15 Million Died of COVID, and Nobody Ran an Independent Investigation
Gurley lines COVID up next to 737 Max, Hurricane Katrina, Fukushima and Challenger and finds an anomaly: every other disaster got an independent investigation and accountability. Six years into COVID, not even the root cause has been examined.
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The argument · tap a timestamp to hear it
Gurley isn't talking about AI this time — he's talking about something that weighed on him for six years
He says up front: this is not an AI talk, it's a serious topic, there probably won't be many jokes. He says it has weighed on him for five or six years, and he hopes spreading it can have an impact. He starts with a run of disasters — the Surfside condo collapse in Florida, the two 737 Max crashes, Hurricane Katrina, Fukushima, Challenger — breaking each into two layers, ‘technical failure’ and ‘institutional failure’, and only then brings in COVID. This setup takes up the first two-thirds of the talk and is the core structure of his argument: first prove what should happen after a disaster, then point out that after COVID nothing happened.
— Bill GurleyAfter a disaster there is a standard process, and it's called CAPA
Gurley says the scientific world has a process for analyzing failure called CAPA — corrective and preventive action — with five steps: discover, investigate, confirm root cause, correct, prevent. He stresses that you cannot skip confirming the root cause, because if you don't know what actually happened you don't know what to fix. CAPA is required by FDA law in pharmaceutical and medical device manufacturing, and aerospace has regulations requiring the same process when something fails. He brings this up to establish a standard: every other disaster followed this process. COVID did not.
— Bill GurleyInvestigators become blockers, and even the ones hired to investigate change sides
Gurley repeatedly uses the pair ‘seekers’ and ‘blockers’. In Hurricane Katrina, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers built the levees, so it naturally became a blocker. What surprised him more: the Corps hired the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) to do an internal investigation and paid a million dollars, but over time the ASCE people moved inside the Corps and became blockers themselves. Raymond Seed, a professor at a California university, later wrote a 42-page report listing every instance of ASCE obstructing the investigation; the document is findable online. Gurley uses this case to show that blocking isn't necessarily malice — it's an institution's instinctive reaction under the spotlight.
— Bill GurleyFukushima's hero was a doctor, not a nuclear physicist
Japan's parliament asked Kiyoshi Kurokawa to lead the country's first independent civilian investigation. Commission members were required to have no institutional ties to regulators or the power company, and had full authority to pursue anyone. Kurokawa said he had three principles: care about human safety, the investigation must lead to recommendations, and he knew from Three Mile Island and Chernobyl how much this mattered from a global perspective. Gurley points out specifically: Kurokawa was a doctor, not a nuclear physicist, yet he led the commission with extremely high standards and professionalism. The report came out seven months later, and its first sentence was: ‘A nuclear power plant accident cannot be regarded as a natural disaster. It is entirely man-made, and it could and should have been avoided.’
— Bill GurleyFeynman dunked an O-ring in ice water on live TV and snapped it
After Challenger broke apart, Reagan set up the Rogers Commission, mostly made up of ‘insiders’ — Neil Armstrong, astronauts, generals, NASA executives. Someone suggested adding a physicist, so they approached Feynman. They didn't know Feynman was extremely independent, hungry for the truth, and had no time for pointless diplomacy. Feynman didn't want to do it, said he hated Washington, and only agreed because his wife talked him into it. The moment he agreed he cleared his calendar for the next six months; no other commissioner did that. Before he even got to Washington he started his own investigation, going to NASA facilities and demanding to see people. Armstrong told him ‘we're only assessing, not investigating’, but it was already too late. On live TV he dunked a piece of O-ring-like material into the glass of ice water in front of him, pulled it out and snapped it, demonstrating the failure. The commission sanded all the sharp edges off his report; he called Rogers and asked to have his name removed, but couldn't — Appendix F is his full notes.
— Bill GurleyAfter COVID, not one of the things that should have happened happened
Gurley lists them: no dedicated editorial team of more than 30 investigators working on COVID, no major media outlet doing it; no sustained investigative reporter with editorial backing of the Gates, Schlesinger or Flackerd kind; no bipartisan Senate or congressional committee like the ones for Katrina or 737 Max; no independent investigation like Feynman's or Kurokawa's; no academically funded investigation — NIST and NSF both launched investigations in the other two cases, but NIH funded no third-party investigation; and no mass litigation by victims to establish what happened. He says that in other, far smaller cases, well-intentioned people did all of this, and did it purposefully and meaningfully.
