Peter Hotez

So that's pretty easy to discredit.

But the next piece to this is what some of the major news outlets that ordinarily we depend on has been doing is

to, as you say and as we say in the book, create this false equivalency between the pseudoscience and the real science.

And that has also become very discouraging.

And, you know, we saw this with both the New York Times and the Washington Post.

And don't get me wrong, there's a lot of good stuff in the New York Times and the Washington Post, and I still –

I still have the apps and I still look at, you know, the Washington Post and New York Times and I speak to reporters from both.

But, you know, especially in their opinion section or in their editorial board statements, they give credence to a lot of discredited stuff and give an equal weight to the real science.

And an example of...

One of the examples we use in the books is the origins of COVID.

We have, you know, six or half a dozen really outstanding papers and some of our best scientific journals from Cell and Science from the scientific community on the zoonotic spillover of COVID, of the SARS-2 virus.

from bats to humans through secondary intermediate animal hosts and how that's documented.

And basically the bottom line is SARS two evolved and just like SARS one did, uh, 20 years before, um, and also in China.

as did MERS, Middle Eastern Respiratory Syndrome, another coronavirus.

And it's important to know because, by the way, we're going to have another major SARS coronavirus likely because these viruses are all over bats, and the studies show that they're jumping higher

um to people either directly or indirectly 60 000 times a year so every now and then one of them is going to catch fire and then of course we have zoonotic spillover from ebola which is also from bats and and the zoonotic influenza so um

That's the reality, and giving this equal weight to gain-of-function, which has been discredited by just about everyone saying that the virus was manufactured.

I don't think any virologist believes that, and even doctors.

the intelligence agencies have discredited, and lab leak.

Again, there's not a single paper published about lab leak.