Bill Gurley presents a compelling case that while past global catastrophes like building collapses, plane crashes, and natural disasters were thoroughly investigated through independent, bipartisan, and media-driven efforts — resulting in root cause identification and preventive reforms — the origin of COVID-19 remains a mystery. He argues that despite the pandemic’s devastating scale — 15 million deaths, $45 trillion in economic loss — no equivalent investigation was launched. Unlike past tragedies, where journalists, scientists, and public institutions worked together as "searchers" to uncover truths, the response to COVID-19 was dominated by institutional "blockers" — leading virologists who suppressed inquiry, promoted misinformation, and marginalized lab leak theories. Gurley details evidence such as the "diffuse proposal," a 2020 document suggesting intentional genetic modification of a virus at a Wuhan lab, and notes that key scientific bodies ignored or downplayed it. He emphasizes that these experts, who previously advocated for gain-of-function research, now appear to have acted with bias, making it difficult to trust official narratives. He calls for a new, independent investigation modeled on past efforts — such as the investigations in Surfside or Fukushima — led by courageous journalists and scientists like Alina Cham, Catherine Ebon, and Emily Cobb. He warns that without transparency, future pandemics will be met with distrust and poor preparedness. Ultimately, Gurley urges society to embrace scientific inquiry, reject institutional deference, and support efforts to uncover the truth — stating that the real tragedy is not fear of the dark, but fear of the light.
Silicon Valley Royalty, legendary investor Bill Gurley. Track record is incredible. The legend who backed Uber and Zillow, who's lived through every major tech cycle for over 25 years. You're not just a commentator, right, you've been an operator. I'd love to unlock this latent human potential. There's been no time in the history of the world where you can learn faster. You can increase your surface area for luck. I'm not a big fan of these dystopian narratives. The thing to do right now is to run as fast as you can. Please welcome Bill Gurley. It's good to be here again. Three years ago I gave a talk on regulatory capture and this group was quite kind and how they reacted and how that video was promoted. I'm very happy we got that word out into the public discourse. Obviously today you hear it quite a bit. I have a different topic I'm going to talk to you about today. I'm not going to talk about AI. It's a serious topic and so there might not be as many fun joke parts in it. It's something that's been waiting on my mind for the past five or six years and I'm thankful that the team here allowed me to come to talk to you about it and I'm hopeful that we can have an impact by getting the word out on this as well. I'm going to start by talking to you about some catastrophes that have happened in the world and how humans normally respond to them. This is the Chamberlain Towers and Surfside Florida. You may remember in June of 2021 when the building suddenly collapsed, 98 people died. What happened? There were design areas from the very beginning. There's poor maintenance schedule and then the board of the condominium did not listen to an inspection report that said they needed to take care of this. Three different things. That's kind of the institutional failure. The technical failure was different and you can see it here. This is a New York Times article. Hopefully they can push play so you can see it's a 3D article if they can't make it play. You'll have to watch it on your own. Here we go. The reason I want you to see this isn't to talk about the details of exactly how this collapsed. It turned out the pool deck was exposed to saltwater air that corroded the pool deck collapsed into the basement which took out the structural columns and the building came down. What I want you to take away from this is the New York Times and its investigative team had excruciating detail about how this happened which comes from doing primary investigative work. There were four other parallel investigations that happened. The NIST is the National Institute of Standards and Technology. After 9/11 they were assigned as a federal agency to go investigate what happened in a building collapse. These two individuals, Matrini Reisner and Bell, would spend five years on this. Alan Killshimer is the wolf of building collapses. He's who you call when you want to figure out what happened. The town of Surfside hired him. Judge Randall would convene a grand jury in the state of Florida to investigate this and there were 17 victim lawsuits which got put under a single class. Troopin was the litigant and Hodgman was the judge that did that. All of these different groups were doing investigations on their own. Sometimes running into each other, sometimes helping each other out but all trying to get at what caused the failure. One particularly who wrote group was the Miami Herald. They had just gone through bankruptcy. They had a new executive editor named Monica Richardson. But they went after this hard. The beat reporter Alan Leibowitz was on the scene within two hours. Sarah Blaske would lead an investigative team. They would eventually find Don Lehman who is a professor at the University of Washington. She would join the team. They would staff up to 37 people on this. They have a 3D model that's equally impressive to the New York Times one. They would deservedly win a Pulitzer Prize for the work that they did. When they wanted Monica Richardson, the executive editor who also won an award for executive editor the year from her peers said we will continue to investigate the collapse to find answers to how this happened to ensure a tragedy like this never happens again. Now finding the failure cause doesn't help if you don't prevent. This is a list of some of the changes that went into all of the condominium rules in Florida. And thankfully multiple other states, especially coastal states, adopted them. So you have change that causes prevention. That's what you want to have happen when these things happen. 