind of regime and doesn’t think in terms of liberty and personal liberty. And they didn’t want blame for this virus to go to this regime they rather admire.

The Failure of Lockdowns

JAN JEKIELEK: Except today, when we look back 5 years now, right, we see the abject failure of these policies, whether in China or here. So do you think there will be a shift in this admiration, given we’ve had the experiment now? What does this top-down rule — how does this top-down rule work in a pandemic scenario? It turns out it fails in every respect.

MATT RIDLEY: There’s absolutely no doubt that lockdowns were a catastrophe. They didn’t work and they caused all sorts of other huge problems. Nobody can look at the evidence now — the evidence from Sweden, the evidence from different American states, etc. — and not come to that conclusion. This virus was too infectious, and too infectious in asymptomatic people, for lockdowns to work. Full stop. That’s what we need to learn.

They might have worked in the early months in Wuhan when it wasn’t quite so infectious and when you had a ridiculously authoritarian regime, but no — the next time we have a highly infectious viral pandemic, we must not reach for locking down the population. And that, by the way, was the conclusion of the public health establishment before the pandemic, months before the pandemic came out. They had a big publication on this saying, “Whatever we do, we must resist the temptation from politicians to lock down the entire population. It won’t work. If the virus is sufficiently infective, it won’t work.” It’s fine with one that’s not very infectious, and you can lock down a limited number of people.

JAN JEKIELEK: Except there’s this small issue of civil liberties and free societies we may want to consider, right?

Why This Virus Was Not a Normal Zoonosis

MATT RIDLEY: Good Lord, where did you get that idea? But I personally think, as an evolutionary biologist, that there is a point that gets missed here, and that is that viruses jump out of animals and into people quite often. We’ve had AIDS in our lifetime, we’ve had Ebola happening just quite recently and others. So the theory that you can catch a new virus from an animal is not wrong. Of course you can.

But they very, very rarely prove to be highly infectious from the start. They have to stutter their way through human-to-human chains of infection for quite a long time before they get really good at spreading, and then they can take off. They also tend to be pretty lethal. So Ebola kills around 30%. Hantavirus kills 30% of the people it infects. So you’re much more likely to see what you’re seeing with Ebola — horrible outbreaks, but you can bring them under control. Or Hanta — on that cruise ship, a few people die and a few more people have to be in quarantine for a while and then it’s over.

What we saw this time was completely different. A virus that was not very lethal — the all-age mortality from this virus was something like less than half a percent. That’s sort of equivalent to flu, roughly. So it was not very lethal but very infectious. That to me tells you this wasn’t a normal zoonosis. That to me tells you that it must have had training on human cells and human molecules in the months, if not years, leading up to the pandemic.

JAN JEKIELEK: And just to kind of frame that out a little bit — because it was already appearing to be so familiar with human cells, it had that ability to enter human cells very smoothly, if you will.

MATT RIDLEY: Yes, it had the ability to use the ACE2 receptor to get into a human cell, and by the way, it was much better at that. It’s not very good at getting into bats at all, even though it’s originally a bat virus. What does that tell you? It tells you it hasn’t been in bats for a while — it’s been in another species. It’s better at infecting humans than almost any other species. Monkeys it’s pretty good at too, cats it’s quite good at, but it was humans — this had turned into a human virus somewhere in the months before it all began.

Now, given that we know this lab was taking SARS-like beta coronaviruses, this very type of virus, and infecting them into human cells and humanized mice for several years before the pandemic, it’s crazy to think that this wasn’t how this happened. Therefore, we really need to rethink our approach to pandemics.

The idea that surveillance of outbreaks so that we know when they’re happening and can react quickly is great, but going and finding bat viruses in a cave in Yunnan or Laos and bringing them 1,000 miles north to a big city with 11 million people in it, to the middle of a big city, putting them in a lab, sequencing them, doing manipulation experiments on them, giving them an extra feature that makes them much more infectious in human cells, and doing all that at a low biosafety level — even if that hadn’t led to a pandemic, now we know they were doing that, we should be absolutely horrified. It does nothing to ready us for a pandemic.

