A member of the World Health Organization’s coronavirus origins investigative team who previously worked with the Wuhan Institute of Virology celebrated the WHO’s findings dismissing the lab leak hypothesis, criticized the Biden administration and U.S. intelligence, and defended China to CCP-linked outlets.
Peter Daszak, a British-born American scientist who runs the New York-based EcoHealth Alliance and had used some of the millions his group received from the National Institutes of Health to fund bat coronavirus studies at the Wuhan lab, spent the 24 hours after the joint China-WHO team released its findings on Tuesday hitting critics of China and the WHO.
“Joe Biden has to look tough on China,” Daszak tweeted in response to a South China Morning Post article detailing how the Biden administration would not necessarily believe the China-WHO conclusions without the United States doing its own inquiry. “Please don’t rely too much on US intel: increasingly disengaged under Trump & frankly wrong on many aspects. Happy to help WH with their quest to verify, but don’t forget it’s ‘TRUST’ then ‘VERIFY’!”
State Department spokesman Ned Price responded to the WHO press conference by saying that “I wouldn’t want to be conclusive yet before we’ve seen the report,” adding that they would be drawing “on information collected and analyzed by our own intelligence community.” He said, “The Chinese, at least heretofore, has not offered the requisite transparency that we need.”
Dr. Peter Ben Embarek, the head of the visiting WHO team in Wuhan, announced on Tuesday that the WHO considered four main hypotheses: direct transmission from an animal species to the human population, through an intermediate host species, through frozen foods, and a “laboratory-related incident.” He said that a jump from an animal to another animal to a human was the most likely path of transmission, claimed that an accidental release from a Wuhan lab was “extremely unlikely,” and suggested that it wouldn’t be investigated further.
Chinese state-run television channel CGTN tweeted that Daszak “warned Joe Biden not to rely too much on US intel.” He replied: “Just reporting the facts of the case! No spin, no politics. I’m delighted Joe Biden is our president but am hoping for a bit more ‘reality’ in the way scientific issues are analyzed. Let’s not play politics with the pandemic any more!!”
U.S. officials have “reason to believe” that Chinese researchers at the Wuhan lab caught the coronavirus months before it developed into a pandemic, according to former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. Pompeo said Tuesday that “not a thing” has changed his suspicions, implying that the Chinese government could seek to distort findings from the WHO’s inquiry.
Daszak weighed in again Wednesday, saying, “Let me be clear. I’m disappointed that a statement came out that might undermine the veracity of this work even before the report is released. Again — as the sole U.S. citizen on this team, I’m happy to talk with White House re: findings of WHO mission.”
Matthew Pottinger, a former Trump deputy national security adviser, said in December 2020 that “there is a growing body of evidence to say that a laboratory leak or accident is very much a credible possibility” and that “even establishment figures in Beijing have openly dismissed the wet market story.”
Of particular concern has been the biosafety level 4 lab in Wuhan that researches bat coronaviruses.
Last February, Daszak helped organize a letter in the Lancet, which stated, “We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin.” The letter defended China’s “remarkable” coronavirus response, saying that Chinese scientists and health professionals “have worked diligently and effectively to … share their results transparently with the global health community.” Daszak told Science magazine that month that “we have a choice whether to stand up and support colleagues who are being attacked and threatened daily by conspiracy theorists.” Emails show the key role that Daszak played in drafting and circulating the letter.
Last April, it was revealed that between $3.4 million and $3.7 million in grants from the NIH had gone to EcoHealth Alliance from 2014 to 2019, which in turn helped fund more research at the Wuhan lab, including research into “the risk of future coronavirus emergence from wildlife using in-depth field investigations across the human-wildlife interface in China.”
Daszak conducted interviews with CGTN and the Global Times (a Chinese state-run newspaper) on Tuesday and retweeted the latter outlet as it claimed, “Aside from China, global experts are looking at Southeast Asia, including Cambodia for potential origins of coronavirus.”
He told the outlet that “there was a virus from Thailand close to the SARS-CoV-2, and also Japan and Cambodia” and “Ecohealth Alliance is already starting our work in tracing their origins.”
He also went on CGTN’s World View and argued that “the cold chain hypothesis — we know that it’s controversial, but there is good evidence from the outbreaks in Beijing, Qingdao, and Dalian.” The Chinese government has been pushing this line for months.
U.S. Embassy officials in China raised concerns in 2018 about biosecurity at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. One State Department cable warned about a “serious shortage of appropriately trained technicians and investigators needed to safely operate this high-containment laboratory.”
The cable also mentioned meeting with Shi Zhengli, the head of the coronavirus research effort at the Wuhan lab, known as “batwoman” for her research related to diseases in bats.
Shi originally “wondered if [the municipal health authority] got it wrong,” she told Scientific American. She admitted asking herself, “Could they have come from our lab?” But the magazine said she “breathed a sigh of relief when … none of the sequences matched those of the viruses her team had sampled from bat caves.” Shi told Chinese state television in August that “there could not possibly have been a lab leak.” Viruses have escaped from Chinese labs in the past.
Daszak retweeted CGTN’s Tian Wei when she said that Daszak “fought back at unfounded accusations against his Chinese peers” on her show. During his appearance, Wei described Zhengli as Daszak’s “friend” and asked him about the Wuhan lab.
“I hear about this very early on in the outbreak, that our colleagues in China were being attacked, they were being accused of designing a virus and spreading it, and they were getting death threats. I mean, how outrageous is that?” Daszak said. “They’re fighting an outbreak, they’re being accused of causing an outbreak. I have my own conspiracy attacks in the U.S. that are still going on today.”
Hume Field, who works with Daszak at EcoHealth, tweeted that “the lab escape hypothesis has been critically assessed and discounted/discarded.” Daszak replied, “You said it Hume… The opinion was a unanimous one.”
He retweeted Australasia Strategy Group Director Dominic Meagher’s comment that “everything else was a diversion” in reference to the WHO’s assessment that the coronavirus had a natural origin, and Daszak replied, “Couldn’t have said it better myself! Shame the diversion worked so well for 12 months, & I think in the US it will linger a lot longer.”
Daszak tweeted that “cold chain food pathways are potentially important” and quoted the WHO team leader saying that “further work on this” Wuhan lab leak hypothesis “is not necessary.”
Liang Wannian, the head of the Chinese team that worked with WHO, focused heavily on the possibility that the coronavirus was introduced to humans through frozen food products — a theory heavily promoted by the Communist Party after Chinese diplomats early on also pushed baseless claims that the disease originated from the U.S. military.
During an interview, CNN pressed Daszak on what actual evidence he and the WHO had for their claims that the coronavirus may have originated from frozen foods brought into the Huanan market from elsewhere in China or Southeast Asia.
“The specific evidence comes from the work that China has been doing, that Chinese scientists have been doing, really from day one of the outbreak,” Daszak replied, though he admitted the animals had all tested negative.
Daszak was briefly pressed by the BBC when he was asked: “Given that this report rules out a lab leak, isn’t your credibility on that somewhat undermined by the fact that you were ruling it out before you even came here?”
But he replied: “A very large group of experts have looked at this … and they’ve come to their conclusion, and I have as well, and what they say is ‘extremely unlikely’ — and that stands alone.”
China has done its utmost to thwart investigations into the origins of the virus, which subsequently turned into the pandemic that has killed 2.34 million people around the world, and the Trump administration withdrew from the WHO in 2020, although the Biden administration rejoined it.
Daszak did not respond to the Washington Examiner’s questions.
