Why Bats Spread Disease and How the WHO Failed During COVID-19 with Matt Ridley

Vance Crowe [00:00:01] As the crow flies on the Vance Crow podcast, Lord Matt Ridley, welcome to the podcast

Matt Ridley [00:00:12] Vance. It's great to be on your show.

Vance Crowe [00:00:14] So for anybody that doesn't know you are my favorite author in the world, probably you are a PhD or Mythologist, you are a member of The House of Lords. You write articles for the Wall Street Journal and outlets all over the world. And I am honored that you would have the time to talk with us about what's going on with the Global Pandemic of Coronavirus. It is April 8th, 2020, and this is where the edge of chaos is right here.

Matt Ridley [00:00:45] Well, the reason I've got time ev we've all got time. We're all stuck at home and I'm in, in a, a padded cell inside my house, which I set up as a, as a makeshift recording studio to record the audio version of my latest book. So I, one of the things we're discovering is the beauties of not having to leave your home and do everything from home. And I think that is gonna be a different world out there after this.

Vance Crowe [00:01:07] It is amazing. There were a lot of things that even I wouldn't do with technology that now this made me be like, oh, that's not that big of a deal. It's so much easier if I do it. So I can imagine that if this is happening all around in businesses, it's going to generate a huge amount of innovation, not least of which will be, I imagine cameras for computers are gonna be, have a lot of innovation around them.

Matt Ridley [00:01:29] Good point. Exactly. And, and, and I mean, you know, weeks ago before this, somebody advised me because I was gonna do a down the Line podcast, buy a decent microphone off Amazon. So I did. And I, it's, you know, I've now used it about 20 times. If this had happened 10 years ago, we wouldn't be able to use the web in the way we have. 'cause very few of us had the kind of broadband we have now, or at least, you know, some people did, but not everybody. And, and I really think that, you know, that this is a revelation to us about what technology can do. And I'm gonna go to a lot more webinars and a lot fewer seminars in the future. I hope.

Vance Crowe [00:02:11] I agree. So where are you right now? What, what is your, what was your level of preparedness before the pandemic and how much are you interacting with the regular world right now?

Matt Ridley [00:02:23] Well, I'm at home in the north of England. I live in a rural area, which is very fortunate. I think that's, I feel very lucky that because I can just step outside the door and go for a walk, I'm not having to worry about running into crowds of people. I'm seeing some neighbors and my wi neighbors at a distance and my wife not at a distance. And that's about it. And given that I am, in any case, partly a self-employed person who writes for a living and does that from his home laptop, it hasn't been that difficult for me to adapt my life to the shutdown. Parliament would've been in recess this week anyway, so I would've been up north where I like to, to be anyway. But in a couple of weeks time, parliament will try and reassemble virtually and we will assemble the science and Technology Select Committee of the House of Lords online. And witnesses will appear online and it might be a mess. And there's a lot of con, you know, argument going on about how to achieve that. But that's the situation. So, you know, for me it's not been nearly as difficult this period as it has been for some people. And it's, you know, if you're living in a small apartment in the middle of a city and you're only allowed out once a day and you're not able to see anybody and it's really tough and, you know, I think we shouldn't underestimate the amount of sacrifice that ordinary people are having to put in to get through this.

Vance Crowe [00:03:50] I couldn't agree more. I, in, when I lived in Washington DC my wife and I shared a 480 square foot apartment that looked out on a brown brick wall. And if we had been there, somebody's living there right now. 'cause it was high value rent. Somebody is suffering through this whole thing where that's all the space they have is a bedroom in one other room and, and places even smaller than that. So it all over the world, people are really making sacrifices right now.

Matt Ridley [00:04:16] I think that's right.

Vance Crowe [00:04:17] So you have a unique view on evolution and in fact, I read The Red Queen and I would say that that was one of the most staggering realizations about how the world works, about how we became who we are. Why don't you give just a little bit of your background on the Red Queen and evolution, and then how do you, how have you been using this knowledge for the study you've been doing into, into the Coronavirus?

Matt Ridley [00:04:44] Well, the subtitle of the Red Queen is Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature. And some of my own PhD research had been on the sexual behavior of birds. Why it is that some are monogamous, some are polygamous, how they end up organizing their sex lives, as it were. Which sounds kind of prurient, but it was, you know, entirely detached and scientific, I assure you. And the, the idea was that, and, and, and out of that came a very, very interesting theory, which is, I mean, I was particularly interested in the question of sexual selection, that is to say instead of natural selection, which is survival of the fittest, sexual selection is reproduction of the sexiest. Why are, you know, good looking peacocks able to get more matings than ill looking peacocks as it were, what's, what's going on there? Why is that happening? And one of the theories for that, which is very similar to one of the theories of how sex evolved in the first place, which is a slightly mysterious question, you know, why do we have to mix our genes without of another person in order to have another, in order to have a baby? I mean, you know, plants don't do that. A lot of them, you know, quite a lot of invertebrate animals don't do that. They just, but off another creature. Why, why do we have to go and get someone else's genes involved? And the answer to that seems to be that it's all about parasites, it's all about diseases. That is to say you have to change the locks on your cells by getting, by shuffling them with those, with the, the, the locks of other people to get new locks for every generation. Because that way you stay ahead of the parasites, which are constantly evolving to try and unlock the locks on your cells, as it were.

