A conversation with science author Matt Ridley on the lab-leak theory and the future of science itself

Author Matt Ridley has lived a fascinating life. A 66-year-old Brit with the equivalent of a Ph.D. in biology, Ridley has spent significant time in his life as a journalist and a banking executive, and he even did an eight-year stint as a member of Parliament as an elected hereditary peer in the House of Lords.

In 2021, Ridley joined forces with MIT researcher Alina Chan to write "Viral: The Search for the Origin of COVID-19," which was released by HarperCollins. The book is an authoritative and highly recommended treatise laying out the factual basis for the lab-leak theory of COVID-19 origins.

The book is written like a gripping thriller and lays out a remarkably persuasive case for a laboratory leak being the most likely explanation for the COVID-19 pandemic.

Attention has been drawn to the book in recent weeks due to the publication, in the New York Times, of Chan's op-ed, "Why the Pandemic Probably Started in a Lab, in 5 Key Points," which has fundamentally shifted the debate over the lab-leak theory.

I caught up with Matt Ridley a couple of weeks ago and asked him about the book, the lab-leak theory, and the state of science in general.

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Blaze News: I want to talk a little bit about the process of writing the book. And I want to talk a little bit about one of the things that I think is a unique feature of the book, which is a little ironic, that you and Alina never met. Have you met even to this day?

Matt Ridley: Oh, yeah, we met, funnily enough, the day the book was published. I came across to Boston, and it was October 2021, and I got someone to film us walking up to each other and shaking each other's hands. And I said to her, "Oh, my God, you're three-dimensional!"

Blaze News: Well, let's talk talk a little bit about the challenges of co-writing a book with someone that you had never met. Did you find it to be a pretty easy process? Technology is pretty marvelous. I mean, the fact that we're able to do this across an ocean is pretty incredible. Did it present any challenges compared to previous work that you've done?

MR: Curiously, no. I mean, it was the first time I'd co-written a book, full stop. I'd never been a co-author with anyone before. So in that sense, it was a blind date for both of us, if you like. And I was quite pessimistic about how well it would go. I felt that it would be difficult to deal with issues where we had misunderstandings and so on. I thought the time difference wouldn't make it easy. I thought the fact that we were from, you know, different backgrounds, never met each other, would be a problem. In fact, I was pleasantly surprised. And you may get a different story from Alina, but I don't think so. We found our writing styles pretty compatible.

You know, I fancied myself as a bit of a writer, but she does too, and rightly so. She's actually a very, very fluent user of the English language. Yes, she could be more technical than me at times. And on the whole, I was that old thing of aim after beauty; she's after truth in the paragraph. So it was a surprisingly easy process. One thing that worked quite well, at one point, was that we sort of wrote it in sections. I would write a sort of 1,000-word draft of a section, send it to her. And the time difference enabled her to process it and rewrite it and send it back to me while I was asleep. And then vice versa.

I did most of the first drafts, but not all.

And she then made some very radical suggestions about restructuring the book, etc. So there's no sense in which either of us can claim to have written more than half of the book, I don't think. It was a very equal collaboration.

Yes, her technical knowledge was definitely superior to mine. And that was what I was after. I mean, I could have sat down and written a book about COVID myself, but it would have been an uphill task to get my head around a lot of the molecular biology and virology, and I was so pleased when she said she would do it because by then I was, although I hadn't had very much interaction with her, I had seen enough to know that she was an extremely smart and extremely sensible person and had the makings of being the hero of the pandemic because she's unbelievably courageous as well. You've seen how she's, as a junior researcher, put her entire career on the line here and put up with the most dreadful abuse, really nasty stuff, and always kept it polite, probably better than I've managed to do.

Blaze News: Well, and we'll come back to that the abuse in the reception of this in the scientific community. Later I do have some questions that I want to ask about that. But I want to first just talk a little bit about how you got into the business of writing about science. Because this seems to be something that you do quite a lot of, and I know that you have a very interesting background, but just talk about how you kind of found this as the path that you're currently walking in life.

