WTH is going on with the Covid lab leak theory? Rep. Mike Gallagher on the Wuhan and the possible Chinese cover up

Episode #104 | May 26, 2021 | , Marc Thiessen, and Rep. Mike Gallagher

Danielle Pletka: Hi, I'm Danielle Pletka.

Marc Thiessen: And I'm Marc Thiessen.

Danielle Pletka: Welcome to our podcast, "What the Hell Is Going On?" Marc, what the hell is going on now?

Marc Thiessen: We are talking about the lab leak hypothesis of the Covid virus, the theory that contradicts the primary narrative that we heard last year, that it naturally jumped from bats through an intermediary animal to human in Wuhan and spread around the world, and the theory that this virus originated in the Wuhan Institute of Virology and that this lab had very bad safety practices and that it leaked out of the lab and spread through Wuhan and then spread across the world.

Marc Thiessen: This theory was dismissed as nut job stuff last year. Let me just read you a couple quotes from headlines. New York Times, "Senator Tom Cotton repeats fringe theory of coronavirus origins." CNN, "Nearly 30% in the US believe a coronavirus theory that's almost certainly not true." NPR, "Scientists debunk lab accident theory of pandemic emergence, virus researchers cast doubt on theory of coronavirus lab accident." Washington Post, my newspaper, "Tom Cotton keeps repeating a coronavirus conspiracy theory that was already debunked." Everybody dismissed this as being some sort of a nut job conspiracy theory and now a very serious science reporter named Nicholas Wade, who was with science section, has written an article in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, which very dispassionately lays out the two theories and makes the argument that the lab leak is more likely. You've got a lot of scientists all of a sudden coming around and saying this is a viable possibility that needs to be investigated.

Danielle Pletka: I want folks to understand why it is that we're talking about this. I think that there has been a very persuasive effort made by a whole variety of people, some very well intentioned and others less well intentioned, to suggest that there's some sort of element of anti-Asian bigotry in examination of where Covid-19 came from. And I think that has been one of the things that has truly hindered our ability to understand it. I don't think any normal person would dispute the notion that we need to understand this but listen, just in case our listeners are wondering

2 what brings us here, here's a headline from the New York Post, "Top scientists slam World Health Organization, insist COVID lab leak theory is viable." Axios, "The COVID lab leak theory goes mainstream."

Danielle Pletka: Another one from , "Congress is investigating the lab accident, COVID-19 origin theory." There are a lot of reasons why it is that we want to understand exactly where this came from, if for no other reason than to ensure that another pandemic doesn't hit us next year or the year after. There's every reason to do this and the resistance on the part of some people, and I include Dr. Anthony Fauci in this, the resistance of some people to understanding this better and the desire to vilify people who have questions is to me just unconscionable.

Marc Thiessen: Well you brought up Dr. Fauci and so let's talk about Dr. Fauci for a second, because Dr. Fauci is head of something called the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which is part of the NIH, the National Institutes of Health. It turns out that the National Institutes of Health funded research into bat coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which is the lab from which it is possible, though not yet proven, that the virus jumped. They did it through something called the EcoHealth Alliance, which received at least $3.4 million from NIH and then did a sub grant, the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Dr. Fauci admits that the NIH was funding this research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, though he says they weren't funding gain of function research, which we'll get into with our guest in a minute. But what that means is that US taxpayers may have been funding the research in the lab into the virus that leaked and spread out of China and all the way to the United States and killed millions of people around the world and kept us in our homes locked down for all this time. So this could actually lead back not just to the Wuhan Institute but to who was funding the Wuhan Institute, which was the NIH.

Danielle Pletka: Right. And again, this is not based on any desire to auto-da-fé the National Institutes of Health. We want research to go on. We want to know more about how to protect ourselves from viruses. We want science to advance, but we also want to be sure that when we are supporting the advance of science, we're doing it in a way that's safe. If you look back, historically, we've seen that there was, for example, an accidental release of smallpox in one instance from a lab. There have been other accidental releases. It's one of the reasons why the lab security scale exists and one of the most important things that I think our government owes the taxpayers is to ensure that we are not funding anything that can be dangerous to them. This is not a witch hunt.