Matt Ridley [00:06:23] And this is called the Red Queen theory because in Alice, through the looking glass, the Red queen is a character who has to run very fast to stay in the same place. So in order for, so, so the parasite is evolving to try and defeat your defenses and you are evolving to try and defeat the parasites defensive. And there is an arms race between the two of you. And we are seeing that played out right now. Of course, in the case of COVID-19, this is a virus that has reached a stalemate in its its arms race with the bat species in which it lives. But it's jumped into new species, the Pangolin and the human being as far as we make out. And the cat interestingly and the tiger. And it is there, it is finding that our defenses are low against it. It has the key to unlock the ace two receptor on some of our cells in our respiratory system, which means it can get in and do damage and we are gonna have to evolve defenses to it. And the only way to do that is for a lot of us to die off. Well that isn't an acceptable strategy politically today, quite rightly so we're gonna have to find other ways o of defeating it. But,

Vance Crowe [00:07:45] Well this brings up a really interesting question, just right outta the gate then. Did the way that we evolve the defensive systems against viruses now that we have medicine, are we as a herd getting weaker? Is that even a question you can ask?

Matt Ridley [00:08:03] Well, it, yes, it's a question you can ask. And on the whole against infectious diseases, the answer would be no. While we are obviously keeping weaker people alive with, you know, medications and so on, these people are more vulnerable to infections. And we're seeing that in high death rate of elderly and people with underlying illnesses today. While, while that is true, on the other hand, your immune system is itself an evolutionary system. It evolves, it does trial and error, a natural selection in real time in your body when the, when the, when the virus arrives. So a a a friend of mine, Rory Sutherland, who's an advertising executive, but very interested in evolution, made a terribly interesting point the other day. He said, you know, all the world's great scientists are trying to come up with a vaccine that defeats this virus. And so far they haven't succeeded. Actually, if you catch this disease and you recover, your immune system has cracked that problem within seven days. It's much cleverer than we are as human beings. Wow.

Vance Crowe [00:09:12] It's

Matt Ridley [00:09:13] A really nice way of looking at it. 'cause what the way the immune system works is it, it it tries every possible combination of antibody that it can come up with, it shuffle, it literally shuffles the, the genes around. So it's to come up with lots of variations on a theme and, and whichever one clamps onto the virus and shuts that virus down, that information is fed back. And that one is then replicated on a huge scale. So you then smother the virus with lots of antibodies. That's, that's how it's working. And one of the possibilities for defeating this virus is to use what's called monoclonal antibodies to defeat it, which are effectively finding this, this antibody that works against it in a person who's cured themselves, you know, who's recovered and multiplying that in a laboratory setting so as to get those antibodies out there. But anyway, the, the, the, the, the general point is it's very important to understand that diseases evolve and hosts evolve. We have huge diversity as a species. Some of us are, you know, tall, some of us are short, some of us are fair hair, some of us have dark hair, some of us fair skin, some of us dark skin, et cetera. All those differences lead us to be differently susceptible to diseases. And we're seeing that, we're seeing, I mean, I have friends who've had a slight cough for two days and got better. I've got another friend he's called Boris Johnson, and he is the prime minister of Great Britain who is in intensive care in a hospital. And we're very, very concerned for him at the moment.

Vance Crowe [00:10:45] He is a friend of yours that's not just tongue in cheek.

Matt Ridley [00:10:48] Yeah, we, we, we were colleagues in various places and we're, we're, we are friends. Yeah.

Vance Crowe [00:10:53] Well, the reason that this is striking to me is you are the first person I've spoken with that knows someone that has coronavirus. So the fact that it's Boris Johnson, I mean, your network is huge. So I mean, you're, I'm sure that there, that increases the odds,

Matt Ridley [00:11:04] But it's closer than that. I mean, my sister has recovered from it. My brother-in-law has only just recovered from it after two weeks of great discomfort. I was talking to someone the day before yesterday who had it near where I live, who came back, who, who went to help do some gardening for a person who'd just been in Italy and got it there, you know, so yeah, it's close to home now for me it's even conceivable that that slightly weird cold I had in January might have been it. And I might have had it, but I don't know. But I do know quite a lot of people now who've who've got it, who've had it. I don't know anyone personally who's died from it. But, but well no, that's not true. A member of the House of Lords died from it last week.

Vance Crowe [00:11:49] Wow.

Matt Ridley [00:11:50] He wasn't a close friend, but he was a great guy. And it's, it's a terrible shame.

Vance Crowe [00:11:55] And so with your knowledge of evolution and the, the, both the human system, but also the animal world, what are you discovering about what's going, what, where this virus came from and how we should think about preventing 'em in the future?

Matt Ridley [00:12:07] Well, I've been looking really hard into this question of where it came from. And it's actually a very complicated tale. It's quite hard to, to to track down exactly what happens. And it turns out that there are some pretty terrifying warnings out there that we should have noticed over the last few years. I should have noticed. So should other people, you know, there are quotes in scientific papers from a year ago, from two or three years ago saying, this pandemic is ready to roll, watch out. And what they were focusing on particular was coronaviruses in bats. Now the key fact here is the visit is the visit of scientists from Wuhan in, in China. That is coincidental by the way. But anyway, scientists from Wuhan to a cave in Yan in 2013, they were on the trail of sars, which was a virus that caused an epidemic in 2002 three. And they were looking for the original reservoir of that virus in wild animals. We knew it had jumped out of wild animals. It seemed to come via C cats. And they essentially f and and they, they hit gold dust in this particular cave in Yonan, which is a thousand miles from Wuhan. So, and, and even further from where the SARS epidemic had happened, but nonetheless, they found a huge colony of bats in this cave. And one of them called rhino LOAs sinus. The Chinese horseshoe bat turned out to be riddled with or riddled, that's wrong. It's carrying lots of coronaviruses of exactly the kind that caused the SARS epidemic even more closely related to the human version of that VAX virus than the Civic cat one.

