March 16, 2025
MM#396--Wuhan Lab Leak: What Really Happened and Why Justice Matters Five Years Later
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Five years after a mysterious virus emerged from Wuhan, China, we're still grappling with unanswered questions about COVID-19's origins and accountability. Drawing from Sharri Markson's eye-opening book "What Really Happened in Wuhan," we explore a remarkable January 2020 meeting where Chinese democracy advocate Wei Jingsheng warned Washington insiders about a suspicious virus leak from a laboratory—weeks before the world understood what was coming.
This pivotal conversation raises profound questions: Why hasn't there been a comprehensive investigation into COVID-19's origins comparable to the Nuremberg trials after WWII or the tribunals for Rwanda and Yugoslavia? Top intelligence officials from multiple nations now believe a laboratory accident at the Wuhan Institute of Virology represents the most probable explanation. Former MI6 chief Sir Richard Dearlove states "the weight of evidence is actually on the escapee side," while former CIA Director Mike Pompeo identifies the Wuhan lab as the likely source. Yet meaningful accountability remains out of reach.
We examine the unique geopolitical challenges preventing justice—China's superpower status, the difficulty in establishing clear intent versus negligence, and international reluctance to confront Beijing. The stark reality is that China has been the source of multiple serious disease outbreaks in recent decades, raising urgent questions about global biosafety standards and potential consequences for nations that repeatedly endanger global health. Despite these obstacles, the millions who lost their lives deserve our continued pursuit of truth and accountability. Five years may not be enough time to untangle this complex catastrophe, but history shows that persistence in seeking justice matters, however challenging that path may be.
Join us as we reflect on this somber anniversary and consider what meaningful steps toward accountability might still be possible, even as the window for justice narrows with each passing year.
Key Points from the Episode:
• Exploring Sharri Markson's book "What Really Happened in Wuhan" and key early warning from Chinese democracy advocate Wei Jingsheng
• Comparing COVID-19 to historical justice mechanisms like Nuremberg, Rwanda, and Cambodia tribunals
• Examining statements from intelligence leaders including former MI6 and CIA heads supporting the lab leak theory
• Analyzing the geopolitical obstacles preventing meaningful investigation and accountability
• Questioning what justice might look like five years after the pandemic began
• Highlighting China's repeated role in pandemic outbreaks over recent decades
• Considering whether stronger international biosafety standards and potential UN Security Council consequences should be implemented
Keep fighting the good fight and seeking truth about COVID-19's origins despite the challenges.
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Chapters
00:00 - Introduction to COVID's Fifth Anniversary
01:50 - What Really Happened in Wuhan - Book Overview
05:01 - Key Players: Diamond, Bob, and Wei Jingsheng
09:44 - COVID-19's Global Impact
11:21 - Historical Comparison with War Crimes Tribunals
16:52 - Justice for COVID-19 - Is It Possible?
22:17 - Scientific Evidence for Lab Leak Theory
30:20 - China's Pandemic History and Closing Thoughts
Transcript
WEBVTT
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Welcome to the Theory to Action podcast, where we examine the timeless treasures of wisdom from the great books in less time, to help you take action immediately and ultimately to create and lead a flourishing life.
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Now here's your host, david Kaiser.
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Hello, I am.
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David, and welcome back to another Mojo Minute flourishing life.
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Now here's your host, david Kaiser.
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Hello, I am David, and welcome back to another Mojo Minute.
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Today we're going to reflect upon a moment of history that changed all of our lives.
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Five years ago.
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This month, roughly about this time, the COVID-19 pandemic struck the world, including the United States, with the intensity that few could have imagined.
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It was a time of uncertainty, fear and profound loss.
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The virus swept across the globe, disrupting daily life, overwhelming health care systems and taking an unthinkable toll on families and communities.
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Schools closed, businesses shut down, people faced isolation like never before.
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The crisis forced us to confront challenges on every level personal, societal and global.
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But through the darkness, there were also stories of resilience and innovation and compassion.
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Today, we're going to take a deeper look at the impact of that period how it shaped our world, what we should know after five years, and will we ever get justice from what happened.
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So with that, let's go to our book of the day, a fantastic book what Really Happened in Wuhan by Sherry Markson, and with that, let's go to our first pull quote, sherry Markson.