Danielle Pletka: You read the politics out from last year and the appalling things said about people who actually thought that the lab leak theory needed to be investigated. Why are we serving ourselves by stifling debate? I ask this question on every freaking podcast. Why do we try to vilify people who ask questions? Why is knowledge somehow a dangerous thing? I don't get it and the last bit of this that I really don't get is why it has become a partisan thing. Why it is that the Democrats seem to feel the need to defend the natural theory and the Republicans are the ones looking into the lab leak. Why?

Marc Thiessen: Two things. First of all, I want to add my voice to what you said, which is that all of

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3 this, if it happened and if it goes back to NIH, was an accident. The research was done in an effort to try and stop people from getting sick and it's something that may have gone horribly wrong but the answer is twofold. One is that nobody's going to want to claim responsibility for funding the research that led to the worst pandemic in modern human history, so there's no interest in the part of the National Institutes of Health in figuring this trail out if it leads back to them. The question on why Democrats are so disinterested in this, I don't know why they are now but why they were last year is because the whole blame China for the virus thing was seen as a way, the Trump administration deflecting its responsibility for the pandemic. And any time anyone from the Trump administration or a supporter of the Trump administration, like Tom Cotton, said, "This could've come from a Chinese lab," they said, "You're just trying to deflect responsibility and is responsible for half a million deaths in America and that's why he needs to be thrown out of office."

Marc Thiessen: Okay, I get it, it was an election year. Politics is politics, but the election's over. Joe Biden's in the White House. Is it because you don't want to admit that it was political last year and you were wrong? Also just a lot of people have egg on their

what could be the actual origin of the virus as a conspiracy theory because it makes them look bad, including a lot of science reporters, who should know better on this.

Danielle Pletka: The bottom line is everybody is in their armed tribal camps and we know that even now, a lot of science reporters are in those camps as well. What brought us to this question and this conversation today is that a friend of ours, Representative Mike Gallagher, wrote a letter to Dr. Anthony Fauci in his capacity as the head of the NIAID I also have trouble with those letters asking about the origins of the virus, asking about funding that was afforded to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. It's a very temperate letter. He's also pressed the Biden administration to declassify all of the information that is available about this so that the American people can judge for themselves. I think all our listeners know Mike Gallagher. He's been on with us before, but he serves as the US representative for Wisconsin's 8th congressional district. He was first elected in 2016 and re-elected since. He serves on the Armed Services Committee. He's also a veteran, a marine, served in Iraq and a smart, responsible lawmaker.

Marc Thiessen: Here's our interview.

Marc Thiessen: Mike, welcome back to the podcast.

Rep. Mike Galla...: It's great to be back. Two-timer, I'm honored.

Marc Thiessen: I know, you're a repeat offender. So listen, you've written a letter to Dr. Fauci regarding this whole lab leak hypothesis and the potential that the US taxpayers actually funded some of the research in this Wuhan Institute of Virology. Tell us a little bit about your letter and what you're trying to get at.

Rep. Mike Galla...: I think where we were a year ago, I guess over a year ago, and in January if you remember, Fauci was out there saying, "There will be no human to human

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4 transmission," basically assuring us that the Chinese authorities had it under control, and I thought that was crazy. I tweeted out something to the effect of, from China, t human to human transmission in Chicago, if I remember correctly. Trump does the travel ban a few days later. We're in the midst of a global pandemic.