MR: Yeah. Well, like all things, it's path-dependent, isn't it? It's what happens to you, accidentally puts you on the road. I did a deep Ph.D., didn't terribly enjoy the process of being a researcher, but knew I was pretty good at writing, enjoyed doing it, noticed that other scientific colleagues didn't particularly enjoy writing, and thought, oh, that's trying to tell me something.

So I began to apply for jobs in journalism. I was very lucky; didn't get the first few things I applied to, but then I managed to get a poorly paid internship, temporary internship, on the Economist. And I turned that into a full-time job, became science editor there, very good place to learn how to write well, because there was a lot of emphasis on good prose, on tight writing, on evidence-based stuff.

But for me, by then I was sort of deeply in love with science as a story. I still think it's humanity's greatest achievement, bar none. You know, to be on the planet at a time when a species reads its own recipe or discovers that the universe is 13 billion years old. These are extraordinary things that dwarf anything you can achieve in the arts, or politics, or history, or science, or something else.

So for me, the motivation, then, was to have a ringside seat for scientific discovery over the next few years and be able to write about it. And I've managed to keep that gig going in various forms. First of all, as a journalist. Briefly, I became a political reporter; the Economist moved me onto that beat. I quite enjoyed that.

But then I went back to, first of all, writing books, and then writing scientific columns, for the Telegraph, the Times, the Wall Street Journal, and others, alongside books, and I've done other things, too. It's not the only thing I've done in life, to write, but it is the main thing and the thing I've loved doing. So I've been very, very lucky to come in at a time when journalism was well paid and well resourced, which it isn't now, to get a good training, and to get a great opportunity.

Blaze News: I think that what you do is is so valuable, especially in the times that we live in now. Because if you think about the start of this pandemic and how people reacted to the news and to things like the Proximal Origins paper, I think a lot of people, even people who are pretty smart, are just not capable — because the scientists who do this start with a background of knowledge that they have.

And so everything they write is for other scientists, and they assume that everyone who's going to read it comes with a baseline of knowledge that makes it indecipherable to the general public.

So people like yourself, who are taking that material, which is good and valuable, and making it understandable to the general public in a way that's still scientifically accurate is such a valuable service, especially as we're dealing with a controversy that has scientific and public policy implications like this one.

So what do you do? How do you, as you're writing this stuff, how do you, to yourself, test and see, all right, is this gonna still be accessible to an audience that doesn't have the scientific background that I might have or that the people that I'm writing about have?

MR: Well, I encountered that problem, too, with editors who say, look, I don't know, why have you put this word DNA and I don't know what it stands for? That was literally what an editor said to me 30 years ago. I said it stands for deoxyribonucleic acid, and that shut him up.

But I don't get this perfectly right, by any means. But I noticed that what I am slightly better at than most scientists is understanding what other people don't know.

By putting yourself in the shoes of the general reader and knowing what has to be explained, but also not falling for a terrible trick that quite a lot of journalists do, which I think is a big mistake, which is to — when something's complicated, you sort of wave it away and jump past it.

And you know, say scientists have discovered a new way of defeating cancer. If they're successful, this will cause trillions of dollars of benefits to the economy. Well, how? What is the way? How did it work?

it's not impossible to explain this stuff. You just have to use simple words, simple sentences, good metaphors, which can be very valuable. And there is a niche for someone who can do that. That's the point, really.

Blaze News: Do you have like test subjects? People who are in your life that you can say, "Hey, read this and tell me if it makes sense before it goes to the editors"? Is that part of your process? I ask because I do I have people in my life who I'm like, "Hey, read this paragraph and tell me if what I'm saying makes sense to somebody who hasn't been living and breathing this stuff for two years."

MR: Very interesting. And yeah, sometimes I do that. Sometimes not. It depends really on the sort of time pressure and things like that. But my wife's a great person for that, because although she is actually a practicing scientist, she's also an extremely fluent writer herself and someone who doesn't spare my blushes. If she thinks that a paragraph is badly constructed, she'll tell me so. So yes, that can be helpful. But it's not necessarily part of the process for me.

Blaze News: I think that was one of the things that I liked probably the most about the book is that it didn't shy away from more dense scientific explanations. I appreciated that you didn't run away from a lot of the stuff that really is necessary to tell the story fairly but that a lot of people are hesitant to get into because they're like, "Man, nobody's going to understand this." And I really thought that you did a good job of balancing those two competing interests.