Matt Ridley [00:13:49] And they took that back to the laboratory and tried to infect human cells with it. And they succeeded in doing so. And they then tried it on mice at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The mice having been engineered to express the human ace two receptor. So this is a, you know, a sort of humanized mouse in one particular respect. And the mice, mouse mice fell ill and died. So they said, we've found sars and we found that it doesn't have to do any recombination or evolving in a market or anywhere else. It can go straight from a bat into a person and kill them. Whoa. That was really interesting and really worrying. And they sounded the alarm about this. It was called the W one, WV one strain of the virus that they did this experiment with. But at the

Vance Crowe [00:14:41] Same, when was this? When did they find this out?

Matt Ridley [00:14:43] 2013.

Vance Crowe [00:14:44] Okay. So enough time for us to have reacted to not, it wasn't just like, just right before this. Okay.

Matt Ridley [00:14:49] Right. But at the same time, in the same cave, they took lots of samples and one of the samples they took was from a bat of a very similar species. It's almost impossible to tell it apart. It's called rhino LOAs ais, it's a commoner species. It's, it's known as the intermediate horseshoe bat. It's more widely distributed, but it lives all across China and Southeast Asia. And this sample also had a coronavirus in it that wasn't the SARS virus. And they put it away in a drawer, or I dunno, not a drawer or whatever, you put it away in a fridge or a freezer or something. And when this COVID-19 started, they went back through the library of viruses they had got from that cave. And they found that that one very closely corresponded with COVID-19 more closely even than the Pangolin versions that have been found in, in animals in China. Now it's not ex, that doesn't mean that this, this virus was caught in the cave that we're talking about because there's, they reckon it's at least 40 years distinct. It's been evolving on separately for about 40 years since, since it's split from the one that we've got. But it does suggest that all over China, there are other colonies of this same bat species that are carrying strains of this virus. And that that's where we will find the actual one we caught.

Matt Ridley [00:16:21] Now what does this tell us about how we caught it? It doesn't exonerate the pangolins and the wet markets because it's easily possible that we will find inner Pangolin an even closer one. And we do know that pangolins get very, very ill with coronaviruses when they're stressed, when they're smuggled into markets in China. And we do know they can catch this, this virus. So it's quite possible that the, that a wet market amplified this virus until someone was given a big enough dose that they could then get seriously enough infected to infect other people and so on. So I think the idea that these wildlife markets are in the frame is still a very strong one. What it does exonerate probably is the scientific laboratory, the, the Institute of Virology in Wuhan, which is where they found this virus from Yunnan. And you might think, well this is a bit suspicious. They were doing experiments on ba viruses in Wuhan, maybe they caused this problem there. It's a very high security lab. It's China's highest security, highest level containment facility for viruses. But what it suggests is that the sample they had is too different from the one that's circulating for it to be the one that's actually caused this. Whoa.

Vance Crowe [00:17:50] So,

Matt Ridley [00:17:51] So it, it, it, it does seem to at least say that a bio weapon theory and a leak from a lab theory is not so likely. Can't rule out the latter. I, I'm pretty ready to rule out the bio weapon theory. We're not that clever. Not even the Chinese are that clever. They can't, couldn't come up with a, a virus this good, as it were. We dunno enough about how to design a virus to do that.

Vance Crowe [00:18:17] A virus this good. That's an interesting frame of reference. No, and when you say that, I mean like we both understand if you were using this as a weapon, we don't have the technology yet to create this, but what makes this disease in particular such a, such a scary one then

Matt Ridley [00:18:34] The fact that it's so contagious SARS is, is pretty contagious and very lethal, very more dangerous than this. But in SARS you are eight days into the disease before you give it to someone in COVID-19, you are four days in on average when you give it to someone. And at that point you're not feeling very ill. So you're still going out and about and indeed, in many cases you are asymptomatic. There is about 10, in about 10% of cases they think that the second person got ill before the first person got ill. In other words, the, the, the person who received the infection, you know, felt ill sooner than the person he'd got it from.

Vance Crowe [00:19:14] It'd be really hard to find causation when that's happening.

Matt Ridley [00:19:16] Exactly. Exactly. And so the highly, highly contagious virus that can be coughed or sneezed or, or wiped or passed by a on, on a, on a, on a substrate, it's a very large virus. It lives in a sort of oil droplet of its own making. So it's relatively resistant to drying out and things like that relatively resistant to temperature problems. So it's, it's, it's a very, very contagious virus. We're fortunate in one respect in that its death rate, its case fatality rate is low. You know, whether it's 1% or half a percent or 2%. We don't, we don't really know 'cause we don't know how many people are infected. But we're beginning to see from, you know, the, the first case was that diamond princess ship, you know, where seven people died out of 700 of, no, I think three people, I can't remember how many people died, but a very small number compared with how many people were infected. But 1% is low, but it's a lot higher than flu and it's a lot higher than the common cold which caused it, which is caused by four different types of coronavirus. Sometimes it, it's also caused by other viruses. So it, it's the combination of being both very contagious and sufficiently dangerous that makes this pandemic really problematic. Now, I would love to put up my hand and say, I saw this coming. I warned the world, it's not true. I was on the whole fairly dismissive of the pandemic threat because I'd seen people overreact to the threat of sars, the threat of swine flu, the threat of bird flu, the threat of Ebola, which we didn't overreact to.