The purpose of that experiment, as far as we can make out — those series of experiments — was so that they could say one day, “Look, aren’t we clever, we’ve made a vaccine that works against any kind of coronavirus.” Well, they were nowhere near that, and they were looking for a gas leak with a lighted match.

American Institutions and Their Role in Wuhan

JAN JEKIELEK: I know that the Chinese Communist Party has a policy — I’ve read the document — of basically doing bioweapons work. They’re interested in this topic. They’re actively working on these types of things. And again, we know that. I think our academic community should know it. Certainly our intelligence community is very aware of that. So there’s that whole realm, whether it’s offensive or defensive, as you pointed out earlier.

I think it’s unlikely, given the military involvement, that we could ever get any information from China, given how they operate. Because you said earlier that you would like to get an accounting, right? Which of course makes a ton of sense. What about these collaborations — American institutions, the National Institutes of Health, NIH, in the US? What about these collaborations?

The EcoHealth Alliance and Federal Accountability

MATT RIDLEY: Well, the American government has debarred the EcoHealth Alliance from federal grants now. That’s quite right. That was an organization that was extraordinarily misleading to us. For a start, failed to tell us about the defuse proposal. I mean, they were the lead authors of this proposal in 2018 to put a furin cleavage site into a sub-ecovirus for the first time. And they sat on that, and throughout the first 2 years of the pandemic, they didn’t mention it until someone in the Pentagon decided it might be a good idea to hand it to a journalist.

I mean, that’s a disgrace. How could you conceivably know of that document and not think it relevant to tell the world? So there are good reasons why we never want to see the EcoHealth Alliance or its leader Peter Daszak getting federal or any other kind of American support ever again.

And the NIH says it needs to defund and cease dangerous gain-of-function research. And when you say, “Oh no, we should stop dangerous gain-of-function research,” all sorts of people put up their hands and say, “Oh, that means we can’t improve wheat crops because that’s gain-of-function.” No, we’re talking 99.9% of biotech genetic engineering work is safe and sensible, and it’s not dangerous gain-of-function. Some of it’s gain-of-function — you’re putting the function of insect resistance into a wheat plant or something, that’s gain-of-function, fine — but dangerous gain-of-function where you know you’re increasing the infectivity of a virus that can infect humans, and you know you’re doing that in a lab, you shouldn’t be doing that at all. It has no place.

And scientists signed up to an agreement back in the 1970s that they would never do things like that. Where’s the self-reflection in the scientific community? Because at the moment, the Trump administration says it’s not going to fund that kind of thing, but it hasn’t come out with a very clear policy. And in 2 years’ time, you could have a new administration that says, “Oh, because we don’t like everything Trump did, we’re going to reinstitute collaboration with China on dangerous gain-of-function experiments.” There’s nothing you or I could do to prevent that happening.

China as a State Actor, Not a Normal Collaborator

JAN JEKIELEK: Well, what I’m trying to do, for example, I’ve written this book on the organ industry in China and so forth. The take-home message from this book is these people do things like this. It’s a government operation, right? So you shouldn’t — don’t think of it as a normal collaborator, right?

MATT RIDLEY: And they — well, can I give an example of that? This is probably in your book, but you know about Reedley, California, the lab there, do you?

JAN JEKIELEK: Oh no, tell me more, tell me more.

The Reedley, California Lab Discovery

MATT RIDLEY: Well, it’s a couple of years ago, in this small town outside Fresno in Central Valley of California, an alert city official saw a hosepipe that had been put into a warehouse that was supposedly not in use. So he knocked on the door and went in, and he found a huge laboratory with Chinese nationals working in it in white coats. He contacted the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta and said, “I think you need to come and look at this.” And they said, “No, no, we’re too busy.”

The local police went in and they found bags labeled with AIDS, Ebola, hepatitis, all sorts of other infectious agents, and a whole mass of scientific equipment going on. But 2 years later, a house that he owned in Las Vegas was looked into just this year, and it turned out the garage was full of more scientific equipment and samples. He was trying to sell COVID testing kits as well.