737 max crash. Unfortunately, there were two crashes, October 2018 and March 2019. For those of you who don't know what happened, let me give you the really short version. Airbus had come out with a plane that was incredibly fuel efficient. And they were starting to take share from Boeing. Boeing wanted to respond. If they built a new plane, it required tons of hours of teaching and training and that makes it harder to sell. So they decided they would attach a fuel efficient engine to an old plane, the 737. That's how you get the name 737 max. The problem is the engine was too big and they had to move it forward on the wing. When you move it forward on the wing, the plane is imbalanced. And they had this problem during test flights when it would occasionally tip up. So they wrote a piece of software, secret software called MCAS, MCAS. And they put it in there without telling anybody. And if the sensor went off and told them the plane was tipping up, the autopilot would push it down. The poor pilot that was flying the Ethiopian airway flight, his sensor malfunction, the software thought the plane was tilting up and it pushed it into the ground. That's what happened. There were many people that investigated this. I call them the six searchers. The US government did a Senate commission, a House commission, and the DOJ went after it. K and KT is the Indonesian firm that are the Indonesian agency that had to write to inspect the black boxes. They could tell very quickly the pilot was fighting the autopilot. The press played a key role, Dominique Gates had followed Boeing for the Seattle Times for 16 years. He would win a Pulitzer for his work here. Peter Robinson wrote a book called Flying Blind. You can tell why it would have that title. 57 whistleblowers sent letters into the Senate to tell on Boeing. The victim's family showed up and were ever present and put pressure on Congress to make sure something happened. And the head of the pilot's union was very upset that they had put this piece of software in there and not told the pilots. Boeing tried to come have a sit-down with the pilot's union and they secretly recorded what Boeing said and gave it to the press. And then when they wouldn't respond to Boeing's request, the pilot's union issued FOIA request against Boeing. It's unheard of. Now in these situations where you have six searchers you also have blockers and unfortunately in this case both Boeing and the FAA were being unhelpful in trying to find out what happened. Boeing initially accused the pilots of not being trained well enough. The FAA refused document requests to the Senate panel and one thing I would tell you about these big organizations when you put a spotlight on them, they can feel the way to that spotlight and they circle the wagons. I think part of its institutional, I don't think they're necessarily evil, they have a six sense about how to respond when they're put on the spot like that. The other thing that's interesting here is a lot of people came to think that Boeing and the FAA were working as one. Senator Ted Cruz, when he had the head of the FAA in front of the Senate, literally accused him of being captured. There's our favorite word again. And he even said to him, "Sir, do you know you don't work for Boeing?" One of the real failures here in this case, 45 days after the first crash, almost everyone knew the MCAS software was at fault and no one grounded the plane. Boeing didn't ground the plane, the FAA didn't ground the plane, and the second crash, I mean the first crash should have never happened because that piece of software should have been identified which would have required retraining but the second crash should have really never happened. I wanted to share with you, I don't want to go through this in detail but these are the two different committees in the House and the Senate and I just want to highlight that they were decidedly bipartisan. DeFazio was the head of the House Committee, very active, Ted Cruz and Wicker were super active. No one thought this was anything that should be partisan or should it be? It turns out the scientific community has a process they use when they want to do failure analysis. It's called CAPA, captive and preventive action and there are five steps. You detect, you investigate, confirm root cause, correct and prevent and it's all about prevention. You want to stop this from happening again but you can't skip root cause. That's a requirement. You don't know how to fix it if you don't know actually what happened. CAPA is required by law by the FDA and pharmaceuticals and medical device, the aerospace industry has regulations that require this type of process if you have a failure. Now let's move on. Hurricane Katrina 2005, look at these stats, they're horrible, 1800 deaths.