Rep. Mike Galla...: But when Tom Cotton seems like a remarkable coincidence that the only level four bio safety lab in China is in Wuhan, where this thing started. We should investigate the lab leak media when after him and called him a tinfoil hat conspiracy theorist. I got attacked back home for suggesting the same thing and all we were saying, and I don't want to put words in Tom's mouth, is this should be investigated. I mean we have to get to the bottom of this, if for no other reason than we want to prevent another pandemic. Well now what we know in the intervening year, thanks to the research of Josh Rogin, thanks to some of the scientific community that are willing to speak out like Dr. Richard Ebright at Rutgers, Nicholas Wade, a journalist who worked with the New York Times, I believe. We're starting to realize that money that was granted from NIH via NIAID, Fauci's organization, was given to intermediary organizations, in this case the EcoHealth Alliance run by Dr. Peter Daszak, and Peter Daszak used that money to conduct collaborative research with the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Indeed he published papers talking about his research with the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Rep. Mike Galla...: What makes this even crazier is that Daszak was the only American, I believe he's a dual American-British citizen, allowed on the WHO investigative team. So the one person in the world who has the most clear conflict of interest when it comes to investigating the Wuhan Institute of Virology, because his entire professional reputation is bound up in that, is the one person we allowed on the WHO investigative team, and even the head of the WHO, Dr. Tedros, went out there and said, "Actually no, your investigation is not complete. We have to go back and investigate the lab leak hypothesis." So the dam is starting to break in the scientific community. In the journalistic community, you're now seeing a lot of people who pooh-poohed the lab leak hypothesis and criticized all those who talk about it a year ago saying, "Actually, there may be something here." All I want to know is whether US taxpayer money, via NIAID, via EcoHealth Alliance, went to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, not only to get ahead of the next pandemic but also to ensure that we're not increasing funding for this dangerous so called gain of function research.

Rep. Mike Galla...: There's a proposal out there right now to 6X the amount of funding. The whole thing is crazy. I mean it's almost stranger than fiction when you start to connect all the dots.

Danielle Pletka: Mike, what's really interesting to me is, we've had Josh Rogin, who's a friend of yours and ours, a Washington Post columnist like Marc, on to talk about his book and some of the research that he did about the origins of the Wuhan virus. He really got short shrift, even a couple months ago but what we're all really talking about these days here in Washington, and I'm not sure how many people have seen this article, was an article by Nicholas Wade, who you talked about, who

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5 used to be a reporter with the New York Times science section. And he wrote a really very, very deep dive piece in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, not exactly on the website, and in it he doesn't say, "Lab leak definitely happened." He doesn't say, "This occurred naturally." What he does is he lays out side by side the natural occurrence theory of Covid and then the lab leak theory and he goes pretty into depth in explaining what exactly was going on and why some of the science behind the actual coronavirus, the Covid-19 virus, doesn't look natural. How did that affect how you were thinking about how to pursue this question?

Rep. Mike Galla...: I think the Wade article remains the most comprehensive and dispassionate examination of both theories. It's a long read. I mean it took me an hour to get through the whole thing. It gets pretty technical, but I think if you're looking for the deep dive into it, it's that. Josh's book lays it out in a more narrative fashion but Wade goes into a bit more detail. That combined with what Ebright has been saying, I think are the best sources out there right now. In my mind, what has always made me suspect that the lab leak hypothesis was correct... I mean I have to admit, we don't know yet. I think the evidence is stacking up in favor of lab leak versus natural emergence, is one, the extraordinary coincidence that the lab was there right at the epicenter. Two, if you dig into Wade and if you dig into Josh, basically the bats would have to travel 1,000 miles through an intermediate species like a pangolin or a palm civit, which to this day, no one's been able to locate, then it would have to not infect a different human population along the way.

Rep. Mike Galla...: Three, the Chinese version of the CDC in, I think, May of last year, effectively said the lab leak theory is not the working theory anymore, and has pivoted to even crazier theories like this popsicle theory that it came in through frozen food. I joked that the next CCP theory is going to be that a bald eagle from Mar-a-Lago

that's always made me very suspicious about the lab leak that we know from the start of this, even prior to January, back in December, the one thing the CCP has been doing very aggressively is obfuscating the origin of this disease and taking to American social media via their wolf warrior diplomats and spreading bat crap, pun intended, conspiracy theories like the fact that the US Army was responsible for the outbreak of this disease.

Rep. Mike Galla...: So if you start from the assumption that the CCP is lying and spreading propaganda, which is usually a safe assumption, then it kind of almost naturally points you to the lab leak theory. Then Wade also gets into this other, very technical thing that I barely understand about why what the natural emergence advocates are saying doesn't really add up about how you would genetically modify the disease. That's a bit beyond my pay grade.