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And with that, let's go to our first pull quote January 2nd 2020, dateline Washington DC.
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Six weeks later, way burst through the door of Diamond and Bob's home just before lunchtime.
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It was the second day of the new year, a Thursday, and Wei had called only a short while before to ask if he could drop by for lunch, prompting Diamond to frantically scour her pantry and fridge to see what she could cook for him.
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From the moment he walked in, wei could speak about little else other than the virus spreading in Wuhan.
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He launched into the news of it immediately.
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Diamond and Bob were highly concerned.
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Wei told them the official line propagated by authorities was that the virus had emerged in a seafood wet market.
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It's just not possible.
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Wei insisted adamantly.
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In a raised voice he systematically and emphatically rolled out that natural animal-to-human transmission that had occurred through the wet market.
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Diamond listened as she rustled up a ramen noodle soup with meat and vegetables made with stock she had frozen from the emergency situation such as this.
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The only thing he spoke about at lunch was the Wuhan disease.
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Diamond said later, with stock sheet frozen from the emergency situation such as this the only thing he spoke about at lunch was the Wuhan disease, diamond said later.
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I was alarmed by the things he told me as they sat down to eat the spicy soup.
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What Wei said next truly shocked Diamond and Bob With a photographic memory that had recalled a long-forgotten, now defunct, phone number.
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After 30 years.
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He told them about a top-secret, highly classified program the Chinese Communist Party had been running for decades.
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I know the PLA People's Liberation Army has been doing research on biological warfare since the 1960s.
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He said authoritatively the laboratories in Wuhan are very suspicious.
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I believe those laboratories are controlled by the military and not by civilians.
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The virus is from the laboratory, either through incompetence, accident, negligence, corruption or intention".
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He paused and then added the wet market theory is only likely if the variousness of the lab technicians sold the used and infected animals to the wet markets.
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Diamond and Bob felt frightened.
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They glanced at each other again for what felt like the 15th time, and again, that is a quote from what Really Happened in Wuhan by Shari Markson Fantastic book.
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Now, who are Diamond Liu mentioned here in this quote and Bob Suchinger?
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Well, they're one of the most powerful married couples in DC elite circles.
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They certainly are a married couple with a deep impact on US-China relations and, furthermore, on human rights advocacy.
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Diamond was born in China, fled during the Cultural Revolution and has been a strong voice for democracy since the 1970s.
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She played a key role in pushing a UN reprimand against China after the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown and has organized major conferences on military and human rights issues.
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Bob Suttinger is an American scholar and a former CIA officer.
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He's worked in top US government roles, including Director of Asian Affairs at the National Security Council during the Clinton administration.
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He's also collaborated with institutions like Brookings and Rand, focusing on Chinese politics and North Korea.
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Both of them together have hosted influential figures like dissident Wei Jingxing I hope I'm pronouncing that correct.
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I hope I'm pronouncing all these names correct.
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They've hosted a dissident Wei at their DC Washington home Washington home, combining Diamond's activism with Bob's policy expertise to shape conversations on China and global affairs.
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Now, who is Wei Xingjing?
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Wei Xingjing is often called the father of Chinese democracy.
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He's a prominent human rights activist and democracy advocate.
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He gained attention in 1978 during China's democracy wall movement with his essay the Fifth Modernization, which called for political freedom alongside economic progress.
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He was then arrested in 1979 for counter-revolutionary propaganda and he suffered some 15 years in prison Before being exiled to the United States in 1997, he's based in Washington DC.
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He continues to fight for democracy in China through activism, and the Wei-Hsing-Hsing Foundation, which earned global recognition for his unwavering dedication.
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Now, the reason to know these three pivotal players is that they're part of a network of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of Chinese citizens who have contacts all over China, in and out of the Chinese Communist Party.
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Let's go back to the book.
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Wei proceeded to tell them about Shi Xingli, specifically mentioning her name.
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It said that the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where she worked, was the laboratory suspected of being responsible for the leak of the virus.
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He mentioned the uncontrollable Hong Kong protests that had been a political firestorm for the Chinese government for months and months.
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Diamond asked is there any possibility that Xi or Xi's political rivals released the virus?
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Such a possibility all exists, wei said, because the power elite would do anything to gain advantages during power struggles.
