Why two scientists are sounding the alarm about the WHO’s COVID-19 investigative team.
Why two scientists are sounding the alarm about the WHO’s COVID-19 investigative team.
W hen a company accused of wrongdoing announces that it will conduct an “internal investigation,” the interested public is rightly skeptical. Everyone knows the drill: Asses will be covered and maybe, if the top executives are really feeling the heat, they will offer a sacrificial lamb in the form of a middle manager.
Hiding behind the imprimatur of the WHO, China is, in effect, conducting an internal investigation into the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic with the assistance of Peter Daszak, the only American that Beijing allowed to join the WHO team.
That’s right, allowed: According to the Wall Street Journal, the WHO gave Beijing veto power over which American scientists would be appointed to the team tasked with producing a joint report with Chinese scientists on the origins of the virus. Beijing vetoed all three scientists nominated by the U.S. but didn’t object to Daszak, who applied separately.
Daszak, as should be obvious by the fact that Beijing accepted his participation, has deep ties to China and an abiding professional interest in protecting the reputation of the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV).
As president of the research nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance, Daszak partnered with the WIV in 2014 to study bat coronaviruses and, over the course of the next five years, provided $598,000 in NIH funding to the Chinese lab to support that research. (The NIH suspended the funding under former president Donald Trump until EcoHealth complied with certain transparency demands. Daszak has publicly resisted those demands, but the NIH confirmed in a March 12 email to National Review that the grant’s status has not changed under President Biden thus far.)
While it may seem natural for Daszak to defend his organization’s funding, his behavior since the pandemic began has far exceeded his organizational ambit.
In February 2020, before COVID-19 became a household name, he organized a statement published in the medical journal The Lancet condemning the “conspiracy theory” that COVID had escaped from the WIV. What’s more, emails obtained by the watchdog group Right to Know show that he tried to conceal his role in whipping support for the letter among fellow scientists, six of whom went on to join the WHO investigative team.
So, nearly half of the 17 western scientists on the team publicly dismissed the lab-leak hypothesis barely a week after the WHO had announced that the disease caused by the novel coronavirus would be named COVID-19. Four of those signatories to the Lancet letter who went on to join the WHO team currently work under Daszak at EcoHealth Alliance, which did not respond to a request for comment.
Daszak’s role in the Lancet statement, coupled with his lack of transparency, shifted his conflict of interest from the “theoretical” to the “material,” according to Gilles Demaneuf, a New Zealand–based data scientist who co-organized an open letter in February calling out Daszak’s conflict of interest and laying out what a full and transparent investigation into the pandemic’s origins would look like.
“He had a conflict of interest and then he acted on this conflict of interest,” Demaneuf told National Review. “This is someone with a conflict of interest acting in a very specific way, which is basically to shut down a line of investigation.”
Demaneuf felt compelled to speak out after the joint WHO team dismissed the lab-leak hypothesis in a February press conference held after a tightly controlled twelve-day trip to Wuhan. He joined Jamie Metzl, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Institute and an adviser to the WHO on gene editing, in organizing the letter, which was signed by 24 of their fellow scientists from all over the world.
Metzl and Demaneuf were alarmed both by the presence of conflict itself, and by Dansak’s failure to disclose it publicly.
Daszak and his allies have argued that because his work with the WIV is well-known and a matter of public record, there was no need for any kind of formal announcement. Daszak did, however, disclose the conflict in a letter to the WHO when applying to join the team.
Demaneuf has a “big problem” with Daszak’s “everybody-already-knows” defense. He explained that scientists are required to disclose potential conflicts of interest when publishing in scientific journals for an audience of a few thousand fellow professional scientists. That the bar would be lower for a public report on the origins of a global pandemic that will be read by millions of laymen astonishes Demaneuf.
“The WHO is actually answering questions that hundreds of millions or billions of people want the answers to,” Demaneuf said. “And they’re not scientists, they’re not aware of these things, so it’s even more important in the case of the WHO to disclose this conflict of interest.”
Demaneuf’s concern was heightened when he realized that Daszak seemed to be acting as an unofficial spokesman for the group over the summer, before ceding the floor to fellow team member Ben Embarek earlier this year, around the time that his conflict of interest began attracting more attention.
“The person who was most often on camera speaking to western journalists and Chinese journalists was Peter Daszak and if you had just followed that you would think that Daszak was the official spokesman for the group,” Demaneuf said. “That’s the impression I got when he was hinting at the results of the work.”
“I wouldn’t be surprised if the WHO communications group had a good look into it and decided to start cleaning up the situation,” he added when asked about Daszak’s disappearance from the scene.
For Metzl, while Daszak’s conflict of interest is certainly disqualifying, it’s of secondary concern relative to the structure of the investigative team itself. The group is composed of 17 Chinese scientists, 16 of whom are unknown to the public, and 17 western scientists, only one of whom, Daszak, is American. The two sides will negotiate every line of the public report on their findings, which is expected in the coming days.
“This report does not stem from a thorough investigation into the origins of COVID-19 but instead stems from a two-week study tour in Wuhan where members of this committee engaged in highly curated conversations and were chaperoned at all times by Chinese apparatchiks,” Metzl said. “The report that comes out as a consensus report . . . it is not designed to be and cannot be the type of full an unrestricted international investigation that’s required.”
Metzl was encouraged when the WHO clarified that the independent team’s dismissal of the lab-leak hypothesis did not represent its official position, and he hopes that the WHO will take similar steps to distance itself from the team’s COVID-origins report when it inevitably falls short of what’s needed. While Metzl stressed that the investigative team is independent and only delivers its conclusions to the WHO proper — which is open to accept or reject them — he appreciates that that nuance is lost on a public who will accept the team’s findings as the WHO’s final word on the subject.
Demaneuf is similarly pessimistic about the report, pointing out that the Chinese scientists on the team will insist that its first two pages suggest a range of origin possibilities that absolve Beijing of its role in covering up the early outbreak.
“This report will need to be validated by the Chinese side. It’s a game of numbers. Seventeen western scientists and 17 Chinese scientists,” he said. “Every sentence will need to be negotiated. I can tell you the Chinese will push enormously in the front two pages, that’s what they do. And generally you’ll see the WHO pushing back in later sections.”
While their letter simply calls for an open investigation that will explore all possibilities, both Demaneuf and Metzl have become increasingly convinced of the one origin story that the forthcoming report is sure to ignore: that of the lab leak.
Demaneuf puts the odds of the virus resulting from a lab leak at roughly 70 percent, citing the lack of a natural human-host population that could account for the virus’s ability to rapidly adapt to human hosts, absent its cultivation in a lab.
“The fact is that this is very well adapted to humans which would require some population somewhere to host this virus and right now we haven’t found any animal host. We haven’t found any village or place where this virus adapted. There’s nothing.”
Metzl, for his part, seems to have been swayed by U.S. intelligence claims that the Chinese military was doing research at the WIV — a claim that Beijing has not yet denied.
But in any case, they are both worried that the world will never have the answers it needs to ensure the COVID nightmare is never repeated.
“The safety of everybody on earth and future generations depends in part on figuring out what went wrong,” Metzl said.