Matt Ridley [00:20:58] But, but we, we would, we were wrong to think that Ebola was gonna run wild through the world as opposed to remain a localized infection. 'cause it's not sufficiently contagious. So again and again I kept saying the only viruses that are gonna really run right through the world, the very contagious ones are gonna be very low virulence. 'cause that's what we tend to experience. The common cold is caused by up to 200 different kinds of virus. None of them want you dead. They all want you well enough to go out to a party and give it to someone else. If you see, that's their method of survival. So I didn't see this coming, but I did say in a book I published in 1999, if we are gonna experience a bad pandemic in the 21st century, it's gonna come from bats and it's gonna be a virus, not a, not a bacterium. And the reason I said that was 'cause of the Ebola story and because of a couple of other viruses, one called nypa and one called Hendra that hendra in Australia and NYPA in India, which had begun to, which had killed people after infection from bats. And I, you know what's funny about bats? Well, we then got SARS from bats. We got Mers from bats, me Middle East respiratory syndrome, which was spread bats via camels in 2012. So, and now we've got this one. What's odd about bats? Well, like us, they're mammals. So they're relatively closely related to us compared with other creatures. Relatively similar biochemically if you like.

Matt Ridley [00:22:30] But more importantly, they live in really big groups. They're very gregarious. Most other mammals don't do that. Bat roosts can number in the millions. There's a cave in Texas with 20 million bats in it at certain times of the year that that's like Mexico City in terms of how many people it's

Vance Crowe [00:22:47] Got. Like,

Matt Ridley [00:22:49] And, and so those respiratory virus is not gonna thrive in a species that only meets other members of its species twice a year. Like a tiger or a panda or something like that. It's only gonna thrive in highly gregarious species.

Vance Crowe [00:23:06] Oh, I had, that had never dawned on me. I thought that bats were uniquely dirty or, or, but that's right. So bats and, and rats which do live in giant or at least they come in contact with one another. So the more social, the

Matt Ridley [00:23:19] Animal, the bats even better than rats because bats fly. And so bats go long distances and they're not just, they don't just meet their neighbors. They meet, you know, strangers too, as it

Vance Crowe [00:23:28] Were. Oh, that this is totally new. I had not heard that or thought of it. It just seemed like, oh, okay, bats are the ones that are the bad ones. They're like mosquitoes or something.

Matt Ridley [00:23:37] There's also a theory that they've got a weird immune system and that viruses adapted to their immune system, therefore run right in ours. 'cause ours is so different, they have 24 genes for interferon alpha, which is a particular antiviral chemical. We only have one such gene. But on the other hand, they, they seem to produce very few B cells because B cells are produced from bone marrow and their bones are mostly hollow to make them light for flight. You know, so there's sort of weird differences there too, which might explain some of the differences.

Vance Crowe [00:24:10] So, you know, you're saying you missed it, but you had indicated maybe bats could be, but there are people that it is their job to make sure that they're, they've got their finger on the pulse of what's going on around the world and they're supposed to sound the alarm. And did they mess up or, or did they catch it in time? What's your evaluation of how this has gone so far?

Matt Ridley [00:24:30] Well, I think one of the things that we're gonna have to do at the end of this is have a root and branch look at the World Health Organization in particular. Because if anybody's job was to look out for pandemic threats, it was the World Health Organization. And I'd like to contrast them with the Gates Foundation, which actually did take the threat of pandemics very seriously. And together with a welcome trust, a similar medical, a medical charity in the uk, a very big charity, they set up something called the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovation. They did this in conjunction with the Norwegian and the Indian governments. And the idea was to get India is where most vaccines are made, is to get people thinking about how to make vaccines quicker and be ready for when a pandemic happened that was set up in 2017 and it's only really just got going. And if it had got going a lot sooner, we'd be in much better shape. But why wasn't that done by the World Health Organization? Why wasn't that done 20 years ago? Why wasn't it done after SARS or after Swine Flu or, or indeed after Ebola just five years ago. And let's look at what the World Health Organization has been doing during that time. It's been scolding us for being too fat or smoking too many cigarettes or whatever, or whatever it might be.

Vance Crowe [00:26:02] Whatever politically favorable things that are well inside the Overton window. It's okay to shake point the finger and say, you right over there are doing bad, bad, bad. I mean, we watched it in the United States. They've been participating in, in calling things that are completely safe, maybe potentially causing cancer and then starting multi-billion dollar lawsuits over in the us So all this stuff about glyphosate being ca carcinogenic or smoked meats Absolutely. Or all these things. That's what the WHO has been doing. They're the supposed to be on guard and they, and they haven't been,

Matt Ridley [00:26:37] Oh my God, I've only just remembered that the International Agency for Research on Cancer, who are the people making a fuss about glyphosate? They're a WHO agency.

Vance Crowe [00:26:45] Yeah, that's right. And we spent a whole lot of time in the United States being like, Hey, those guys over there, they're not using science to make these decisions. Right. They're doing something else. And now it's come, come home to roost in a global pandemic. Then I'll,

Matt Ridley [00:26:57] I'll give you another example. They've been campaigning furiously against vaping against electronic cigarettes demanding that countries ban them, congratulating India on bringing in a ban against them most recently. And they've done so really quite mendacious. So they actually had to withdraw a claim that they made just about two months ago that vaping was dangerous because it contained antifreeze. And this is just not true. I mean, they were confusing two different chemicals, both of which have the word glycol in them, but are completely different chemicals used for completely different purposes. So, but but worse than that, Margaret Chan was Director general of the World Health Organization. And in 2015 at the very height of the Ebola epidemic in West Africa, she made a speech saying that vaping was one of the great threats to world health.

