Preparedness and response under president trump. He talks about the origins of covid19 and whether theres evidence of an accidental leak at the wuhan lab. Thank you eg of you on our video feed. I am david asher, a Senior Research fellow, resident at hudson. I cover a variety of things, everything from financing, sanctions, to nuclear oil agile nuclear biological weapons. I wanted to introduce you to dr. Robert kadlec, a colleague who has done pioneering work in this area going back to his times starting at the u. S. Air force academy and moving into the military for a few decades, and working in high raking roles in health and Human Services. Conceiving and developing our National Defense strategy and executing it in the midst of the biggest threat disaster in history, which was the outrage of covid19. I am here to discuss that with dr. Robert kadlec, and to go over some of the Lessons Learned in his long career. Let us go on and move forward from here. The most important thing i would like to highlight today is the importance of this muddy waters, the origins of covid19. And its report that came out in the Senate Health committee. That report is one of the most important reports about covid19 to have been issued, if not the most important. I would like to introduce dr. Robert kadlec. I dont know if you want to give any background on how you came to get involved in health and Human Services and have you made your way to capitol hill. Dr. Kadlec it is a pleasure to appear with you, and your colleagues at hudson. I want to say thank you for the opportunity. How did i get here . The simplest thing to say is i am a threepeat offender. And with the election of donald trump, then representative tom price to become his assistant secretary for preparedness and response, which is an interesting turn of events. When i first worked for richard burr, we wrote the enabling authorization legislation that created the secretary for preparedness response. It was central to the genesis of work speed during the covid19 pandemic. Mr. Asher i should have credited your work on the hill as well, you have done so many different things. Those are very important effort. The immediate question is, we can talk about it later, what happened . We had the appropriate architecture that you had health developing for the government. I do not think it failed us. People underrate the work you have done with a small group of colleagues in creating operation warp speed and the ability to manufacture mrna vaccines. It would be great to get your full review of the report you did called muddy waters, about the it is the most enlightening report i have read. You were doing this for senator burr and other republican members of the health committee. If you can explain about how you got into it, what motivated you, and what you learned along the way. Dr. Kadlec it was a task that was assigned to me in 2021, my second day back on the hill. His intent with chairman patty murray, the ranking the chairwoman for the health committee, was to create a bipartisan investigation using only open Source Information to determine if possible the origins of the covid19 pandemic. That task was focusing for 20 months, during my tenure, to look at two different hypotheses. One, whether or not the virus emerged from a zoonotic event, or some intermediate species, or was this a consequence of some kind of Laboratory Research that was being conducted in on my possibly at the time visited of the approach we took was simple. Looking at and a valuation of plausible hypotheses. Is it conceivable that under each of those two headings could there be reasonable or possible events that could result in a pandemic . We found three subtypes for each of those categories. We conducted a investigation with a team of teams. We created a team a and team b, and they led the effort to accrue evidence from organ source materials validating the Material Information as we could that would align to either a zoonotic origin or a Left Research origin. That is how we proceeded, we were backed up by a fairly extensive technical team, people that we solicited for their insights, many of them who offered their time freely, willingly and free to provide us technical insights as it relates to biosafety, molecular biology, epidemiology, medical infectious diseases. We had another dozen people outside of the six or seven that we had dedicated to the effort. I met several of your team members early on. I was very impressed by them. A highquality group of people they have on capitol hill to take time to do and effort that was unpopular at the time. No one was people may have been interested in knowing the origin, but the government, the executive branch, was not interested in sharing information related to that. It was extremely difficult, to do it in a way that was not biased, one team that was po rlab leak, and another team that was focused on natural origin, and trying to other evidence for each hypotheses was grueling. You certainly did a great job, i read the report, which is 200 pages of text, and what you sayf the things that you learned regarding the origin that really changed or shaped your view in the course of doing the report . In the context of the government and from other sources that are available. I noticed that you did dwell on this right sharp increase in influenzalike illness in china in the fall of 2019 can you give us a few minutes of detail on that . One of the things that we did differently from the Intelligence Community, we were beneficiaries of the slide report by the office of director of National Intelligence. We did get access to the other report. We open the aperture of our investigation that preceded well beyond the timeframe that the dni did. For example, we looked well beyond the fall of 2019. And going back into the fall of 2018, and even earlier to evaluate what we would say the trajectory