Marc Thiessen: Could you just explain, Mike, what is gain of function research, for people who don't understand it? Because that's a technical term and it's really important to this whole thing.

Rep. Mike Galla...: Absolutely. Again, I'm not an epidemiologist, I'm not a scientist. I'm a fake doctor, political scientist. As I understand it, in spending the last few months just talking to people in the scientific community, it's where you take naturally

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6 occurring, in this case, coronaviruses, bat coronaviruses, and via a combination of genetic modifications, in this case they were using genetically modified mice, you make the naturally occurring disease more pathogenic, more infectious, more chimeric is another phrase you hear. That is indisputably what was happening at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and in the exchange that Dr. Fauci had with Senator Rand Paul last week, he claimed, "We don't support gain of function research in China." There's two things going on there. One, he's hiding behind a very legalistic definition of gain of function research, and I actually think he's at a minimum, not being forthcoming. I think it's closer to the truth to say he's actually lying about it. Dr. Ebright is great on this. He basically lays out in a clear fashion why by any standard, this was gain of function research because people at the lab were making naturally occurring coronaviruses more infectious, more pathogenic.

Rep. Mike Galla...: But the other thing is, to say we're not funding it in China, obviously we're not directly funding it in China. The NIAID gives grants to groups like the EcoHealth Alliance and then the EcoHealth Alliance does work with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, in part because there was a moratorium on this dangerous research from 2014 to 2017. So the only place where this research could continue was in places like Wuhan, and in that same testimony, Fauci admitted that we don't have 100% visibility into what was going on at the Wuhan lab. I don't know if he's just purely hiding behind what I think is a very misleading interpretation of gain of function, or he's saying, "Sure, we gave the grant to EcoHealth to go scoop up bat coronaviruses in the wild, but we didn't know that at the institute, they were actually making those naturally occurring coronaviruses more infectious," but I think it's almost impossible that he didn't know it.

Rep. Mike Galla...: We need to declassify all the intelligence, we need all the email traffic related to these grants, how was it that during a moratorium, a grant actually went to the EcoHealth Alliance? That seems crazy to me, presumably Fauci had to justify that exception. Post moratorium, there was an oversight board that was put in place specifically to prevent such dangerous gain of function research. Why is it that the grant that subsequently went to Daszak and the EcoHealth Alliance, was never submitted to the oversight board? I mean the oversight board didn't even see it, and then that grant was suspended in April 2020, after the pandemic. It was turned back on but the funding didn't flow because they asked Daszak to answer seven questions that to this day remain unanswered.

Rep. Mike Galla...: I want to be clear, I'm not bringing this up to bash Fauci or really to assign blame to anyone yet. I just want to understand what the heck happened. I think we should all have an interest in understanding what the heck happened, and I don't think this should be politicized. It shouldn't just be Republicans looking into this. I would want Democrats to be as interested in this as well because this thing's totally upended our world and all of our individual of the past year.

Marc Thiessen: The phrase is what the hell is going on, Mike.

Danielle Pletka: When you talk about gain of function, I think it's important that people understand in very simple terms what this is. Basically, the way they explain it in a coronavirus is you're going into a naturally occurring virus, a coronavirus for example is what causes the common cold. You're going into that natural virus

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7 and you're altering it in a way, in this instance, in a way that it is more adhesive to human cells. You are going in and actually making it more lethal. When you start to understand that, doesn't that kind of make sense to you that the Chinese would want to cover that up?

Rep. Mike Galla...: Yeah. I mean the technical way to describe it, or the essential question is, was the Wuhan Institute of Virology creating novel SARS-related coronaviruses that do not exist in , by combining spike genes from one SARS-related coronavirus with other genetic information from another SARS-relating coronavirus and thereby obtaining viruses that infect humans and lab animals? But that's very technical. But yes, you're absolutely right. There's a noble impulse behind it. Fauci is the leader of a group in the scientific community that thinks you have to do this type of research because that's the way you get ahead of the next pandemic. It's not like they're deliberately trying to infect the world and destroy

the next pandemic. That's the basic idea.

