COLLINS: “Do you think that it would be helpful if they declassified the new intelligence that is around this that has caused the DOE to change its assessment?”

BIRX: “You know, I think it’s important that a group gets together of scientists, particular molecular virologists, and moves past all of the politics and say, ‘What do we really know? What do we know now about this virus, how it mutates, how it spreads through humans? What do we know that China was doing?’ And it makes total sense that China was working on a vaccine and growing these — growing these viruses in tissue culture. That changes the virus over time. That’s what you do in the laboratory. And so, it makes sense. And I think really getting people to get — I know we are never going to get the data from China. China has not been transparent. We saw in that their recent outbreak. They weren’t telling how many people were actually succumbing to Covid. We knew it was dramatically higher than the numbers they were providing. That’s been going on for three years now. And we have to be very clear, China they did not learn from SARS, they were not transparent with Covid-19 in 2019, they are not transparent today in 2023, and we just have to understand that we are not going to change China’s behavior and put into place processes and accountability across the globe to ensure that other countries are protected.”

COLLINS: “Given that, Dr. Birx, if you say we will never get it from China, are we doing enough now as a country? Is the United States doing enough to prevent this from happening again?”

BIRX: “No. And just like we learned after 9/11, we have to have a coalition of like-minded countries that work together and bring the private sector to the table because they are the groups that have multinational employees all across the globe and we need a surveillance system that works with the private sector to really understand what is happening in countries that are not transparent.”

COLLINS: “All right, Dr. Birx, that’s a scary warning, that the United States is not doing enough, but thank you for joining us this morning.”

[First off, all of a sudden “it makes sense.” That’s awfully convenient for Birx to say NOW. Second, we can certainly help keep this from happening by ending gain-of-function research, especially in funding it in China. We never should have started it again in 2017. — Ed]