MR: Can I just make a point? Because I think it's an interesting one. And it's something I feel quite strongly about. And I think it does get forgotten and missed.

And that is that we couldn't have written this book without these talented amateurs who began to look into the subject, people like Francisco Ribera, and the Seeker, and Babarlelephant, and several others. We call them the internet sleuths.

And I noticed there's a slight tendency for even the scientists, as it were, who think it was a lab leak to sort of say, right, well done chaps. Now leave it to us, we'll take it on from here.

And you know, Francisco Ribera knew no molecular biology when he started out on this. I don't think the Seeker knew much. I mean, he has a background in film.

These guys showed that immensely detailed, viral, logical stuff about genome sequences and sample treatments and experimental procedures could be understood by intelligent individuals who didn't have a background in science.

Now, you can say they make mistakes. Well, maybe they did, but remarkably few in the case of those guys. And that slightly gives the lie to the idea that you have to be part of the scientific priesthood to take part in this debate.

And I really don't like that we all caught the virus, in my case twice so far. We all lost loved ones in the pandemic, we all have a right to take part in this debate, and nothing annoys me more than scientists saying, "Stay in your lane, leave it to us."

Blaze News: So let's talk about that. I mean, look, these these guys clearly have got some high-wattage intellect in addition to having a lot of time on their hands, and you talk in the book about how they came to that — a lot of them had lost their jobs in the pandemic and suddenly had all day with nothing better to do.

It's one thing to take someone who's clearly extremely intelligent, like the Seeker, and has a lot of time on his hands, and he's going to solve a mystery.

But is there a justifiable concern? I mean, right, especially in the medical field, people do their own research, maybe on Google about whatever symptoms they have, and they come up with these crazy, half-cocked theories. I mean, it's not totally out of left field, this concern of hey, in general, the public should probably leave that stuff to doctors.

Or is it? I'd love to hear your perspective on that.

MR: Absolutely. No, you're dead right there. And I spent a lot of my time dealing with people who've half understood something, got really carried away with it, and been seduced by some false expertise. So that is an equal problem.

And I think the only thing I would say is that the right response to that is not, "Leave it to us. We know what we're talking about."

Instead, the answer should be, "Come with me, and I will explain why we have reached this conclusion."

Blaze News: This was this was my thought when I read the Proximal Origins paper for the first time, which was shortly after it was released. My thought was, "This doesn't answer the question that was asked to you."

I mean, that was to me the immediate problem. Okay, you have some good evidence, at least in your view, that there's good evidence that this virus was not engineered. Since then there's been controversy about that.

But it didn't even purport to really go into well, what happens if it was a naturally occurring virus that they had in their lab that they were studying that had not been genetically engineered? The paper didn't even mention that as a possibility, as far as I could tell.

And I think that sometimes scientists do have that kind of blind spot about things that they assume that the public, I think, has a right, especially as you note in your book — something like this that's affecting us all, we have the right to demand, "Show your homework."

I mean, trust us to actually see what you're doing here. And there was a lot of frustration from a lot of people, including me, in the beginning of this over that.

MR: Absolutely. And, you know, part of what fires me up is real fury about the way I was deceived by that one paper, because I actually used it as justification for telling other people that our lab leak was not plausible.

Colleagues in Parliament and others were saying to me a bit about this kind of stuff. "I've heard that it might be a lab leak."

And I was saying, right up until May 2020, "No, there's a paper that proves that it isn't. I've only read it quickly. I didn't understand some of it, but the paper did seem very clear that you can rule this out. "

Then I went back and went through the arguments in there, one by one. And remember that when I'd first seen them, I thought, that's a bit strange, you know, the argument. "If they had engineered it, they'd have done a better job." Right?

Blaze News. Right, that was the whole nut of the paper, that they would have done a way better job if they were trying to make a biological weapon. Which, I don't have any basis for evaluating that. I'm not a scientist, so whatever. I'll take your word for that.

But that wasn't even the question that was being put to them. I think that certainly was one of the questions, but it wasn't the whole question or even the main question.

