958: Alison Young | Lab Leaks, Pandemics, and a World at Risk

958: Alison Young | Lab Leaks, Pandemics, and a World at Risk

[00:00:00] Jordan Harbinger: This episode of The Jordan Harbinger Show is brought to you by Nissan. Nissan SUVs have the capabilities to take your adventure to the next level. Learn more at nissanusa.com.

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[00:00:12] Alison Young: And in theory, building a biosafety level three, level four lab should be a good thing. But if they're not properly maintained, if the people in them are not trained, if they're not following the protocols, all it does is give potentially a false sense of security. The government accountability office in the United States has been warning more than a decade at this point. The more of these experiments with dangerous pathogens that are done, it increases the risk of a catastrophic accident.

[00:00:44] Jordan Harbinger: Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. On The Jordan Harbinger Show, we decode the stories, secrets, and skills, the world's most fascinating people, and turn their wisdom into practical advice that you can use to impact your own life and those around you. Our mission is to help you become a better informed, more critical thinker through long form conversations with a variety of amazing folks. From spies to CEOs, athletes, authors, thinkers, and performers, even the occasional Russian spy, neuroscientist, rocket scientist, Hollywood filmmaker or tech luminary. And if you're new to the show or you're looking for a handy way to tell your friends about the show, and I always appreciate it when you do that, I suggest our episode starter packs. These are collections of our favorite episodes on persuasion and negotiation, psychology and geopolitics, disinformation and cyber warfare, crime and cults and more, that'll help new listeners get a taste of everything we do here on the show. Just visit jordanharbinger.com/start or search for us in your Spotify app to get started.

[00:01:35] Now, I know a lot of you need a break from the Ukraine War and the Hamas Israel War and whether AI might kill us all. So I wanted to talk about something more uplifting — lab leaks. Namely leaks from labs that research deadly pathogens. The lab leak theory is one of the things that I've slowly changed my mind about over the past few years. I went from no way to on the fence. And early on, it seemed like a wacky conspiracy theory, and it was, there was no real evidence for it. And people who were spouting that theory were usually kooks. They believed in other kooky conspiracy theories as well. So I didn't take it seriously until I started talking with scientists and other people that knew how common lab leaks actually were. Today's guest is a journalist who spent several years documenting lab leaks from all over the world. You'd be surprised, shocked even, to learn how often these things happen, and frankly, how lucky we've been so far that nothing more serious has happened as a result. Today we'll dig into historical lab leaks, modern lab leaks, safety protocols, China.

[00:02:31] Soundbite: China!

[00:02:32] Jordan Harbinger: Gain of function research and more.

[00:02:34] So here we go, with Alison Young.

[00:02:38] Well, thanks for coming on the show today. The timing on this is great because everybody in my house, including me, is a little bit sick, so it's very relevant right now. Thankfully though we're not sick with a lot of the stuff that leaks from laboratories and I was actually really shocked reading your book how often lab accidents happen.

[00:02:55] The frequency is really uncomfortable, especially since a lot of it seems to be caused by what sounds like laziness and human error, which is hard to patch and remedy because it's not like they're not trained right to like, "Maybe you should wear gloves when you're working with tuberculosis or whatever." And it's like, "Eh, I don't want to waste a pair of gloves. Their gloves are in the closet and, that's all the way over there." That's what it sounds like, reading some of these lab leak reports.

[00:03:20] Alison Young: Yeah, it's a shocking thing. And like most people, I had never given any thought to the safety in biological labs. I just assumed, like most people, that these are labs that operate under the most strictest protocols that people follow everything to the letter.

[00:03:38] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

[00:03:38] Alison Young: Exactly. And that's not what I found on reporting this over 15 years.

[00:03:44] Jordan Harbinger: And that's a long enough time period because at first when I started looking at lab leak stuff years ago because of the pandemic and all the conspiracy theories around lab leak stuff, I was like, "Well, if you look really hard at the whole world and all the labs, you can find a lab leak or two, of course." And then it's like, "Oh, actually it's a lot of labs in a lot of countries and it's the same lab like five times. And then they did this remedy that didn't work and then they leaked to get —" And it's just really disappointing, which is kind of an understatement, I suppose. I guess the benefit is, usually people don't get infected, but, I mean, how often does somebody need to get infected with a deadly pathogen before it's like, "Oh, we could've, we really should prevent these." Or millions of people get infected with a deadly pathogen before we realize, this is like a major, major problem.

[00:04:30] Alison Young: Yeah. You know, rare events can have catastrophic accidents. So you don't need people in labs being infected all the time for the public and policymakers to care about this. You just need the right pathogen infecting somebody and them carrying it home and spreading it out in the community to launch an outbreak and potentially even a pandemic.

[00:04:57] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. It's a dice roll where really it's clear that we kind of only need one bad accident for this to be catastrophic in nature. And I mean, covid might have been one of those things. I guess we'll talk about that in a second. So what usually causes this? I mentioned before, laziness, but don't these lab leaks — look, when I watch TV and they're in the CDC, it's like there's metal walls and there's emergency, this and that, and there's airlocks and everyone's wearing suits. Is that not real? Is that not how these labs operate?

[00:05:28] Alison Young: Some of them do operate that way. I mean, everyone thinks about those scientists that are in movies like Outbreak with Dustin Hoffman and they're wearing the giant moonsuits that are power inflated, and so, they are wearing those kinds of things. Depending on the lab, depending on the pathogen, they might not be wearing those kinds of respirators and full body suits. But even when they are, part of the challenge with all of this is, human beings are involved. And so if you don't put on your suit in the correct order, if you don't take it off without properly decontaminating it, if you don't necessarily realize is in some cases that a lab that is supposed to have negative air pressure overnight started blowing positive into clean corridors and you wander down that corridor without wearing protective equipment, there are all kinds of things that can go wrong. And that's everything from you can be bitten by infected animals. You can cut yourself accidentally on an infected scalpel. You can have wastewater systems that accidentally spew wastewater out of tanks and into open storm drains. There are just all kinds of things that can go wrong in these labs and they have.

[00:06:39] Jordan Harbinger: When you say posit— can you explain the air pressure thing? The positive and negative air pressure thing is not — I don't think that's common knowledge.

[00:06:46] Alison Young: So going back in time, one of the ways that in the early days of these biosafety labs that they learned that scientists were getting infected is that they would breathe air that was wafting around buildings. Carried along by the air conditioning. So you might have a lab in one part of a building working with some sort of infectious pathogen, and then they open a door and it floats out and it infects other people in other rooms. These labs over time have been designed when they're working with certain pathogens to have negative air flow. And so basically, the idea is that the air from clean areas, comes into the dirty areas and then passes through HEPA filters before it goes outside of the lab again.

[00:07:33] Jordan Harbinger: I see.

[00:07:33] Alison Young: So that's one of the layers of containment that keeps these pathogens inside the labs.

[00:07:39] Jordan Harbinger: How far back in time are we going where somebody's like, "Oh, don't worry, I left the anthrax on my desk 20 feet away. You're fine. I'll just open the door and turn on the fan." I mean, how far back in time are we going where that wasn't obviously a terrible idea?