400,000 people displaced, damage 125 billion dollars. What happened here? Well, the Army Corps of Engineers that built the levee want you to believe that the water went over the levees. But that's an act of God, natural disaster. But this was only a hurricane or category three level hurricane. What in fact happened was the levees gave way from underneath. They washed under. And that's what's unfortunate is this was a preventable accident as well. As with these others, you have searchers and blockers. The House had had a commission, the Senate had a commission, the press played a key role. Mark Schlusting and John McQuade had written a series three years earlier about how this could happen. They would win two Pulitzers. I actually had a chance to talk with John about it. The NSF, the National Science Foundation cared so much about this. They did a bakeoff to have another team doing investigation in these two professors in the University of California led that. And then the state of Louisiana hired a team out of LSU. And they all investigated and I talked to John sometimes once again, running into each other, sometimes blocking, sometimes sharing notes, and they all came to the exact same conclusion that this was a man-made error. The US Corps of Engineers is the one that built the levees and they nationally, as I talked about, are going to act as blockers. What's weird here is they asked the American Society of Civil Engineers if they would join the investigation, join the internal investigation. They paid them a million dollars. And over time, they would just get kind of encapsulated inside the Army Corps and become blockers themselves. When this dust-all-settle Raymond Seed, the professor from UCAL, he wrote a 42-page report to the ASCE explaining all the times that they blocked. That document's on the internet, you can go see it. Like 42 pages, that's a lot of blocking. The other thing that happened here that's great is prevention. These different investigations led to 90 recommendations. Those changes were made. And the seawalls have held, it was $15 billion. Seawalls have held now for 20 years, which is great. Let me move through a couple more real quickly. This is Fukushima, $2254,000 displaced, $200 billion in cleanup. What happened here is pretty simple. The seawall in front of the nuclear plant was 5.7 meters. The water went over the wall, took out the generators. The course started to melt down. There was no way to cool them. And the disaster happened. There were internal documents that showed they expected tsunamis in a 30-year window to be in the 10-15 meter range, and they buried the report. So if you had simply raised the wall, this never happens, but it didn't happen. And in a lot of these cases, there's a combination of a technical failure and an institutional failure. The technical failures, what happens to the product or the surface of the building or the seawall. The institutional failure is, why did the humans let that become a weak point here? As with the others, their searchers and blockers, the press played a role. Martin Fackler, at the New York Times, spent 20 years in the Tokyo Bureau. He would be a Pulitzer finalist. Mr. Yuri Mitsu took the third place paper and added 20 investigators to his staff to go after this. Had a huge impact, one, two awards. The Japanese citizens were out in force both protesting and filing claims. And just like the FAA and Boeing, TEPCO was the company running the power plant. NISA was the regulator, and they blocked, and they blocked and they got in the way. And in fact, the failure was partially just a result of regulatory capture once again. That they weren't playing the right role of regulator and regulate E. They had almost become friends. Now, the real hero of this story is a guy named Kiriyoshi Kirikawa. He was asked by the Japanese parliament to lead the first ever private investigation they've ever had in their country's history. And they had a lot of power. They were told that no one on the committee could have any institutional connection to the regulator or the power company. They had the full authority to go after anybody in any way. And they had a ton of meetings here, some of the stats. Kirikawa, when he kicked this off, said he had three mandates that he wanted to adhere to. When he cared about human safety, he didn't want it to be a battle about nuclear energy. Two, he said the investigation should definitely result in recommendations. And third, he knew the weight of this because of three mile island and share a noble from a global perspective. And he cared about that. Now, interestingly, he's a medical doctor. He's not a nuclear physicist, but he led this commission with a level of grace and professionalism that makes him a hero from my perspective. All these searchers are heroes from my perspective. He would publish a report seven months later. Interestingly, they chose to publish it in English first because they were worried about global transparency and how they were perceived. And in the first sentence, he says, the accident at the power plant cannot be regarded as a natural disaster. It was profoundly man-made and it could have and should have been prevented. Powerful, one last one. This is the challenger shuttle disaster. January 1986, I