Transcription
Undeclared wars are commonplace. Tragically, our government engages in preemptive war, otherwise known as aggression, with no complaints from the American people.
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Sadly, we have become accustomed to living with the illegitimate use of force by government. To develop a truly free society, the issue of initiating force must be understood and rejected.
What if sometimes to love your country, you had to alter or abolish the government? What if Jefferson was right? What if that government is best which governs least? What if it is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong? What if it is better to perish fighting for freedom than to live as a slave? What if freedom's greatest hour of danger is now?
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Hi everyone, Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Thursday, July 30th, 2026. Professor Jeffrey Sachs joins us from the other side of the globe from where I am. Professor Sachs, welcome here. So, the viewing and listening folks understand, you are not only a world-class economist and geopolitical scientist, you have engaged in an extraordinary amount of research, you and your staff, on the origins and spread of COVID, and you speak about it from a substantial amount, an overwhelming amount of personal research with which you are familiar. You, like I and almost everybody watching, were aggravated yesterday when Dr. Fauci was able to skate because of the pardon given to him by President Biden. So, with that background, and before we get to Fauci himself, and unless it comes into your answer to my question, what is your understanding is the origin and the place of origin of COVID?
Thank you. I think this discussion is of profound significance for the world, our safety and our survival may depend on us getting to the bottom of what happened with COVID because there are reasons to believe that this was a laboratory-created virus and one that was funded by the US government and that that fact, if it turns out to be the case, it is not certain, but there are reasons to believe it to be the case. I that it was covered up the investigation of that possibility. Let me say that I chaired a commission for the Lancet medical journal for several years on COVID, and one of the issues before that commission was the question of the origin of the virus SARS-CoV-2 that caused the pandemic and that causes the disease, and we looked intensively at this question and followed the evidence and followed the forensic evidence as well. And by forensic evidence, I mean the investigative patterns that many brave investigative reporters pursued because the US government did not act honestly and the scientists engaged with the US government did not act honestly. My experience on these issues dates back more than a quarter century because I have advised the World Health Organization on pandemic diseases. I played a uh direct role in designing and creating the Global Fund of HIV and malaria and have been involved with the the question of pathogenic disease for a very long time. Let me again say at the outset of our discussion we don't know the uh the full story of the origin of this virus. There are of course two main hypotheses. One is that it came out of nature uh and the second is that it came out of a laboratory experiment. And I believe that the weight of the evidence is the latter, but I would not say it's conclusive.
Was that experiment in the United States of America?
Yes, uh very heavily. I there are again multiple interpretations of how a laboratory creation and or release of this virus may have occurred, uh but I think the weight of the evidence on that hypothesis is that the basic scientific work in creating such a virus, if that's what happened, would have taken place in the United States. Though the testing and possible accidental release of the virus uh may have happened in China. But clearly there was a US China research program funded by uh Tony Fauci's division at the National Institutes of Health. And the nature of that work uh the background of that work uh the uh plausibility that that work resulted in this virus called SARS-CoV-2 was hidden from the American people. And many key facts that would be directly ascertainable continue to be hidden. And let me say that under any circumstance in my view uh Rand Paul's uh investigation is uh superbly right. Brave. Accurate. No vendetta. It is trying to find the truth of a pandemic that killed more than a million Americans and more than 7 million people worldwide.
Uh and Rand Paul bravely is pursuing this. Uh Fauci's behavior in uh taking the Fifth Amendment was absolutely disgraceful. Unacceptable. And if this uh person has uh any scruples and integrity his utmost uh effort should be to find the truth. He does not behave that way, did not behave that way all through this pandemic, not at one moment. He was not forthcoming at any moment about the possibility that his research unit at NIH had funded the activities that led to this virus. He hid that possibility. He uh denied that possibility. Uh he knew that what scientists were saying publicly was not what that they were saying privately. And he has a responsibility to the world to do the opposite of what he did in Congress.
Here's what he did yesterday. Here's a little uh snippet uh of Senator Paul questioning him and Dr. Fauci invoking the fifth. Then I'm going to give a brief explanation of the fifth and then I'm going to ask you about the University of North Carolina. I think I have right.
That's correct.
Chris, the clip of uh Doctors Paul and Fauci.