Rep. Mike Galla...: There's a separate question that I don't think is valid, as to whether the CCP was trying to weaponize this. I have seen no evidence to support that theory, but it does make sense, particular since we now know there were US officials that visited the Wuhan Institute two years prior to the pandemic, that flagged a ton of security concerns at this institute where this dangerous research was being conducted. It makes a ton of sense that the CCP screwed up and this thing leaked from a lab and they wanted to do everything possible to hide that fact, at least in my mind.

Marc Thiessen: Dany asked about the possibility, why would China want to cover this up? The question is, why would Fauci want to cover this up? You mentioned the testimony with Rand Paul. He said, and this is the exact quote, "The NIH has not ever and does not now fund gain of function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology." That's a very specific and carefully worded statement that is true, possibly, but intentionally misleading because we do know that they did fund research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology through the EcoHealth Alliance. We do know that that sub-grant was going to bat coronavirus research, which Fauci even acknowledged in his testimony. He said, "Let me explain to you why that was done," he said, "The SARS-CoV-1 originated in bats in China. It would've been irresponsible if we didn't investigate bat viruses and the serology to see who might've been infected in China."

Marc Thiessen: So he acknowledges that they were funding research at the Wuhan Institute on bat coronaviruses and then also we do know that the same people who were getting that funding, were also doing gain of function research. So if that's all true and this did end up coming from the lab, as an accident, then it means the US taxpayers were funding the research that created the virus that leaked out of the lab and that caused all of this. Isn't that why there's no incentive for Fauci to come clean on this or for us to really get behind a true investigation, because it might actually come back not to the Chinese Communist Party entirely, but also partial responsibility to NIH?

Rep. Mike Galla...: That's it, 100%. I mean 2011, Fauci wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post advocating for gain of function research as a way to get ahead of the next

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8 pandemic. Rogin describes him of the godfather of gain of function. For him to sit there and say, "Well, we didn't actually fund this research at the Wuhan Institute," well the follow up question that needs to be asked is, what about the papers published by Daszak and Shi, not Xi Jinping, Shi the bat lady, Shi.

Marc Thiessen: She's a researcher at the Wuhan lab that was using the NIH grants to study bat coronavirus.

Rep. Mike Galla...: And that's not a conjecture, that's a matter of fact by her and Daszak's own admission in publications that came out in 2016 and 2017, wherein they reference the very NIH grants that allowed them to do the research. In my mind, based on the evidence I've seen, there's no question that money flowed from NIH and NIAID to EcoHealth, to the Wuhan Institute, and Fauci can try and hide behind this extremely legalistic answer.

Marc Thiessen: Well he admits that. He just says it wasn't for gain of function research. When you break down his question, that's what his answer is. That's what's he's saying. He admits what you just said is true.

Rep. Mike Galla...: Yeah but somebody needs to ask Dr. Fauci, "What is your definition of gain of function research?" Put him in a room with Dr. Ebright and have them debate it because I just don't understand how Fauci... He could say, "We didn't know that gain of function research was happening at the Wuhan Institute," and I think it's fair to say we didn't have a full account of everything that was going on there. The Chinese military had a presence there. The reason we're starting to know about all this is because the Trump administration, on January 15th of 2021, I believe, declassified all this information and notably, the Biden administration came in and they actually said, "Yeah, we think that's legitimate." They haven't disputed some of the central things that the State Department declassified. My assessment is Fauci is just hiding behind an absurd, legalistic definition of gain of function. I just don't think that's sustainable at all.

Danielle Pletka: Part of this problem, to my mind, and I don't want to get over-excited about Fauci because I just don't, but part of the problem is that the last year has elevated him to this saint-like position and I think the incentive for him is not to want to relinquish it.