[00:07:52] Alison Young: So, really, microbiology, compared to some of the other sciences like chemistry, is a relatively young science. And so, the science of safety in microbiology was pioneered during the 19, basically late 40s and 50s at the US Army's Fort Detrick, outside of Washington DC by a man by the name of Arnold Wedum. And one of the things that I just found fascinating in researching the book was looking at how Dr. Wedum and his team at Fort Detrick figured out how it was that people were getting infected. They weren't having obvious accidents, but they were still ending up with these deadly, horribly debilitating diseases that were part of what was at the time the US' offensive biological weapons program.

[00:08:39] Jordan Harbinger: Man, you would think that they would be pretty damn sure — the method of transmission when they're like, "We want to make something that is really deadly and really contagious." And it's like, "How does this spread? I don't know, but you might want to wear gloves or something, because we have no idea." It's like, "I am not taking that job until they're like, 'It's respiratory. Here's your balloon suit thing. You can't get it if you wear this.'" That's just shocking that, that somebody was like, "Well, in the name of science, I'm just going to plug my nose and run in there and see what I can do and hope that I don't walk out with this all over my shirt when I go home to my kids." That's what it sounds like.

[00:09:15] Alison Young: Well, and in fact, one of the things that I just thought was so interesting is Dr. Wedum talked about the culture of being a martyr to science. And you know, you have these very dedicated scientists who were trying to save humanity, you know, in that case, in the biological arms race that was going on, but also trying to find vaccines and other countermeasures to protect the public. And the idea being that back in the day when there weren't the kinds of technologies that were developed at Camp Detrick and Fort Detrick and that are essentially many of the same ones used today. Before that, it was almost a matter of pride of how many times you had caught your experiment, is what Dr. Wedum would write about.

[00:10:01] Jordan Harbinger: Oh my gosh. So like how many times you got anthrax while working with anthrax or tuberculosis or whatever.

[00:10:07] Alison Young: Or whatever it was. And in reading through the old papers in the archives, you had these cases where Dr. Wedum and his team were studying how often lab accidents were occurring all around the world. And really, it's something that we're not studying to this day, but his team did some of the really groundbreaking work. And they went and they interviewed lab directors across the United States and around the world, and they found that they weren't even tracking how often their people were sickened by their experiments. And there's this one amazing case where this one director of a lab has this initial interview with them, and he's saying, "We only had a handful of lab infections, and those were years ago." But basically by the end of the visit, he had forgotten that he himself had suffered a horrible lab infection, that his wife had suffered a horrible lab infection that some people had died. I mean, it was all of these things because it was just not the kind of thing that there was a focus on. During that 1950s kind of era when safety started being a focus in microbiology labs.

[00:11:08] Jordan Harbinger: So you say his wife got it. She didn't work in the lab. He brought that home to her and she got it. Is that accurate?

[00:11:14] Alison Young: She worked in the lab, but there were —

[00:11:15] Jordan Harbinger: Oh, good.

[00:11:15] Alison Young: Other, but there are others who didn't work in the lab who basically had things brought home to them. There was one of the cases that Dr. Wedum's team documented where one of the scientists brought home anthrax and she ended up with this anthrax lesion on her face. They initially thought it was a pimple and it kept getting worse. And ultimately, he wasn't infected with anthrax, but he had tracked it home to her.

[00:11:37] Jordan Harbinger: Oh my gosh. I can't imagine having something like that on my face. I went to the Amazon and one of the guys on the trip — we were in the middle of the jungle. One of the guys on the trip had something on his lip a few weeks later, and then he's like, "Oh, does anybody else have this?" We're like, "No." And then like a month later, he's like, "So, this is called Leishmaniasis and it's rare and it's all over my face and I have —" The photos were graphic. I remember thinking like, "This could only happen to this guy." He had the worst luck, this guy, was just absolutely like the opposite of whatever Forrest Gump is. This guy was like the inverse of that. And he really had a hard time. He had to go to a specialty clinic in Panama because where he was living, that fortunately specialized in like rare tropical infections or something and they were like, "Wow, a Leishmaniasis case in the wild. This is incredible. Where were you?" And we're all like, "Okay, we're really lucky we didn't get this." I don't know how he got it. Must have gotten bit by like a sand flea on his face and that was it, man. Flesh eating bacteria. And that's my dumb ass going into the middle of the Amazon jungle. Like that's — you roll the dice when you do that. But you'd think these lab people would be more careful. And look, yet people are like, "Oh, that was 1950s. I get it." Now though, how many lab accidents are we talking about per year? Do you have sort of like an average from the 90s and beyond?

[00:12:57] Alison Young: So I wish that I had a great count for you. One of the things that I think probably would surprise most people is that there is no universal or mandatory requirement that lab accidents get reported in the United States and not around the world.

[00:13:14] Jordan Harbinger: Okay.

[00:13:14] Alison Young: And it's an unusual thing. And we should talk a bit about how microbiology is different from other industries, but there's only one subset of labs that work with a subset of dangerous pathogens that have a reporting requirement. And so, just in that small little corner of the universe of research, from about 70 to a hundred serious incidents with these baddest of the bad bugs are reported each year. So 70 to a hundred incidents. And to put that in a little bit of perspective, in the past seven years, there have been nearly 600 of these serious, they call 'em release incidents. That's where someone has been potentially exposed inside a lab or the pathogen somehow got out of containment at least briefly.

[00:13:59] Jordan Harbinger: 600 in one year?

[00:14:01] Alison Young: In the past seven years.

[00:14:03] Jordan Harbinger: Oh God. I was like, "That's two times a day. We need to stop doing this."

[00:14:06] Alison Young: Exactly.

[00:14:06] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

[00:14:06] Alison Young: No, no, no.

[00:14:07] Jordan Harbinger: Okay, that makes more sense.

[00:14:07] Alison Young: So about 70 to a hundred incidents a year, 600 in the last seven years. And of those 600 incidents, there were nearly 800 lab workers who required medical assessment or treatment.

[00:14:20] Jordan Harbinger: Wow.

[00:14:20] Alison Young: So that goes to the potential for exposure. So these are known incidents. But what's even more concerning is, when there have been studies of when people are infected in lab accidents or have what are called lab acquired infections. Most of the time, when they start interviewing this person who gets infected with this type of pathogen that they're working with in a lab, they have no idea that any accident has occurred. So if you think about this, we've got at least a subset that we know that maybe a hundred reported incidents with a certain subset of pathogens happen a year. But when people get sick, they usually don't recognize that something happened. They just end up with some sort of an infection. Even then, they may not report it or know that they have a lab acquired infection because many of these things, thank goodness, are not transmissible from person to person and they have symptoms that are similar to the flu or a cold, and so they may not actually get tested to find out whether they had some sort of a lab infection.

[00:15:29] Jordan Harbinger: The whole thing, honestly, is quite shocking. I'm shocked that they're not required to report lab accidents. If you told me that in Soviet Russia, they weren't required to report lab accidents, I'd be like, "Okay," But we're talking about the United States where, what, there's no regulation for that and it's just like, "Hey, if you let anthrax out, could you just call the sheriff or something or just, you know, mop the floor an extra time." That is really surprising. Are there inspections from the federal government that go in and make sure that these things are more secure or is that also lax? Because if you don't have to report it, that makes me think that there's nobody — there's no oversight.

