One of the members of the World Health Organization investigative team who helped create a report that largely rejected a coronavirus lab-leak hypothesis said on Sunday “it makes sense” that he was picked to help with the inquiry despite his past history with the Wuhan facility in question.
“My relationship working with the Wuhan Institute of Virology is public. We’ve been publishing papers for 15 years on this issue. Our funding comes from the federal government, so it gets sanctioned by the U.S. government,” Peter Daszak, the leader of the EcoHealth Alliance, told CNN’s Fareed Zakaria when asked to respond to allegations of bias or the potential for a “conflict of interest” in the matter.
“If you want to bring together a group of experts to really have a deep understanding of how a coronavirus would emerge in China, it makes sense to bring in the people who’ve been working in China for 15 years on coronaviruses with the same scientists that we need to talk to, and that was my role on the team. … I think I brought value to that,” Daszak continued.
A final draft of the WHO-China study concluded a Wuhan lab leak was “extremely unlikely.” The report said a jump from bats to another animal to humans was most probable, and the WHO team proposed more studies into each avenue of origin, except the lab-leak hypothesis. Daszak and the international team conducting the study have been roiled by allegations that they bowed to the Chinese government and allowed undue influence into the findings.
WHO INVESTIGATOR ADMITS IT TOOK CHINA’S WORD ON WUHAN LAB LEAK
The United States and 13 other world powers last week issued a joint statement calling for “transparent and independent analysis and evaluation” into the origins of the virus. The nations added that the study should be “free from interference.”
“Together, we support a transparent and independent analysis and evaluation, free from interference and undue influence, of the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic,” the statement read. “In this regard, we join in expressing shared concerns regarding the recent WHO-convened study in China, while at the same time reinforcing the importance of working together toward the development and use of a swift, effective, transparent, science-based, and independent process for international evaluations of such outbreaks of unknown origin in the future.”
Daszak defended the findings during his Sunday appearance.
“Well, this is a scientific report, so what we did here is look at scientific evidence, data, information about all the possible pathways this virus could have taken from the wildlife host, which we think is probably a bat, into Wuhan and cause the pandemic,” he told Zakaria.
“What we found when we visited the laboratories in Wuhan and looked at the literature that’s been published for them [and] asked them pretty tough questions about these origins, we simply found no evidence that suggests those labs or that lab, in particular, is the source. We deemed it extremely unlikely that it came from that lab,” he added.
Robert Redfield, who was the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention under former President Donald Trump, said COVID-19 likely originated through an accidental escape from the Wuhan lab and hinted this occurred following gain-of-function research there.
“I am of the point of view that I still think the most likely etiology of this pathology in Wuhan was from a laboratory. Escaped,” Redfield said, adding that “it’s not unusual for respiratory pathogens that are being worked on in a laboratory to infect the laboratory worker.”
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Secretary of State Antony Blinken cast doubt on the report during an appearance last week on State of the Union on CNN.
“There’s a report coming out shortly by the World Health Organization — we’ve got real concerns about the methodology and the process that went into that report, including the fact that the government in Beijing apparently helped to write it — but let’s see what comes out in that report,” Blinken said. “But we do need to have both accountability for the past, but I think our focus needs to be on building a stronger system for the future.”
