Hi, this is Charles Hoskinson broadcasting live from warm, sunny Colorado. Always warm, always sunny, sometimes Colorado. Today is June 3rd, 2024. I'm making a video to keep up with the times, talking about good old Dr. Fauci, the Fauci ouchie, my good friend Fauci, and all the wonderful, magical things he's done for the United States in his more than four decades of service.
First, a tweet from Yan LeCun. For those of you who don't know him, Yan is a very famous computer scientist. He's a brilliant man, very talented. He's the Chief of AI over at Facebook, and he's responsible for the LLaMA models, which we personally use. I'm very impressed with his work; he also won a Turing Award, so he's a very smart guy. He says, "The kind of attacks that Dr. Anthony Fauci is being subjected to by Republicans is disgraceful and dangerous. This man is a hero; he helped save millions of lives." Emphasis on millions. Yet, he is vilified by Republican members of Congress who are more interested in political expediency and posturing than in the safety of the public. Some even attack the very concept of science, the scientific method. This is insanely dangerous. The undermining of the public's trust in the public health system actually killed people during the pandemic.
I've complained about how some captains of industry—he's referring to Elon Musk here—treat their scientists, but the mistreatment of Dr. Fauci by Congressional Republicans tops everything. Here's the thing: if you really want to weigh in on this, a million Americans died from COVID—one million, okay? At least that we know of. That's more than World War I and World War II combined. In fact, it's more than most of the wars the United States has fought combined.
There is a schism in the American public right now. One side feels that Dr. Fauci is this triumphant hero who's never lied in his entire life, never done anything wrong, and has saved millions of lives. The only thing he's guilty of is fighting the evil anti-science Republicans, who all they want to do is kill everybody by feeding them horse dewormer. There's another side that is deeply concerned about the nature of this virus because common sense tells them that there's something different about this pandemic compared to prior pandemics like the avian flu of 2009 or the swine flu or other things we've seen, mainly the facts and circumstances behind its origin. They say, "Perhaps we should investigate that."
What’s happened is that every attempt to investigate the origins of COVID has been fought viciously. I've got a book right here written by Matt Ridley and Alina Chan—wonderful people. When you look at the authors' details, Dr. Chan is a post-doctoral researcher with a background in medical genetics, synthetic biology, and vector engineering at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. Is that an anti-science conspiracy theorist? No, actually, she has a pretty good, long list of qualifications. Ridley is a journalist who systematically walks through a cave in China that has bats in it, which used to be mined for copper. It shows that the stuff in that cave looks a lot like COVID, even though those bats were years behind what was supposed to be a zoonotic infection. There’s evidence that people from Wuhan went there to collect samples and took those samples back to Wuhan.
Then you have the diffuse proposal, which was sent to DARPA by EcoHealth in 2018. It's a blueprint for gain-of-function research to study how to make something like COVID for vaccine research. Lo and behold, you have Dr. Shi from the Wuhan Institute of Virology connected to all these other scientists asking for $14 million to go and look for something. This paper is often referenced to say that COVID was naturally born, and it has been cited thousands of times. It was published on March 17th, 2020.
When people started investigating, including the U.S. Congress, they revealed that shortly before this paper was published in Nature, a very respected publication, the authors of the paper were closely coordinating with Dr. Fauci, Francis Collins, and at least 11 other scientists. On February 1st, 2020, Dr. Anthony Fauci, Dr. Francis Collins, and at least 11 other scientists convened a conference call to discuss COVID-19. It was on this conference call that Dr. Fauci and Collins were first warned that COVID-19 may have leaked from a lab in Wuhan, China, and further, may have been intentionally genetically manipulated.
Only three days later, on February 4th, 2020, four participants of the conference call authored a paper entitled "The Proximal Origins of SARS-CoV-2" and sent drafts to Messrs. Fauci and Collins prior to the final publication in Nature magazine. The paper was sent to Dr. Fauci for editing and approval on April 16th, 2020, slightly more than two months after the original conference call. Dr. Collins emailed Dr. Fauci expressing dismay that the proximal origin paper, which they saw prior to publication and were given the opportunity to edit, did not squash the lab leak hypothesis. He asked if the NIH could do more to "put down the lab leak hypothesis."
The next day, after Dr. Collins explicitly asked for more public pressure, Dr. Fauci cited the proximal origins paper from the White House podium when asked if COVID-19 was a lab leak. It goes on and on about all these things. Then we have Dr. Fauci coordinating with people in the virology community to evade FOIA. I just spent some time on the phone with David from EcoHealth Alliance, the people who created this blueprint right here, which DARPA rejected because they thought it was too dangerous. But Wuhan went ahead and did it anyway with our tax dollars. He is concerned about the privacy of texts and other messages from his cell phone to you and me because he has been using a government phone, which permits personal conversations. Even things sent and received via Gmail on his cell phone could be FOIA-able.