MR: But then, when we discovered that they hadn't changed their minds in private, from their Slack messages and their emails, that actually they still did think it was very lucky to have been in the lab in culture or possibly even engineered.

And they went on thinking that after they'd published the paper; that is misconduct of a serious kind, in my view.

So for me it is it is a truly terrible scientific scandal on a on a level with the Piltdown Man hoax but more consequential. And I say this as a fan of science. I love science, and I want it to triumph. And if people behave like this within science, then they are simply fomenting anti-science and playing into the hands of genuine conspiracy theorists.

That's my concern.

Blaze News: So one of the things that you mentioned in the book — and I had not considered this perspective before — is that if it was discovered that the COVID-19 pandemic was caused by a lab leak, that could have a negative impact on all of science — that every lab in the world doing anything is going to come under additional scrutiny, which I thought made a lot of sense.

Do you think that that kind of realization played a lot into the circling of the wagons that you saw early in the pandemic from the scientific community?

MR: Yes, I think it's partly that and partly a version of that, which is that the the gain-of-function virologists were quite deliberate in saying to their colleagues in other fields, "Watch it, if you don't defend us, they'll come after you."

And I don't think that would have been true at the start. I think it's become more true now. Because they all did circle the wagons and did join the same side.

So it sort of became a self-fulfilling prophecy. That's my concern.

If right at the start, Kristian Andersen and Anthony Fauci and Jeremy Farrar and people like that had said, "Look, we think it's possible — we don't know, but we think it's possible that it did come out of that lab; they were doing research that was very similar. We'd love to know more; we'd be delighted to be proved wrong. And we're not trying to pick on anyone, but please, can we have a proper investigation, because we can't rule it out?"

These are the kinds of things they're saying now, and it's three years too late.

If they'd said that at the beginning, then any reputational damage would have been confined to one Chinese lab. Maybe not quite that that narrow, but to one corner of virology.

Whereas as it is, I really worry that biotechnology in general is going to get caught in the backdraft of this. In other words, you know, people who have now become convinced, in the world of politics, that this was a lab leak are saying maybe we shouldn't be improving wheat crops using genetic engineering.

And that's a disaster because that's a really safe technology and completely different field, etc. But I blame the virologists who dragged the field down with them.

Blaze News: And obviously, the thing that we're all keeping a close eye on right now is that we have H5N1 circulating in mammals now, mammals that are in close proximity to humans. Obviously, our belief is that it's a much deadlier virus than SARS-CoV-2.

If that does make a zoonotic jump into the human species, to what extent is the public health community going to be listened to this time if they tried to implement a lot of the same measures that they did for the COVID-19 pandemic? What are your thoughts on that?

MR: Well, I think that's exactly right. And, you know, crying wolf is always a problem. The swine flu panic of 2009 left a lot of people, myself included, thinking, "Well, next time, I'm not going to be so gullible."

But there's a part of me that thinks that the really important lesson here is to to understand how these zoonotic jumps happen and whether or not, when they come out of an animal naturally there, they are preventable.

Because I think the evidence suggests that in the case of SARS, MERS, Nipah, and probably H5N1 — because it's a natural transfer into human beings, it's not very good at its job to start with, and it's not going to be wildly infectious.

Yes, it may be very lethal, but no, it's not going to be wildly infectious. That's what SARS and MERS and Nipah were like. Therefore, quarantine, contact tracing, and those kinds of things are going to work fine.

Where they're not going to work is with an asymptomatic, highly adapted virus that is not necessarily completely asymptomatic but non-virulent, or not very virulent, highly infectious virus that has been in human beings for quite a while already in a lab.

And that may be the lesson we have to learn here is that the reason we couldn't stop this one in its tracks is because it was so well adapted to human beings from the start.

Now that suggests that locking down the world because of an H5N1 outbreak in Kansas would be a mistake, but locking down a small part of Kansas to stop it spreading may well work.

I very much fear that if there is an H5N1 outbreak, a lot of virologists will jump down and say, "See, these things are zoonotic! How dare you suggest it's always a lab leak?"

And I think that's the wrong lesson. The right lesson may be lab-leaked viruses that have been trained on human cells and humanized mice are going to be way harder to stop than the natural zoonotic jobs.