Vance Crowe [00:27:59] Oh God.

Matt Ridley [00:28:00] And she gave her excuses for not attending an Ebola conference so that she could attend one on how to ban vaping instead. Now if that's not Mari Antoinette telling the poor to eat cakes, well that's not a very good analogy, but you know what I mean.

Vance Crowe [00:28:20] Well, I mean, I, my my experience with international organizations, I worked at the World Bank and there you are trying to eradicate poverty that is its supposed mission. And I worked and got all the way up into the area that planned the leadership conferences where the president and the managing directors and the sector directors and the country directors would all come together. And it was only when I got to the top of the world at the international organizations that I realized these people are political koan. They are there because they've done political favors inside of the country for their government. They get to this body and then whoever has the money, whoever controls the, the access to their country, not, not to the international organization, right. That's who they serve. And it is corruption at the deepest debased level that I ever saw anything. And I, I actually had my life crushed. I I had to leave and move to St. Louis because of it.

Matt Ridley [00:29:16] Well, well done. You and, and the perfect example of this is the way the World Health Organization behaved during the Ebola epidemic of 20 14 15 because an an NGO called Meta San San Frontier raised the alarm and said, this crisis, this Ebola crisis in West Africa is getting outta control. It's a real problem. And they were savaged by the World Health Organization. How dare you say, it's outta control. We know exactly what we're doing, it's fine. Now at that stage, there were only a few hundred cases within months there were thousands of cases. And even the World Health Organization was forced to admit that it was out of control. Now why were they so negative about Med Sense on Frontier raising the alarm

Vance Crowe [00:30:02] For the, the US That's Doctors Without Borders is is the equivalent kind of thing. Exactly. Yes.

Matt Ridley [00:30:06] Sorry. Same, same, same organization. And the the answer is because each, the World Health Organization was very, was very, was listening to its country representatives who were saying, what are these NGOs doing? We're in charge of health. How dare they ring the alarm bell before we do, we haven't noticed a problem, we're not gonna make a crisis out of it. Now, the reason I can say this without fear of, you know, being wrong is because the World Health Organization organized an inquiry into its own behavior over Ebola, which was a good thing to do. And it came up with very damning conclusions that, that its own behavior had slowed the response to this epidemic and had actually got in the way rather than helped. Now, okay, fine. They, they, they fessed up and admitted that they'd got things wrong. So that's fine, isn't it? You know that, but did they learn? No, because look at what they did in this case. They spent January repeating Chinese assertions that this was not transmissible human to human as late as the 24th of January. That's extraordinary.

Vance Crowe [00:31:27] Yeah. Twitter didn't even believe it by then, by

Matt Ridley [00:31:29] The Taiwanese were the Taiwanese raised the alarm about human to human transmission based on what they were hearing about doctors getting infected in Wuhan on the 30th of December, nearly three, nearly four weeks before. But of course the Taiwanese must not be listened to in the World Health Organization because they're not a member of it at the insistence of China, who are big funders of the World Health Organization.

Vance Crowe [00:31:55] Give a little bit of more background for people that aren't familiar with East Asia. What's going on with China's relationship with Taiwan from your perspective?

Matt Ridley [00:32:03] Well, Taiwan was where Chan Kai-shek retreated when Maung defeated him on the mainland. And Maung was never able to in invade the island of for Moza and kick Chiang Khe out. So his regime became the Democratic version, the the non-communist version of China just on this one relatively small island now decades went by and Taiwan basically behaved like a separate independent country. And most of the rest of the world eventually recognized it as such. And the Chinese never did. But they came to a fairly peaceable accommodation with it until recent years when Xi Jinping changed that policy and said, no, we want to treat them as the enemy again.

Vance Crowe [00:32:47] And they go all around the world and all the, the developing countries that wanna get aid from China. One of the contingencies is don't recognize that Taiwan exists. Right. That

Matt Ridley [00:32:56] Goes

Vance Crowe [00:32:56] On in Costa Rica. I'm sure that's going on in Africa. That's, that's, that is the policy.

Matt Ridley [00:33:02] And you'll notice there was a hilarious, although shocking television interview that a, a reporter in Hong Kong did with Bruce Ale award, the deputy head of the World Health Organization. And she said, what do you think about what Taiwan is doing to prevent the epidemic? And he pretended not to hear the question. Maybe he didn't hear the question, but when she repeated the question, he said, no, no, no, I don't want you to repeat the question. Let's move on to another question, which was a kind of weird thing to say.

Vance Crowe [00:33:31] And when she

Matt Ridley [00:33:32] Did repeat the question anyway, the connection was lost click, she reestablished the connection and asked the question again. And the

Vance Crowe [00:33:42] Answer. And the question was, what are, what are the ti what are the Chinese, what does the WHO think about the Taiwanese believing that there is person to person con con contact?