This came from Tony Fauci in their conversation this morning. David has multiple things going on this week, including medical appointments. We’re evading FOIA because we don’t want people to be able to read our text messages and email messages. It’s a great circumvention of federal law. Remember, no one is above the law except for the people who violate FOIA. Rand Paul tweeted, "Fauci claims he never talked with Morens about helping EcoHealth Alliance, which partnered with the Wuhan lab, but this email from their 'back channel' at Boston University claims Fauci instructed Morens to use a back channel."
When you start digging into these things, it's just rotten as hell. With all due respect to Dr. LeCun, who is a legendary scientist and I have great respect for his work as an AI researcher, you just don’t know what you’re talking about. This is not about anti-science; this is about an organization that decided to subsidize research abroad in places like China to study manufacturing viruses in labs like Wuhan. It’s about when something started infecting people, people panicking within our government, using back channels to evade FOIA, and then manipulating the peer review process to write papers that basically whitewash and say that something that leaked from a lab was more likely than not of zoonotic origin.
Then they used their powers to deplatform people for years on Facebook, YouTube, and other social networks who had the audacity to say it was a lab leak. Why is it a lab leak? Well, where people started getting infected was right in a major city, not in the countryside. From my lifetime, your lifetime, all of our lifetimes, these epidemics that spread from animals start in the farms in the countryside and work their way into a major city center. You can see a pattern with it. Ground zero is right next to the laboratory where research was being done and funded by American taxpayers.
The Chinese government, immediately after this started breaking out, locked down the whole city, silenced everybody, disappeared a bunch of people inside the city, and refused to let anyone from the United States or the World Health Organization in. Scientists on our side, in a panic, created back channels to evade any recordings, published papers with very limited evidence, and tried to deplatform people from even suggesting that it was a virus made in a lab. We have DARPA proposals, we have grants that went there, and we have numerous communications of them talking about how to design a virus of this nature.
Then we have the response of the government. Unlike all other pandemics of our lifetime, this one made everybody panic. Did we ever stop for a moment to ask why everyone was so scared about COVID? Maybe, just maybe, it’s because it was the first synthetic virus that was going pandemic, and we had no idea how bad it actually could be. In an abundance of caution, the government overreacted because how can you know it’s not a natural disease? Every step of the way stinks to high heaven.
In an ordinary free society, what we do is properly investigate these things. We’re more interested in the sex life and business payments of a presidential candidate than we are in something that a million people died from. Where’s the special prosecutor to look at the text messages, emails, and phone calls? To subpoena and look into EcoHealth and Fauci and Francis Collins and all these scientists that were in this cabal? Also, to track and trace all the money we spend in synthetic biology to make gain-of-function viruses abroad? Where’s the executive order to create a moratorium on gain-of-function research until we develop a national policy and talk about our neighbors like we did with the IAC when nuclear weapons were made?
A million Americans died. We went to war for over 20 years when 9/11 happened, and planes flew into skyscrapers and the Pentagon. This is 300 times worse in terms of the death of Americans, and yet it’s a terrible tragedy we just have to move on from. If you’re on the political left, it just didn’t happen, and you know that with so much certainty. Every fiber and ounce of your being knows that, without a doubt. Trust the science? Whose science? The whole point of science is professional skepticism. The whole point of science is good until you discover something new.
Maybe, just maybe, if people are trying to avoid official record-keeping and they create back channels, and when you actually have proposals suggesting a year before COVID came out how to build COVID in a lab, when you have books written by postdoc researchers at MIT who meticulously trace and track years of records to showcase where bats came from that had COVID-like diseases, maybe, just maybe, there’s more to the story. When you have the FBI say that a lab leak cannot be discounted, why would they know? Because the FBI and the intelligence services routinely monitor the messages of foreign scientists that work on things that can be used for proliferation or bioweapons.
There’s no doubt in my mind that Dr. Shi’s text messages were being monitored by the NSA and the FBI. If there was a lab leak, they would have panicked and started messaging each other that their staff were getting sick with something from the lab, and it’s spread. Maybe they panicked. We would probably know that; the FBI would be aware of that but couldn’t reveal it publicly for fear of revealing sources and methods. A special prosecutor would be able to see such things and aggregate such a report.
So why aren’t we interested? Because the dark truth of the matter is the people in our government already know the answer. If Yan wants to be a useful idiot for a philosophy and tell people straight up that this is just some political persecution by right-wing extremists who are anti-science, he’s missing the entire point of the anger. The largest wealth transfer in American history happened during COVID. All of us suffered; we were all locked down. We lost the doctrine of informed consent with medicine. Medical practitioners lost their licenses when they disagreed with the mainstream orthodoxy, regardless of whether it had a positive or negative patient outcome.
