[Music]
to tell you about what we've done with
um funding from bvy but first I want to
explain the context and why I'm so
concerned about um the risk of unnatural
pandemics these are just my
declarations I'm a physician and
infectious disease researcher from
Australia
um so we hear about epidemics all the
time right we hear in the news about
Aven flu about impo um we know that
these things are never ending there and
actually the data shows the risk of new
emerging infections is increasing really
important to understand the past and the
present in order to look at what the
risk is in the future and this case is a
really good one because it illustrates
all the problems with the medical
community accepting the possibility of
unnatural epidemics and this is bagwan
Raj Nish whose cult perpetrated the
biggest documented biot terrorism attack
in the US in
1984 uh the public health authorities
including the CDC judged that it was a
natural outbreak and there was a
politician who said no I think the Raj
Nishi did it and he was ridiculed and
shouted down uh and even 6 months later
when Raj Nish confessed that they'd done
it he wasn't believed so if you even a
confession isn't enough to identify an
unnatural outbreak where does that leave
us and then a full 12 months later the
FBI was doing a raid on the ranch of the
Raj Nishi and came across their illegal
biolab which had far more dangerous
pathogens in it than the one they used
for this
attack there's just so many examples
that I don't have time to give you about
the inability of the medical and Public
Health Community to ask the question
even about what is the origin of this
epidemic let alone identify unnatural
ones San Francisco in the 1950s the US
military sprayed bacteria over from a
ship in the ocean over the a of San
Francisco to see how far they could
disperse a biological weapon and people
did get they thought the bacteria was
harmless but people did get sick and one
person died no one knew anything about
this until 30 years later when a
journalist uncovered the truth um and
the medical community did not recognize
that it was an unnatural outbreak then
in the 60s the US military dropped light
bulbs into the subway system filled with
trillions of bacteria that were a proxy
for Anthrax it wasn't actual Anthrax but
a similar related bacteria to see how
the spores would disperse in the um
tunnels um in the Soviet Union an island
called vros Dena was used as a
biological weapons testing facility and
in 1979 they exploded a small pox bomb
on this island there was a ship passing
by 15 kmet away uh where someone got
infected and it set off a big outbreak
of small pox a highly fatal outbreak in
the town of Aral and there's numerous
other examples including um a a pandemic
of flu that occurred in the 70s which
was traced back to an improperly
inactivated vaccine strain of the virus
and for 30 years scientists kept saying
denying that it was an unnatural
outbreak um this man Ken albeck was the
deputy director of the Soviet Union's
bioweapons program bio preparat and he
wrote defected to the US and wrote this
book which really details some of the
pretty mindblowing things they were
trying to do in the 60s and the 70s when
the tools were much more clumsy than
what we have today so they were trying
to engineer even more fatal versions of
small pox shorten the incubation period
and to combine genes from small poox
with other deadly viruses like Lassa
fever and if they were doing that today
it's just so easy to do it whereas back
then fortunately it was much more
difficult basically anything with DNA
can be edited um whether it's a virus a
plant a human being and of course Human
Genome editing started in 2016 in 2018 a
Chinese scientist caused an uproar by
not only editing two embryos but
bringing them to B those children being
born he presented the results at a
conference and there was this enormous
faux outrage by the whole Global
Community uh but very soon afterwards
the all the superpowers jumped on board
into what I think is the new arms race
which is engineering of human beings um
in the UK and of course the objective is
to engineer super soldiers um in the UK
you can't even uh request a Freedom of
Information you can never find out what
they're doing so you can bypass
mandelian inheritance you can insert
hereditable characteristics you can Prim
a whole population in the type of attack
that could be done today includes um you
know releasing something that would
prime a population to make them more
vulnerable and then a second attack with
uh a biological
weapon so like every type of Technology
whether it's robotics or AI biological
research has dual use potential so
mostly it's used for good um but it can
also be used for harm and and we could
be living in a Jurassic Park of viruses
and not even know
it in the first synthetic virus was made
in 2020 and it was uh in 2002 sorry 20
25 years ago about 25 years ago by some
American scientists who created a
synthetic version of um
polio and then some Australian
scientists created a version of um a Rel
a virus related to small poox that was
100% resistant to the vaccine and
universally fatal and that all that
research is open source which means
someone else can read it and copy those
methods in 2018 Canadian scientists
created uh aox virus very closely
related to small pox called horse pox
and if you can make one you can make any
of those orthopox viruses um and there's
been a range of other quite scary
research including syn
Ebola um and ever since the SARS
outbreak in 2003 scientists have been
fascinated with creating a SARS version
too and there's numerous Publications
prior to the covid pandemic detailing
This
research so the the the guys who um
developed the can you put the slide
forward for me my pointer isn't working
