Hi everybody, this is Charles Hoskinson broadcasting live from warm, sunny Colorado. Always warm, always sunny, sometimes Colorado. I want to make a video today to talk about something that is unrelated to cryptocurrencies but related to our industry in a broader context: the destruction of trust in institutions.
Many of you know that I can be a bit skeptical at times about the things my government, the U.S. government, talks about and claims, especially when those things have significant geopolitical importance. There is nothing that has happened in my lifetime more significant than COVID-19. This was the first time in my lifetime—and actually almost everyone living's lifetime—that all of our society was shut down, and it has had very real and significant impacts on everyone.
For example, where my clinic is located in Gillette, Wyoming, the town is trying to build a bridge. The original budget pre-COVID was $18 million. The same bridge, same materials, same firms, now has a projected cost of $30 million due to delays caused by inflation felt everywhere in the United States. Our supply chains were wrecked, people were forced to stay at home, and society was deeply divided.
At the time COVID emerged, many people labeled the idea of it coming from a lab as a conspiracy theory. Now, years later, it is no longer labeled a conspiracy theory. We have the director of the FBI, the Department of Energy, and most recently, the CDC director—who was in that position at the time—saying that they believe a lab leak is the most probable origin or at least a consideration.
Why is this relevant, and why should we care? Let me share my screen. Here’s why I care: when you look at the list of U.S. military casualties in the last twelve wars we've had—from the American Civil War ranked in order of lethality to the Spanish-American War—and sum up all these numbers, you get about 1.3 million people. If you go to Google, the death toll of Americans who died from COVID is 1.1 million people. It's in the same order of magnitude.
Over the last three years, 103 million people have been impacted. We see patients all the time at the clinic who are permanently disabled with long COVID as a result of this. The 1.1 million people who died is comparable to every armed conflict in the entire history of the United States: the Civil War, World War II, World War I, Vietnam, Korea, the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, the Mexican-American War, the Iraq War, the Philippine-American War, the war in Afghanistan, and the Spanish-American War.
In the last few years, we have been through an event that has killed more Americans—or is in the same order of magnitude as all of these conflicts combined. You might ask yourself, shouldn’t the origins matter? We don’t want this to happen again.
This is a Biden-appointed FBI director, not a Republican, stating on CNN that COVID-19 likely resulted from a lab incident. Why is the FBI credible? Because the FBI has access to signals intelligence in the United States. They know the emails and messages and can conduct very complex investigations. They were given these capabilities during the war on terrorism, and they have not given them back.
There’s a great book by Matt Ridley and Alina Chan from MIT that talks about the origins of COVID. I read it recently, and it outlines the cave where the genetic sample was likely collected by a woman. There’s also a lovely article from MIT Technology Review that discusses the cave where they likely got the virus from and the five people who died there in 2012.
Now, what’s the blueprint for COVID? Here’s the DARPA proposal for the blueprint for COVID written by EcoHealth Alliance. They proposed using $14 million from DARPA. If you read the document, it wasn’t approved by DARPA, but one of the people listed is from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, who had been collecting samples at the time of this proposal for over six years.
Now, I know that the minute some people see Marjorie Taylor Greene, they dismiss everything as false. But Dr. Redfield was the director of the CDC, the organization that many were comfortable de-platforming people for saying something contrary. He led that organization, and more importantly, he’s a trained virologist. In February of 2020, he stated that the virus looks engineered and gave specific reasons why. When people were meeting at NIH, he was excluded from the discussions about what to do next.
This is a fact. It’s happened. The death toll is in the same order of magnitude as every war in U.S. history combined. Why does this matter? Because this person is not under investigation, this lab is not under investigation, and the whole process of gain-of-function research is not under investigation.
As it stands today, there are hundreds of facilities throughout the world conducting research on pandemic-causing diseases with very little oversight. We live in such a partisan culture that even though the FBI says this probably did come from a lab, those who deny it often have financial connections to it. The people who are supposed to keep us safe from these pandemics were excluded from the conversations.
There is no government investigation, no special prosecutor, even though over a million Americans died. Trust Google’s numbers; more than a million Americans died. Books have been written that provide credible cases, and proposals were submitted to DARPA about how to build something like this. The scientists who probably did it in the lab were denied access.