[00:16:05] Alison Young: So, what I've found in my reporting over the years is that this is an area — there's no sort of nuclear regulatory commission for biological research, okay. It is an incredibly fragmented area where depending on what kind of pathogen you're working with, whether or not you receive federal funding, you may or may not have any sort of inspection. So the vast majority of biological research does not come under the kind of regulation most people think it does. It does not receive safety inspections from an independent outside entity. There is not the reporting of accidents that's required. Now, as I've mentioned, there's this subset of pathogens. It's several dozen pathogens that are things like anthrax, Ebola — the ones that you think of as sort of the baddest of the buck.

[00:16:58] Jordan Harbinger: Smallpox or whatever.

[00:17:00] Alison Young: Smallpox. Exactly. H5N1, Avian influenza viruses. Those are what the government called Select Agents. And these select agent pathogens do come under regulations. So there is some level of inspection and there is a mandatory requirement of instance and accidents being reported to the regulatory agencies that oversee them, and it's jointly overseen by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the US Department of agriculture.

[00:17:31] Jordan Harbinger: Okay, so at least like at the top level of the baddest of the bad, somebody's paying attention? Or is that an overstatement?

[00:17:36] Alison Young: Somebody is paying attention. How effective that oversight is, is the subject of quite a bit of the book.

[00:17:43] Jordan Harbinger: Mm-hmm.

[00:17:44] Alison Young: So you have two agencies that are overseeing these labs. The reports of accidents are secret. The public can't find out about them. You can find out if your local pizzeria has had some sort of a safety violation, but you can't find out if labs working with some of the most dangerous pathogens, what happened in any reported accidents. They treat that information as protected, and it has been exempted largely from the Federal Freedom of Information Act.

[00:18:13] Jordan Harbinger: That does not sound right. So I can find out if the local Chipotle had E. coli in the lettuce, but I can't find out if the neighborhood lab accidentally released Ebola to a bunch of people that work there.

[00:18:23] Alison Young: Correct.

[00:18:23] Jordan Harbinger: But that's by design, right? Because they don't want people to freak out about how often they're accidentally releasing stuff to each other, to themselves.

[00:18:31] Alison Young: They will say that the reason is, is it's a security concern, and they will say that if details about the kinds of experiments that are going on, problems in their experiments, did it will make them at risk of terrorists or somebody else. But one of the things that if you look closely at these labs, they have no problem publicizing their victories and their experiments in their glossy magazines at the universities that have these accidents with the same pathogens that it needs to be kept secret if they've made mistake.

[00:19:06] Jordan Harbinger: I see. So if they're like, "Breakthrough with a potentially Ebola vaccine from the local neighborhood laboratory." It's like on the front page of their glossy newspaper or whatever. But if it's like, "Oh, and we accidentally released some of the Ebola to our employees, but don't worry, none of them died." It's like, "Well, actually, we can't say anything about that because security." So that's just a convenient excuse from the sound of it.

[00:19:29] Alison Young: Yes, it appears to be. And in fact, Congress — they cite some legislation that passed many years ago, but the congressional intent, you can go back and take a look at it, it was never to shield the accountability of these labs or the government agencies that oversee them. And coming back to your other question about the regulation. One of the big challenges with regulation in this area is, I mentioned it's the CDC and the US Department of Agriculture that are overseeing these labs. Both of these organizations operate their own labs as well. Their parent organizations fund the research that they're overseeing. And as I document in Pandora's Gamble, both the USDA and the CDCs labs have had some very serious safety issues, which they also have tried to keep secret from the public.

[00:20:18] Jordan Harbinger: So this is probably a dumb question, but why are coverups so common? Is it just to keep the public from panicking?

[00:20:25] Alison Young: You know, I've been an investigative journalist for a really long time. Nobody likes their mistakes being out in the public.

[00:20:32] Jordan Harbinger: Okay.

[00:20:32] Alison Young: And a light being shown on 'em.

[00:20:34] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, but it's a potentially deadly. It's different than, "Oh man, you know, I don't want to publicize that somebody slipped and fell on the floor of my business. I'm just going to get new flooring. I don't want people to freak out and not come." this is, "Oh yeah, we — accidentally, there was some anthrax and there's a school a few blocks away. Let's just not tell anyone." The stakes are too high. It's not just a business that had, yeah, a food poisoning issue and then they had to fire the chef and repla— you know, this is different. This — it's completely different. So I guess, I am incredulous and just shocked and disappointed by the fact that people have died. I assume people have died because of lab leaks in the us. Is that accurate?

[00:21:10] Alison Young: There have been over time.

[00:21:12] Jordan Harbinger: And they're just like, "Oh, let's not tell anyone." As an attorney, I think of product liability. If you have a car tire and it shreds spontaneously on the highway and your SUV flips over, there is a multi-billion dollar lawsuit waiting for your company. And I think that happened with Firestone or one of those tire companies a few a decade ago. What do I know? This is like, "Let's just not tell anyone." That is not an option for any other industry that I can think of.

[00:21:38] Alison Young: I think part of the issue is that the public has not had the kind of interest in the safety of these labs until the questions started being raised about whether COVID-19 could have come from a laboratory accident. So, the public to this time has not demanded transparency of these labs in the same way the nuclear industry. I mean, when you have accidents like Three Mile Island, Fukushima and Chernobyl, those are very big and obvious events. The public demands accountability and transparency in the nuclear industry, and of radiological research. The public has not, for the most part, done that in the area of microbiological research.

[00:22:24] Jordan Harbinger: How easy is it to get infected in a lab? Because it sounds like, "Okay, If you don't wear the suit, or if it's 1950 and you don't understand the air pressure or whatever." Fine. But now what you mentioned getting cut by an infected scalpel, they're not wearing gloves that can't be cut by those scalpel. I just find it — again, maybe I'm naive here, but I'm thinking if I'm working with anthrax or Ebola infected monkeys, I'm wearing the anti cut gloves or the bite proof gloves or what — I'm wearing the suit. I'm taking the shower afterwards. I just — maybe you just have to beat this dead horse. I don't understand how this seems to be such an easy mistake to make or set of mistakes to make.

[00:23:01] Alison Young: What scientists have told me is that the use of safety equipment, it can often be cumbersome. It can reduce your dexterity. It makes it harder to do your work. If you're in one of those giant moonsuits, it's slow, it's hot, it's painful, it's noisy. It's all of these kinds of things. And so there is sometimes, just the human nature of, "I've got a lot of stuff to do and I need to do it quickly." and corners get cut.

[00:23:27] Jordan Harbinger: I suppose there's probably — you mentioned the Cavalier like, "Hey, I got a new strain of Ebola, but I'm fine now, guys." I can imagine that happening at bar night with a bunch of sort of maverick scientists, working on the latest bioengineering. Although it's cavalier, especially if it's something that could infect somebody else like your kids and family. But I guess, maybe. Is there an element of scientists don't want safety protocols getting in the way of scientific progress? Because I can see them saying, "I can either put on the suit and the gloves and do all this stuff, or I can do what I've done a million times with no incident, which is use a pipette and drop this in there, and then I can go home an hour and a half earlier." Is that what we're looking at?