Blaze News: One of the things that you talk about in the book is when you mentioned certain experiments that were done, you would say, well, these were safer, because they only involve pseudo-viruses or portions of viruses or not live virus.

Why isn't all research conducted that way? I mean, are the scientists really losing out on anything by doing research that way?

MR: That's a really good question. And I don't think I know for sure what the answer is.

In many cases, yes, you can learn just as much from a pseudo-virus — a non-infectious viral particle — in terms of its ability to bind to receptors and things like that. What you can't do is actually see the effects of disease, you know. And so sure, there are definitely going to be things you can't do without making a live virus.

But I think almost everybody who's looked at the work they were doing in Wuhan seriously will conclude that the upside of that research, in terms of learning about what these viruses might be able to do in human beings, was pretty small. And the downside was huge. There was a terrible asymmetry there.

Blaze News: My focus is on the gain-of-function research. But one problem is that a lot of that has nothing to do with where the danger comes from. So, for example, a couple of days ago, it was pointed out that the CDC is trying to increase testing capacity for H5N1, which we've just discussed.

And the article says that in order for test kits to be developed, you obviously have to have H5N1 samples to develop the test kits so that you can know whether the kit you're developing is going to respond positively to being exposed to virus particles.

I mean, where does it end? Is there a way to do this safely? Because you talk in your book about how lab leaks are extremely common and have always been. How do we balance that need to prepare with the risk that we're increasing the chances of it happening in the first place by doing all this?

MR: It's a really good question. And I don't think there's an easy answer, but it's worth remembering how we thought about smallpox in this respect, because for a long time, scientists argued: "Yes, we must keep smallpox in labs, in case it breaks out again, so that we can be ready to combat it."

And then you had that incident where a smallpox sample was discovered in the back of freezer that was being cleaned out. And then people thought, "Hang on a minute, better not to keep the samples," and I think eventually, both the Russians and the Americans agreed to destroy their smallpox samples.

So the beauty of viruses is that I can send you the recipe, the genetic code of SARS-Cov-2 or H5N1, by email without any chance of infecting you. That email is not going to be infectious.

But of course, that also contains the danger that if you're a bioterrorist, you can then reconstruct the virus from that. If you're well enough equipped, you can reconstruct the virus from that information. So, yeah, I don't I don't know how we get that balance right. But I do feel we have been getting it wrong.

Blaze News: I share that sense. But one of the problems that I have, as I'm sure you've heard, is that we just don't know the extent of even what's happening. And nobody can even answer that question: Who's handling this material, what security level are they handling it at — all of which is advisory in the first place.

I mean, the WHO has no capacity to force China or anyone else to work on certain viruses at certain containment levels. So it's a difficult challenge for sure.

MR: The parallel with the airline industry is a very good one here, I think.

You know, if you didn't know what crashes were happening in the world and what had caused them, you would not know how to make the airline industry safer.

And it was the sharing of information of lessons learned from crashes. That is the main reason behind the incredible improvement in our safety. It's ridiculous how safe planes are now.

Blaze News: One of the things you mentioned in the book was a story about an individual who, I believe, worked in Taiwan at a lab and there was a there was a leak from his lab. He got sick, and instead of telling everyone, he went home and quarantined at home, because he didn't want to bring shame upon himself and upon his lab.

And I thought about this. And I'm not saying this in any sort of negative way, but in that part of the world, shame is just such a bigger part of their culture.

Do you think that that is a potential explanation for some of the ways in which the the Chinese government and the Wuhan Institute of Virology have done some things that really to an American sensibility or to a British sensibility look like they're trying to hide something? Did you consider that as a possible explanation for some of the ways that they behaved since the start?

MR: Yes, I do. I think that's quite a good point. But there are two aspects to it.

One is maybe an Asiatic, cultural thing about shame, which is what you're talking about here, which is true in Taiwan, as well as mainland China.

But second is the incentive system within an authoritarian communist regime, where I think it's very clear that the absolute priority is following the protocol and doing what the party says is the right thing.

And one of the whistleblower doctors in Wuhan in January 2020 was rebuked and reprimanded for threatening the, I can't remember the wording, but threatening the reputation of the city of Wuhan.

You know, that's an extraordinary thing to say, really, isn't it?