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Z would be the most likely culprit If the virus release was indeed intentional, because Z controls the military and the military controls the research in the biological warfare section.
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Diamond didn't know what to make of it.
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It was surreal, unthinkable.
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A virus was apparently spreading and yet not a word from any official outlets.
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The entire matter covered up and silenced.
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She asked Wei are they really doing this?
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Wei said they have no baseline.
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The phrase, which has no English equivalent, is usually translated as they have no bottom line, but more accurately means they can descend to a very low level.
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Diamond and Bob were in shock.
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This was like wow.
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Were in shock.
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This was like wow.
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We couldn't believe our ears.
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She said it was January 2nd 2020.
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And well, you know the tragedy that lay ahead for the whole world.
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The world was turned upside down by COVID-19.
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What they call officially is SARS-CoV-2 spread like wildfire.
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It all began in late 2019 in Wuhan, china, and by March of 2020, the World Health Organization, the WHO, had declared it a pandemic.
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By the end of the year 2020, there were about 81.5 million confirmed cases worldwide and 1.79 million deaths, a staggering number that probably is even higher due to limited testing in some areas.
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Lockdowns became part of everyday life.
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Schools closed, lockdowns became part of everyday life.
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Schools closed, businesses shut their doors, public spaces were empty and life as we knew it came to a grinding halt.
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Economies took a huge hit, with the global GDP shrinking by an estimated 3.4% that year alone.
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Hospitals were overwhelmed with shortages of protective gear and beds, creating heartbreaking situations and the human toll massive.
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Massive Millions struggled with long COVID, while anxiety and depression and isolation became all too common.
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Vulnerable groups like the elderly and low-income communities were hit the hardest.
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It was a very tough time, to say the least.
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So we bring up all of this tragedy and human heartache and we bring it up for the fact that.
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Is it like any other world event, major event?
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Will we have justice?
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Will we get to the bottom of the origin of this virus?
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You know, if we compared the COVID-19 biological virus to any other major events, with tragedy, death, how does it compare?
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Perhaps if we compared it to World War II?
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You know, we had the Nuremberg trials, which held Nazi leaders accountable for war crimes, crimes against humanity, including genocide, including the Holocaust which killed six million Jews and millions of others.
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There was an international military tribunal that charged some 24 top Nazis, sentenced 12 of them to death and others to prison, with later trials persecuting another 161 more individuals.
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These trials introduced the concept of crimes against humanity and they set a precedent for the international law community.
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They even influenced the 1948 Genocide Convention.
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Now some criticize the trials as victors justice, as many low-ranking perpetrators went unpunished and allied actions were not examined.
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But let's move west, from 46, 1946, to 48.
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We had the tokyo trials.
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They prosecuted Japanese leaders for the World War II war crimes, including the rape of Nanking, and atrocities across Asia and the Pacific region, which resulted in an estimated 20 million deaths.
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28 officials were tried, seven were executed and others received pretty long prison sentences.
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Though the Emperor Haruhito was controversially not prosecuted, and while the trials documented key crimes and delivered some justice, criticism of allied biases and incomplete accountability still remains.
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What if we just took a broader look in the last 50 years?
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Some major events.
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You know.
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We had the Rwandan genocide in 1994, where we saw a Houthi extremist kill some 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus in just 100 days.
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It was one of history's fastest genocides.
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The UN's International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda convicted some 61 key figures, including the former Prime Minister, gene Kambanda, while local Grassy courts tried over some 100 million low-level perpetrators, actually brought them to a court in Africa.
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Now this tribunal contributed to justice in Rwanda's stabilization, though some perpetrators still remain at large.
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What about the Yugoslav wars from 1991 to 1999, where we saw over 130,000 deaths, 2.4 million people displaced and widespread atrocities, including the Bosnian genocide and the Sabrenka massacre?
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That international tribunal for former Yugoslavia from 1993 to 2017, a pretty long time indicted some 164 individuals with key convictions for genocide and war crimes, including Radovan Karcic and Radovan Maledic.
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While that tribunal delivered justice and exposed atrocities, reconciliation in the region remains fragile.
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What about the Cambodian genocide from 1975 to 1979 under Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge, which resulted in 1.7 to 2 million people dying, or 25% of that population?