[00:24:03] Alison Young: That is what the research over the years of Arnold Wedum. He was very much concerned that scientists didn't want safety getting in the way of their work. And it's still a challenge to this day. And I want to be clear that, look, there are plenty of scientists who do adhere to the protocols and do follow the procedures and use the equipment and all of those things. But as you've mentioned, it is surprising how often there are those who do not, and we have gotten lucky. You asked how often, how easy is it for scientists to become infected. We don't know how often laboratory acquired infections occur because just like with accidents, there is no mandatory universal requirement that lab acquired infections get reported to any sort of oversight body. Karen Byers, who is a researcher up in Boston, she has spent much of her career tracking, at least reports in the scientific literature and elsewhere, public reports of scientists who have become infected. From 1979 to 2015, she has been able to tally up 2,230 lab acquired infections with 41 deaths, and that's around the world. But it's also widely acknowledged that these kinds of infections are under-reported.

[00:25:26] Jordan Harbinger: You are listening to The Jordan Harbinger Show with our guest, Alison Young. We'll be right back.

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[00:28:26] Now, back to Alison Young.

[00:28:30] Look, I suppose there's an element of choosing scientists for their passion, right? Their talent for whatever they're doing in their advanced degree and not because they're the best at safety protocols. And that makes sense. I understand that. But then I think, would they hire a pilot who was just like, "You know what? I don't give a crap about safety. I just like flying planes. I fly him fast, I fly him low." Nobody would hire that guy ever. And yet here we are for somebody who could kill far more people than a passenger plane full of innocent people with a pathogen. And it's like, "Yeah, but he's the best darn gain of function guy out there, so who cares if he doesn't want to wear the suit, sometimes." That's what it sounds like.

[00:29:12] Alison Young: And even sometimes it's not even just doesn't want to wear the suit. It may be that the suit is not assembled properly, or they didn't take care to make sure that the suit that they're wearing is working, or that the equipment is not necessarily being maintained properly. You mentioned your background, you know, in the law, one of the things that one expert has talked about quite a bit is, what if these labs had to obtain liability insurance against the release of pathogens? Would that change the safety culture calculus?

[00:29:45] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. That's interesting. People say that with the police, right? "If they had to buy their own insurance for accidentally injuring somebody on the job, this wouldn't happen every day." And maybe there's something to that, right? Maybe there's something to that idea that like, "Hey, if you had to report the lab accident, maybe they'd hire a safety czar for every lab that makes sure that the suit doesn't have a hole in the back where people can't see it after they put it on, that's been there for 10 years." Because I can see people being like, "I follow safety protocols, but stuff still happens." And it's like, "Yeah, but the armpits been worn out in that suit for years and nobody sees it because you can't —" You don't look in a mirror and raise your arms up in the air after you put on this big balloon thing and somebody's job is that. Maybe now, nobody's job is that. So I have a little bit of sympathy for not knowing that there's a pinhole in a suit or something along those lines. Is there an element of, and I think you wrote about this in the book, scientists don't really want to place restrictions on other scientists, even if they're safety restrictions. I think I read something along those lines, and I don't know if I find that too convincing because it's so dumb, right? It's so foolish that you would let the entire world come to a deadly pandemic because you didn't want to inconvenience one of your colleagues, or you thought you were too smart to follow safety protocols.

[00:30:54] Alison Young: One of the debates that's going on right now, and there are some discussions about whether there should be greater oversight and some restrictions on what kinds of experiments can be done, particularly relating to gain of function research. The debate has all been about that only scientists and only virologists are the ones who should be allowed to be engaging in this debate because they are the experts at this. And so along the lines of what you're talking about, there is this narrative that has been created that only those involved in biological research should be the ones setting the rules and overseeing themselves. And I would say that in the 15 years I've been reporting on this, perhaps the biggest challenge has been that there is not transparency and there is not sunlight, which, you know, the old adage is, "Sunlight is the greatest disinfectant." If the public doesn't know how often accidents are happening, if policymakers don't know how often accidents are happening because there's no transparency, there is not the incentive to be able to address the problems.

[00:32:03] Jordan Harbinger: Well, yeah.

[00:32:03] Alison Young: And there is this idea that if you take any action in this area, it will somehow stifle science and bring the ability of these labs to bring forth lifesaving treatments If they were to have some of the same kinds of oversight that say, the nuclear industry has.

[00:32:21] Jordan Harbinger: Well, yeah, I'm thinking about oil companies. If Chevron was like, "Look, we don't want to have to report oil spills. It's just going to piss people off and make 'em scared. We'll handle it." People would be like, "Uh, no, I don't think so. I want to know when your refinery leaks into the river. I want to know when your offshore oil rig has a big ass hole in it and it takes you three weeks to plug it. A gajillion gallons of crude oil spill into the area where we all fish. No thanks. I don't think you need to handle that yourself. You need some oversight." And yet with this, which seems to be equally or possibly even more deadly, we're just like, "Oh, that's, yeah, okay. Let's let the experts handle it." It's just such an unconvincing argument to me.

[00:33:04] Alison Young: But it is resonating, I think, with some segment of the population. I mean, the mantra of trust science is now the new narrative. And if you are saying, "But wait a minute, should the scientists be allowed to grade their own homework in this area? Shouldn't there be other disciplines that have a seat at the table to help evaluate risk?" That is somehow seen as being anti-science.

[00:33:29] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. Well, I think this almost seems like deliberately misleading, right? Because look, trust the science? I trust the science. It's the people involved in the science that I don't always trust. I just want them to have a couple checks and balances. That doesn't seem like an unreasonable request.

[00:33:42] Alison Young: And it isn't in other sort of areas of the sciences.

[00:33:45] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. Come on, man. All right. Sorry. I know I'm like, "As if this is your fault." But I just, you know, sorry, you're on the front line. I have nobody else to yell at right now. There's one accident that you mentioned earlier in the show that's in the book — these lab tanks containing wastewater that contains particles of, I think anthrax and other deadly microbes. It flooded in a rainstorm. And not just once, by the way. It was like multiple times. Why is there so much wastewater in laboratories? What are they using the water for besides washing, I dunno, glassware? I don't even know if they do that. Do they incinerate that stuff? No idea.

[00:34:18] Alison Young: There are a variety of things that they're using wastewater for. Say you've got your little petri dishes and you're doing an experiment, you would — at the end of the experiment, put bleach or some sort of disinfectant on them and then those would end up being washed in some way. The main reason that there are huge volumes of wastewater in some of these labs is the showers. So you have scientists who are showering in and out when they come out of hot labs.

[00:34:44] Jordan Harbinger: Okay, that makes sense.

[00:34:44] Alison Young: To make sure that they're not tracking it out. And the other area is for the animals. So you have these large rooms with animals that have been used in experiments who are infected with —

[00:34:55] Jordan Harbinger: God knows what.

[00:34:56] Alison Young: Various kinds of pathogens. They have to hose down those cages that they've been in. And so there are potentially infectious pathogens in their waaste, in the fur. And so all of that's going down the drains as well.

[00:35:09] Jordan Harbinger: Is there not onsite treatment? They just put it in a tank and then what? They ship it off somewhere to get, I don't know, boiled or whatever. I don't know.