um the the scientists who developed the
synthetic um horsepox virus they um uh
so the two s the two ways in which
unnatural pandemics can occur error or
Terror and the picture on the left is
the swlos anthrax outbreak um that was a
town in which the Soviet Union had a
bioweapons facility someone forgot to
replace the filter on an air vent one
night and all night long they were
pumping weaponized anthrax into the town
next door and at least 100 people died
um but the Soviets said it was a natural
outbreak they said it was due to the wet
markets they made a big show of killing
dogs in the markets to prove that it and
they interestingly at the height of the
Cold War the Americans agreed with them
completely that it was a natural
outbreak so from the medical and
scientific Community the consensus was
it was a natural outbreak and it wasn't
until the fall of the Soviet Union that
Boris yelson confessed that had been a
lab leak um and in the case of um Terror
one of the other examples of an anthrax
outbreak is the one after 9/11 where it
was pretty obvious because the anthrax
was mailed in envelopes with threatening
letters today you can uh anyone can
create a biolab in their home um just as
you can make a me lab in your kitchen so
too can you do a do it yourself biolab
and the um the possibilities are really
endless the scientists um that made the
synthetic pox virus said the advance of
technology means that no disease-causing
organism can forever be eradicated
because you can always make it in a lab
and that's the declining cost of Gene
synthesis in that same paper showing how
accessible it is
today uh illegal biolabs in
2022 uh a code officer noticed a hose
sticking out of a warehouse in redley
California and uh very very slow and
inadequate response from us authorities
it took them 3 months to get a warrant
by the time they searched it they found
humanized about a thousand humanized
mice vials labeled Ebola HIV SARS kv2
Etc and it was a biotech company that
was proposed supposedly making covid
rapid antigen tests for which you do not
need animal or um live virus and that's
still um being investigated as to how
that happened but it just shows you how
wide open the risk
is in terms of current epidemics the cay
one empo in Democratic Republic of Congo
is a huge um problem 70% of the cases
are in children 80% of the debts are in
children this is much more highly lethal
than the empo that caused the clay 2
epidemic in high inome countries in 2022
there's a long sting in the tail of SARS
CO2 it's still causing substantial
excess
mortality and our research showed that
long Co um has major economic impacts in
2022 alone we estimated long Co cost9
billion of losses in the Australian
economy from people being unable to work
at full capacity or not at or only at
partial capacity and then
h5n1 bir flu in the US 30% of commercial
milk samples on the supermarket shelves
are contaminated with the virus if it's
pasturized milk it's probably not live
virus but if you're into drinking raw
milk it probably is and it's just a
matter of this virus switching its
preference from birds to humans which
have different receptors in the upper
respiratory tract and then we've got a
pandemic now how do we detect these
pandemics when they're Rising um the
risk is there how do we detect them the
traditional methods we use uh like lab
Lab diagnosis that depends on having a
test if it's a brand new disease there
is no test these are the graphs showing
these are data from wh showing on the
top the date of symptom onset so that's
the day people got sick and on the
bottom the date of reporting so you can
see there's a substantial delay so by
the time you get official notifications
it's usually spread which is exactly
what happened in um Co so we've got
evidence from blood tests showing that
Co had spread through Europe and the US
in November December 2019 so we
developed an early warning AI system
using open- Source intelligence called
epatch now a true epidemic disease grows
exponentially and that's why you go from
zero to 100 in a short period of time
and why Health Systems collapse and why
critical infrastructure collapses
because of this exponential growth so
time is critical and we're trying to
find the signals very early before
governments are aware of it and
literally the co response did occur in
the Red Zone um so we use three
different AI systems and we search in
over 50
languages in fact 70% of all the
intelligence we get is in non-english
languages which tells you how important
that multilingual intelligence is we
visualize the data in a number of
different ways and we do a pandemic
watch looking for undiagnosed
pneumonia we've published quite a bit of
research on it including um looking at
epidemic signals in Ukraine um that in
2022 all um formal surveillance ceased
so there were no more reporting of covid
cases of TB of HIV nothing so um we were
able to give a very comprehensive
picture of what was going on epidemic
Wise from open- Source data
uh we also looked at radiation signals
in Ukraine using the same
methodology um but ultimately a tool
like this like epy watch and this is
where bvy has helped us as well with the
philosophy of bvy as well is that it's
no good having a tool like Epi watch
being used by an elite few in some
building in Geneva or wherever really
has to be used at the Grassroots by
local health workers on their mobile
phon so that aware of what's going on
and they can connect the intelligence
with what they're seeing on the ground
and so we launched an app in Hindi in
2023 um working with the um government
um the National Institute of
epidemiology which is a government
agency in India and we're continuing
that work now uh looking at evaluating
the use of this app hopefully next year
so thank you very much