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That was done through starvation, forced labor and executions.
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Decades later, the extraordinary chambers in the courts of Cambodia convicted three senior leaders, but many victims' families remained dissatisfied due to the delayed justice and limited court convictions.
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The trials documented the genocide's devastating scope, though, though Now comparing COVID-19 to the events like Nuremberg or the Rwandan genocide or the Cambodian genocide does offer us some key differences and some obstacles.
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You know there's a lack of clear intent with the COVID-19 biological pandemic.
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You know there's a historical contrast there.
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Nuremberg and Tokyo prosecuted individuals like Hitler's lieutenants and Tojo for international acts of genocide, aggression, atrocities.
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The Rwandan and Yugoslav tribunals targeted planners of the ethnic cleansing.
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In those cases there was evidence of intent.
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We had Nazi records, khmer Rouge directives.
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All of that was overwhelming COVID-19,.
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The challenge is there's no real single person or group that has been definitely proven to have caused the pandemic with intent.
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There's no sense of maliciousness from what we can find so far.
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Now, the lab leak hypothesis does suggest negligence and recklessness.
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Suggest negligence and recklessness that poor biosafety in Wuhan.
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But we have no smoking gun which is comparable to the Nazi extremist orders or the extermination orders.
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But if China has withheld early data, like we believe they did, then proving that this caused millions of deaths globally is legally and factually murky.
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But is it really?
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That's still a question I struggle with five years later.
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Does justice have a clear target anymore?
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Target anymore?
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I do think we should start by looking at two folks within our own American government apparatus.
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While we might not be able to find the origin of COVID-19 in Wuhan, china, we can look at Drs Fauci and Birx and ask the question should we as a society demand a real trial under oath to uncover the truth about what they knew?
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Not just another congressional hearing, but an actual tribunal with full discovery subpoena power and the ability to hold people in contempt if they refuse to cooperate.
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Now I get it.
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Proving causality is complicated.
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It's not about pinning all the blame for the COVID-19 deaths on one or two people.
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The goal would simply be to find out what they knew and whether there was any intent to cover it up, to get down to the maliciousness of it, at least within the United States, because that's a very different question.
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I understand the geopolitical challenges.
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After World War II, we, the allies, had the power to hold trials in Germany and Japan because they were defeated nations.
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Different story with COVID-19.
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Defeated nations Different story with COVID-19.
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China is a global superpower, nuclear armed, economically dominant, resistant to outside investigations about the virus's origin.
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Totally understand.
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The WHO's 2021 investigation was widely criticized as extremely weak, with China controlling all the access, and subsequent attempts to dig deeper have gone nowhere.
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Unlike Nazi Germany, china isn't a defeated enemy and no country or organization, not even the UN or the ICC, has the leverage to force accountability upon them.
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But let's not forget, countries like Russia are deflecting blame too.
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They're making the unified action feel impossible, so they're playing the game in the geopolitical sense.
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But should not the United States take the lead and show the world that we are serious about getting to the bottom of this?
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Why not set the example and start with what we can control within our own rule of law framework in the United States?
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We have to seek the truth, is my point.
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And what would justice look like?
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You know, in prior cases we talked about trials, executions and truth commissions.
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So with COVID-19, the possibilities could be a COVID tribunal to investigate the mismanagement within the United States.
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Now that would get around the geopolitics and the lack of evidence on the origin of the virus.
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Around the geopolitics and the lack of evidence on the origin of the virus Could get to the point where we would have enough evidence to demand that China would pay trillions for global losses.
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Now that might be unrealistic given China's defiance and sovereignty.
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Now the Truth Commission aspect a global inquiry to document failures without prosecution, like South Africa's TRC commission.
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That could be feasible, but toothless without any enforcement.
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And then domestic accountability we could prosecute leaders for negligence, similar to Brazil's Bolsonaro, which faced scrutiny for his COVID denialism.
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But here's what I want to add from this wonderful book what Really Happened in China?
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Let's go back to the book.
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In January 2020, the military took over the Wuhan Institute of Virology, silencing, controlling and surveilling anyone in the facility Disturbingly.
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A senior PLA scientist working with Shi Xingli filed a patent for a coronavirus vaccine on February 23, 2020, remarkably early, only to die by May in mysterious circumstances.
