July 29th, 2026

Rough transcription of Hour 1

Segment 1
Hello America.  Mark Levin here.  Our number 877-381-3811.  877-381-3811. We can’t possibly fit into the 3 hours of this program. Everything I want to get to. That said, I want to focus a bit on Fauci. And the COVID virus, because what the nation went through was quite. Quite horrendous in so many respects. And covering up for the communist Chinese and their lab and the funding that our government provided. That lab is really unacceptable. It was Tom Cotton who first raised the possibility. First raised the possibility of the lab. It was my show on Life, Liberty and Levin. Will they gas The man who was formerly the New York Times science writer Nicholas Wade, who had written a long piece. Who I brought onto the program that pushed this really into the. Into the national mindset in a very significant way because he is a very serious writer for a very liberal newspaper. And he was retired, but he was very, very concerned about what was taking place in the reporting. And I gave them the first national platform they had. And people don’t remember how. Our free speech during that period of time was under attack, like everything else in terms of our civil liberties. But most TV hosts and radio hosts. Were too worried, too nervous, too stressed to take a firm stand. And I’m not talking about the nutjobs and the conspiracy nuts. I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about legitimate, substantive positions. Sir Nicholas Wade was on Life, Liberty and Levin on May 23, 2021. I don’t normally do this, but I need to do this because it’s very important. Our history is very important, especially when it comes to this virus and the lack of civil liberties. Cut to ago. Our guest is Nicholas Wade. The question is the origin of COVID 19. This is brought to my attention by a friend of mine, David Berlinski, one of the smartest people I’ve ever met. He’s been on this program a few years back. And you said, Mark, you’ve got to read this article and you need to have Mr. Wade on your program to talk about this. That is the origin of the Corona virus. And Mr. Wade is an investigative science writer. He’s formerly New York Times, science writer, formerly writer with Nature and Science. So he knows something about these subjects. And I want to thank you for coming on the program. The first paragraph, sir, of your of your piece, which is published in something called the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. So it sounds like it’s quite legitimate. The first paragraph says the COVID 19 pandemic has disrupted lives the world over for more than a year. Its death toll will soon reach 3 million people. Yet the origin of pandemic remains uncertain. The political agendas of governments and scientists have generated thick clouds of obfuscation, which the mainstream press seems helpless to dispel. I want to go through some of this so it’s understandable for all of us, some of the institutions, some of the names. And you can fill it in for us, if you don’t mind, sir. So let’s begin with identifying some of the institutions and actors. What exactly is the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in Washington, D.C.? Well, that’s a branch of the National Institutes of Health, and it awards grants to scientists in the US and abroad who study matters of interest to to allergy and infectious diseases. And in particular, it supports research into animal viruses that seem to have the potential of spilling over into humans. And that includes these bat viruses called coronaviruses. Is it a big bureaucracy? Is it is it is it a heavily funded bureaucracy, do you know? I don’t know for sure. But all these components of the new age, the National Institutes of Health, have a lot of money to give out. They found lots of research. It will be hundreds of millions of dollars if not approaching a billion. So who is the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases? Well, that’s Dr. Anthony Fauci, and he’s been there a long time, about 37 years, by my calculation. Now, what is the Wuhan Institute of Virology? So that is the leading center in China for studying coronaviruses, and it’s in Wuhan. And the chief scientist there is called Dr. Zhengli Shi, who is an expert on bat viruses. In fact, in your piece and others have called her the bat lady, that’s how expert she is on bad viruses, correct? That’s right. She’s been collecting these viruses from from the caves in southern China and elsewhere where bats hang out for many years. And she has an enormous collection of them. Who is Ralph s baric? Well, Ralph back is counterpart in the US, you might say. He’s a very distinguished coronavirus researcher. He trained Dr. Shi and many whose techniques, particularly those for genetically engineering coronaviruses, and he’s a leader in his field. And I’m going through this time with the American people to know so we understand the individuals that you write about, we understand these institutions, and then we can draw some more