Jay Bhattacharya

So first of all, I think, I mean, this is an analogy to this.

Like when you're a third year medical student, I was in medical school once, that's the first time you see patients.

You put on a white coat and my God, the effect that putting on a white coat has on like the desire for the patients to tell you stuff, they'll just tell it, people tell you everything about their lives.

They have problems that they want you to solve, right?

And the instinct that you have with the white coat on, you're 24 years old, 25 years old, is to like answer their questions even when you don't know the answer.

All of public health found itself in that position.

They're facing an uncertain threat that there's no real science yet about it because it's a brand new disease.

The entirety of society is looking at them saying, what should we do about this?

What's the wise, right thing to do about this?

and you don't know the answer.

And as a med student, you have to learn to say, I don't know.

You have to learn to say that.

It's not an easy instinct.

And public health failed at that at large, right?

So they looked to leaders, leaders like Tony Fauci and others, to guide them on what to say in that setting.

And those leaders also failed at that.

The second element is what happened to potentially cause the pandemic.

I believe, and I think a lot of scientists agree with me, that the best available evidence suggests that the pandemic was the result of a lab accident that happened in Wuhan, China.

What percentage odds of that being true?

My view, it's pretty close to...