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The scientific evidence is equally as compelling.
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As many scientists have noted, sars-cov-2 has highly unusual features that point to a laboratory origin.
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The genetic code for a furin cleavage site, which has never been seen before in beta coronaviruses, appears in the precise spot in the S gene where scientists genetically tweak viruses to make them more infectious to human beings, and the spike protein the S gene makes has a higher binding affinity to the human AC2 receptor than that of any other animal.
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So then, the question is what does all this mean?
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Does the circumstantial and scientific evidence amount to an overwhelming case that COVID-19 leaked from a laboratory?
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To answer this question, former intelligence agency leaders at the CIA, the NSA, mi6, and Five Eyes Intelligence Network offered their unparalleled insights.
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The former head of the British spy agency MI6, sir Richard Dearlove, said in an interview for this book that the evidence supports a laboratory leak.
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The weight of evidence is actually on the escapee side, and it's strongly on the evidence.
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Coldly, the likelihood is that this is an escape from a laboratory, and it's up to the Chinese to demonstrate conclusively to us that it isn't, not just to tell us it isn't.
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Later on, further down the page, we pick up this quote A high-level Five Eyes intelligence source describes the evidence that the virus came from the laboratory as quote compelling and says there have been active Chinese disinformation.
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Former CIA Director Mike Pompeo has had access to the top secret intelligence on the origins of the virus during his time as US Secretary of State.
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Quote my sense is that if you said you have to weigh the possibilities, I would say the most likely probability is that it was a worker who was infected, either someone through the wet market or someplace through there, or family members through a secondary transmission.
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He says.
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Pompeo believes the Wuhan Institute of Virology, over and above other Wuhan biology labs, is the most likely source of the outbreak.
00:25:47.282 --> 00:25:53.886
I haven't seen any avenues that would support a leak from any other of their sites.
00:25:53.886 --> 00:25:58.722
He said that would support a leak from any other of their sites, he said.
00:25:58.742 --> 00:26:22.190
And then, further down the page, former Deputy Secretary of Australia's Defense Department, peter Jennings, said there is a huge amount of evidence pointing to China's interest in biological weapons and the Wuhan Institute of Virology classified research program and that their biosecurity standards were sloppy.
00:26:22.190 --> 00:26:30.950
If you put those together, that creates a compelling case to say that the possibility of a lab accident is actually very high, he said.
00:26:30.950 --> 00:26:51.944
Finally, of course you have almost the hysterical way in which Xi Jinping and the Communist Party sought to cover this up, to prevent investigations and to furiously deny that there was a problem.
00:26:51.944 --> 00:26:59.079
To me, that is a sign of culpability that the party realizes what happened and they understand the risks that it presents them internationally and at home.
00:26:59.079 --> 00:27:10.189
Taking all of those things into account, I think the chance of this being a leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology is actually very substantial.
00:27:10.189 --> 00:27:23.934
And then we go on to Trump's former National Security Advisor, robert O'Brien, who says the circumstantial evidence pretty strongly suggests that the virus came out of the lab.
00:27:25.276 --> 00:27:35.047
But I always thought whether it was a wet market or a lab leak was somewhat immaterial given the history of past health crisis.
00:27:35.047 --> 00:27:40.759
These crises keep coming out of China and affecting the entire globe.
00:27:40.759 --> 00:27:49.028
What amazes me is the whole world hasn't banded together and just said enough is enough, you guys need international supervision.
00:27:49.028 --> 00:27:59.380
China has released these four or five plagues on the world in just the last 21 years and its government can't control the problem.
00:27:59.380 --> 00:28:02.366
That is the really big issue.
00:28:02.366 --> 00:28:03.308
Unquote.
00:28:07.155 --> 00:28:14.944
Now we did some checking and China does seem to be a hotbed for pandemics.
00:28:14.944 --> 00:28:18.910
You can think of the original SARS pandemic.
00:28:18.910 --> 00:28:20.979
You can think of this COVID-19 pandemic.
00:28:20.979 --> 00:28:27.375
You can think of other flu outbreaks the 1957 Asian flu, the 1968 Hong Kong flu.
00:28:27.375 --> 00:28:35.648
Now, in the last 21 years, however, only SARS and COVID-19 clearly have originated from China.