Matt Ridley [00:33:51] Well, no, it was, it was what does the, what does the World Health Organization think about the Taiwanese strategy to control the V virus, which has been very successful on the whole, that was all it was. And in his answer he answered about China, he wouldn't, he can't use the word Taiwan if he works for the World Health Organization. Wow. Now he, since he since stepped down because of the embarrassment over this. But it's an indication, you know, 'cause again, a week after they said there was no human to human transmission. They, China eventually admitted the wars and Taiwan, the, the, the World Health Organization then sent people to China and they visited Wuhan and they visited Beijing and they came away with some extremely sycophantic remarks about how marvelously the Chinese were managing it, how generous they were hosting this visit and all this. It was a bit odd, you know, I mean, it's a sort of strange way to behave. And one has to realize that Dr. Tedros, who's the current director general of the World Health Organization, was the former foreign minister and health minister of Ethiopia and was part of an organization called the Tigray Liberation Front, which was a Marxist insurgency that took over Ethiopia and built Ethiopia into a very successful economy, but a very authoritarian one and did so with a huge amount of Chinese backing and Chinese help. So, you know, I'm not, I don't wanna exaggerate this, it's, it's, it's a, you know, there's lots of angles to this, but at the end of this, we have to say, why is an international body part of the United Nations so much at fault for failing to prepare us for a pandemic in the first place and then failing to raise the alarm when the pandemic started.

Matt Ridley [00:35:43] And could it have something to do with its very subservient relationship with one donor country in particular, which is an authoritarian regime that has very strong views about how it should be, how things should be managed in terms of presentation. And the Chinese government itself has got very strong questions to ask about why it was so slow in admitting the problem and indeed in why it wasn't. I think this is an even more serious question, why it did so little to get rid of the trade in wildlife products in why in in live wildlife products, in markets all across China.

Vance Crowe [00:36:24] Well, I have, I have a, i I have a friend that gave me a hypothesis on that is completely unproven. But, but saying as the livestock industry has come under more and more pressure from different environmental groups, whether that's through climate change pressure or Any, any water pollution, those kinds of things, that has increased the price of protein. And China is always going to need protein. So they aren't going to the wet markets because they just love to eat these exotic animals. You're talking about people that don't have a ton of options. You know, beef is not a large import into China. They eat pork and chicken, they've lost 50% of their herd via African swine fever. Maybe we ought to look at what the pressure of, of all of these climate change and anti-pollution on agriculture is because it may be forcing countries to do things they shouldn't be doing.

Matt Ridley [00:37:16] I think that's, I think there, there, there's a point there. I, I'm not, I I don't think it's the whole answer. I think there are things like the cultural pressure to encourage traditional Chinese medicine. I mean, remember, you know, a rhino horn or a pangolin scale is not much in the way of protein or nutrition. It's a medicine on the whole. And the traditional Chinese medicine approach, which Xi Jinping has also praised is based on some pretty loony pseudoscience, but with very good political contacts and has, has established itself that way. But I think you are not wrong there. I think there is the, you know, protein is, is a crucial thing in the Maoist years. I suspect China got into the habit, or possibly even in the imperial times, China in a desperation for protein in a very impoverished population got into the habit of eating almost anything with a bit of protein into it, in it. And, you know, famously would eat body parts that we wouldn't eat like chicken's feet or whatever it might be. And, and you know, what's wrong with a bit of python steak? If, if, if that's what you want or, or a rat or or something like that. Well, what's wrong with them, and this is a very important point, is that the, the relatively small number of species that we've really domesticated, you know, made into a completely farm animal like the cow, the pig, the chicken and so on, we've had their diseases.

Matt Ridley [00:38:47] We've, we've used them. I mean, we got measles and smallpox off cows. They were lethal diseases that killed millions of us. But we're through that now. Cows can't give us any more diseases, if you see what I mean,

Vance Crowe [00:38:59] We're so close. We've been the domestication of 15,000 years.

Matt Ridley [00:39:03] Our diseases too. No doubt. That's

Vance Crowe [00:39:05] Why we don't get diseases from dogs and why we can be so, I mean, there may be diseases that hang on a dog that then come to us, but, but relatively small.

Matt Ridley [00:39:13] Correct. Whereas every time we bring a new species into our lives, we risk catching its diseases. Now if it's a tiger, that's not a problem. 'cause as I said, tigers are very solitary creatures. They're not gonna have respiratory viruses in them because tigers meet each other so infrequently. But, you know, we, we got HIV from chimpanzees and that's a sexually transmitted disease. We probably got it by eating chimpanzees, but we might have amplified it by well-meaning programs of inoculation and Oh wow.

Vance Crowe [00:39:52] That's outside the Overton window

Matt Ridley [00:39:54] In Africa. Yeah, well there was a, there was a theory that we might, it might have even been the, the a contaminated poliovirus that spread it, but I don't believe that theory anymore. I, I gave it some credence to start with. But I do think that a lot of, you know, a lot of nuns were reusing needles to, to inject vitamins and antibiotics into people in clinics all across Central Africa in the 1950s and 1960s. And that might have amplified an original thing. So, so that's an example of a zoonosis an animal that, a virus that came out of an animal into the human species. So now it, it isn't just a question though of killing an animal and eating it. I mean, you know, we, we eat wild creatures all the time. Most of the fish we eat are caught wild in the sea, for example. It's a question of bringing them live into markets. That's the real problem is, is to have these markets where all these creatures are alive. It's not just China. I mean, if you go to Indonesia, you see wet markets where, you know, dogs and snakes and things are all sitting there muddled up together and mixing their droppings with each other and so on. So really, really unhygienic conditions from the point of view of cross species mixtures. And, and it's possible that some of these viruses would recombine in such circumstances make entirely new viruses. So that's the, that's the, the case against wet markets as they're called.

