The following is a transcript of an interview with Dr. Scott Gottlieb that aired on “Face the Nation” on Sunday, March 5, 2023.
MARGARET BRENNAN: And we are back now with former FDA commissioner and Pfizer board member, Dr. Scott Gottlieb. Good morning. Welcome back. Good to see you.
DR. SCOTT GOTTLIEB: Good morning.
MARGARET BRENNAN: Dr. Gottlieb. I wanted you to sort of give us some context here, because I know you’ve said in the past on this program that we will likely never know the origin of COVID-19, short of finding the exact animal that carried the virus or a smoking gun, proving that it accidentally leaked out of the lab. You said both theories were plausible. Has anything changed that makes you more certain now?
DR. GOTTLIEB: Well, look, I think that there’s enough information in the public domain to create a presumption that this could have come out of lab, maybe a strong presumption. We have seen some incremental reporting, there’s classified information that hasn’t been made public, you heard the Congressman even refer to classified information that even Congress hasn’t seen in this instance. And I think based on that premise, that there’s, you know, a likelihood that this came out of a lab. We may never be able to prove it with certainty. We should start behaving like it did come out of a lab and start taking the steps to make sure that that couldn’t happen again. There’s a lot of things that happened around the labs in China, particularly the WIV in Wuhan, the Wuhan Institute of Virology that created sloppy conditions. They were doing high risk research in low level, low security labs. They were doing risky research. You heard the Congressman talk about the gain of function research that was going on in that lab. We know the Chinese military was operating in that lab simultaneously. So we need to look at all those things. I would be focusing on the activities in and around that lab, and deriving from that, what steps we need to take going forward to make sure that we get better security around high risk research that if this did come out of a lab, it’s- it’s not going to happen again.
MARGARET BRENNAN: And we’ve talked on this program to Matt Pottinger, who served in the Trump administration who said, intelligence needs to be a more robust part of pandemic protection. And I know you agree with that. You know, there was a piece in The New York Times by David Wallace Wells, an opinion piece called, “We’ve been talking about the lab leak theory all wrong.” And the argument is that lean into the lab theory and just look at how to prevent lab leaks. He’s calling for things like a national registration on research based on risks and benefits, new safety standards, global governance to go with this as well. Why doesn’t that exist? And why isn’t that being created?
DR. GOTTLIEB: Yeah, I think it should be. I mean, we’re three years into this, there’s some recommendations that are on the President’s desk. I think we need to start getting serious and looking at what steps need to be put into place. You know, we’re still stuck on a debate about whether it was or wasn’t a lab leak. I don’t think we’re going to prove that. I think we should work on the assumption that there’s a probability that it was a lab leak, and start putting in place the kinds of protections that we need. The Congressman talked about gain of function research. He made the point that there isn’t a real commercial prerogative for doing that kind of research. I agree with him. We ought to look at whether we outlaw that kind of research. And certainly, if it’s going to take place, conducted in BSL-4 labs, high security labs under very strict conditions, where we know what’s going on, and don’t outsource it to labs in China. Sometimes the highest risk experiments get outsourced to the worst labs around the world, because they’re the ones willing to do those experiments. And so if we’re going to do high risk research, because we think it’s important from a national security standpoint, and that’s the only context with which this would make sense, there really isn’t a commercial context in which this would make sense; we need to get better control over it. And to Matt’s point, Matt Pottinger’s point, we need to get the intelligence agencies engaged in this as a national security- as a part of their national security mission, and look at public health preparedness through a national security lens. I think we’re doing that now. But we need to be very explicit about that. And that does mean also surveillance around some of the high risk activities that can create these kinds of risks.
MARGARET BRENNAN: So- but that’s the White House, and that’s the intelligence agencies, rather than a congressional mandate.
DR. GOTTLIEB: Look, Congress certainly has a role here. I think that Congress could start coming up with a list of recommendations to the administration. The administration has recommendations from independent bodies. Ultimately, this is going to be federal rules that get imposed on research that gets funded by the federal government, as well as what we try to do through international conventions, working with the WHO and the World Health Assembly to try to get international agreements in place on what countries are and aren’t going to be willing to do. Now you can’t prevent rogue regimes from doing this kind of research. That’s where the intelligence agencies come in to do monitoring, to see if rogue regimes are doing high risk research that could create conditions for a lab leak, either inadvertently or deliberately.
MARGARET BRENNAN: And the Biden administration has called on China to release more information, and they have not delivered it. Dr. Fauci talked about that in November on this program. I also want to ask you about what we just learned about President Biden’s health. He had this skin cancer diagnosis of basal cell carcinoma lesion removed. Given his age, is there any reason to worry more about it?
DR. GOTTLIEB: There’s no reason to be concerned about this particular lesion. This is a slow growing cancer, usually confined to the surface of the skin that can be completely excised with a small surgical procedure. It sounds like the President had this fully removed. It shouldn’t recur, it typically doesn’t spread. These kinds of lesions typically occur in regions of the body that are exposed to sun. It is related to exposure to UV light, so typically you see it on a neck or the face. Just for awareness, it’s not like a melanoma where it appears as a very dark, irregular lesion. Typically it’ll appear as sort of a clear and waxy kind of lesion, maybe scaly, so it has a different kind of appearance. But the President should be fully cured of this through a small surgical procedure to remove it.
MARGARET BRENNAN: Dr. Gottlieb, always good to talk to you.