information out about them and what’s been taking place here. What is gain of function or. JOFFE Research. Well, this is anything you do to a virus that increases its pathogenicity. So it’s long been possible with new techniques of genetically of genetic engineering to make changes in a virus’s genome and to add properties to it that he didn’t have before. And that is called gain of function if you make it more pathogenic. Is this a controversial area of research getting viruses and making them more lethal? Yes, it has been controversial because of its obvious danger. So for a period from 2014, 2017, it was under a US government moratorium on funding such research. And the moratorium was lifted, but it was replaced by a small reporting system, if you will, funding research of this kind. You. Minister to report into the government that you were doing it. And what is the theory behind research like this, making viruses more lethal, particularly lethal for human beings? Well, that’s right. It sounds crazy at first sight, but the rationale is that many of these viruses are going eventually to jump from animals to humans anyway once they acquire sort of a couple of mutations that allows them to make that jump. And so if we could define these mutations in advance, we would get a jump on the virus, sort of jump on what he was going to do naturally. And that would give us a leg up in trying to predict and prevent future epidemics. That’s the rationale for for conferring gain of function on these viruses. So basically create in a lab more lethal viruses from the original virus. So you can try and figure out what to do with it should it become more lethal and jump into human beings. Is that about right? Yes, that’s right. With one exception is that you’re not you’re not always working with the original virus. You are often swapping into it bits and pieces from related viruses that may be able to do something based on spread the range of hosts the virus can attack. Now, this expert, these there’s Chinese expert scientist at the Wuhan lab. You say she set out to create coronaviruses with the highest possible infectivity on human cells. Is this what she’s known to do? She’s not known just for that. She’s just she’s known as a sort of general expert on on coronaviruses. Now, I assume if you’re going to be messing around with viruses and making them more lethal, that there’s some level of safety you need to have at these labs. And you say there are four degrees of safety designated, BSL one, two, BSL four, with BSL FA being the most restrictive and designed for deadly pathogens like the Ebola virus. And you’re right, the Wuhan Institute of Virology has a new BSL four lab, but it’s state of readiness. Considerably alarmed the State Department inspectors who visited Beijing much of her work. Gain of function in coronavirus, you write, however, was not performed in the highest safety level of BSL four. It wasn’t a BSL three, it was BSL two. And you get the the input from an expert from Rutgers by the name of Professor Albert. And he says it’s clear that some or all of this work was being performed using a biosafety standard. Biosafety level two, the level of standard in a dentist’s office, In a dentist’s office. Well, that raises some issues, doesn’t it, sir? Yes, it does. I mean, there there are other general issues, because these were the internationally agreed rules for working on coronaviruses. If you if you are working on the two coronaviruses that caused the two previous epidemics, the SA one epidemic and the US epidemic, you had to you had to research those only in BSL three. But if you are working on any other coronavirus, you could work in BSL two, said Dr.. She was following the international rules. It’s just that to outsiders it seems as illogical as here they are. Because if if you create a particularly dangerous coronavirus in BSL two, your safety precautions may be inadequate, so it may well escape. So in this lab, the Wuhan lab, they’re working on viruses and putting this in Marx, plain English viruses that could become more killer viruses, more lethal viruses to human beings. The level of safety in this lab. One, two, three, four, four. Being the highest is a two. And I want to ask you a couple of other questions related to this, sir. Who is Peter Daszak? Okay. So Peter Daszak has an important role in this story. He is the president of an organization in New York called the Eco Health Alliance. And its main concern is to study animal viruses around the world that might turn into human pathogens. Now, the idea, as we’ve discussed, the gave the grant, it did not do not give the grant directly to Dr. Shi at the Wuhan Institute. He gave it to Peter Daszak. So he is the prime investigator on this grant, and he then subcontracted Dr. Shi to do the work on coronaviruses. All right. We’re live now. I have to take a break. This is very important. It was important when we did this. Over five years ago. And it’s important tonight. Right now, I will pick up where we leave off when we return.