of Coronavirus Research in china, particularly at the Wuhan Institute. Recognized that it is not the only institution in wuhan that does this kind of research. There are a number of colleges, universities, veterinary schools, that participate. It was really to understand what was the kind of baseline. What we learned through this kind of temporal evaluation that began literally in 2017 the construction of the Wuhan Institute of virologys Biosafety Laboratory was completed, was that there were challenges that they were confronting from the very beginning in terms of act guessing materials, expertise, and particularly operationalizing what is a High Containment Laboratory of bso for. China had very little experience in dealing with this or managing. As you go forward, you realize that in november 2018, this was something the state Department Recognized as well that they reported on the fact that there were a lot of concerns from the chinese as well as from outside of hurts, including United States scientists, then indicated that there could be a risk to what china was doing as it related to some of this Cutting Edge Technology and research with coronaviruses and the possibility of not having the highest level of biosafety. The consequence of not only constructing a new facility but operating and maintaining this facility. So, coming to your point about what happened, we found some early indicators that there were concerns around biosafety going into the spring of 2019 at the Wuhan Institute of urology. Virology. There seem to be even greater concerns as it related to the nature of some of the research that was being performed, particularly some of the research that was seeming to be performed at a lower level of biosafety than typically encountered in other laboratories around the world, particularly the United States. Just to give you a little flavor of what we found, this leads to what happened in the fall of 2019. Every spring and summer, the Wuhan Institute would go on field expeditions to Southern China where coronaviruses were found. This is found in nature, they would go into caves, capturing bats, recovering samples from bats, and taking the samples and sometimes the bats themselves back to wuhan, into the institute where they would process the samples, oftentimes at a biosafety two laboratory level, which is like your dentist office. We recognize that some of the risk was when they would retrieve these bad and process the samples, oftentimes were lower than acceptable levels of biosafety, that could be a risk. The second part was, they would actually do some genetic manipulation of these viruses, oftentimes in low biosafety levels as well. This is documented both in public literature, dissertations that were released, and the bat lady. When we get to the fall of 2019, we see that there is this research that is ongoing. There is this explosion of cases of influenza like illness that begin probably in late october, early november. Probably the most compelling observation was made by u. S. Diplomats in the wuhan consulate who report both to their colleagues in beijing and it filters back to the u. S. There seems to be a vicious flu outbreak occurring in late october, early november of 2019. This information is further corroborated by the fact that there are some studies that were done by harvard that indicated there was increased hospital traffic, increased searches on the Search Engine for symptoms that compared to what covid19 was at that time, as well as other reports from our state department that indicated possibly researchers became sick with covid like systems symptoms in early november. The south china post releasing a china cdc report that the first documented case of covid may have happened as early as november 17. All these things coalesce to a report that was done by a chinese epidemiologist that was published they are in 2020 that showed this very large spike of influenza like illness. China itself released information to the w. H. O. In april 2021 that indicated there was a surge in early november but we are not associating with testing for influenza. You have this whole mass of events that say, hey, it is possible and probable that cases that were occurring of this influenza like illness that a word in early november were likely associated with covid first divergence. That is something i have seen as a lead investigator. We saw that spike, it was captured in chinese statistics. We saw a lot of anomalous data, totally unclassified, coming off of social media in china in late november of 2019 that was parallel to the increases in i o i, influenza like illness. I am a detective, so we are used to talking about it. This doesnt make any sense. We havent seen something. I will always be a little bit cautious, there are certain things we dont know. But, we know a lot if you put together the mosaic. There are pieces missing from the picture. The picture is pretty incriminating. Can you comment on what evidence you found that there was a national origin, if any . Did you see patients coming out of china that discovered something . Did you see them acting in a way that wasnt panicky regarding the origin . Or was panicky. Something about the behavior you observed that convinced any of your team that they didnt know where this thing came from . It is interesting that you say that. The benefit of doing the investigation that they did where we had a team a and team b, was trying to crew all the evidence that we could from all sources that were published or otherwise that would provide at least some reason to believe that this could have been a zoo nautica event coming from an animal. What we found, quite strikingly, even though precedents favors that answer, there was no documented information or evidence that would support that. For example, when sars originally occurred in 2002 in china and was also subject to a coverup