I mean, I think it's — there may be a shame issue with with certain cultures that would be slightly different in the West. And then there would be also the tendency to be slightly less likely to challenge superiors and whistleblow.

And then on top of that, you've got an authoritarian communist regime where centralized authority tells you what to do, and you never step out of line. And you would certainly not be rewarded for admitting a mistake.

Blaze News: One of the things that I think has probably been the most unfortunate aspect of this entire lab-leak saga is that in the beginning, there was, of course, the circling of the wagons by the scientists, and they put out the statements that seemed authoritative, and, I think, worldwide, that was pretty convincing to a lot of people.

But here in the United States, of course, we had an additional layer of kind of oomph added onto that by our media, just based on the fact that former President Trump kind of leaped out in favor of the theory when the jury was still very much out.

And I don't think that his endorsement was actually that strong. It was just kind of an offhanded comment that he thought this.

But it became a scenario where not only was this zoonotic origin theory considered authoritative by scientists, but it was an opportunity to dunk on somebody who was unpopular with the American press in Donald Trump.

I'm wondering: Did it play out differently in Europe? Because I was not aware of the incident you related in your book with the BBC film crew that actually went and tried to find the mine where the genetic ancestor to SARS-CoV-2 may have been found and were confronted with clear obstruction and threats from the Chinese government.

And, to me, I was impressed that they had done that. I mean, in America, certainly early in the pandemic, I don't think you would have found that from a major media outlet even though you should have.

Did it really play out differently in Europe? Or was it pretty much more of the same thing we had in America?

MR: It was pretty much the same thing, partly because we were in Europe taking a lot of our lead from America on this, partly because our media also had an obsession with Trump.

And you're quite right that Trump didn't say anything about this at all. I checked this until, I think, the 18th of April, which was the press conference when Fauci announced the — well, it can't have been April, must have been March.

But anyway, when Fauci announced that the Proximal Origins paper was coming, and at that press conference, Trump was asked about the lab leak, and he simply said, "I'm going to hand over to Fauci to answer that question."

So it's not what Trump had said about a lab. It's what they were worried that Trump would say about a lab that made the press so allergic to this topic.

To answer your question on John Sudworth of the BBC and his investigation of the Mojiang mine shaft — he was a lonely individual within the BBC. The BBC itself, in its news departments and its science and health correspondents, barely touched the topic and, to this day, have barely touched the topic. And they leaped gleefully on the Worobey papers that said it had actually been in the market.

So Sudworth was a lone exception. And I talked to him. He told me that other foreign correspondents in Beijing that he spent time with were giving him a hard time for taking this stuff seriously, too.

So that took one brave individual, really, to stand up for that. And even when he then did a sort of podcast series that was broadcast a couple of years later about the whole story, which is very even-handed actually and it interviewed George Gao and got some interesting things on the record and so on.

But when he did that, again, I talked to his producer, and they came under huge pressure within the BBC not to give airtime to the lab-leak theory, it is extraordinary the degree to which the media felt it necessary to take an editorial decision to censor one side of this debate.

And I don't think Trump-phobia explains all of it. I think quite a lot of it comes from a tendency among science correspondents not to criticize scientists.

Blaze News: That's an interesting point that I hadn't really considered because one of the things that has perplexed me is — the video of the people from the WIV digging around in that cave was released. ... I saw it on the internet pretty early on in the pandemic.

And my organization does not have the budget to fly me to China to go try to track down this mine, but I would have, I would have loved — no matter where I worked, if I'd been working at CNN, I would have been like, man, let's get somebody and go look at this.

It's bizarre to me that here you have two institutions — science as a whole and the press — whose entire reason for being is supposed to be curiosity about things that we want to investigate and get to the bottom of.

And instead both of those institutions from the beginning of this have just turned around said "nothing to see here, folks, move along." You know, what's the guy from "South Park," Officer Barbrady, they've been saying "nothing to see here, folks, move along. We're not even going to look."

It's bizarre to me that there hasn't been more.

MR: I quite agree. I agree. The refusal to be curious is a really shocking dereliction of duty by many journalists, I think.

Blaze News: Have you been in contact with Alina [Chan] since the op-ed ran in the New York Times?