Rep. Mike Galla...: That's also why I think it's so hard for the media to ask Fauci some tough questions. Because they have also spent the last year deifying Dr. Fauci and demonizing anyone who has elevated the lab leak hypothesis. And it's hard, I get it, to say, "Hey, maybe we got this one wrong," because this would be one of the biggest press failures in American history. I think that's absolutely a part of it but something interesting you brought up, Dany, is it's really not just about Fauci. I mean, NIH, NIAID was part of it but there are other sources of funding for EcoHealth that were far bigger than what they got from Fauci's organization. USAID is part of this, DOD is part of this, DTRA, DARPA, DHS had this grant that Daszak got to create a community of experts to combat disinformation in a pandemic and guess what? That community of experts combated the disinformation that it came from a lab. I mean, this stuff is insane when you start to dig into it.

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9 Rep. Mike Galla...: Again, I just keep coming back to this. We've got to get to the bottom of it. I've called it the most important question facing the world today. The fact is, the CCP is weaponizing our inability to understand the origin against us and we may think some of their propaganda and conspiracy theories are crazy but I'm not sure that foreign audiences, particularly foreign audiences in the domestic audience in China, are unsusceptible to CCP narratives. They're in some cases at least winning the domestic narrative and using that against the US, using it to divide us internally too.

Marc Thiessen: We all know that false narrative like an election being stolen can be accepted by large segments of the population even in a Western country like ours. False narratives can take hold, for sure.

Danielle Pletka: I really think it's important what you're talking about here about, if I may steal the expression from some friends of ours about this big Covid lie that the Chinese government seeks to perpetuate. Yes of course, they don't want the world to think that they gave us a disease that's killed millions and is still killing people every single day here and in India and all over Africa and elsewhere where access to the vaccine is not as good. But of course, who is the main audience that they want to believe that they did not do this? The Chinese people, on whose neck they keep their boot every single day of the year. Don't you think that's true?

Rep. Mike Galla...: 100% and this is what drove me crazy when for the last year, all these wolf warrior diplomats were all over Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, spreading all of this craziness, in some cases being amplified by useful idiots in the American media. They deny their own citizens access to these platforms that they're using against us and it's because they fear their own citizens. It's China that has already chosen to decouple itself technologically from the rest of the world out of fear of its own citizens' knowledge and there's something there that we just don't understand yet. And again, I think it's easy to dismiss all the wolf warrior stuff as so ham handed as to be counterproductive but I don't know, I think there's a way in which they're using that to enhance the power of the party. That's, in my opinion, ultimately what they're always after. It's the survival of the party and full and total allegiance to a party that's going to control every aspect of your and will not allow any form of dissent.

Marc Thiessen: They have an interest in keeping the word from getting out and any evidence from getting out that they might have been responsible for it but they had unintentional, I believe, allies in the US media in this because the whole narrative

So any effort to "blame China" for the virus was seen in political circles as an effort to deflect against Trump's responsibility. So now, Trump is gone. Can we finally look into China now and see the responsibility? Because when Tom Cotton was scientific community's saying it's a viable hypothesis. How much did the political desire to blame the president for Covid play into this cover-up?

Rep. Mike Galla...: I think that's a big part of it. I mean I tweeted at Chuck Todd the other weekend because he was having Fauci on. I've nothing against Chuck Todd. Apparently he's a Packers fan, so that goes a long way with me. Because he's having Fauci

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10 on, I'm like, please ask him some of these questions. Instead he asked him about seasonal mask wearing and whether we'll be back to normal by Mother's Day next year and I lost my mind. But a year ago, I remember I was watching Meet the Press and he had this whole segment, I forget who it was with but basically saying, "Yeah, the Chinese did a way better job of controlling this whole thing than we did." And that's been the narrative that China, which even if it was accidentally, gave the world a virus, did an awesome job and America, and its allies, which gave the world the vaccine, did a terrible job because America sucks and we need to constantly self flagellate. That stuff just drives me absolutely crazy.