[00:35:16] Alison Young: So the case that you've mentioned here is one that happened at the US Army's Premier Biological Research lab, which is, goes by the acronym USAMRDC. It's at Fort Detrick, just north of Washington, DC. And so they since the 1950s have, I mean, literally since the days of Arnold Wedum had been using boilers that Arnold Wedum helped certify in 19, like 57 to boil, basically cook the wastewater out of these labs and make sure that nothing can survive. Okay, so here are these tanks, but what I write about is how they were supposed to have been decommissioned many, many years ago, and they were leaking and rusting out of the top because of the chlorine gas. And anytime they got too full, they would spill out over the top of these tanks and they knew that they had this problem. So much so that they had protocols in place that said they couldn't fill the wastewater tanks more than half full because they would leak out the top, and then there ended up being these flooding rains. It's a long story. The rainwater gets into the tanks. It's flooding out everywhere. And ultimately, it spews over a containment wall into an open storm drain and into a beautiful stream that flows through downtown Frederick, Maryland. And all of this is bad, but they also did not go out of their way to alert —

[00:36:38] Jordan Harbinger: I was going to say, "And then they didn't tell anyone." Right.

[00:36:41] Alison Young: Exactly.

[00:36:41] Jordan Harbinger: God, that's so frustrating. Because of course, don't swim in a stream after a rainstorm. I think everybody lives near the ocean knows. Don't go surfing.

[00:36:47] Alison Young: !Yeah. Well you really don't want to after that.

[00:36:49] Jordan Harbinger: Right. But then it's like, "Oh, it's probably fine. It's been a couple days." And it's like, "Oh yeah, we forgot to tell you that there's anthrax monkey poop in there now. Oops. And by forgot, I mean didn't want to because it might be embarrassing. Sorry, your kids went swimming. Sorry you used that to water your garden."

[00:37:04] Alison Young: And I think this is one of the layers that the public, I think will be shocked to hear is, so even when something like this very catastrophic accident happens, I mean just north of the nation's capitol, when the army and Fort Detrick finally tell the local public health officials about this, the head health department person in Frederick, Maryland wanted testing done, to make sure that the water was safe. In her email, she's talking about people were out there planting lily pad in the streams. And basically, she told me for the book that they weren't going to do the testing and her little health department doesn't have the expertise to test for those kinds of pathogens.

[00:37:46] Jordan Harbinger: It's so bad here. And yet the US, correct me if I'm wrong, has some of the best biosafety protocols and regulations in the world. So does that mean the rest of the world is even worse, I assume?

[00:37:56] Alison Young: There is a huge sort of variation in how various countries oversee these labs and then there are countries that have none of, even the kinds of protocols and limited regulations that we have in the United States. And what has happened since COVID-19 is, my Google alerts are full of countries all around the world that have never been building these biosafety labs. They are now building their own biosafety labs to work with these very dangerous pathogens. And in theory, building a biosafety level three, level four lab should be a good thing. But if they're not properly maintained, if the people in them are not trained, if they're not following the protocols that they've been trained to follow, all it does is give potentially a false sense of security. And the government accountability office in the United States has been warning, going back more than a decade at this point, that the more of these labs that are built, the more of these experiments with dangerous pathogens that are done, it increases the risk of a catastrophic accident.

[00:39:04] Jordan Harbinger: Of course. I mean, we're just rolling the dice multiple times. If you've got a hundred labs or a thousand instead of a few dozen. And by the way, so that's not even — we talked about a lot of weird stuff in the United States. Lemme just do a little quick laundry list here. They also, here in the US, worked on airborne diseases like tuberculosis with no respiratory gear. Shipped live anthrax that was accidentally marked as dead anthrax. Mishandled SARS — so what was that again? The SARS was back when I was in college. It was like some —

[00:39:32] Alison Young: The first SARS virus. Yes.

[00:39:34] Jordan Harbinger: So that was like COVID before COVID I guess.

[00:39:36] Alison Young: It was.

[00:39:37] Jordan Harbinger: They mishandled SARS samples and spread it. Somebody got infected and then just took a train home while sick because she wanted to get home for the holidays or whatever. Smallpox labs with no air filtration, not always using gloves, questioning the efficacy of gloves, which sounds like a tough argument to make, but whatever. That is just a sort of short, brief list of other things that have happened in the US alone. And that really scares me because like you said, they're building these labs all over the place. And I was on the fence about saying this, right. Because China is a major world power. They should be capable of running a level four lab. But now we see that the United States is also not really capable of flawlessly running a level four biosafety lab. And now we know China kept lying about the origins of COVID, saying it came from the United States or from Australia's frozen food. And I even had a Chinese ad agency or whatever media agency, try to pay me and a lot of other YouTubers to post this video saying, "COVID came from a US white-tailed deer, or the US white-tailed deer population." And the leaks are made so much worse by lying about them and covering them up. But I used to be like, "China!" But now it's like not just China.

[00:40:48] It seems like we're also, to be fair, doing the exact same thing. It's not — Oh, here's my sample:

[00:40:54] Soundbite: China!

[00:40:54] Jordan Harbinger: It's not just China, right? The United States is doing the same thing. And that's really disheartening. I don't know how to — it's — I can't really overstate it. It's just really a crappy realization to come to.

[00:41:06] Alison Young: There are a number of safety experts who have been pushing the United States to strengthen the kinds of oversights we have of our labs, and there's great pushback from those in the research community saying that if we enact even stricter regulations here, it will put us as at a competitive disadvantage against other countries. But those who are advocating for it really note that the United States should be a leader in this. The United States was a leader in this back in the 1950s, when Arnold Wedum set the standards that are to this day, the bedrock of when people are using safety practices are what? Basically is still being used to this day.

[00:41:47] Jordan Harbinger: When I first started looking at the whole China disinformation stuff, pointing to US lab failures or just the — or frozen food or whatever for Covid, of course it was really disgusting. But now it sounds like it's pretty good disinformation because it's based in reality, right? It's not, "Oh, the US doesn't have lab leaks. You're just trying to distract." It's, "The US has tons of lab leaks and you're trying to distract." It seems like being more transparent would actually help in this case. And my friends, C-Milk and Winston covered this on their channel — The China Show. We'll link to it in the show notes. Because they also brought receipts and showed the email that we got, asking us to repost this video. But will we ever find out where Covid originated or did the delays by China and even like maybe the World Health Organization, did that just become impossible, at this point?

[00:42:32] Alison Young: I hope we will find out where COVID-19 came from. Whether that is from what the natural source of it is, or if it came from some sort of a lab accident. One of the reasons I am hopeful we will find an answer is that we did find answers on the first SARS when SARS one was circulating. We did find out where that came from. And even if it's a lab accident, there is hope that we may find out. One of the reasons I am hopeful that there is still an opportunity to find out where COVID-19 came from, whether that's from nature or from a lab, is a case I write about in the book of a really horrible anthrax outbreak that occurred in the former Soviet Union in 1979. And this is a case where dozens of people were killed after what US Intelligence said was a Soviet bio weapons facility. It spewed anthrax spores into the air. It ended up killing all these people and dogs and everything else. And the Soviets even came to the United States and said, "This wasn't a factory and this is tainted meat. And it was actually, black market meat and people ate this meat, and that's how they got sick. And it was nothing about the air." And these scientists were even invited by US scientists to Washington, DC to the National Academies. And they showed slides and they showed pictures and prominent US scientists said, "Oh, we believe our colleagues from the Soviet Union." They seemed to be very forthcoming and they're sharing information and there's no evidence that this was an aerosol release. They've made a convincing case that this all came from tainted meat. And then, as the politics changed in the Soviet Union, you ended up having Russian president, Boris Yeltsin in 1992, admit that in fact, it was an anthrax accident at this lab. And times changed and it turned out that scientists, at great risk to themselves, had saved evidence of what had actually occurred.