Segment 2
Let’s pick up right where we left off. Go. Let me get this straight, because this is important, I think, to the American people. Our infection official Federal Infectious Disease Office Director Fauci runs it. They gave a grant to this intermediary organization, Eco Health Alliance in New York, run by Peter Daszak. They, in turn, gave a grant to Dr. Shi in the Wuhan lab to do exactly what well her task was, which we know because the the abstracts of the grant have been are a matter of public record. A task was to explore oh, what made the spike protein. And that’s the part of the coronavirus that sticks out and actually attacks its target on on human cells or whatever or other animal it may be infecting. She she was to explore the range of infectivity of these spike proteins and it seems from a range of coronaviruses. And she would swap them in one by one to a sort of a generic coronavirus backbone to see which spike proteins made the virus most infectious. That seems to have been her program, and that’s more or less what Daszak describes in an interview he gave in December 2019, just before the pandemic hit. So we’re funding, in part, this lab in China, run by Dr. G through a party in New York run by Peter Daszak. And the purpose of this funding is to is to increase the lethality of coronaviruses. Theoretically, for the purpose of trying to figure out what to do with these more lethal viruses. Should these more lethal viruses become manifest, correct? Well, I think that’s basically right. But I think I would put the emphasis in a slightly different place. I mean, first of all, it was it was definitely the duty of Dr. Fauci and the need 80 to explore these these viruses and see what kind of danger they presented because they had already generated two pandemics. The stars as well in the epidemics area was very legitimate subject of of research for him. And that was the overall purpose of of the ground. It wasn’t in itself to create the most dangerous virus. It was to explore the the infective possibilities inherent in the natural viruses circulating in bats in China. Would it be the responsibility of a government agency to make sure that a lab that’s getting ultimately federal dollars for this sort of research has the security and safety measures that it ought to have? Apparently, the State Department didn’t think it did. Well, I think that’s a very interesting question, and probably we can’t answer it quite yet. I mean, if we’re supposing that being a virus escaped from a lab in the US, a lab that was funded by an idea, I didn’t think we’d immediately say, well, you and I are responsible for that. I think, first of all, we’d, we’d look to the director of the lab and say, Was he following all applicable safety rules? Did he take all necessary precautions? All right. We’re going to take a little break here. As I continue to press this matter, press it a little harder with Nicholas Wade when we return. We’ll be right back.

Segment 3
All right. We’re going to pick up where we left off because I want to try and pack it all into this hour. If we can remember, it’s Nicholas Wade, formerly of The New York Times and the science editor, the science writer there about about COVID and where it came from. Go ahead. So I think the responsibility lies first and foremost with with the lab director. And then if you wish to go one step back, in this case, you arrive at Dr. Daszak. He was the principal investigator on the ground. And maybe, though I didn’t know exactly how the regulations are written, but just in general terms, you would think he would be the first oversight person responsible for making sure that his grantees, like Dr.. She were working in safe conditions. But now, if I could take it one step further back than that, as I’ve mentioned, Doctor, she was was working in in exactly the same rules as a followed by virologists all around the world. So now you could argue, well, the virologists have set these rules far too low to be easy on themselves. They didn’t like suiting up in a bubble suit for a BSL level four. That’s what you see the pictures of Dr. Sue on the Internet. She’s wearing one of these bubbles, which is not the condition she was working. So it may be that responsibility is also shared. We should be looked at in terms of what the virology community as a as as a whole was recommending in terms of these safety levels. Here was Nicholas Wade, who is a well known writer about science and work for the New York Times, nature science, magazines, all these these expert sort of areas, and wrote a piece that has really drawn my attention, the attention of a lot of people in something called the Bulletin of Atomic Science. So it sounds pretty important. And so I took a look at this, and I want to get into this again further. Peter Daszak, you said he’s the president of the EcoHealth Alliance of New York. He got a grant from an infectious disease federal department. He used a grant to fund some of the research at the Wuhan lab. Well, let me ask you this, Mr. Wade. Dan Sick. There’s a publication called Lancet. And what did Dance It and Lancet wind up doing in turn when the when the pandemic first broke out? Well, when it first broke out, there were two very reasonable scenarios for the origin of the virus. One, it could have jumped naturally from animals, and the other it could have escaped from the lab, which, after all right, in the middle of Wuhan, is the Wuhan Institute of Virology, as we’ve said. But right from the beginning, public perception favored natural emergence over lab escape. And that’s perception was very much shaped by a letter that appeared in The Lancet and derided lab escape as a conspiracy theory and said the natural emergence, of course, was the way this virus had emerged. And we should all stand shoulder to shoulder with our Chinese colleagues on the forefront of fighting the