Jay Bhattacharya

But, I mean, again, scientists disagree with me on this.

I mean, I think if you just focus on the scientific evidence alone, I wouldn't say it's certain.

I'd say it's, again, there's legitimate, excellent scientists that don't think it was lab leak, right?

So I tend to be on the side of the scientists that think that it was lab leak based on other things.

There was a whole effort.

by the scientific community, by the NIH, the Chinese scientific groups and European groups, essentially prevent all pandemics.

The research program was you go into the wild places, find viruses in those wild places.

Right.

Find the bats.

Find the bats.

There's a trillion or more viruses out there.

most of which do not infect, have any chance of infecting humans, but you don't know which of those viruses you're pulling out of the wild places in the lab are likely to jump into humans.

And so the argument was in this 2000, let's say 2003 to 2020 some era, is that we have to manipulate those viruses, make them potentially more dangerous and more infectious to humans in order to triage.

and identify the viruses and pathogens that are closer to making the leap into humans in some evolutionary sense, and then prepare countermeasures.

Yes, or in advance of it ever infecting a human being, right?

The utopian promise was we are going to prevent the world from ever having to suffer from a virus making the leap from natural location into humans ever again.

That was the utopian vision.

Obviously, there's problems with the vision, but the countermeasures that you develop for those pathogens...

in the lab, that you've never made the leap into humans, will obviously never have been tested in humans.

Like the vaccines you develop, because no human has ever been infected by that vaccine.