Megyn Kelly’s podcast got heated on Thursday as she questioned virologist Dr. Robert Garry about the Wuhan lab leak theory, asking him several times to stop dodging her questions.
During Sirius XM’s “The Megyn Kelly Show” podcast, the host spoke with Garry, a Tulane virologist, about the “furin cleavage site” in the virus, and how he allegedly changed his mind in just 48 hours regarding its origin from that of a lab leak in Wuhan, China, to something that started in nature.
Garry said that the furin cleavage site wasn’t some “smoking gun” for “lab leak proponents.” Kelly said he was “backtracking” as he tried to once again claim it wasn’t something new in coronaviruses. The host had to remind Garry that earlier in the show, he claimed that there has “not been another one with furin cleavage site.”
Kelly then noted that we know, thanks to uncovered emails, that Garry originally thought COVID was likely leaked from the Wuhan lab, stating that he said, “I just can’t figure out how this gets accomplished in nature.”
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After his conversations with Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, as well as then-Director of the National Institutes of Health Dr. Francis Collins, he changed his mind. Kelly said that Garry completely “reversed” himself, claiming just two days later that “it can’t possibly be lab leak, it is nature.”
The virologist said he wanted to correct the record, explaining that it was “one email” that he sent to his “colleagues that were looking at this, one email out of hundreds of emails,” adding that after he got further into the genome, it became obvious to him that the coronavirus was from nature.
“But forgive me,” Kelly interjected. “Wasn’t it just days … just two days later that you reversed yourself and said, actually no, okay, forget what I said about it coming from a lab. I now say it’s natural.”
Garry replied that it wasn’t “really a reversal,” and claimed “it’s what scientists do.” When pressed by the host about “what happened in those 48 hours,” the virologist said he looked at the “genomes of the viruses more closely.”
The former Fox News host then pressed Garry over his paper calling the origin “natural” after speaking to both Fauci and Collins, who are on record not wanting the virus to be labeled a lab leak.
“It’s one thing if you can say, ‘Megyn, let me show you what I saw that proved to me it came — we found the pangolin,’” Kelly said. “You know, that’s why. I’d say, gotcha. I get it. But there’s nothing that proved this thing came from nature in those 48 hours. Nothing. What happened was there was a communication with Fauci and Collins.”
Garry claimed that Fauci and Collins were agnostic about COVID’s origin, to which Kelly replied, “That’s not true. Because we have their writings.”
The virologist insisted they didn’t try to influence his article in “Nature Medicine” magazine, and said we “changed our minds.”
“The science was very clear then; it’s very clear now,” Garry added. “They didn’t have a virus like SARS CoV-2 at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. They didn’t stick a furin cleavage site in it.”
“You don’t know that,” Kelly replied. “You absolutely do not know that.”
“I do know that, actually,” the virologist insisted. “I mean, based on all the science and evidence that we’ve gathered, it’s just extremely unlikely that they had anything close to SARS CoV-2 in that lab.”
“Well, that’s different than no,” Kelly said. “Now you’re admitting that you’re just positing this. ‘Extremely unlikely’ is different from ‘I know she didn’t do it.’ There was bat coronavirus, gain-of-function research going on.”
When pressed by the host if he denies that there was “gain-of-function research” taking place at the lab, Garry said “there was research being done, but there was no research being done on a virus that could’ve been converted into SARS CoV-2.”
Kelly asked again how Garry knows, and he said “they would’ve published on it before … it’s hard to find in nature. So, how did they get it?”
When she asked how he knows they would’ve published and wouldn’t do so if it was being done nefariously, he said once again, “We’re diving into conspiracy theories there.”
“No, it’s not a conspiracy theory,” Kelly replied. “It’s a question. It’s a question. You can’t dismiss a legitimate question by labeling it a conspiracy theory.”
“That’s a tactic!” the host added. “That’s not science.”
The former Fox News host then pushed back on Garry’s suggestion that all these scientists being in on it would amount to a conspiracy theory. “Why is it not possible that they were working on it in a low-security lab … and then they had a, ‘Oh, you know what’ moment when it got out?”
“I have to reject the idea that people like Peter Dazak and Ralph Baric were involved in some conspiracy with Zhengli Shi at the Wuhan Institute of Virology to create SARS CoV-2,” Garry shared. “It just did not happen that way.”
“Again, you’re setting [up] a straw man,” Kelly replied. “I’m not saying that they had a conspiracy to create this particular virus. I’m saying they were doing bat coronavirus research, gain-of-function research that was very dangerous. And it was not properly supervised in a lab with adequate security, which is what has led many of us to think something went wrong.”
Near the end of the segment, the virologist flat-out asked Kelly if he had convinced her of his perspective yet, and Kelly said that he hadn’t, but gave him credit for coming on to take the questions.