In the red folder on your table is a copy of section 192 of title two of the US code. Your counsel's been provided a copy as well. That section makes it a crime for witness appearing under subpoena to refuse to answer any questions pertinent to the question under inquiry. Do you have that in front of you?
On the advice of counsel, I respectfully decline to answer based upon my rights under the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution.
Let the record record that the witness has refused to answer whether there's a folder in front of him based on his Fifth Amendment right.
Of course it went on and on and on. So
This is This is not a Oh, I'm sorry.
about You know the law, Professor Sachs, but I'll just make it very clear. When you accept a pardon, you don't have to accept it. Of course, I never heard of anybody rejecting it. But when you accept it, you wittingly or unwittingly wave, give up, your Fifth Amendment right for the subject matters covered by the pardon. Now, the pardon that President Biden gave him covered every conceivable federal crime that he may have committed from the time of his majority as a young man up to January 20th, 2025, which is the date of the pardon. What should they have done yesterday? During the hearing, they should have sent lawyers to a federal court getting an order ordering to testify. They didn't do that. I I toss it back to you. You were giving us uh the history. Please tell us about North Carolina.
Just to say the whole idea that the lead scientist that oversaw the grants that were involved in this coronavirus research uh is uh subject to a broad-sweeping presidential pardon. And then the same scientist is invoking the Fifth Amendment against uh the the the rights uh of avoiding self-incrimination is itself astounding. We need to know the truth of why 7 million people died in this pandemic. And a scientist should be devoting every morsel of his being to knowing the truth, especially one that may uh accidentally uh have been implicated in this. And uh the behavior is not about incrimination. The behavior is to understand where did this pandemic come from? Now, the point basically is that dangerous research was being done and was contemplated to be extended in the uh years and months leading up to the pandemic itself. Uh the kind of virus that causes uh the COVID-19 disease, uh a sarbecovirus, is uh the object of uh extensive research, uh probably uh the world's leading uh researcher on this uh is a uh professor that, as I understand it, has been dismissed now from University of North Carolina. And there were very important grant proposals in the lead-up to the epidemic that described extraordinarily dangerous research that point to the very changes in the virus that were observed that caused this disease. And there is reason to believe that uh this research was done under NIH funding, uh that it was led by a research team at University of North Carolina, uh that uh that research involved altering uh the natural uh genome, uh the genes of uh these coronaviruses to create a a new coronavirus that uh is what uh led to the pandemic. And the most significant uh sign of that is uh a change of the genome from what has uh ever been observed before in this uh class of viruses uh that is called a a furin cleavage site. It is uh a number of genes that are added to the spike uh the gene that uh uh in the spike that codes for the spike protein uh of uh this virus that makes uh SARS-CoV-2 so infective for human beings. And the research proposal that was hidden from the public view says that it was the intention of this team at the University of North Carolina and its partner team in the Wuhan Institute of Virology to insert these genes uh into uh a backbone of a virus that did not have those particular genes, that did not have a furin cleavage site with the idea that that would change the behavior of the uh virus and make it more infective.
Why would anybody do this?
Th- This was spelled out in a research proposal that is shocking. Uh it's called the DEFUSE proposal. And one of the most uh awful parts of all of this, Judge, is that that proposal uh was known to all these protagonists uh at the moment that the pandemic broke out, and it was hidden from view that there had ever been such a proposal. I what is uh known is that the Defense Department had issued a call for proposals and a proposal was made that this research team that was a US-China joint research team would insert this furin cleavage site into a virus backbone for a very peculiar purpose by the way. We're I don't want to take us too far away but to make a a vaccine that would vaccinate bats strange enough not to vaccinate humans but the idea was that bats in China would come into contact with this artificial construct designed in North Carolina in essence and uh by being vaccinated by this virus would then not be able to harbor viruses that would be dangerous to American fighters fighting in Asia. It's bizarre but that was the diffuse proposal. It was a Defense Department proposal. American soldiers may fight in Asia. They may come into contact with the dangerous bat dangerous viruses carried by bats will infect bats with a kind of vaccine so that those bats won't be able to be the reservoir or be able to carry viruses that could then infect American troops.
Does Dr. Fauci know all this but never revealed it?