Danielle Pletka: So one of the last things I want to ask you, and this shouldn't be an exit question, it should be its own podcast but I still think it's hugely relevant. A lot of people think we've been through COVID, we're at the end of the tunnel, all of these recriminations are just anti-Asian bigotry and unnecessary and isn't it time for us to move forward? My question for you as someone who, like me, has studied and cares and in your case, served in, the Middle East, China has just recently inked a major economic deal with Iran. They've inserted themselves at the US invitation into the Iran nuclear talks. They're playing a very different role on the world stage than they were even two years ago and I think there are real implications for understanding how they work as we understand how to face up to them in other places. I mean, I'm curious what your view is.

Rep. Mike Galla...: My view is, and again like you Dany, at one point I thought of myself as an Arabist and so I've had to try and learn a little bit about INDOPACOM and China. I basically just know some smart people and I steal their thoughts but my view is-

Marc Thiessen: A Sino-Arabist.

Rep. Mike Galla...: Is there such a thing?

Marc Thiessen: We just made it up.

Rep. Mike Galla...: essential to his project, which is now a lifelong project because he's ruler for life, effectively, is to completely and utterly discredit Western democracy as exemplified by the United States, and thereby show that the CCP's model of techno-totalitarianism is superior and I think they're exploiting this crisis to suggest that that's the case. So it's not only the immediate project of kicking us out of the first island chain, effectuating unification of Taiwan with the mainland, it's this broader what I would call ideological project of basically showing the world that America's on the way out and it can't shoot straight and we've got everything under control here. It's awesome, download your Xi Jinping thought app, we'll tell you how to think, we'll tell you how to live, we'll track all your movements, you'll be perfectly safe, don't worry about the fact that we've got a million people locked away in a concentration camp and are perpetuating a modern day genocide, nothing to see here. I mean there's this broader ideological struggle that's going on and I think it's a mistake to think you could separate one theater of operation from another.

Rep. Mike Galla...: In fact, where I think the Biden administration is going to run aground is in the

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11 exact same way that the Obama administration ran aground. In other words, a well-intentioned effort to pivot to the pacific is going to get screwed up because they misunderstand the fundamental alliance structure in the Middle East and they create absolute chaos and they get sucked into that chaos. So we'll have actually our third failed pivot in as many administrations by the end of this administration.

Marc Thiessen: Exit question for me, isn't this all the more reason why we have to get to the bottom of whether this came from the lab or not? Because if their strategy is what you describe and this is an information war, essentially, that they're fighting in addition to other forms of war, if we were able to conclusively show that it was their lab that created this virus and unleashed it on the world literally, not just through incompetence but through negligence and that they actually created it and leaked it out.

Rep. Mike Galla...: Yeah, I kind of see three reasons to justify getting to the bottom of this. Well maybe four. One, this has totally upended our world and I want to know. Two is the scientific question of, we need to know in order to prevent this from happening again, a future pandemic. Collect the lessons, learn, etc. Then I think a third corollary to that second one is, if indeed it leaked from a lab, it would be insane in the literal definition of the term to increase our funding for gain of function research by six times, which is what's being proposed by something called the Global Virome Project, and we'd have to clean up all these federal agencies that may have played a hand in funding the Wuhan Institute of Virology. But I think the final reason is what you point out. I think it brings up this question of whether China can indeed be a responsible stakeholder in the global order, as all the integrationists were telling us for the last two decades. It raises this question as to whether a country like China should be allowed to dominate and corrupt the WHO and block Taiwan from participating. There's a whole host of questions related to China's role in the world that I think are related to the question of where the disease came from, if that makes sense.

Danielle Pletka: It makes a lot of sense. We are only at the tip of the proverbial iceberg here and I think I can speak for Marc for once in saying that we're grateful. We're grateful that members of Congress are looking into this. I hope, just as you do, that it will end up being a bipartisan effort as opposed to simply a bunch of Republicans. There's nothing for the Democrats to defend here. This is something that's in American interests, not in party interests. So thank you for doing it and thanks for joining us as always.

Rep. Mike Galla...: It was an absolute honor and pleasure. I'm a huge fan of the podcast. You guys are doing a great job. So it's essential listening in my house.

Marc Thiessen: Thank you.

Danielle Pletka: Thank you very much. We'll use that to advertise. Take care Mike.