disease. Now, this letter, later turned out, had been drafted and organized by Dr. Marshak, who, of course, if the virus had indeed escaped from the Wuhan lab, he might certainly be perceived as being at fault for not overseeing it better. So he had a clear conflict of interest, which unfortunately was not declared to the readers of of The Lancet. And indeed, his letter ends. We declare no conflict of interest in this cited by a lot of the media at the time, as I recall. And. People who said, well, maybe we ought to look at the lab and so forth. As you point out, they were dismissed. Some of them were dismissed as kooks. President Trump said maybe we should look at the lab and maybe that had an influence on the media in our country. Who is Kristian Anderson? Well, he’s a virologist and he was the author of A Second Letter, which also was wildly influential in shaping public perceptions. And this second letter also said that the virus could clearly not have been manipulated and therefore natural emergence was that was the best solution. But in fact, there was no there was no good scientific basis for his statement. He was assuring the public of something that he could not know for sure. And that is something that in general, scientists, in my view, should not do. So we have these scientific journals, we have these scientists, we have sort of these groups of scientists. In the case of Dan Sick, he had 20, 25, actually 35 signatures. We have the second one from Anderson, five signatures. The media basically use these letters as an argument that it it had to be from animal jump to human beings. Why do you think the media was so incurious? I mean, people are getting ill. This is a pandemic. Would you I mean, if you were back at The New York Times and so forth, wouldn’t you say to your editor, I want to know how the hell this happened? Well, I agree. It’s very puzzling to me why the media, headed by the science journalists were on the staff of most mainstream newspapers and networks, didn’t run after this story, which by any standards was one of the biggest Sun stories of the decade. And I am perplexed to know why they didn’t see through the rather large holes in the Andersen and Daszak letters that so much shaped public opinion. But with the science journalists going along with the natural emergence theory, there is a zoo, I guess will depend on their advice. Went along, too. Yeah. And in addition, the the whole issue became horribly politicized, essentially by President Trump saying the virus escaped from the Wuhan lab and not providing any evidence. Now, I’m pretty sure my guess is that what his intelligence services said to him was exactly the same as they’ve been saying under the Biden administration, namely, that we cannot rule out the possibility of lab escape. And Mr. Trump, I fear, dropped all those caveats and announced it as if it were an outright fact. So therefore, everyone who was with President Trump sort of favored lab escape when everyone who was against President Trump refused to consider it. It seems to me to be a reflection of how politicized our whole public discussion has become, that that means political attitudes prevailed over what should have been scientific curiosity. Well, let me say two things about that. If I’m Mr. G. In communist China, and if the president of the United States says it came out of a lab, then why wouldn’t I prevent provide the data that you indicate in your article that the Chinese have, but they won’t release to prove otherwise? And I suspect President Trump may have been trying to goad the communist Chinese into providing that data. He said it came out of the lab. All the communist Chinese had to do is say, Wait a minute, here’s our data, have access to our lab. Isn’t it interesting that the Chinese will not, as you say in your article, release any of the data related to this research? Yes, I think it is. One has to sort of bear in mind that there’s a knee jerk reaction of authoritarian regimes is to suppress data. And the Chinese did suppress data after the SA one epidemic, which had a perfectly natural causation. Nonetheless, I think what we see here is a very systematic and relentless cover up and that all the records of the Wuhan Institute have been concealed. All the databases, that information about BAT viruses have been closed down. And I think the trickling information that the Chinese have let out has been mostly either false or designed to mislead and misdirect here. So, ladies and gentlemen, it seems like a good time to tell you. This is from May 23, 2021, Life, Liberty and Levin on Fox. That’s Nicholas Wade, who is an expert on so much of this. And in fact, was The New York Times science writer, formerly writer with Nature and Science. At the time we were talking about this, there was a lot that was swirling around, but I wanted to dig into this piece. Because nobody else had. And I jumped right into it so we could find out what was going on, because it was becoming quite clear to me that this had come out of a lab. Go right ahead. You’re watching what’s going on. I mean, you see your former profession. What caused you to write this article? It’s a very substantial article. What caused you to do this? I first got interested in this about about a year ago, and I read an article posted by a man called Yuri Deighan, who’s a Russian Canadian, and he wrote a very long article showing in detail how this virus could have been manipulated. He didn’t say it was. He just said it could have been. And that started me reading everything I could find about the situation and gradually accumulating evidence until I found I had enough to write a very, very long 11,000 word article. And why do you think you’re one of the few? People who was curious enough are motivated enough to do this. I mean, there are people still The New York Times and The Washington Post. There are people