In addition to that, anyone who spoke out against this was harassed, deplatformed, and ultimately ostracized by the mainstream. Corporations behind this made hundreds of billions of dollars in profit with all liability taken from them. You can’t sue them, regardless of what happened. Why is it that when this is of such national interest, and each and every one of us had to suffer and be locked down, our children had to suffer and be locked down, a private company with zero risk is allowed to make tens of billions of dollars in profit for something they didn’t even invent? Why are we okay with that?
It’s undebatable; you can follow the money. Why is it that once this all happened, we didn’t take a timeout for a bipartisan commission and ask ourselves as a society what went wrong? We still do not have that because people already know the answers at the top, and they just want to move on after stealing so much from us and causing so much harm. Now, this mechanism, this lever of lockdowns and the removal of informed consent from medicine, is permanently in the hands of the political class, and they know they can get away with it. The next pandemic, they can do something much worse if so desired, using the exact same techniques.
We lost a million people. It seems like a statistic. Those are husbands, wives, children, grandparents, daughters, and sons. Those are real people. They died; it was horrible for each and every family impacted. We owe it to them to at least ask, "Can we do better as a society?" Fauci did not save millions of lives; he lied about gain-of-function research. We have the receipts; it has been shown again and again. It has taken years of effort from real heroes to uncover this. In his arrogance, he hides behind this veil of team blue versus team red.
This is not a Republican issue; this is not a Democrat issue. This is an American issue, and it asks a very fundamental question: When does the U.S. government have the right to lock you down, inject you with something without your consent, and then tell you that you have to lose your business, your money, your freedom, and your livelihood? If there are negative consequences to it, who pays? If you are on the left, divorce yourself from the politics for a moment and just look at yourself in the mirror and ask a very fundamental question: If COVID was the product of gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, what does that personally mean to you?
Ask yourself that. Look at yourself in the mirror. If it actually was, what does that mean to you? Because right now, so many people in that tribe are so certain about something they know so little about. Perhaps it’s just that you can’t handle that truth; you don’t want to connect those dots. Your faith in government is so absolute—the same government that lied to us about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, the same government that assured us we’d win in Afghanistan after 20 years there, the same government that routinely, with the CIA, overthrows governments, interferes with elections, and assassinates political leaders, the same government that tested syphilis on Black people with the Tuskegee experiments, the same government that, without consent, gave LSD to people through MKUltra.
The same government that routinely lies, but somehow this one case, if they get caught with their hand in the cookie jar, couldn’t possibly be gain-of-function research? We just have to trust them? Not a single person at NIH lied so much so we can’t even investigate it? We can’t even look into it? We can’t even assign a special prosecutor to read people’s emails, even though our own emails get read, our own text messages get read? We’re all so comfortable with this gargantuan spy state where every single day, everything you do in your digital life gets archived by intelligence agencies and analyzed to make sure you’re not a threat.
But when government officials who are in charge of tens of billions of dollars of budget coordinate with foreign governments like China and give them money to do synthetic biology research, gain-of-function research, we can’t even look into that? We can’t even investigate that? We can’t even discuss it? It’s anti-science if we look into it? Since when did science support the government in every decision it makes and trust them blindly with no evidence? The entire point of science is professional skepticism. The entire point of science is to challenge authority and to look for new evidence. The entire point of science is to do better in the future than what we have today.
But apparently, it’s anti-science to question the doctrine of the people in power and in charge. Forgive me if I don’t trust them; they’ve lied to me my entire adult life. Since I started paying attention, everything I’ve been promised—the budget will get better, the deficits will go down. When I started university, our national debt was $4.5 trillion; now it’s $34 trillion. A lot of my friends from my generation fought in Iraq and Afghanistan, and they were promised it was for a purpose and that we would win. We didn’t. Now we’re in Ukraine and many other places. What have we gotten out of it? Where are we going with this?
Now they’re telling us to trust the science on these things, and I don’t even know what that means. I’m sorry, but when people write a paper on the origins of things and they push it into a major journal when they have an incentive to say one thing because perhaps the other thing was financed by them, that’s not objective science. Any more than when Pfizer or GlaxoSmithKline or any pharmaceutical company does research; it’s not objective. The purpose of it is to create products. That’s why the FDA exists—to act as a counterbalance to hold them accountable and make sure that the things they say are accurate. We challenge that on a daily basis.
This is a fundamental thing in America. It really is. It’s about whether we trust our institutions or not, and the reality is we can’t because they’ve hurt us, lied to us, and betrayed us again and again. For those of you on the left, if you don’t understand the anger that’s coming out of the other political spectrum, it’s not about Trump; it’s not about MAGA; it’s not about some hatred of Hillary Clinton or a particular person. It’s much more elemental and fundamental. It’s about a belief that the political, economic, and social institutions that we all grew up with are no longer accountable, are no longer credible, and have become dangerous.
If they can kill Americans, if they can lie to the American public, if they can arbitrarily arrest anyone who challenges them or deplatform information, these institutions are no longer worthy of a free society. If you on the left feel that that’s totally fine, that’s okay as long as your team
1:07:35
26:05
26:19