A report by congressional Republicans raises questions about the role played by EcoHealth Alliance’s Peter Daszak in the early stages of the COVID pandemic.
A new congressional report will tie Peter Daszak, the controversial director of the New York-based EcoHealth Alliance nonprofit, to the Chinese Communist Party’s propaganda campaign about COVID-19’s origins.
“We have uncovered strong evidence that suggests Peter Daszak is the public face of a CCP disinformation campaign designed to suppress public discussion about a potential lab leak,” states a new report, a copy of which National Review obtained before its planned publication later today, by Republicans on the House Foreign Affairs Committee.
The committee’s Republicans are releasing the document as an addendum to the COVID-origins report they issued last year. Among other things, this version highlights research from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) that viruses can be genetically modified without leaving a trace and that the WIV made unusual security-related procurements the same day that a mysterious virus database was taken off-line. “The preponderance of evidence suggests SARS-CoV-2 was accidentally released from a Wuhan Institute of Virology laboratory sometime prior to September 12, 2019,” the report concludes.
One of the most noteworthy revelations, however, might be indications that the WIV — a CCP-controlled facility — appears to have played a role in Daszak’s efforts to shape public opinion surrounding the virus’s origins.
“It’s incredibly concerning that Peter Daszak, an American scientist who has taken millions of dollars from the U.S. government, took directions from the CCP to persuade the American people a lab leak was nothing more than a ‘conspiracy theory,’” said Representative Michael McCaul, the committee’s top Republican, in a statement to National Review.
When Daszak organized a now-infamous statement referring to the lab hypothesis of COVID’s origins a “conspiracy theory” in February 2020, he did so at the behest of individuals affiliated with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, according to emails cited in the report. The specific messages in question have been accessible online for months, but the report will bring public scrutiny to the WIV’s role in organizing the Daszak statement for the first time.
“You should know that the conspiracy theorists have been very active, targeting our collaborators with some extremely unpleasant web pages in China, and some have now received death threats to themselves and their families. They have asked for any show of support we can give them,” Daszak wrote in an email on February 8, 2020, asking Rita Colwell, a microbiology professor at the University of Maryland and Johns Hopkins University affiliated with EcoHealth Alliance, to add her name to the letter.
The statement, which later appeared in the Lancet, a leading medical journal, uses similar language, vaguely referring to concerns that the virus originally leaked from a lab as a conspiracy. “Conspiracy theories do nothing but create fear, rumours, and prejudice that jeopardise our global collaboration in the fight against this virus,” wrote Daszak.
That letter, among other articles and public statements, was used by Daszak and others to create a false consensus view in the media that COVID did not originate in a lab. Since the early days of the pandemic, however, that’s changed: A number of U.S. officials across the Trump and Biden administrations have stated publicly, or reportedly mused in private, that the disease could have begun with a leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. In May, President Joe Biden ordered a 90-day investigation by the U.S. intelligence community to review any available information about such a potential origin.
It has been widely reported that Daszak organized the Lancet letter, but the Republicans’ report might be the first time that the role of the WIV in orchestrating it has been brought to prominence. The emails on which their allegation is based were initially released to the public in November 2020, after U.S. Right to Know, a nonprofit group that advocates transparency in the food system, obtained them via a Freedom of Information Act request.
Despite the group’s relative obscurity, its 466-page email cache soon became a political lightning rod: An email on February 6, 2020, revealed Daszak’s previously undisclosed role in organizing the letter — and the lengths to which he went to conceal his involvement.
When that statement was published on February 19, 2020, the world was in the initial phases of the coronavirus pandemic, and Daszak’s role went largely unexamined. Meanwhile, he played an outsized role, in that statement and his public comments, in downplaying the likelihood of a lab-leak origin of COVID.
To this day, the U.S. nonprofit director has been an invaluable resource to the Chinese Communist Party’s propagandists, who have cited him in numerous articles and videos over the past several months. Last week, the People’s Daily noted that he called China a “victim” of the Wuhan-lab theory.
