Jack Crowe has an explosive report on Peter Daszak’s conflicts of interests as a WHO investigator into the origins of the coronavirus.
On the homepage, Jack Crowe has an explosive report on Peter Daszak’s conflicts of interests as a WHO investigator into the origins of the coronavirus.
The article details how Daszak, who is president of the EcoHealth Alliance, led a months-long campaign against the lab leak hypothesis of COVID’s origins, even though his organization had used an NIH grant to fund research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, from which the disease is thought to have escaped. (As Crowe explains, the grant was first issued in 2015. It was revoked by the Trump administration when officials worried about EcoHealth’s lack of transparency, and later reinstated).
It’s worth reading in conjunction with new reporting by the National Pulse’s Natalie Winters that lists all the studies that Daszak coauthored involving either co-authors with ties to Chinese party-state entities, or funding by such institutions.
The organizations implicated in Daszak’s research include the Chinese Academy of Science, the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences, and programs operated by the Ministry of Science and Technology. Like every other sector of society in China today, scientific research simply cannot exist independently of the Chinese Communist Party’s aims, as Winters points out:
The National Natural Science Foundation of China (NNSFC) has also funded Daszak’s studies on Bat Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome and novel astroviruses from small mammals in China, and Serological Evidence of Bat SARS-Related Coronavirus.
The NNSFC “implements works entrusted by the State Council and relevant governmental administrations,” lists itself as a state-owned institution formed “under the loving care of comrade Deng Xiaoping.” The NNSFC also describes itself as “guided by President Xi Jinping’s Socialist Thoughts with Chinese Characteristics for the new era.”
One 2015 paper noted by Winters — co-authored by Daszak and a team of Chinese researchers, including some with People’s Liberation Army affiliations — attempted to sketch out the future of cooperation on combating infectious diseases between U.S. and Chinese scientists. All of this is all the more relevant in light of the State Department’s claims that “The Wuhan Institute of Virology has engaged in classified research, including laboratory animal experiments, on behalf of the Chinese military since at least 2017.”
The authors of the paper had gathered for a meeting in China, and the document summarized the findings of their discussions:
These leading nations have the opportunity to set an example for best practices in science by combining intellectual, technological, and financial resources to help reduce the impacts from emerging infectious diseases at every level, from families to global economies. Working more closely together, the world can head off the threat of pandemics through an improved understanding of the underlying drivers of disease emergence, with benefits for science, health, ecological integrity, and economic well-being.
Back then — the first year of Daszak’s NIH grant — such cooperation on global public-health issues was a no-brainer, which is why U.S. funding offered to Daszak was used to support WIV research. In the intervening years, clearly, and following the outset of the pandemic, much has changed in this reflexive sort of engagement with Beijing.
But it seems, though, that Daszak’s interactions with Chinese institutions have convinced him of an obstinate need to placate an authoritarian regime with no true interest in fighting infectious diseases, to the point that he’s been one of its loudest defenders in the scientific community. And up until now, Daszak, who was lauded as a credible expert and rewarded with favorable media coverage, was massively successful in discrediting the lab-leak theory, despite his many, obvious conflicts of interest.