by the chinese government, able to ascertain is that they were able to identify fairly rapidly a host that was being sold in wet markets, this was a food source. The animals would be slaughtered by the animal handlers and interestingly enough, typically, animal handlers were some of the first people to get sick with sars in two and 2004. Fastforward to 2019, we dont see any evidence, and china has not been able to produce an intermediate host for this. There is a lot of reason to do about a raccoon dog, none of those animals were found to be infected with sarscov2 no more nor were any animal handlers found to be infected with that. There was a study published in the spring of 2020 that indicated that they were doing longitudinal surveys of seven wet markets in wuhan three years prior to the pandemic. They werent looking for sarscov2, but two things were notable. First of all, animals that were susceptible like the raccoon dog , no bats were sold there. The bats were a very important source of the virus in Southern China, the bats and susceptible animals were brought to the wet markets together where they were sold as food. Interesting enough, they are not a food source in wuhan. It is a local delicacy, not one in wuhan. It is kind of an anomaly to see it. We could say that at least from the standpoint of historic precedents, evidentiary data, the key connections that would normally be found in historic cases of sars transmission documented previously were absent in wuhan at that time. What was really interesting is that we showed evidence, particularly in the early november timeframe, of what would have been concerted government activities that would suggest something did happen, likely at the Wuhan Institute of virology and put also at the wuhan university, the institute of animal models. We found some reports that would indicate that at the same time, there were publications, probably deceptive in nature, that were trying to cover the tracks of the involvement of the Wuhan Institute. And the wuhan university. The second thing is, we had a high level chinese official come from chinas academy of sciences on november 19 where he did a couple of interesting things. His day of arrival was notable because he was the subject of an internal posting on the virology website that indicated that he ran what was likely a p sure, a chinese mechanism of reporting that often goes through the political channels to the highest level that is needed to resolve an issue or problem. That individual sends back down instructions. It appears that this chap from beijing was carrying orders from xi jinping himself that indicated there were concerns around by security around the wuhan and the two of virology and in fact that he was lecturing them about issues that were a matter of national concern. We do know on the 19th of november a senior official from the Chinese Academy of sciences, the lead bio security official came down and met with Senior Leadership and brought with him a p sure, which is orders from high level senior officials, in this case, the official from beijing on instructions directly from xi jinping related to the issues around bio security at the Wuhan Institute of virology. He also led a 2. 5 day remedial biosafety Training Program the next day for members, as well as with some other institutes in wuhan, indicating something may have happened. Coincidentally, the same day he arrived on the 19th of november, the Wuhan Institute of virology issued a short notice for a device that would be added to an auto wave exhaust pipe called an air incinerator which is quite an unusual activity and would suggest possibly there was some kind of infectious release from an autoclave. Autoclaves are used to sterilize infectious waste. Often times by the use of steam pressure and temperature over time, that renders whatever infectious material is inert or uncontaminated. For some reason, on the date this gentleman came from beijing, they had to order a special device that would augment the sterilization capacity of this autoclave. There is circumstantial evidence in my mind that there may have been some kind of event that preceded his arrival, that required the response of a highlevel official, awareness by the senior government, as well as these remediation efforts that were taken. I want to add something that has not been noted in publications or in the media. We noticed that hudson, in our research, dr. G chen zhang, the official who is quite important, we sent this leadership from beijing to wuhan is now the head of biosafety and institute of virology. Only on the chinese website. Not in english. The guy who was dispatched to apparently [indiscernible] has been put in charge of biosafety itself. This is more than an anomaly. Somebody has been on a detective i have been a detective. Other types of work against proliferation and criminal networks. This is something that i find almost unbelievable and that the guy who is really the top person in the chinese scientists in beijing is now at wuhan, i cant imagine he is there for no reason. That was a bit of a revelation when you said that, i have to omit, that is an important additional finding. If you consider, as we have looked longitudinally, this is a little different than our colleagues in the Intelligence Community, that we were able to document things that occurred a year after the day of what we believe was the timeframe when we think something happened that you would still find evidence of remediation activities. For example, the Wuhan Institute of virology issued a patent to reformulate its disinfectant that it found to be extraordinarily corrosive to sensitive biosafety equipment that at least according to a description of the patent, may have resulted or contributed to the escape of hilo pathogenic highly pathogenic microorganisms. It was specific to the idea that these events could have Signif