In early 2021, he joined the joint WHO–China study on COVID origins, which deemed such a leak “extremely unlikely.” That determination was widely criticized, however, for all but ruling out the scenario without any evidence. WHO director general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and 13 allies of the United States panned the results of the probe.
Daszak was the only American to join the WHO team, after the three candidates put forward by the Trump administration were rejected by the WHO. At the time, critics pointed out that he had a potentially glaring conflict of interest: EcoHealth Alliance funded coronavirus research at the lab and had received millions of dollars in grant funding from the U.S. National Institutes of Health to do so. These conflicts of interest later led him to step down from the Lancet’s COVID-origins commission.
In addition to the email to Colwell, the GOP investigators point to another that hints heavily at coordination between Daszak and the WIV in downplaying the possibility of a lab leak.
The afternoon after Daszak initially sent out a draft of the statement that would appear in the Lancet 13 days later, he wrote to Ralph Baric, a professor at the University of North Carolina and the world’s leading coronavirus researcher, about a conversation he’d had with Linfa Wang, a Duke-National University of Singapore professor who is also regarded as one of the world’s preeminent authorities on coronaviruses. The report notes that Wang, a PRC national, also chairs the WIV’s scientific advisory board for emerging diseases and had been in Wuhan, likely for meetings with top officials at the institute, until January 18, 2020.
“He thinks, and I agree with him, that you, me and him should not sign this statement, so it has some distance from us and therefore doesn’t work in a counterproductive way,” wrote Daszak in the February 6 email, referring to a conversation he had with Wang about a draft of the Lancet statement. “We’ll then put it out in a way that doesn’t link it back to our collaboration so we maximize an independent voice,” he added.
Baric wrote back: “I also think this is a good decision. Otherwise it looks self-serving and we lose impact.”
That email has been widely commented on, as it shows that Daszak had wanted to obscure his role in the Lancet statement. However, this report’s discussion of the message places a new emphasis on Wang’s role at the WIV and the vast influence of the institute’s Chinese Communist Party Committee.
The GOP lawmakers’ report also notes the extensive record of collaboration between Wang, Daszak, and Shi Zhengli, the WIV director and another subject of fierce controversy, on coronavirus research.
Since supporting the Daszak-led letter, Baric has come around to the possibility of the lab-leak scenario; in April 2021 he signed on to a letter endorsing further investigation of the Wuhan lab in Science magazine. Daszak has not. Instead, after the Science letter and other events brought the lab-leak hypothesis to prominence, he wrote another letter to the Lancet, essentially doubling down on his claims from over a year ago.
But Wang’s role in all of this has remained a bit of a mystery. Following publication of the U.S. Right to Know email trove last November, Alina Chan, a postdoctoral fellow at the Broad Institute, noted on Twitter that “the 2 scientists who would’ve known the most about lab origins plausibility did not agree to sign the letter: Ralph Baric and Linfa Wang.” She also wrote of the prominent researchers, “As far as I can tell, neither one has ruled out a lab-based scenario, even if they have suggested avenues for investigating natural origins.”
The GOP team faces roadblocks to uncovering more information about the CCP’s role in the origins-disinformation campaign. McCaul said it was concerning that Daszak didn’t respond to any of the investigators’ questions.
“That’s why I’m calling for Peter Daszak to be subpoenaed before the House Foreign Affairs Committee. It’s our responsibility to conduct oversight of taxpayer’s money — and we need to know exactly what Peter Daszak was spending that money on.”
The report brings new attention to these questions, casting a harsh light on figures who have been sympathetic to Beijing’s position on the origins of COVID. As Beijing has rejected the WHO’s calls for a second-phase investigation, including a closer look at the lab, it seems that only a bipartisan congressional investigation — using subpoenas of Daszak, the Lancet, and others — can reveal the WIV’s role in this disinformation effort and bring us closer to understanding the origins of this calamity.