00:28:35.648 --> 00:28:51.526
The H7N9 flu, the avian flu from 2013 to 2017, that also emerged in China, but it's not among the top five due to its limited global impact.
00:28:51.526 --> 00:29:06.894
The most major other pandemics H1N1, mers, ebola they all came from elsewhere Ebola came from West Africa, mers came from the Middle East and the H1N1 came from North Africa.
00:29:06.894 --> 00:29:28.801
But China's dense population in wildlife markets and their trade networks increased these Zootonic risks, as they call them, and the fact that we've had two in the last 21 years means they, as a country, china, should be on the hot seat.
00:29:28.801 --> 00:29:31.342
They should be on the hot seat.
00:29:34.496 --> 00:29:37.005
And finally, some perspective against history.
00:29:37.005 --> 00:29:40.961
What about the speed?
00:29:40.961 --> 00:29:42.641
Is five years long enough?
00:29:42.641 --> 00:29:47.805
Well, the Nuremberg trials began months just after World War II ended.
00:29:47.805 --> 00:29:48.826
That was pretty easy.
00:29:48.826 --> 00:29:52.397
The Yugoslav wars were the same.
00:29:52.397 --> 00:30:02.371
It took five years, or five years past COVID, and that's slow, but it's not unprecedented.
00:30:02.371 --> 00:30:07.126
The Cambodian genocide took some 27 years to even start.
00:30:07.126 --> 00:30:14.929
So it all depends on the locality where it begins, such as China in this case with COVID-19.
00:30:17.636 --> 00:30:19.042
And then to have some resolution?
00:30:19.042 --> 00:30:22.384
You know, historical justice has not always been perfect.
00:30:22.384 --> 00:30:37.249
We've had escaped Nazis, unpunished apartheid figures in South Africa, and we've had, you know, many, many folks from all these genocides that slipped through the cracks.
00:30:37.249 --> 00:30:56.071
Now COVID-19's lack of closure mirrors the most unresolved cases more than the tidy ones, and our past events just show us that justice does require power and it requires evidence.
00:30:56.071 --> 00:30:58.700
It requires looking for that evidence.
00:30:58.700 --> 00:31:05.582
We know under the Biden administration that everything was essentially shut down After the first year.
00:31:05.582 --> 00:31:17.001
Joe Biden never brought up COVID-19 again, never brought it up in his discussions with the Chinese, never brought it up in his discussions with the Chinese.
00:31:17.001 --> 00:31:36.359
So, in short, we know that COVID-19's diffuse nature, the uncertain origins even though we just documented that the most likely culprit is a lab leak and the geopolitical realities toward a Nuremberg-like response though we would like that.
00:31:37.855 --> 00:31:41.866
It's certainly not a war or a genocide with a villain easy to hang.
00:31:41.866 --> 00:31:44.884
It's messy of a global disaster.
00:31:44.884 --> 00:31:49.306
There's plenty of blame and no consensus on who to punish.
00:31:49.306 --> 00:31:53.925
Now, five years isn't enough to untangle the whole thing.
00:31:53.925 --> 00:32:11.461
Now, five years isn't enough to untangle the whole thing, and certainly with not a seismic shift like a leaked proof of a cover-up or a weakened China that would welcome such investigations.
00:32:11.480 --> 00:32:23.855
Now, historically, the world, together with the United States in its leadership role we have gotten to the bottom of these tragedies when the stars are aligned Now here.
00:32:23.855 --> 00:32:27.119
So far, after five years, they have not yet.
00:32:27.119 --> 00:32:34.609
But in the past we've only uncovered the truth behind these major tragedies when everything else lined up.
00:32:34.609 --> 00:32:40.538
And, like we said, so far they have not.
00:32:40.538 --> 00:32:46.568
But two major pandemics in the last 21 years should be a wake-up call for the international community.
00:32:46.568 --> 00:32:57.859
It's clear the world needs to come together and enforce stronger global standards to prevent the spread of these future outbreaks.
00:32:57.859 --> 00:33:02.988
And should China lose its spot on the UN Security Council if it doesn't meet these standards?
00:33:02.988 --> 00:33:08.436
Honestly, we think that's a good, solid first step.
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