at CBS and NBC and ABC. You’re talking about a virus that has killed an enormous number of people that shut down our economy, that changed the way we even govern ourselves. And and the media will pick up stories on things that are of no consequence whatsoever. And yet here you are. I guess you’re semi-retired. And here you are. You’re looking at this saying, you know what, I’m going to get to the bottom of this. I mean, what accounts for that? Do you think you were in this industry a long time? Well, I think we we see a sustained Chinese propaganda effort at work. But you know, more than that, it was just the the blindness, if I could put it that way, of of our media, where we had to polarize to see scientific issues for for their own sake without putting a political gloss on them. And everyone was sort of blindsided right from the start by it by these two letters we’ve just discussed into thinking that natural emergence was the only possible solution know. In fact, you have two possible scenarios. We have no direct evidence for either of them, so we must keep our minds open. We didn’t know for sure the origin of the virus. It’s just we’ve got these two possible scenarios. But if you look at all the evidence and ask yourself, well, which scenario explains all these facts better on present evidence, it seems to me at least that the lab escape hypothesis explains a lot better. So that’s where we are. But it’s a sort of complicated conclusion to arrive at. And I can only assume in answer to your question that the media was blindsided. They didn’t do the work that was necessary. They failed to take off their political glasses and look at just news, which seems sort of so old fashioned nowadays. And that’s that’s they failed to at least present the two possibilities in the way I tried to do in the article. Don’t you think even though there’s not a direct connection, as you point out, don’t you think the National Institute with these infectious diseases or the National Institutes of Health, these entities that the American people have had a lot of faith in, they’ve put a lot of reliance on, and I have over the decades that they have a responsibility to try and figure out how this happened. I hear nothing from those institutions about where they think this virus came from, other than they dismiss people who have thoughts and comments and so forth. It just seems to me if you’re going to be in the business of grant giving, I don’t care if it’s three levels below or whatever it is at this point, you know, something horrific happened. Shouldn’t they have some responsibility to try and get to the bottom of it, including saying, look, we’re trying to get the data, but the communist regime in China won’t give it to us? Mark, I think that’s an excellent point. The National Institutes of Health, even more so in all the media, surely had a duty to investigate the origin of the virus as carefully as it could to lay out its role in it, to explain why it continued funding this research, even during a US government moratorium on funding it. And there are lots of questions that I wish the NIH had addressed a year ago and been upfront about and invited public comment and scrutiny and just laid out everything they knew and tried to see what had happened and explain it to us. And we’re going to have to break here. We’re back live. We’ll leave it at that. I believe it came out of this lab. The the conversation goes on. I link to it on my social site. So if you want to check it out. And this was really the first national rational discussion about this and basically was covered up by the very people who were funding it. And that would include Fauci. They didn’t want to pursue it. They didn’t pursue it. The letters that the gentleman talks about were intended to throw everybody off track and throw them off track from the lab, the lab that we were funding in communist China. So I believe to this day it came out of that lab. The Chinese still have not allowed us to get a hold of the data. And but the the fact that it jumped from bats to humans never really I never really bought into that, even after reading all the arguments for it didn’t make any sense to me. We’ll be right back.

Segment 4
Next hour, I’m going to play for you. It’s certainly not as long it’s a few minutes. A call we received out of the blue. From a lady who identified herself as Elaine. She was the medical supervisor administrator at a nursing home. We now know her name to be Elaine Healy. And she talked about a memo, an order that had come out from the governor’s office. I would be Cuomo at that time in New York. Directing, directing, nursing homes to accept. Without excuses. Without challenge individuals who are being released from hospitals who had the COVID virus. Many of you remember this. But I’m going through this because Mr. Ford, she took the Fifth Amendment on every single matter. And so we want to fill in the gaps that he left out. It’ll only be a seven or eight minute clip. I’ve trimmed it down, but it’s something you need to remember, something you need to hear about what was taking place at the time. The hearing today in the Senate was eye opening. It was eye opening because of what what Fauci wouldn’t say, which was he wouldn’t say anything, anything. Putting aside the law, putting aside the part and putting aside the legal issues which all address on Life, Liberty and Levin, probably. But for now, I want to focus on the substance, because virtually every one of you was affected. Every family was affected and many of you were infected. We know I was and many others were as well. But many people didn’t survive. These decisions were made by our government. And this is one of the reasons I say when the Bernie Sanders government should control our health care and Medicare for all and say, not so fast. Better think hard and fast about this. We’ll be right back.