[00:44:34] Jordan Harbinger: Wow.

[00:44:35] Alison Young: They had kept the old organs of people. They had kept other records, and ultimately, Russian scientists around 1993 ended up publishing research that showed that this had in fact been this horrible biological lab accident. It took 15 years for that truth to come out.

[00:44:59] Jordan Harbinger: This is The Jordan Harbinger Show with our guest, Alison Young. We'll be right back.

[00:45:03] This episode is sponsored in part by Quince. Just today, I caught Jen sporting some pretty amazing pants. Turns out, they're from Quince. She's all about their collection. I think we're basically taking all the sponsorship cash and turning it around and giving it right back to 'em. But, whatever. This is all about their stuff. And together, we've been giving our wardrobes a major upgrade with Quince finds, all without having to raid our retirement fund. Quince offers that high-end feel for a fraction of the cost. Imagine wrapping yourself in luxurious Mongolian cashmere sweaters for just $50, or stepping into sleek 100 percent leather jackets. Their ultra soft joggers and hoodies are our go-to for comfort. And Jen's really into their fine jewelry. You have to say it that way. It's like stumbling upon a high-end brand at thrift shop prices with discounts ranging from 50 to 80 percent. Quince cleverly cuts out the pricey middleman, opting to work directly with top-notch factories. This smart move gets rid of traditional retail markups, translating to incredible savings for us savvy buyers. And I know what you're thinking, "They probably have slave labor running over there." No. Rather, they have a commitment to ethical, safe, and responsible manufacturing. It's all about looking fabulous while being mindful of the planet and its people.

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[00:47:39] Now, for the rest of my conversation with Alison Young.

[00:47:44] Well, and the government fell. So if the government doesn't fall from — like Xi Jinping is still around and his successors are. If the CCP is still in charge of China, they're not going to be like, "You know what? Just tell everybody the truth." That's never going to happen. Especially with the whole concept of saving face and everything. I mean, it's unlikely. Even if a very friendly pro Western government came to power that they would go, "Oh, you know what? We should admit that we are the ones behind this." That's the last thing they're going to want to do. I got to wonder how they saved — I get saving research and things like that from the Soviet regime onto the new one. How do you save the organ of somebody who died? It's got to be weird to be like, "No, I really just — I want a collection of lungs and jars on my desk. I'm going to keep these for a while." And everyone's like, "Okay." How do you do that?

[00:48:26] Alison Young: There were pathologists and they actually kept them in plain sight, in jars out there. And so they were overlooked and they just thought they were part of other kinds of collections and specimens that were used by these experts.

[00:48:40] Jordan Harbinger: Like, "Oh, that's just creepy, Dr. Slovatnik." He loves — he just has a lot of lungs in the office. Why is that weird? He's a scientist. That is admirable, but also very, just very odd. You know that guy had a lot of explaining to do and he's just biting his time until he can come out with the truth. I guess it's to be admired, but it's a very weird picture to paint. This is a tangent here, but a few people online are talking about how the US or the West, whatever it is, has bio weapons and labs in Ukraine. And that's supposedly one reason that Russia invaded. Now that smacks of Kremlin bullsh*t to me. But do you know anything about those labs? Do they even exist?

[00:49:18] Alison Young: I don't. That's not an area I've reported on it. I do know, I mean that the US did fund when the Soviet Union fell. There was an effort by the United States to fund public health labs to try to dispose of and deal with the remnants of the former Soviet bio weapons program. But beyond that, I haven't reported on that.

[00:49:38] Jordan Harbinger: Okay. I was just curious. You know, with all the disinformation out there, it's hard to even, to find any basis in reality for some of this stuff is almost impossible. And the other stuff is, "There's a lab there, but it studies the common cold, and it's not a bio weapon lab, but Putin says it is because he's got to justify sending in Spetsnaz troops to take it over or whatever." Some of the diseases that come out are really scary. What was the — there was one bacteria that can lurk in your body for decades before it suddenly decides to give you a super nasty disease and kill you. What is that?

[00:50:06] Alison Young: The one that's sometimes referred to as the, "Vietnamese time bomb". So that is called Burkholderia pseudomallei. And it is a bacteria that often is found in Southeast Asia and it lurks in muddy, wet areas and it can be absolutely deadly, and if you are infected by it, either like through inhaling aerosolized water, it can lurk in your body for decades before activating itself and ultimately killing you.

[00:50:36] Jordan Harbinger: That's terrifying. That's up there with those pools in Australia that have signs that say, "Don't swim here because there's brain eating amoeba in the water." It's just — I don't know. It just never goes swimming in anything that's not a chlorinated swimming pool, I guess. It's just, ugh. The fact that that even exists is scary to me.

[00:50:53] Alison Young: Even scarier though, is when you have a lab in Louisiana, which is an environment that can support that kind of bacteria using sloppy biosafety practices at the Tulane National Primate Research Center, north of New Orleans. They ended up having an incident where this particular pathogen, a biosafety level three pathogen, ended up somehow infecting monkeys in their disease-free breeding colony outside of the labs and right next to a river and marshland and everything else. And it has led to concerns by officials that that bacteria may be growing and lurking in the environment in Louisiana as a result.

[00:51:36] Jordan Harbinger: So that's really scary, right? Is this something that's in the soil then? Is that the one that's in the dirt?

[00:51:40] Alison Young: It's the one that basically forms sort of like ant mounds down into the soil. It can colonize the soil.

[00:51:47] Jordan Harbinger: So someone's going to dig it up and build a structure, and the construction crew could theoretically get infected with this. And then we have a pandemic of whatever that is.

[00:51:55] Alison Young: The way that people get ill in Australia and in Southeast Asia is often, it's during typhoons. I mean, and so you have the issue of New Orleans and Louisiana and hurricanes. If it takes a significant enough foothold, if it has been deposited there by these monkeys that were outside, that's the concern, is that it could become more of a public health threat in the area.

[00:52:21] Jordan Harbinger: My gosh. The fact that it can exist outside, I mean, it's one thing if we're doing it in Michigan and it's like, "Oh, this can never survive out here If there's not enough humidity, there's not enough — the temperature change, it's going to — it freezes the ground. It's going to all die." This is like, "No, it can live there indefinitely, forever. It'll just sit there for 50 years until somebody gets it in the little termite mound or ant mound colony." Yikes.

[00:52:42] Alison Young: Well, and you were talking earlier about wastewater. This is a case where the records that ultimately it took, I mean, it takes years under the Freedom of Information Act to get any of these records for the articles that I write. This particular lab was working with this bacteria, was infecting these monkeys with it, and the records ultimately showed that they were basically exsanguinating. They were killing the monkeys, draining their blood into a sink and just down the drain without the effective disinfectant. And this is a water loving bacteria. It's one of the things, I mean the US Department of Agriculture, the regulatory agency over this lab along with the CDC, this is information that they tried to keep secret and I had to fight under the Freedom of Information Act to get it out, to be able to reveal it.