— Bill GurleyHe names five people: they aren't experts, they're blockers
Gurley names Francis Collins, Anthony Fauci, Peter Daszak (EcoHealth Alliance), Jeremy Farrar (Wellcome Trust, later WHO) and Ralph Barik (a virologist at UNC), saying they aren't experts but blockers, behaving exactly the way the FAA, Boeing and NASA did in the other cases. He gives four reasons: first, they are insiders in the virology world, and when the spotlight hits, the instinct is to close ranks and protect themselves; second, they ran a disinformation campaign that steered people away from the answers; third, before COVID they were all public supporters of gain-of-function research — Fauci wrote a 2011 Washington Post column saying the benefits outweighed the risks — and Gurley says if you tell the whole world this must be done because the benefits outweigh the risks, you have zero chance of fairly establishing what happened, because living every night with the thought that what you did caused 15 million deaths is unbearable, and the brain is more likely to trick you into thinking it didn't happen; fourth, and most important, they simply weren't looking.
— Bill GurleyThe DEFUSE proposal: 78% of scientists had never heard of it
Three years into COVID, the DRASTIC team found this document, called the DEFUSE proposal. Gurley asks on the spot who has heard of it; about three hands go up. No major magazine has reported on the DEFUSE proposal. There was a survey of scientists: asked about the origin of COVID, and if they answered ‘animal transmission’, then asked whether they had heard of DEFUSE, only 22% said yes and 78% said they had never heard of it. The document is a proposal from EcoHealth Alliance (Peter Daszak's organization) linking a top virologist at Duke University in North Carolina with Shi Zhengli, the ‘bat woman’ in Wuhan, and suggesting inserting a furin cleavage site at the S1-S2 junction of a bat coronavirus, because they believed it would make the virus more virulent in animals. Gurley says he took this to an AI and had it do a ‘clean session’ — not looking at anything it had been told before — and asked how it would react to the DEFUSE proposal if it were guiding an investigation into the origin of COVID using CAPA principles. The AI's answer: a direct investigative lead, an extremely critical and important investigative lead, this is primary documentary evidence, the highest level of evidence. Gurley says if this document had been public in January 2020, the conversation at the time would have been completely different.
— Bill GurleyIn their own words · checked verbatim
Six years later, we still don't know. So excuse me if I'm not afraid of what some AI developer's chatbot will do to humanity when you can't even tell me what the thing has already done.
Bill Gurley19:08
If, if you have to overcome politeness and seek the truth when seven people have died, then how should you behave when 15 million die?
Bill Gurley20:08
if you told the world that we absolutely must do this because the benefits outweigh the drawbacks, you have zero chance of being impartial in figuring out what happened, because going to bed every night thinking that what you did led to the deaths of 15 million people is unbearable.
Bill Gurley23:08
irrefutable evidence of a conspiracy to cover up and deny the possibility that this could well have been a laboratory error, orchestrated at the highest levels of the scientific establishment, and by a selfish group of scientists who deliberately misled the public.
Bill Gurley28:10
You are not a bad person if you seek the truth, you are a good person if you seek the truth.
Bill Gurley32:11
We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark. The real tragedy in life is when people are afraid of the light.
Bill Gurley33:11
This is pure evil. This is madness. This is madness. This is pure evil—bringing people together who are just saying, "Hey, is it possible that this came from Wuhan? You actually funded research into enhancing the functions of viruses. Why is this such a difficult question for them?"
Bill Gurley36:15
Figures
| Surfside condo collapse death toll | 98 | 1:01 |
| Hurricane Katrina death toll | 1,800 | 10:05 |
| Hurricane Katrina losses | $125 billion | 10:05 |
| Fukushima death toll | 2,200 | 12:07 |
| COVID death toll | 15 million | 19:08 |
| Global cost of COVID | $45 trillion | 19:08 |
| Share of scientists who had heard of the DEFUSE proposal | 22% | 29:10 |
Glossary
- CAPA
- The standard process for analyzing failure: discover, investigate, confirm root cause, correct, prevent — and you cannot skip confirming the root cause.
- gain-of-function
- Research that deliberately makes a virus more dangerous to animals or people. Obama banned it, and it was later discussed for being allowed again.
- DEFUSE proposal
- An EcoHealth Alliance proposal suggesting inserting a furin cleavage site at the S1-S2 junction of a bat coronavirus.
- furin cleavage site
- A structure at the S1-S2 junction of SARS-CoV-2 that the DEFUSE proposal suggested inserting, believed to potentially increase virulence.
- DRASTIC
- A loosely affiliated group of scientists sharing information to trace the origins of COVID, who found the DEFUSE proposal.
How to listen
Founders and investors interested in COVID origins, institutional failure and investigative journalism; anyone who wants to see the non-AI side of Bill Gurley.
The first 18 minutes of disaster case studies — skip straight past 18:08 if you already know them.