remember where I was. It was a Tuesday. I was in college. It was a long time ago. Everyone, if you've seen the documentaries, you know what happened here. The O-rings on the solid rocket boosters weren't designed for cold. Turns out it was cold that morning in Florida. And that flaw caused a problem. Unfortunately, the subcontractor that had worked on that piece tried to object the night before that they shouldn't launch and he got shut down. So you have a technical failure and institutional failure once again. Now, I could talk about a lot of searches and blockers, but I'm just going to talk about one Richard Feynman who was already mentioned during the Holland conference this week. Richard Feynman was a professor at Caltech. When the shuttle challenge or blew up, Ronald Reagan created the Rodgers Commission. And they added mostly insiders, Neil Armstrong, that astronauts, they had generals. They had people from Washington, people from NASA, NASA executives. But someone had the idea that they should put Feynman on there. And I think they wanted like a stamp of approval from a physicist. The good news is it made a lot of sense. He's one of the most famous scientists of all time. He went on Nobel Prize and he worked on the Manhattan Project. So he had a lot of credibility. What they didn't know is he's fiercely independent. He's highly true-seeking and he has zero time for unnecessary diplomacy. They didn't know that was common. He didn't want to do it. He said he hated Washington, I kind of get that. His wife talked him into it, but once he did it, he cleared his schedule. He took everything off his calendar for six months into the future. None of the other commission members did that. And he started doing investigation on his own before he ever went to Washington. He's like showing up at NASA facilities and like asking to meet with people. And when he got to Washington, none of the other members wanted to act that way. In fact, Neil Armstrong told him, you know, we just evaluate. We don't investigate. It was too late, he was already doing it. Now, three fun facts about this. First of all, there's a famous story, if you're watching in the documentaries, where Rogers runs into Neil Armstrong in the bathroom and says, "Fimins being a real pain in the ass." The second thing is, he staged a stunt on live television. He found some material that was similar to the O-ring, and in front of everybody, he dipped it in his cold ice water in front of him and pulled it out and cracked it to show the failure. It infuriated the rest of the commission. And then lastly, when he submitted all his notes to the commission, they wrote a final report. They really kind of smoothed over everything, and he was pissed. And so he called Rogers and said, you know what, take my name off of it. Of course, he'd already done the thing on TV. There's no way they could take their name off of it. They caved appendix F to the report as all of his notes, included in their entirety. Now, why am I talking to you about all these catastrophes and searchers and blockers and heroes like Kurokawa and Feynman? Because I want to talk to you about COVID-19. In December of 2019, COVID-19 caused 15 million deaths. Disrupted every life on the planet and cost our globe $45 trillion. It was particularly hard on children. You've read about learning loss. My kids were in high school in college and missed three years of the most formative years of your life. I never want to live through this thing again in my life. But guess what, for all the other catastrophes, I told you what root cause is. Six years later, we don't know. So forgive me if I'm unafraid of what some AI guy's chatbot is going to do to humanity. When you can't tell me what this thing already did. (audience applauds)
My p second COVID is way higher than my p-dume and if their models are so smart tell me what happened here. Let's get them working on this problem. I want to I want to put this in perspective. I've added up all the deaths and cost of the five catastrophes I talked walk through with you and you get to five thousand deaths and three hundred forty nine billion dollars. COVID is three thousand times bigger than that. Find men in one of the documentary said someone was telling me needed to be nicer and he said but seven people died. If if you if you have to get through niceties and seek truth when seven people died how are you supposed to behave when 15 million people died? I can take it even further add up all plane accidents all hurricanes all nuclear accidents all building collapses all space accidents you still only get one third of the way that would happen with COVID. We should want to know what happened here so we can stop this from happening again. Here's what didn't happen and this is shocking because all these wonderful people all these well-intended people did this in the other cases which were much smaller and it did in a purposeful meaningful way. There's no committed newsroom with over 30 investigators on COVID. None of the major papers did that. There was no gates or Schlessteen or Flackard like a dog at investigative reporter that had the backing of his newsroom going after this. No bipartisan cynic congressional committees like you had in Katrina in 737 Maxx. You didn't have a standalone