MR: Yes, I talk to her regularly. And she worked on that for many, many months. It wasn't an overnight thing. And I think the New York Times did an extraordinarily good job of editing it and presenting it. ...

Blaze News: They put some work into it. They put some graphics in there that were really good. Yeah.

MR: And she told me that some of the people she was working with, on the graphics side, particularly, you know, started out saying, "Oh, come on, it's not a lab leak, is it, because, you know, we know it's not that," and ended up thinking the opposite, you know, because what they did, as good fact-checking journalists should do, is they tested every one of her propositions, and they went back and looked up the evidence she gave, and so on.

Now, the attacks on her article that have come since — they didn't do that, they just sort of throw mud. And you know, some of them say things like, "But we know there were two different strains in the market."

No, we don't. Go and look at the papers that prove that actually, there was an ancestral strain to both of those. So there was only one introduction into the human species, etc.

So I think it was a very important moment journalistically, when she wrote that, and it made her a target. That has been very unpleasant for her.

And I haven't seen much follow-up in the Times, but I know that there's been a lot of attempts to counter it, with articles in the New York Times, which she's been having to respond to, etc. And I don't know where that's getting to. But if it was actually a good example of how the muscle memory of doing really good investigative journalism is still there in some of the mainstream media, because it's been very hard to spot it in recent months.

Blaze News: Help me understand one of the points that you made, which I've also found fascinating. You talked a lot in your book about the burden of proof in a discussion like this.

And to me, as a person, again, who's not a biologist, but you know — instantly, if you find that a virus starts circulating among people down the street from a lab that is known to study similar viruses, under conditions that we knew even at the time were considered to be unadvisable, that, to me, should be the default place to look. Number-one starting place is there. And if we rule that out, that's fine. But let's rule that out first.

How did it become the default assumption that instead, that was just an extraordinary coincidence? And how did we come to assume, even though we can't find any animal that would be responsible for this, that it was probably an animal somewhere instead?

MR: Well, this is an argument that I don't tend to be able to kill very easily; it just keeps coming back around. And it is simply based on the proposition that most pandemics in the start were natural. And therefore, the probability is that we must give the benefit of the doubt that this one is most likely to be natural, as well, unless you can prove that it wasn't.

So the lab is innocent until proven guilty, if you like.

Now, the problem with that argument is that most pandemics happened before virology labs were doing this kind of stuff, let alone on the big scale.

So it's like saying most crimes did not involve the internet before 1990. Well, there wasn't an internet before 1990. It's that bad, I think. And therefore we should assume that the internet is not being used in this cybercrime? Well, that would be ridiculous.

So for me, that alone reverses the burden of proof. There are lots of virology labs out there. So any time any outbreak happens of a new disease, we need to suspect — like, say, Ebola in West Africa — we need to ask the question, are there any labs working on this nearby?

In this case, somebody has said, "I don't find that convincing. I personally think there was a natural outbreak," but I don't see anything wrong with putting these two hypotheses on an equal footing from the start.

And then as you say, when the outbreak happens in in the only city that is doing active gain-of-function research on SARS-like viruses on this scale on the planet, then yeah, the burden of proof has got to be pretty strongly — that has to be perhaps even the default explanation until you prove otherwise.

Now, the general public gets that. They really do, you know. They see the coincidence of time and place as being a pretty persuasive point. The scientists like to dismiss it, but I think they're doing so on very flimsy grounds.

Blaze News: Yeah, I mean, certainly as you point out in the book, you could hypothetically come up with some other scenarios of how the virus could have traveled a long distance from its initial jumping point into humanity without leaving a trace. But the way we understand how most viruses work, you should look geographically closest. That's got to be your first point of suspicion.

MR: Right, the respectable response, which was done by that talk show host who was talking to Jon Stewart in that famous clip some years ago, was, well, yeah, but the reason they had a virology lab there was because they had a virus threat there. Well, that turns out to be wrong, because geographically, we're talking about 1,000 miles difference. We're talking New York to Florida distance. But it's a perfectly respectable question to ask. Right?

Blaze News: Thanks. I really enjoyed the book. Good to talk to you.

MR: Great to talk to you as well.