Yes, he knew all of this from the first moment and the scientists around him knew all of this and I key actors knew all of this and this particular proposal which was ostensibly turned down by the Defense Department because it was too dangerous I was only revealed in 2021 by a whistleblower who posted it, made it public not because the government said, "Oh my God, let's see what had been proposed." Now, the hypothesis is that though the Defense Department turned it down, the work continued anyway on NIH grants, that is on grants from the division the National Institute for Allergies and Infectious Disease that Fauci headed. And that the grants that Fauci was giving in effect I enabled the continuation of a grant that had been turned down by another branch of US funding by what's called DARPA which is a Defense Department agency which had turned it down. So, the argument is this extraordinarily dangerous research was proposed. I it was a US-China joint scientific venture. I it was potentially extremely dangerous. It was turned down for that reason. It was funded I otherwise because the same I protagonists were on NIH grants that were funded. The work continued. The virus was created and it escaped from laboratory testing in China when it was being tested on bat colonies maintained in the China Institute after having been created by the US scientists. That's the That's the hypothesis. And just to say
get from North Carolina to China? That Is it an actual movement of the virus, or is it just the technology is transferred and they replicate it in in China?
It's easy to send viruses as one virologist said to me and said publicly, viruses are sent in the mail all the time. They're constructed, they're put on filter paper, they are carried on airplanes in in gear that scientists carry to and from. One of the members of this research group worked at Wuhan. So, this was worked directly in the laboratory that was maintaining the bat colony on which this virus was ostensibly to be tested. That's the hypothesis. Let me be clear, this is not proven. What is absolutely decisively known is that this possibility was known from the start and it was pushed aside so that people who claimed that this was a laboratory leak were called crackpots, conspiracy theorists, and so forth by people who knew that this was a real possibility. The amount of lying that went on to the American people in the days early period of the pandemic is now fully documented because of leaks, whistleblowing and Freedom of Information Act releases, and Fauci was definitely part of that. His behavior was disgraceful. There was a paper published in March 2020 uh that was one of the most influential, most widely read and downloaded papers in modern scientific history called the proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2. Remember, SARS-CoV-2 is the name of the virus. So, the paper was the proximal origins of SARS-CoV-2, and it was uh published by Nature magazine, which is one of the leading scientific magazines in the world. And it said that this was a natural virus, and it hid all of the information that these scientists themselves knew and discussed privately that led them to believe there was a very real possibility that this was a laboratory creation. This has gone on now basically for more than 6 years. Uh this idea, or 6 years I should say, this has gone on since the outbreak, the idea that the laboratory leak is some outlandish idea, the idea that this was US-funded uh manipulation of uh a a beta coronavirus that led to this outbreak, uh that that's a crackpot theory, uh has been propounded uh by uh Fauci and these scientists, even though in private he has has said, "Well, it could be something else." The public behavior has been absolutely disgraceful. Uh the forensic evidence, I would say, of people lying uh, so continuously on this, covering up this possibility, to my mind is itself uh, revelatory of the intentions of these people, their own worries, and the very real possibility that this was created at University of North Carolina, uh, escaped in China, and that for that reason they did not want this followed up at all. And to this day, absolutely key documentary evidence in several laboratories in the United States have been hidden from University of North Carolina itself, and from a very uh, important laboratory in Montana called Rocky Mountain Lab, which is a NIH research laboratory that probably uh, played a role in the University of North Carolina research work uh, on this virus and may have played a very key role in the early testing of uh, this SARS-CoV-2. We have not had an honest an an honest, direct, straightforward, rational discussion in this country. And when Fauci says that Rand Paul is obsessed with this, that is absolutely disgraceful. Fauci should have come in, sleeves rolled up, and said, "Let us urgently get to the bottom of this together. This is the most important single question because I, Tony Fauci, championed this kind of gain-of-function research. I regarded as as an acceptable risk. Let's find out what happened." That should have been his attitude yesterday. It should have been his attitude from January 2020, but it's been anything but that. And then, for reasons that are
second, let me just stop you for a second, Professor, to make an an administrative announcement. If you're watching us live, we're going to continue this because it is so compelling. The 11:00 a.m. Eastern Time schedule for Max Blumenthal has been moved to 11:15. So, Professor Sachs and I will continue this a little bit longer because it is utterly compelling and the audience is continuing to grow and Max will pop on on at 11:15. Please continue. If you could say anything to Dr. Fauci himself, based upon what you know and based upon your scandal of what you saw yesterday, what would you tell him?