Matt Ridley [00:41:26] And after sars, which was thought to have originated in a wet market being amplified by the Palm Cs that were being sold in these markets as I think a sort of medication rather than as just as food after sars, there were strong warnings that China should do something about these markets. And for a while they did. And then they went back on their word and, and, and sorry by the way, an awful lot of animals are now bred for these markets. So it's not as if they're caught in the wild necessarily. They're bred in farms. So, you know, there were Palm C farms, turns out the farms weren't infected, it was the markets that were infected so that, that whatever happens. You see what I'm getting at here, I think is that when this is over, we mustn't turn our back on free trade and say, we'll grow everything at home. We'll, we'll have no trade with China. It's been incredibly beneficial to China and to ourselves to be able to trade freely with them. And they are doing a lot of innovation that we can learn from and we are doing a lot of innovation that they can learn from. We wanna be able to continue that. But in inanimate goods, that's fine. In if, if in the course of that they are doing something or we are doing something that could lead to a pandemic spreading in this global network, then we've gotta think hard about it and stop doing that. So trade in healthy things, fine trade in dead animals, fine.

Matt Ridley [00:43:02] Well, up to a point we don't want them, you know, there are conservation environmental impacts, but trading live animals markets in these things where this kind of thing can get going. The world as a whole has an interest in what happens in a market in Wuhan.

Vance Crowe [00:43:18] Well, I definitely believe in free trade and I think people that trade goods don't trade bullets, you know, they don't shoot 'em at each other. I, I think it's a very good thing. However, we are watching a trade zone. The EU seem to have some pretty big problems right now, or at least when I'm, when I'm hearing from people in Italy, they're saying, Hey, where's, where's Brussels now? How is, how is this all working out? So from your perspective, how would you describe what's going on with the EU right now to a US audience?

Matt Ridley [00:43:48] Hmm. I wouldn't go so far as to saying to say we're seeing the death throws of the EU because you should never underestimate the ability of politicians to keep a show on the road. But I would say that the EU is in serious trouble. The Eurozone is in serious trouble and Britain's decision to leave the EU has never looked more sensible. And I say that for several reasons. One, because in terms of the solidarity between countries that it was supposed to engender, it's not showing up. There's a big row between the northern countries not wanting to bail out the southern countries in the Eurocrisis and again in the COVID crisis. And I think this is gonna manifest itself in a breakdown of the Euro zone because the Italian banks were pretty well bankrupt before this anyway. They just didn't want to admit it, as it were. The Germans didn't want to bail out the Italian banks. And and yet after this, I think, you know, the Italian economy is gonna be in very deep trouble and something will have to give. And I suspect what'll have to give is that it Italy will have to have a devalued currency so that it can become competitive again. It should have had that in the Eurozone crisis seven or eight years ago. It would then have been able to grow its economy. It hasn't grown its economy Italy for 10 years, you know, it's gone slightly backwards in that time. That's extraordinary when you think about it.

Matt Ridley [00:45:21] So, so there is, there are real financial consequences for what's happening, but also just in terms of what the EU is supposed to achieve. The, the great mantra is that it's that everybody works together, even not in a crisis, but the head of just today, the, the, the head scientist in the European Union in the European Commission resigned saying, oh, I didn't know that. I, I, he's an Italian, I can't remember his name, but he's resigned. It's in the fi today's Financial Times saying, I just can't work in this organization. They're not able to coordinate anything in our response to this pandemic. They weren't even agree to joint funding of research and operation on this. So what is the point of this great big supernational government sitting in Brussels with the part to tell us what to do. And 60% of our laws before we left the EU were originating in Brussels and we had very little democratic control over them. What's the point of them if they can't coordinate a response to a crisis like this? You know, in this crisis we're looking at what the Germans are doing, we're looking at what the Spanish are doing, we're looking at what the Italians are doing, the Brits are doing. Nobody's saying how are the Europeans handling this crisis? So I I'm, I I think that big international organizations from the World Health Organization to the European Union are looking highly problematic in the wake of this and that nation states are gonna be back as an important factor.

Matt Ridley [00:47:04] That doesn't mean barriers between nation states. The whole point of a nation state in my view is to control what happens in its own borders and be free to trade freely with what happens in other people's borders. What we call mutual recognition. Look, if something's safe in my country, then you, you should regard it as safe in yours and vice versa. That's the way to do free trade. Not to say all the rules must be exactly the same in every country, which was the eus way of doing it.

Vance Crowe [00:47:34] You know, I believe at least in the United States, you're gonna see, we're gonna see a move back, not just to the Federalist system here where people have states rights. Missouri is distinct from the larger national government. I think you're gonna see a huge resurgence of the rights of cities because it's, it's in the cities where those where the problem actually occurs. You don't get sick in the United States, you get sick in St. Louis or you get sick in New York. And for so long people have moved towards, we just need to let the federal government have one universal standard and let's just do that. But now if, if in the US for example, we reshore a whole bunch of vaccine production, chemical production, manufacturing, that's gonna come down to where are the cities that can handle that sort of labor demand and regulation relaxation, because that's what drove so many of them out. And if you're gonna be competitive in the global market, you're gonna have to be the city where your people can get to work the fastest. Do you see parallels between that and what's going on in the EU and in Great Britain?

Matt Ridley [00:48:39] Yes, I do. Yeah, I do. And I think that, you know, the rise of Andrew Cuomo is an interesting story there too. But let me give you an example of, of that. There's a lot of argument about testing, about testing for the virus. And the UK and the US were pretty bad at this to start with. They didn't ramp up testing enough. The CDC in the US insisted that all testing be done through it and its own tests used. And the public health England did the same thing in England. The Germans had a completely different system. They had a federalized decentralized system with 28 different health authorities each choosing to do their own testing program and most of them going out to private contractors to get the testing done. And they said to the private contractors, can you ramp this up? And they said yes. And within weeks the Germans were testing hundreds of thousands of people and they were testing people who felt ill and people who weren't, and health workers and everyone else. The US realized that it needed to do something like this and it it, it did a u-turn and it stopped letting the CDC monopolize the testing system and it went out to the private sector and it's now tested millions of people. And it ramped up very fast, it learnt its lesson and it became more like Germany. Britain is still stuck in the, in the original system. All our tests are still being done through one laboratory. Can you believe it?