[00:53:33] Jordan Harbinger: That's really careless. Like, "This bacteria can survive in water. Great. Let's dump it down the drain." Why are they emptying the monkey blood into the drain? That sounds like something from a horror movie.

[00:53:43] Alison Young: I asked that question. It was among the many, many, many questions they would not answer.

[00:53:48] Jordan Harbinger: Really? Oh, so it's not like, "Oh, you have to do that because when you incinerate the monkey, keeping the blood in there makes it harder." It's just like, "Ah, we're not telling you why we drained the blood down the drain." That's weird.

[00:53:59] Alison Young: It was not clear. I mean, and this is yet another situation where the protocol said that they were supposed to have a stopper in the drain and not send it down there without decontaminating it, but according to the records, they didn't follow their protocol.

[00:54:12] Jordan Harbinger: God, can you imagine having that job, too? "All right. You need to drain these five monkeys before you can go out to lunch." My God.

[00:54:19] Alison Young: The thing is, is that — I mean, what would be the consequence for these labs if these records that identify problems in labs were posted on a public website? I mean, how would that affect the behavior of the labs? How would it affect the safety of the labs? Does it pose some sort of a terrorist threat to them, which is essentially the argument against doing it.

[00:54:41] Jordan Harbinger: I understand the counter argument. I'm thinking one of the first things they taught us when we went to work at the law firm a zillion years ago was any email you send, think about it on the front page of the New York Times, because that kind of thing can happen. That's what they want you to think about when you're like, "I'm going to do this weird, somewhat unethical thing and it's going to be fine, or I'm going to send this rocket of an email off to somebody." So what it does is it causes you to go, "Maybe I should put a stopper in the drain, like we said we were doing, and maybe I should use enough bleach because I don't want this to be on the bio watch blog with my name and picture of me being a careless, a-h*le, and possibly infecting the entire community with whatever crazy bacterial infection." It's an incentive, or I should say a disincentive, right? It's like not committing crime because you don't want to go to prison. That's what it is. I don't want my name in the media as somebody who's reckless. So maybe I will — maybe I'll wear gloves. That's what accountability is. So, yeah. It's no shock they don't want it, but it's also shocking that they don't have it.

[00:55:44] Alison Young: And I think one of the things that is going on right now is that there is legislation in Congress where there is a proposal to start, at least on a voluntary basis and whether that would have any effect is unclear. On a voluntary basis, have labs start reporting incidents, but they have specifically exempted the reports and the data derived from the reports from release to the public under the Federal Freedom of Information Act. And so that's legislation that's being considered by Congress right now. So there is continuing to be the pushback against transparency in this arena.

[00:56:23] Jordan Harbinger: Before we go onto the next thing here, I would love to talk about the biosafety levels because you mentioned biosafety level three, four, what are the levels? What do they mean?

[00:56:31] Alison Young: So there are basically biosafety level 1, 2, 3, and 4. And you know, when you're thinking about your college chemistry or high school biological lab, those are going to be sort of an open bench top. You might have basic biosafety practices like washing your hands, wearing gloves, wearing a lab coat, those kinds of things. The higher level high containment labs are the ones that I'm primarily writing about, which are biosafety level three and biosafety level four. So these are labs that are working with pathogens that are particularly dangerous, infectious. At biosafety level three, you're having that negative air pressure. You don't have that at lower safety levels. You're having the negative air pressure. You are working in what's called a "biosafety cabinet". So these high containment labs are basically boxes within boxes. So if you're working on an experiment, you're working in a room that has negative airflow, and then you're doing your experiment, you're manipulating your vials and your tissue samples in a cabinet that also has negative air pressure.

[00:57:40] Jordan Harbinger: I see.

[00:57:40] Alison Young: So everything is drawing everything away from you.

[00:57:42] Jordan Harbinger: Oh, I've seen those, right. Those boxes where you stick your hands in and there's gloves built into it, and you do your thing in there. So you're never touching the thing. You're never moving it or touching it.

[00:57:51] Alison Young: And so those ones that have the gloves attached are actually an even higher level. Those tend to be more sort of in a biosafety level four environment. The ones in a biosafety level three actually have a curtain of air that your hands are going into.

[00:58:04] Jordan Harbinger: Oh, I see.

[00:58:04] Alison Young: So they're open at the bottom, but very similar kind of concept. And then biosafety level four are the ones that everyone sees, the people in the moon suits. The full body suits. And whether you're using a biosafety level three or a biosafety level four lab depends largely on the lab's judgment of the type of pathogen, the danger of the experiment, whether they add a respirator at biosafety level three, they may do that. It's largely based on guidance and professional judgment, unless there is some sort of regulatory aspect because it's a select agent, or unless it is because of federal grant requirements that they have to do something with it.

[00:58:47] Jordan Harbinger: Right. So if it's like H1N1 and you're getting government, CDC grant to do it. They might say, "You have to be a biosafety level for lab and use all the accoutrements of that lab." But otherwise it's like, "Hey, whatever you think is good." Which is not great when — because I can imagine a scientist being like, "I should really wear a respirator." And the manager's like, "Yeah, well you can buy your own, but we don't have 'em here." And the guy's like, "Ah, those are like 10 grand. I'm not buying my own. Eh, screw it. I'll just wear a mask." I can just see this dialogue playing out. And it might — I might be a little too flippant, but I can see a private company being like, "We don't have to have the good respirators, so we're not going to get the good respirators."

[00:59:25] Alison Young: You know, I don't know whether that is as much about it as they may decide. We don't think that there's that much risk. I mean, risk is an assessment that is made by individuals. And one of the concerning things about the Wuhan Institute of Virology was that they were doing some work with lab manipulated coronaviruses at lower biosafety levels. And so that's one of the things that caught the attention of some of the scientists who were initially questioning whether covid could have come from a lab.

[00:59:57] Jordan Harbinger: All right. Before we go, I'd love to talk about gain-of-function research. It's probably a whole show, but first of all, what is gain of function research people? It's in the zeitgeist right now, but tell us what this is and frankly, why we do this at all.

[01:00:09] Alison Young: So gain-of-function research is when a lab is taking a pathogen and making it more infectious, more deadly, perhaps maybe able to infect species that it isn't normally able to infect. Now, there's also a whole lot of debate over how you want to define gain of function research, but that is — that's a reasonable definition of it. And the reason that scientists who are proponents of doing this kind of research, say it is important, is that it allows them to study how these kinds of pathogens might evolve on their own. And to give humanity potentially a head start on developing vaccines and tests and other countermeasures that could protect us.

[01:00:55] Jordan Harbinger: Why are we doing this? I get — okay, we're experimenting on these things, but what's the point of making a bird flu, "Now it can infect humans and it's more deadly."? That seems like a terrible idea. If we know it can be done, great. Do we need to do it though? That's the part I don't really — what are they doing with this that's beneficial for mankind?

[01:01:15] Alison Young: Your question is the one that is asked by many scientists, those who oppose this kind of research and who are questioning its merit. Their argument is that this is theoretical research that is not going to produce tangible applications. It's requiring taking on, depending on what the experiment is and what the pathogen is, potentially very significant risks. And are those risks worth it. And that is what the debate is that's playing out. And there is currently recommendations for how to better define and potentially conduct more thorough risk assessments of this that are sort of working their way through the federal government at the moment.