I would tell him to uh take the the last chance to redeem himself on a on a human level and on a scientific level by working together with many people, including myself, who have been working on this for years, including Senator Rand Paul, who again I want to praise as a person of enormous intelligence and integrity that has pursued this. And I also, by the way, not just to tell Fauci, but I want to tell the Democrats something so strange happened in the Democratic Party that rather than being concerned and with the possibility that US funded research knowingly against high risks of this kind of activity went ahead and may have caused this, instead defend Fauci as if this is some issue about an individual rather than about the cause of a pandemic that claimed millions of lives. It's completely ununderstandable to me.
I know that the president
understand. And maybe And just to add one more point, you know, what's the kind of research that was underway and that may have caused the pandemic by creating this virus is ongoing.
That is the point. It is ongoing. And it's ongoing probably I with US government active financing and support but probably also in US laboratories, maybe without the US government even knowing about it. There was an extraordinary episode where Boston University, I believe it is, I'm pretty sure it was Boston University, used this so-called gain-of-function manipulation to create a modification of SARS-CoV-2 and it did this I think around 2022 and then the US government said, "How dare you do this? Who gave you permission?" And the university said, "We don't need permission. This wasn't on US government funding." And that episode by itself, which just passed with very little attention, is utterly shocking that a university could claim that it has the right to do this if it's not directly government funded without uh the monitoring of the profound spillover risks of this kind of activity. So, understanding this issue is not merely a question of culpability, though after 7 million deaths or 10 million deaths or 20 million deaths, whichever number one picks, is enough of a reason. But, the fact of the matter is understanding this may be key to our survival. And I can tell you absolutely without question, this I can say unequivocally, there was no attempt to explain honestly to the American people this possibility by the leading virologists who knew behind the scenes that this was a real possibility, if not a likelihood, and they never told the truth to the American people. And our newspapers, I will cite the New York Times because I found its behavior either shockingly incompetent or shockingly bought. I don't know which it was and is to this moment. But, they continue to play this story as if this is harassment of this fine scientist, rather than the question of getting to the truth. And the coverage just in the last couple of days by the New York Times, I haven't reviewed the others. As you know, I am in Asia and not able to read every bit of the American news, but the New York Times coverage is disgraceful. Disgraceful. Because this is a live scientific issue handled with such ineptitude, it's shocking. This is not about Rand Paul versus Tony Fauci. This is about the origin of this virus when there is real reason to believe that we have not been told the truth about what is known and that there is reason to believe that either evidence has not has been withheld to this moment or possibly has been destroyed. But that key evidence the records of the laboratory at the University of North Carolina, the records of the laboratory at Rocky Mountain Lab, the grant not only grant proposal, but grant reviews of the NIH grants of the people that are involved in this issue, these have not been made public. They have not been released. Maybe they have been scrutinized by some people and not others. There has been an attempt to somehow put the blame on China. This is an another kind of subterfuge or misdirection. Because if the release came in China, the likelihood is that if that was a release of an artificial virus, the high likelihood is that the virus itself was made in the United States. And that basic point has continued to be shunted aside. And maybe the intelligence community has told these congressmen and senators stay away. I don't know what it is, but I do know from a scientific point of view how readily the US side could be examined systematically, objectively, independently, by the way, and we could find out, well, it's not true, or it is true.
Right. Professors
simple fact has never been done.
Professor Sachs, you are yet again a paradigm of intellectual honesty and personal courage. This has been a tremendous service that you have just given to to the viewing public. This this segment that I'm sure will go viral. Thank you, Jeff. I know it's the middle of the night where you are.
I'm so grateful for the chance to discuss this because for the American people this is so essential. This is the essence of of the purpose of your show, Judge. This is our freedom that is at stake. We need to be able to examine these facts and get to the truth.
Thank you, Professor Sachs. We'll look forward to seeing you next week on this or on a geopolitical another geopolitical topic. All the best to you.
Thank you so much.
Sure. A great man to come to us with all of this scientific explanation, explained so that we can all understand it, and from where he is in the middle of the night. Okay, coming up today, if you're watching us live in 10 minutes, at 11:15 this morning, the golden boy, Max Blumenthal, why is BB Netanyahu desperate? And at 2:00 this afternoon, Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson. Does Trump know that he already lost the war? Judge Napolitano for Judging Freedom.
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