Vance Crowe [00:50:07] Well isn't that because you guys have a nationalized healthcare system? I mean, isn't that we

Matt Ridley [00:50:11] Have a very centralized, nationalized healthcare system. It has finally been dragged by the government into admitting that it ought to be using pri the private sector as a contractor. But it's taken weeks and weeks and weeks and it's done so very reluctantly. And as a result we are not testing most frontline healthcare workers in this country. That's terrible.

Vance Crowe [00:50:37] Yeah. And

Matt Ridley [00:50:37] We're not testing most people who get the disease. I mean I have several friends who have had the disease and never tested. I mean they've definitely had it, there's no question about it. The symptoms were exactly right and they self isolated and all that, but they never got, they never had a test to prove it. 'cause there aren't enough tests to go round. Now finally, just this week we're starting to ramp it up, but it's pretty shocking how badly that has has happened. And what that tells you is that you need different countries or different states or different entities to do the experiments to show up what, what countries should be doing in a better way.

Vance Crowe [00:51:17] The, you know, I'm grateful that Sweden is doing their open. Let's see what happens at the herd better than than us.

Matt Ridley [00:51:24] So let me, I know I'm not terribly optimistic about that for them, but

Vance Crowe [00:51:28] You know, you think so much. I remember a Ted talk you gave about ideas have sex, you've written a book about innovation and it's coming out soon. I is it coming out soon? I mean, you're doing your book on tape right now, right?

Matt Ridley [00:51:41] Yeah, I've just recorded the audio version. The US edition is coming out on the 19th of May without any mention of the word coronavirus in it. 'cause I finished it last September. The book, the UK edition is being delayed to the end of June so that I can write an afterward about the epidemic. The reason for that is 'cause the US had started printing when the epidemic went crazy a few weeks ago and the UK hadn't yet started printing. So it was able to delay the, the book is called How Innovation Works and Why it Flourishes in Freedom And it's got a lot about public health in it. It's got the stories of the inventions of different vaccines, the stories of the invention of chlorination to defeat typhoid in the water supply. The story of the, the mosquito net and the imp the insect inside impregnated mosquito net that the Gates Foundation championed in Africa, which made such a huge difference gets malaria. So I tell the stories of lots of different innovations and from that I draw general lessons about what innovation is, why it happens to us as a species, why it happens in some places and not in others, and how you encourage it. And I think this epidemic reminds us how important innovation is. Just to give you one example in the last chapter of the book, I lament the fact that medical device regulation has come become so tight that it takes a very long time to get licensing for a new medical device.

Matt Ridley [00:53:18] On average 22 months in the USA and 70 months in Germany. Now, a new medical device would include a new testing d diagnostic test or a new vaccine. Well, no, I think a vaccine wouldn't count as a device, but do you get the idea and the, you know, if we had regulations that allowed us to innovate faster and to approve innovations faster, we'd have more innovations coming forward and we'd be in a better position to cope when a pandemic came along

Vance Crowe [00:53:52] And wherever, whatever country, whatever city, whatever area makes that possible, boom, I'm moving. Like what? Whatever that is, that is where you wanna be because that's where the new things get created.

Matt Ridley [00:54:04] Well, when this finishes, when this epidemic finishes Vance, I'm really interested in the idea that whichever country or area of a country gets out of their epidemic first the world is gonna be their oyster. I mean, they're gonna be able to pick up business all over the place. 'cause there's gonna be other countries whose airlines and manufacturers can't work at full capacity. So there's gonna be pent up demand for them to capture. So there's gonna be winners and losers coming outta this looks horribly like China will be a winner. Well, we'll see. I don't say that with any vindictiveness. I just, you know, because I, I think the Chinese regime has a lot to answer for, for, for the way it responded. But the Chinese people don't deserve any, anything like that.

Vance Crowe [00:54:49] The Chinese are entirely dependent on other economies opening up and being able to handle the supply that they have. So that's true. They gave everybody a cold and, and now that you know, they're not there to to play. I know you have a, another interview coming up. You're a very busy man. What is the name of your book One more time and how can people follow you if they wanna learn more about what's going on with you?

Matt Ridley [00:55:14] The book is called How Innovation Works and it comes out from Harper Collins in May and they can reach me on Twitter at matt w Ridley and, and you have a

Vance Crowe [00:55:28] Great website? A great website. I go there all the time. Yeah,

Matt Ridley [00:55:31] My website, I think it's called rational optimist.com but it's also called Matt ridley.co uk or something like that. I think so. Anyway, one or one or the other.

Vance Crowe [00:55:40] Well I can tell you that if you're waiting for his book to come out, the Rational Optimist was one of those books that I can say re it actually made tangible changes in my life, made me rethink how I thought about many, many things. And it is a true honor to see you yet again, despite the fact that it's in the middle of a global pandemic.

Matt Ridley [00:55:59] Well, let's have lunch in a pub again soon when we're allowed to.

Vance Crowe [00:56:02] That'd be great. Well, Lord Ridley, back to work. Thank you so much. We'll talk to you later.

Matt Ridley [00:56:07] Thank you so much Vince.