[01:01:57] Jordan Harbinger: It just seems like an absolutely terrible idea for so many different reasons. I mean, if you need to simulate a massive pandemic, you can do that with computers. If you need to design a pathogen that can infect humans, we can sort of imagine what that might look like or you can design it and not make it. I just don't understand why we need to be like, "Wow, we have this disease and it's super deadly, but it really doesn't affect and it's not contagious and it's hard to spread and it only affects pigs. Now we have a human version and it's super contagious because it can be — you can breathe it out and it's still infectious in the air four minutes later." I just don't understand why you'd make anything like that at all. It's like making a giant nuclear bomb in your backyard and you're just like, "Hey guys, look what I made. Don't worry. I'm not going to use it." Why would you build that? It just doesn't make any sense to me at all. And if it's going to be done, I think I speak for a lot of people when I say I would want that to be done under the strictest of absolutely military level safety, where everyone is vetted and it's not run by a private company and nobody's cutting corners because it's this overfunded government entity to doing this and there's 12 people involved and it's damn near impossible for this thing to get out. Not just like, "Oh, anybody can do this. They just need to pick up some smallpox and a license from whatever government in the country that they're in." I mean, that scares me. And I think I'm not alone.

[01:03:20] Alison Young: You are not alone in the concern about that. And I think it is one of those areas that the public is starting to have an awareness of. And there is in theory, some oversight of it, but as I document in one of the incidents in the book about the University of Wisconsin at Madison, which is one of the leading sites of doing gain-of-function research, they had a trainee in December of 2019 who was working with one of these lab manipulated avian influenza viruses that was capable of infecting mammals and had been engineered in that way. And they're wearing this full face mask protective gear that's supposed to supply them with clean and safe oxygen, but they hadn't attached it properly and their hose ends up dangling in the lab's air. And what's even worse is that when this incident occurs, as I document in quite a bit of detail using public records, there were efforts that were made to downplay and avoid reporting it.

[01:04:21] Jordan Harbinger: I've done a couple episodes on synthetic biology. Some of this is basically gain-of-function or making new, horrible diseases. This was with Rob Reid, episode 244 and 510. We're going to link to that in the show notes. Thank you so much for doing the show. This must have been — when you were researching this, were there ever times where you're like, "All right, I just need to take a break for a few days."? Because this is — it's a little depressing, right? It's just left and — bad news. A lot of bad news that you had to collect and read.

[01:04:46] Alison Young: It is a lot of bad news, but I will say that after having covered this area for USA today and the Atlanta Journal Constitution and other news organizations, I'm glad that the public is really sort of interested in this topic now. It is so important that the public, really at this time, look into the safety of these labs and have their voice heard, because now is the time that there is some interest in perhaps making some changes in how these labs are overseen.

[01:05:17] Jordan Harbinger: Alison Young, thank you so much.

[01:05:19] Alison Young: Thank you.

[01:05:22] Jordan Harbinger: As usual, I've got some thoughts on this one, but first we talked to legendary filmmaker Oliver Stone on why the American media is partially culpable for the state of the world, interviewing Vladimir Putin and so much more. Here's a quick bite.

[01:05:35] You weren't even drafted to go to Vietnam, right? You wanted to go?

[01:05:40] Oliver Stone: I went to Vietnam because as I tried to say in the book, partly suicidal, it was a death instinct. It was like I have no place in the world. I come out of Vietnam and I'm completely zonked and I'm back in civilian society. I'm free. No one's telling me what to do. I don't know a soul, so I go over to Mexico. Get bombed, laid, all that stuff. Get a crazy few days. Come back and is zoned out. And come back at midnight, trying to cross back the border at midnight, carrying my Vietnamese grass, which I'd smuggled back from Vietnam. Of course, I get stupidly busted. Federal smuggling charge five to 20 years.

[01:06:15] Jordan Harbinger: Oh my God.

[01:06:15] Oliver Stone: Yeah. Serious.

[01:06:16] Jordan Harbinger: That's a crazy punishment. How much grass are we talking about?

[01:06:19] Oliver Stone: Two ounces.

[01:06:20] Jordan Harbinger: That's ridiculous.

[01:06:20] Oliver Stone: Maybe less.

[01:06:22] Jordan Harbinger: I heard you once put LSD in your dad's drink at a party. That's a bold move, man.

[01:06:27] Oliver Stone: Yeah. Why not? Because he needed it.

[01:06:28] Jordan Harbinger: What do you mean?

[01:06:30] Oliver Stone: His attitude on the war was f*cked. I put a heavy dose of orange sunshine into his scotch. Man, I really dumped it in and he got so f*cking high. He never knew what hit him.

[01:06:41] Jordan Harbinger: Do you think you could make a movie like Platoon now? Do you think an American studio would touch a movie like that these days?

[01:06:46] Oliver Stone: No, no, no. Not with friendly fire and killing civilians and — no, it's impossible now. National Security Cinema read it. He goes into detail on some 800 movies in the Pentagon has worked on. You have no idea the influence, how deep they've gotten. What I've said to you at this interview is important. If you think about it, listen to it again, you'll see why it's suffocation is in order here.

[01:07:14] Jordan Harbinger: For more, including the lesson Oliver Stone learned when he was a cab driver prior to becoming a world famous director, check out episode 411 on The Jordan Harbinger Show.

[01:07:27] Man, this stuff is spooky, eh? We need to take safety a lot more seriously if we're going to avoid catastrophe. One anecdote from the book was that a lab right here in the USA was sending people home when they got stabbed with dirty needles and telling them to quarantine instead of, you know, actually quarantining them. Unreal. Come on, folks. Do better or just kill everyone off already. At this point, I'm just sick of waiting. Before I forget, big thanks to the University of Missouri School of Journalism for lending us Alison for this conversation. A lot of fun. Well, fun might not be the right word, but I really enjoyed the conversation, anyway. All things Alison Young will be in the show notes at jordanharbinger.com or ask the AI chat bot, also on the website. Transcripts are in the show notes. Advertisers, deals, discount codes, and ways to support the show, all at jordanharbinger.com/deals. Please consider supporting those who support the show.

[01:08:15] We've also got our newsletter where every week, the team and I dig into an older episode of the show and dissect lessons from it. So if you are a fan of the show, and I hope you are, you want to recap of important highlights and takeaways, or you just want to know what to listen to next, the newsletter is a great place to do just that. jordanharbinger.com/news is where you can find it. Don't forget, of course, about Six-Minute Networking. That's over at sixminutenetworking.com. I'm @JordanHarbinger on Twitter and Instagram. You can also connect with me on LinkedIn. Please send me a note if you do.

[01:08:41] This show is created in association with PodcastOne. My team is Jen Harbinger, Jase Sanderson, Robert Fogarty, Millie Ocampo, Ian Baird, and Gabriel Mizrahi. Remember, we rise by lifting others. The fee for this show is you share it with friends if you find something useful or interesting. The greatest compliment you can give us is to share the show with those you care about. If you know somebody who is interested in science, lab leaks, wants to rub it in my face that I actually changed my mind about something, you know, go ahead and share this episode with them. In the meantime, I hope you apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you learn, and we'll see you next time.

[01:09:14] Thanks again to Nissan for sponsoring this episode of The Jordan Harbinger Show. Learn more at nissanusa.com.