Now clearly this was breaking all sorts of laws and extremely unsafe. But he was well-funded, this man, by Chinese investors. It’s not that easy to see him as a lone wolf who happened to be just a little bit off the reservation. It’s easier to think that there was some quite significant official support helping him do this.

Now that’s just one incident where an alert city official stumbled on something. We’ve had Chinese nationals arrested at airports for stealing biological material from labs in Detroit. We had another case in Winnipeg that was similar, etc. There’s very little doubt that with at least a blind eye from the Chinese authorities, there is a lot of espionage going on with respect to biological materials. And we’re very aware of this when it comes to cybersecurity, but in biosecurity, we’re asleep at the switch on this.

Biosecurity: A Neglected Existential Risk

JAN JEKIELEK: And I mean espionage and possible active experimentation in America, right? I mean, that’s the sense that I’ve gotten from those two locations, from those two sites that you just mentioned.

MATT RIDLEY: Yeah, I genuinely live in fear. People tell me I should be worried about AI as an existential risk or whatever. I don’t understand why people are not more alarmed about biosecurity now. And I speak — I mean, I’m a passionate defender of biotechnology. I think it’s a wonderful technology. I think we should be using it in agriculture and medicine a lot. It can help us enormously with human flourishing. And I think we, in Europe, were crazy to reject genetically modified crops. We would have been environmentally as well as economically better off if we’d done so. So I’m not coming at this as someone who’s campaigned against biotechnology. Quite the reverse.

I think that science says if we find out about a lab leak, it’ll be bad for the reputation of science. Well, it wouldn’t have been if science had done its own research and said, “Look, these were bad apples.” But now, I’m sorry, those apples have infected the whole barrel. Where’s the funding for an investigation of the origin of COVID? Where are the grants to academics saying, “Please, could you find out everything you possibly can, and please, can you collaborate with Chinese about this?” It just doesn’t exist.

The scientific community want to tiptoe away from this, hoping that nobody will ever know and that they can say it wasn’t proven, we don’t know. And they think that’s better for the reputation of science. I think that’s disastrous for the reputation of science. I love science. I think it’s humanity’s greatest achievement bar none. And I think it’s really dropped the ball on this one.

Biosecurity vs. Civil Liberties: A Dangerous Tension

JAN JEKIELEK: I share your concern about biosecurity, again, given what I know the Chinese Communist Party is involved in, right? And we got a hint of some of that through COVID. But at the same time, we also saw how biosecurity was used as a way to lock down society, introduce all sorts of policy that was erroneous — that would be the nicest way of putting it — in some cases arbitrary, and so forth.

I mean, on the one hand, obviously, this biosecurity is a huge issue. People can concoct all sorts of crazy things in a little lab, especially with tacit agreement of the Chinese regime and so forth. On the other hand, the same idea is used as an excuse to implement policy which has been highly inappropriate, and I’m not convinced we’ve learned that lesson at this point.

MATT RIDLEY: Now you’re right there that we crack down too hard on some things and we’re not cracking down hard enough on others. I mean, I would like to see the world give quite a tough time to biology laboratories that work on viruses in terms of monitoring what they’re up to. I do not want to see ordinary human beings told there is now a general rule in place that the moment we snap our fingers, we’re going to impose curfews and we’re going to close schools and we’re going to stop you leaving your home and all that kind of thing.

So we were far too tough in the pandemic on ordinary people, and we were not nearly tough enough on labs. That’s the answer.

Now look, I’m a libertarian. I think there are too many rules and regulations getting in the way of innovation in the world. But when I listen to some of the virologists who are complaining about people like me, I’m not that libertarian. They say things like, “It’s a disgrace that the government tells us what we can and can’t do in our laboratories.” Well, that’s about the one place where I quite would want a little bit of government approval. I mean, we have ethics panels saying you can’t do that experiment, it’s not ethical. We do not have safety panels in universities doing that. Literally, it’s easier to get safety approval for an experiment on a virus than it is to get ethical approval for an experiment on an animal, say.