investigation with someone like Feynman or or Kirikawa. There was no science-funded investigation. The NIST and the NSF launched them in these other two cases and I each didn't fund a third-party investigation here and no massive victims lawsuit to figure out what happened. So what went wrong? I'm going to share some thoughts with you and I want you to be aware of a couple piece of information that I think are kind of new or new to be understood but I want to make one one qualification. This has been bothering me for a long time. I've read a ton. I'm sure there are people that are smarter than me on this but I've got to be top 1% in terms of how much information I've consumed. The first thing I would tell you is these five people relied on as experts. You know the first two Francis Collins, Anthony Fauci, Peter Dasik runs something called the Eco Health Alliance. It's a nonprofit that did virology research. Jeremy Ferrar was ahead of the welcome trust that funded a lot of this stuff and went on to work at the Hu. And then Ralph Barrick is the top virologist in the U.S. at the University of North Carolina. What I'm here to tell you is they weren't experts, they were blockers. They acted exactly like FAA and Boeing and NASA did in these other situations. And I'm going to give you four reasons why I know they're blockers. First, they're virology insiders. So as I said, there can be a natural instinct to circle the wagon when someone shines a spotlight on you. Two, they led a misinformation campaign to take us off the lead and to tell us not to search. I'm going to tell you about that in a second. Three, they were all outspoken gain-of-function advocates prior to COVID coming along. And if you don't know what gain-of-function is, is when you take a virus and you make it intentionally more dangerous to animals or humans. They felt that that was smart to do. Obama had outlawed it. They were constantly promoting to try and make it more happen more often. Fauci in 2011 wrote an article in the Washington Post in editorial where he said the pros outweigh the cons. Now, if you talk to any behavioral psychologist, if you've told the world we should definitely do this in the pros outweigh the cons, there's zero chance you can be impartial when it comes to figuring out what happened because to go home at night and think that something you did contributed to the death of 15 million people would be impossible to go to bed. Your brain's much more likely to trick you into just thinking it didn't happen. You wouldn't be allowed on a jury if you had that kind of bias. And the fourth reason and the most important reason I know their blockers is because they didn't search. I tell you they stopped searching but they never started searching and they should have been searching. They should still be searching. There are people that did search, they're not at large institutions. The tool in the bottom drastic is a loosely affiliated group of scientists that came together and share information. They have a website. You should follow them. It's like 20 Nick Shirley's that are all verologist or scientists. US right to know is a nonprofit that's filed the majority of the FOIA claims here and you can donate to them I have but I want to tell you about these five heroes. They're heroes of mine that have been actively trying to find out what happened from the very beginning. Alina Cham was one of the first molecular biologists that realized that the virus looks like it was designed for humans. She wrote a book with Matt Ridley and here's some really good news. In the past couple of years the New York Times has published two of her op-eds. I would rather it be the investigative team at the New York Times but it's a start. They're really good. Read both of them. Catherine Ebon was the first person to really stick their neck out and say we're not looking at this the right way. She published an article oddly in Vanity Fair titled The Fight to Discover COVID Origins. I think the title is important because the fight was about the discovery process. Emily Cobb worked for US right to know she may know more than anybody. She's been the one uncovering all of these documents and we've been getting more and more documents each and every day so we're learning more. Zaynep Tufeki is a professor at Princeton who also writes sometimes for the New York Times I'm going to tell you something she did recently that I think is super important and then Alison Young wrote a book called Pandora's Gamble that looks at all of the lab leak failures that have happened prior to COVID which is an interesting and relevant data point to study if you want to consider whether or not that was part of the problem. These five women have been attacked for sticking their neck out. Some of them directly by the men on the previous slide and I think that's completely unreasonable. I think they're heroes. Now there's two things I want to tell you about and then I'll wrap it up. There's two piece of information you should know about. I said earlier that the five experts slash blockers had created a misinformation campaign to take us off the lead. I think that's an understatement on what they created a highly successful misinformation campaign to convince everyone that lab that animals spill over