Welcome to an HBO podcast from the HBO late-night series, Real Time with Bill Maugh.

All right, here we are with the host of the Esra Klein show podcast and the co-author of the book Abundance, Asra Klein,

and he writes the weekly dish newsletter and hosts the podcast The Discatch with Andrew Sullivan.

Andrew Sullivan.

Okay, here are the questions.

Andrew, what do you think of news that British intelligence knew COVID was a lab leak in 2020

and officially ignored their report?

Not just new, added a 95% certainty.

Same with the German intelligence service. March 2020. There's a new book

out called COVID's awake. I was reading it this last couple of weeks. And the core paper that

killed off any idea that this was a lab leak in China, the proximal origin paper, which was produced with Fauci and Collins, the NIH and NIAID,

helping it along was a lie, a conscious lie, that the people who looked at it,

we now have their emails, are saying in the very first days of looking at the virus,

this looks very man-made to us.

This is so frigging obvious, this is man-made.

So friggin-obvious to one of them said.

And then they wrote the report saying there is no evidence that this was made in a lab.

The question is why? Why would they lie to us about that?

And they did. Well, I can give you one answer, the New York Times. The New York Times said any

questioning of this being from a lab was racist, which always struck me as odd because it seems

much more racist to go, wow, these people are eating bats.

I know.

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