No Accounting for COVID Policy Failures

JAN JEKIELEK: That’s the wrong way around. You know, another thing that just comes to mind quickly is that the way the whole COVID scenario played out, it feels to me like we haven’t had an accounting of how poorly that went for us as a society. And this was implemented in, I don’t know, over 100 countries, I think.

MATT RIDLEY: Well, let me give you an example of exactly that. We have had a COVID inquiry in this country led by a judge and staffed by ignorant barrister lawyers. They have generally been very hard pushing, and the judge who leads the inquiry has been concluding that the problem is we didn’t lock down hard enough and soon enough, right? When the evidence totally points the other way. So this is just the bureaucracy looking after its own interests and defending its own decisions.

But when one politician, Michael Gove, was being grilled by this committee, he said, “By the way, we need to talk about the origin of the virus because it probably was a lab leak. That should have altered our conversation right at the start, because if it was a lab leak, it was more infectious, lockdowns were never going to work.” He was shut down. He was told that that’s outside the scope of this inquiry.

So the lack of interest in the biosafety error that led to the pandemic is a problem. The excessive interest in defending the biosecurity errors that led to the lockdowns is an equal problem.

Amateur Sleuths Who Outperformed the CIA

I said that there’s been no funding, no proper research into the origin of the virus. But what did happen rather remarkably during this period — and it is an extraordinary story, and one that deserves to be much better known — is that some amateur sleuths put their heads together and did incredible things that illuminated vital information about what was going on in Wuhan that the official espionage people and the official academic researchers hadn’t bothered to tell us.

JAN JEKIELEK: Okay.

MATT RIDLEY: I mean, you’re talking about DRASTIC and other groups — DRASTIC, and particularly a wonderful Indian guy called The Seeker, Gene Reyes, his real name, Francisco de Asís in Spain, Gilles Demaneuf in New Zealand. These are ordinary people working in their spare time on their own dime who did things like find crucial theses in China, work out exactly which bat cave the Chinese scientists had been visiting on which dates and collecting which viruses in them.

It’s an amazing story, that, of citizen science. And they were way better than the CIA, MI6, the Royal Society, the National Academies of Science. They found out far more than these guys. And journalists do not recognize that enough. Just hats off to the amateurs. It’s a reminder that society is not run by brilliant experts who know how to tell us what to do. The people who make society really work are ordinary people.

The Failure of Mainstream Media

JAN JEKIELEK: Let’s finish off on this. This is something that I find incredibly disturbing. In a way, it’s been good for us that we were asking normal questions that a great many media were deeply uninterested in, in numerous areas, whether that was this Steele dossier back in the day, or whether it was COVID origins, or later, COVID response. What do you make of what happened to so many of our trusted media when they’re sort of absent on these, some of the most important issues of our day?

MATT RIDLEY: A lot of the media became willing purveyors of propaganda during the pandemic. That was a real shock to most of us. I’m a journalist by background, and I was brought up or educated to regard journalists as people who challenged authority rather than pervaded its message. But I’m afraid in the pandemic, pretty well every mainstream media decided it was their job to tell us to do as the government told us to do. Sorry, that’s not your job. Your job was to challenge stuff. So the media got very supine in this period.

Closing Thoughts

JAN JEKIELEK: Well, a final thought as we finish.

MATT RIDLEY: Thank you for talking to me about the lab leak. I’m not going to give up on this subject, and I’m sure you’re not either. It took us 12 years to work out that a lab leak was responsible for an anthrax epidemic in the Soviet Union. They denied it for 12 years. We then found it was true. We’ve got another 6 years to go before we get to that point. I’m pretty sure that at some point we will get more information. It’s a very, very important episode in human history. And I think we mustn’t let it drop.

JAN JEKIELEK: Well, Matt Ridley, it’s such a pleasure to have had you on. Thank you so much. Thank you all for joining Matt Ridley and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I’m your host, Jan Jekielek.

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