“Biohacked: China’s Race to Control Life” with Brandon Weichert
"Would you want your DNA and other healthcare data going to an authoritarian regime with a record of exploiting that data for repression and surveillance? Let’s be specific, would you want it going to China?”
That’s just one of the questions my returning guest national security expert Brandon Weichert and I cover in this far-reaching conversation about China's BioTech ambitions and their alarming implications.
Brandon Weichert, author of Biohacked: China's Race to Control Life is a leading expert in geopolitics and emerging technologies and who been described as a “panic-and-anxiety inducing scholar.” He lives by Dr. Herman Kahn’s mantra that “I’m against fashionable thinking” and you won’t hear much of that in this disturbing, yet at the same time entertaining conversation.
In the realm of cutting-edge biotechnology, the relentless drive of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to exploit emerging BioTech technologies casts a dark shadow over the global stage.
"China's President Xi Jinping has identified biotechnology as one of the key fourth industrial revolution industries that China must dominate in order to achieve his China Vision 2049," warns Brandon.
Amidst this pursuit, China has been utilizing CRISPR-Cas9, the gene editing tool originally developed in America. "China's using CRISPR-Cas9, the gene editing tool that we in America developed and we shared with China, which allows scientists to go in, and at the genetic level, splice human genes and either take out unwanted or undesirable aspects of that individual's genome or input," reveals Weichert.
"You have to wonder, are they thinking, 'Hey, we can gene edit desirable traits into our preferred people and create the perfect communist man,'" ponders Weichert.
“You need to think about genetics as a geneticist acting as computer programmer. Instead of manipulating ones and zeros in a program, they're manipulating the genetic data that they accumulate on people, ordinary people, everybody.”
“They're looking for things in our genes, either individual genes or group genes, that they can manipulate and they can create what the Chinese military refers to as specific ethnic genetic attacks.”
In this riveting conversation, Weichert leaves no stone unturned as he sounds the alarm about the urgent need to reassess our business ties with China's biotech sector. "We need to stop doing business with China's biotech sector and be very concerned about their hostile intentions towards the United States."
Moreover, Weichert confronts an ugly possibility head-on: "COVID-19 might have been a bioweapon" and discovering the truth behind what happened with COVID-19 is crucial to understanding how to safeguard our future.
"In 2015, the top Chinese military scientists wrote a white paper in which they outlined how they could use weaponized coronaviruses to attack and collapse an enemy country's medical and economic systems to affect political change at the international level. COVID-19 did all of that."
"Coronaviruses can be artificially manipulated into an emerging human disease virus, then weaponized and unleashed in a way never seen before. I don't know for certain what happened in Wuhan, I will tell you what I am certain about. This is not a naturally forming disease. But we may never know whether this was a lab leak by accident or if it was intentional."
China's BioTech ambitions represent a grave threat to U.S. national security. Listen in as Brandon unravels these ambitions and confronts the ethical, geopolitical, and national security concerns they raise.