was a decidedly determined cause of this and that anyone that considered a lab leak even thought about it or ask a single question was a conspiracy theorist and they were successful at it. They leveraged the the scientific journal community which they understood the proximal origins paper went out like this thing was written in like a week. There's no way you did an investigation. They just wanted to to get it out there and then the Lancet had a similar one. These papers have been cited over and over and over again. If you try and like go through Wikipedia you just always end up going back to them. So they were highly successful. They also somehow made this thing partisan. Using the word conspiracy theory with Trump bad. I don't know how it happened but they were able to get people and their surveys and polls. People what do you think caused COVID and if you're Democrat or Republican you have a different answer. That's nuts. Like there's no way that should be relevant in this discussion. Recently more and more of this information has come out and so you have more more understanding of how they came to write these papers. Like and you can see inconsistencies between what they think and what they wrote. Zaynett put this on Twitter 45 days ago and I think she chose her words very carefully. She said incontrovertible proof of a conspiracy to cover up and deny the possibility it well may be a lab mishap. Orchestrator from the highest levels of the scientific establishment and a self-serving group of scientists who deliberately misled the public. Those are strong words. She put that up 45 days ago. It has 400,000 views and zero community notes. At least today. Maybe tomorrow and we'll have some. Catherine E. Bond was more terse but equally opinionated. She calls it manufactured consensus. If you feel strongly, you think you know what happened in COVID, you need to understand that this happened. It took people off the scent. Three years after COVID, the drastic team uncovered this document. It's called the diffuse proposal. Who's heard of the diffuse proposal? Raise your hand. This is nuts. Look, it's like three people. Okay. No major journals ever covered the diffuse proposal. It's there was a survey of scientists who they said, what do you think caused it? If they said animal spill over, they said if you heard it diffuse only 70, only 22% had 78% so they'd never heard of it. What's the diffuse proposal? Three years after COVID, drastic uncovered this document. You can go download it. It's real. It was a proposal by EcoHealth Alliance, Peter Dasik's company that connected
Next, the top virologist at Duke in North Carolina with the top virologist at Wuhan, the bat lady of Zhongli, and there's a proposal that they're going to insert a firm cleavage site at the S1S2 junction of a bat coronavirus, because they think it will make it more viral in animals. And it's in a document. I went to AI. I said, "Let's do a clean session AI. That means don't look at anything I've ever told you before. If I were interested in helping to solve the origin of COVID, and I was using the scientific principles of Kappa to guide me, how would I react to finding the diffuse proposal? Look at these answers. The Reconvestigation Elite, Highly Critical, Major Investigative Elite, yes, that would be a high priority piece of evidence, primary document evidence, highest tier evidence class. Most people don't know about this thing, and I would make an assertion. But this document been exposed in January of 2020. We would have had a very different conversation back then, but it wasn't. The searchers are aware of the document, Rand Paul's aware of the document. Hopefully now you're all aware of the document. One of the things I think I need to say, if you ask these AI bots, what would you do next in your Kappa process, they say you would go after documents at Duke University and University of North Carolina. And the searchers have been doing that. Unfortunately, the University of North Carolina and the state of North Carolina are blockers. They're refusing to deliver the documents. And I would encourage, if any of you have connections to you and see or know anyone on the board, I would encourage you to make them think about whatever they're protecting and whether that's more important than preventing the next one of these. If you want to learn more about this, Matt Ridley just did an interview last March with Jay Badacharia at NIA, it's a great way to catch up on everything people have been learning. And as we look forward, and this is where I'd love your help, let's support the searchers. We have to find a root cause to this thing. We don't want this to happen again. I can't tell you that I speak for science like Anthony Fauci did, but I can tell you I speak for scientific inquiry. There's no one that should be telling you you can't search. That makes no sense whatsoever. You're not a bad person if you search, you're a good person if you search. You have to move through and around the blockers. I don't think you want to attack the blockers. I think Rand Paul's making a mistake making it about prosecution. We should make it about root cause and prevention. This isn't partisan, it should have never been. If you're view on what caused COVID, it's because of who