We weren’t allowed to investigate this time, unlike the last coronavirus pandemic in 2003. A Senate report stated that the lab leak is a credible origin. Shouldn’t we, as a society, given that a million Americans died, demand an independent, bipartisan, objective investigation? Shouldn’t we audit the finances of the NIH, the CDC, and other organizations to ensure we know where their grant money is going?
We need to proactively have a conversation about gain-of-function research. A million Americans died. September 11 caused a fundamental change in the entire foreign policy of the United States, costing our country trillions of dollars. The death toll was around three thousand. This is three thousand times worse in terms of American deaths, and we’re saying we just need to move on.
I’m sorry, I’m never going to do that. Why? Because these institutions do not have trust. When you have the former director of the CDC, who was leading the CDC at the time, saying he was excluded from meetings while the World Health Organization and non-American organizations were included to discuss the origins of COVID, it’s a problem. They allowed a paper to be shadow-written by those people and published under other names to label it a conspiracy theory.
Now, three years later, the FBI, the Department of Energy, the U.S. Senate, and other institutions say it’s a probable thing, and we banned people from expressing that opinion back in 2020. We say there’s no need for an investigation, no need for forensic accounting, and no need for changing our pandemic policies.
The reality is that the number of people it takes to create a pandemic-causing agent is shrinking. We’re going from thousands to hundreds to dozens. The number of people and institutions conducting this kind of research is increasing, and the lethality and infectiousness of these diseases are improving.
COVID, whether you believe it’s natural and zoonotic—which doesn’t really make any sense—or not, is the beginning of a trend. If we’re not careful, a small group of people with malicious intent could create something that could kill a third of all humanity. What would that do to society? The mortality rate for COVID in the United States was one percent. Can you imagine the social consequences of thirty percent?
How do you avoid that? You have to trust institutions, and right now, the institutions that are supposed to avoid that are not credible. It’s very clear. I appreciate that your politics may be in a certain position, but you really need to take a step back and realize this is not a partisan issue at all. The last twelve wars of the United States were not exactly partisan issues. If something kills as many people as that, we have to short-circuit the programming and ask ourselves what we want to accomplish moving forward.
There need to be special prosecutors, forensic accounting, and deep investigations that are bipartisan and independent into the origins, the response, and ultimately the policy moving forward for COVID. I will continue to finance and advocate for this by giving money to politicians who push these things. I will continue to talk about these issues with whatever microphone I’m given because this nearly broke and destroyed America.
It was devastating; it was the largest wealth transfer in American history from small businesses and small actors to large businesses and large actors. It was a massive affront to our civil liberties. It destroyed credibility in everything from medicine to institutions, and none of those wounds are healed. We have half of America that seems to think that’s okay and that everyone should just grow up and move on.
You don’t grow up and move on when a million people die and nobody asks why. You don’t grow up and move on when the people who were leading us during that time, who should have had a right to know, say they were excluded, while transnational organizations were engaged in a cover-up.
This is a hill to die on. It’s an incredibly important issue, and it’s something we should all care about, regardless of our politics. It’s just common sense. Think about how the last three years have impacted you, your family, your career, your ability to travel, and your plans. Some people listening to this know individuals who were personally impacted by this.
Don’t you think we have a right to know with certainty about these things? If you’ve already made up your mind and think everyone’s a conspiracy theorist, then tell me: why wouldn’t these people want independent investigations? If the answer is so clear, it would vindicate them. Why wouldn’t they want forensic accounting to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that we do not finance gain-of-function research in foreign labs?
Why wouldn’t they want to create a paper trail demonstrating innocence? It’s because they know that if they look into these things, they’re going to find out they’re not innocent. If we don’t expose it, why should we assume that behavior will change? If they get away with killing a million people, why should we assume it won’t be ten next time, or twenty, or thirty, and end us all?
We’re playing with fire. This is the equivalent of a nuclear bomb going off in New York City and claiming it was a natural phenomenon, and we should just all move on without looking into how that happened. Would you feel comfortable with that?
We owe it to our people to be better, and it starts with each and every one of us not taking what’s crammed down our throats and demanding independent, bipartisan, fair investigations. We need to vote with our feet. If they don’t do it, vote the people out and put in those who will.
This is not a partisan issue; it’s about a million Americans. You should care too. Thank you.
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