Last week, Project Veritas released a stunning video of an undercover reporter's bar conversation with Jordon Trishton Walker, a 27-year-old man who claimed to be the Director of Research and Development at Pfizer. Walker told the reporter the company was exploring ways to "mutate" COVID viruses through "directed evolution" in order to develop future vaccines.

The loose-lipped Walker told the reporter, “Don’t tell anyone this though. Promise you won’t tell anyone."

“One of the things we’re exploring is, like, why don’t we just mutate it [COVID] ourselves, so we could create -- preemptively develop new vaccines, right? So, we have to do that. If we’re gonna do that though, there’s a risk of, like, as you could imagine -- no one wants to be having a pharma company mutating f***ing viruses."

Walker provided his theory on how the virus originated: “You have to be very controlled to make sure that this virus [COVID] that you mutate doesn’t create something that just goes everywhere. Which, I suspect, is the way that the virus started in Wuhan, to be honest. It makes no sense that this virus popped out of nowhere. It’s bull****.”

He continued, "The way it [the experiment] would work is that we put them in, put the virus in these monkeys. And then we successively, like, cause them to keep infecting each other, and we collect serial samples from them ..."

Walker said Pfizer does not fear government regulators because many of them plan to work in Big Pharma eventually and don't want to burn their bridges.

Additionally, he admitted that COVID vaccines have been and continue to be a cash cow for the company, and it wants to keep those profits rolling.

(The video was removed from Youtube for violating the site's "community guidelines.")

The most watched video in Project Veritas history and it hasn’t even been 24 hours… pic.twitter.com/xaRvlD5qTo

— Project Veritas (@Project_Veritas) January 26, 2023

A few points about the video. Viewers aren't told precisely whom Walker thinks his companion is. When he was eventually confronted by Project Veritas' founder James O'Keefe (in a second video), Walker said, "I was trying to impress a person on a date by lying."

Please also note also that the video has been edited, which could potentially skew context. And, according to Forbes, "[A] Google search didn’t really reveal any legitimate source that could verify the person’s name and title." Pfizer's Jan. 27 response to the allegations made against their company does not mention Walker specifically.

Jordon Trishton Walker, described as Pfizer Director of Research and Development, brags that the company researches mutating the Covid virus THEMSELVES so they could develop vaccines for the mutations PFIZER creates!!! Watch what happens when @JamesOKeefeIII confronts Mr. Walker: https://t.co/SvmAreFcGb

— Larry Elder (@larryelder) January 27, 2023

On Friday, Pfizer responded to the allegations. The best description of the company's statement comes in the title of an article published by the Independent Sentinel: "Pfizer Issues a Doublespeak Non-Denial Denial of Directed Evolution."

Pfizer's statement said the company "would like to set the record straight." It does not mention Walker. The company denied they have conducted gain-of-function research, which is research intended to increase the lethality or the transmissibility of a pathogen. Nor have they engaged in directed evolution research, which is defined by Nature Magazine as a "cyclic process that alternates between gene diversification and screening for or selection of functional gene variants."

I have no background in science and can't begin to explain the difference between the two. In fact, my mind harkens back to a song that topped the charts in the 1980's called, "She Blinded Me with Science." But I digress.

Next, the statement said, "Working with collaborators, we have conducted research where the original SARS-CoV-2 virus has been used to express the spike protein from new variants of concern." Oh, of course. How did we miss that?

[firefly_poll]

It continued: "This work is undertaken once a new variant of concern has been identified by public health authorities. This research provides a way for us to rapidly assess the ability of an existing vaccine to induce antibodies that neutralize a newly identified variant of concern. We then make this data available through peer reviewed scientific journals and use it as one of the steps to determine whether a vaccine update is required."

Next, they launched into a discussion of Paxlovid, a Pfizer drug that is widely used to treat COVID. "In addition, to meet U.S. and global regulatory requirements for our oral treatment, PAXLOVID™, Pfizer undertakes in vitro work (e.g., in a laboratory culture dish) to identify potential resistance mutations to nirmatrelvir, one of PAXLOVID’s two components. With a naturally evolving virus, it is important to routinely assess the activity of an antiviral."

The Project Veritas video was all about how the company was allegedly manipulating viruses, which Pfizer and others call a baseless conspiracy. However, Pfizer appeared to admit to this very thing in certain situations:

”Most of this work is conducted using computer simulations or mutations of the main protease–a non-infectious part of the virus. In a limited number of cases when a full virus does not contain any known gain of function mutations, such virus may be engineered to enable the assessment of antiviral activity in cells.” (Emphasis added.)

This wasn’t safe when it was done in Wuhan, China, and it isn’t safe when it’s done here. A virus doesn’t need to outsmart anyone -- all it takes is one careless mistake to hitch a ride to the outside world. Definitely not something we want being done in secret at some unaccountable laboratory or anywhere else.

This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.