Rep. Mike Galla...: Thank you.

Marc Thiessen: So Dany first of all, that interview gives me hope because there's been a lot of dumbing down of Congress but it's really good to know that there's a serious,

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12 smart lawmaker like Mike Gallagher, who's leading the charge on this. And who really wants to get to the truth and get to it for the right reasons. And so I'm encouraged and I hope that he's going to be successful in getting answers to some of these very serious questions.

Danielle Pletka: One of the things that Mike is asking for, which I think is really important, is access to intelligence. Because we know that our intelligence community was collecting information on what was going on in Wuhan and what the Chinese CDC was up to because when the Biden administration came in, they wanted to refute the conclusions of the Trump administration and instead they saw the intelligence and they had to begrudgingly agree that it seemed likely that there was something going on at that Wuhan lab.

Marc Thiessen: Both the Trump administration and the Biden administration agree that this is a viable possibility, then it definitely needs to be investigated. Look, Americans have a right to know. We have a right to know the origin of the virus that wreaked such destruction on our country, on our economy, on our grandparents, on nursing home residents and our children who've been kept out of school, all the horrible things that have happened in the past year. We have a right to know how this started and who's responsible for it, and hold those people accountable because the reality is that if this was in fact a lab accident, it wasn't a naturally occurring thing, China is responsible.

Danielle Pletka: Responsible because they have done nothing but lie and cover up and there are plenty of people in the United States who are complicit with that.

Marc Thiessen: It fundamentally changes their responsibility. The defense is, look, if this was naturally occurring and they did a bad job of handling it. But no one can control nature. You can get a get out of jail free card there to some extent. If this happened in a Chinese lab and leaked from a Chinese lab for which they are responsible for lab security and they're responsible for what... It's not a private lab. There are no private labs in China. It's all government. I know there was PLA activity in the Wuhan Lab of Virology, then they are responsible in a much more fundamental way. Not euphemistically, they could've done a better job of containing the virus. They actually are responsible for it getting out. It's a human error, not an act of nature. That's a very, very fundamentally different thing and then also, was our government responsible indirectly by funding this irresponsible research that was taking place? We have a right to the answers to those questions.

Danielle Pletka: I couldn't agree with you more but I want to leave our listeners with something. We've all become scientists over the last year, understanding more and more about RNA and mRNA and vaccines and coronaviruses and this additional bit of knowledge that we talked about today on the podcast was this notion of what's called gain of function research and it basically is what it sounds like. It is adding a function that does not exist to a virus by manipulating the genome, by manipulating the RNA in some way and we saw a confrontation between Rand Paul and Anthony Fauci on Capitol Hill that Mike Gallagher referenced but I want you guys to hear, no friend to any Conservative including Rand Paul, PolitiFact, on this topic.

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13 Danielle Pletka: to the EcoHealth Alliance characterized the function of newly discovered bat spike proteins and naturally occurring pathogens and did not involve the enhancement of the pathogenicity or transmissibility of the viruses studied." That's their first quote. But then they add, "MIT biologist Kevin Esvelt reviewed a paper that appeared to have been published with financial assistance from the grant. According to Esvelt, certain techniques that the researchers used seemed to meet the definition of gain of function research." So don't listen to me, don't listen to Marc, listen to PolitiFact. They're the ones saying that this research was in fact almost certainly done with the grant that was provided by the US taxpayer to the Institute of Virology and their friends at the EcoHealth Alliance. Slam and a dunk, I'm afraid.

Marc Thiessen: That is very discrete advice for just this one instance, don't listen to Dany, don't listen to Marc, listen to PolitiFact. That goes in the category of even the blind hog finds an acorn once in a while. I have lost a lot of respect for fact checkers over the last year, let me tell you.

Danielle Pletka: You're right. And I think our listeners are well aware of what we speak. Speaking of which, don't forget, subscribe, review, share it with your friends, your mom, your dad, your kids, whoever you want, and don't hesitate to reach back out to us and let us know what you think. Thanks for listening.

Danielle Pletka: Take care everyone.

Marc Thiessen: Bye.

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