you vote for. Please reconsider that. I would ask the newsrooms to dive in, be like Monica Richardson, and then let's put a truly independent commission together. Let's find our cure, our our Feynman. I'm going to leave you with a quote, I'm way over time, I'm going to leave you with a quote that's attributed Plato that sums up what I've been thinking here. We can easily forgive a child who's afraid of the dark, the real tragedy in life is when men are afraid of the light. Thank you. Wow. I got to ask a question, stay out here, no, no, stay out here, stay out here, I'm going to do a question. Another standing ovation here, Bill, wow, you put a tremendous amount of effort into this. We've known each other for 30 years, I've seen you emotional, I think two other times, one was the Jason Isbel concerted. Another time your top set got counterfeited or something, but this is emotional and this is personal for you. What they did to our kids is really clearly impacted you. Maybe you could talk about why it's so important that we consider the damage that was done to this generation. Well, I mean, for me, it's all back to prevention, like you have to stop it from happening again. I have zero confidence right now that if another pandemic started tomorrow, we'd have any better way to navigate it. I think we might do worse because the misinformation campaigns cause a lack of trust. Next time you're not going to listen to them, there's not going to be ability for anybody to lead. I'm struck, as you can tell by the presentation, by the difference between the attitude of the people that searched in these other catastrophes, how they were viewed as heroes and what happened to the people that were looking here. Yes. And you repeatedly talk about the power of journalism, Pulitzer's, and investigative journalism specifically, which is different than clickbait journalism. There is something very virtuous about investigative journalism and those type of journalists. Maybe you could speak to that and then explain to us why people didn't go after the Pulitzer here, why they didn't put a large amount of resources to it because that seems incredibly suspicious and I seem to have a recollection of how she getting a pardon, which also seems to be a red flag that you didn't bring up, so think those two issues. Well, yes. So on the investigative part, I mean, one of the reasons I mentioned to all the Pulitzers was just to highlight that fact, right? There is a wonderful video on YouTube if you're interested in this topic at the Brookings Institute. Three or four of the ladies that I showed, let a panel to talk about why the press missed this. And both Katherine and Emily Cobb pointed back to the misinformation campaign by the virology experts and how they kind of made it like a faux pas to actually ask questions. But considering the scale of the outcome, it's just horrible that that happened. And I would once again, I would encourage them, like they're still work to do. They're still information coming out, getting closer, like come on in. Yeah. And there's something really tragic here in that if you asked questions this time, you were put into a conspiracy theorist who didn't trust the experts and you were the damage for asking questions. This is pure evil. It's crazy. I mean, it's pure evil to take the paper and just say, hey, is it possible this came out of the Wuhan? To have if you would fact funded gain of research, why is that such a hard question for them to answer? Well, I said, I think of behavioral psychologists would tell you, you're able to fool yourself to keep your own sanity. Yeah. Now, I'll just end with this. Knowing what you've known, you've put thousands of hours into this. You and I have been talking about this for three or four years now and this has been a passion approach of yours and they really appreciate you sharing it with the audience. What do you believe, based on what you know now, is the most likely scenario of how COVID originated and what we can learn from it, just based on being in the point one percent. I would tell you, I intentionally didn't take a side on that here because we haven't found root cause and I would celebrate, you know, anyone that's 100% convinced it's animals spillover, to do research there, I funded US right to know. If you want to go search for the animals, I'll fund that too. You should know China has tested 80,000 animals and not found a single crossover and they have a huge incentive to find one if they could. Yes. The wet market theory would be absolutely free them from having fingerprints. And yeah, right. So there's a massive incentive why hasn't, but if you want to keep looking, go look. Much in these documents that have been uncovered, admitted there were multiple cases prior to this spreader event at the wet market, which also is another problem you have to deal with. Yeah. Listen, Bill, I think this could wind up being the most important work of your life and as your friend, I'm just in awe of your passion and your doggedness. And anyway, we can support it. I think everybody here and in the audience that all in would love to donate to more research being done. So we'll tweet that in the future. Give it up one more time for Bill Gerrally. Thank you. Thank you, brother. You're welcome.
Podcast Summary
Key Points:
Bill Gurley highlights that major global catastrophes like the Surfside collapse, 737 Max crashes, Hurricane Katrina, Fukushima, and the Challenger disaster each had identifiable root causes discovered through independent investigations involving journalists, scientists, and bipartisan commissions.
In contrast, the origin of COVID-19 remains unresolved after three years, with no major journalistic or scientific investigation led by independent, well-resourced teams, and no bipartisan or third-party inquiry launched despite the scale of the disaster.
Gurley identifies key "blockers" — including top virologists like Anthony Fauci and Peter Dasik — who acted with institutional bias, promoted misinformation, advocated for gain-of-function research, and suppressed inquiry, effectively blocking public access to evidence and downplaying lab leak possibilities.
Summary:
Bill Gurley presents a compelling case that while past global catastrophes like building collapses, plane crashes, and natural disasters were thoroughly investigated through independent, bipartisan, and media-driven efforts — resulting in root cause identification and preventive reforms — the origin of COVID-19 remains a mystery. He argues that despite the pandemic’s devastating scale — 15 million deaths, $45 trillion in economic loss — no equivalent investigation was launched. Unlike past tragedies, where journalists, scientists, and public institutions worked together as "searchers" to uncover truths, the response to COVID-19 was dominated by institutional "blockers" — leading virologists who suppressed inquiry, promoted misinformation, and marginalized lab leak theories.
Gurley details evidence such as the "diffuse proposal," a 2020 document suggesting intentional genetic modification of a virus at a Wuhan lab, and notes that key scientific bodies ignored or downplayed it. He emphasizes that these experts, who previously advocated for gain-of-function research, now appear to have acted with bias, making it difficult to trust official narratives. He calls for a new, independent investigation modeled on past efforts — such as the investigations in Surfside or Fukushima — led by courageous journalists and scientists like Alina Cham, Catherine Ebon, and Emily Cobb.
He warns that without transparency, future pandemics will be met with distrust and poor preparedness. Ultimately, Gurley urges society to embrace scientific inquiry, reject institutional deference, and support efforts to uncover the truth — stating that the real tragedy is not fear of the dark, but fear of the light.
FAQs
These events show that technical failures often combine with institutional failures. In each case, independent investigations by journalists, scientists, or regulators uncovered root causes, leading to preventive changes. The key lesson is that transparency, rigorous investigation, and bipartisan action are essential to prevent recurrence.
He observed that in events like Katrina, Fukushima, and the 737 Max crashes, independent investigations—led by journalists or scientists—uncovered real root causes. These investigations were critical in identifying failures and implementing preventive measures, unlike institutional responses that often ignored or concealed facts.
Investigative journalism, such as the work of the Miami Herald, New York Times, and journalists like Monica Richardson and Alan Leibowitz, played a vital role in uncovering deep, factual details. Their persistence led to major findings and earned Pulitzer Prizes, proving that journalism can drive truth and accountability.
Despite years of inquiry, the root cause of COVID-19 has not been established due to a lack of independent, well-funded investigations. He argues that powerful institutions—like virology experts—acted as blockers by suppressing questions and promoting a misinformation campaign that prioritized consensus over truth.
He references the 'Diffuse Proposal,' a 2020 document from EcoHealth Alliance proposing genetic modifications to a bat coronavirus to make it more transmissible. This document, which was buried and not widely known, suggests a potential lab-based origin and is seen by Gurley as high-priority evidence that should have been investigated immediately.
He argues that top virologists, such as Anthony Fauci and Peter Dasik, were not neutral experts but acted as blockers. They promoted misinformation, discouraged questions about lab leaks, and leveraged scientific journals to create a false narrative that animal spillover was the only possibility, effectively silencing inquiry.
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