"The World Health Organization's (WHO) latest mission to Wuhan to trace the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic is back in the headlines. But not for the right reasons...It is no coincidence that Daszak was handpicked for this effort. "
"To understand why, we need to go back and look at Daszak’s close affiliation to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), dating back to at least 2013, when he co-authored a bat coronavirus study with the director of the lab, Shi Zhengli."
"But it’s not just Daszak’s collaboration with Shi that was a problem but also what they were collaborating on. The work done by Shi and Daszak was no secret. The fact that they isolated a deadly virus from a bat was celebrated in research circles"
"But not everyone was thrilled about what Daszak and Shi were doing...According to Rutgers University Professor Richard Ebright, cited in the same piece, “the only impact of this work is the creation, in a lab, of a new, non-natural risk.”"
"It was not just scientists writing in Nature that found the risk was too high. The Obama administration also determined that these gain-of-function experiments were too risky and banned them in the United States in 2014."
"Daszak himself warned of the risk of laboratory spillovers in a 2015 piece...Daszak’s collaborator Shi, the director of the WIV, had published a piece in 2010 describing how a lab leak in Yunnan Province had led to an outbreak of Hantavirus."
"But that was not the end of it. After the Obama administration banned gain-of-function experiments, Daszak outsourced the work to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The project...was funded by Dr. Anthony Fauci’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease NIAID (NIAID)."
"Daszak advertised his deeds, even tweeting out in November 2019 that “we’ve made great progress with bat SARS-related CoVs … ID’ing ones that bind to human cells, using recombinant viruses/humanized mice.”"
"In a December 2019 interview with YouTube channel MicrobeTV, Daszak boasted that he could “manipulate [coronaviruses] in the lab pretty easily.” He also explained how coronaviruses could “get into human cells in the lab” and that he had started experiments with chimeras"
"Soon after [this], news of a bat coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan started filtering out. Despite his knowledge of the pre-2020 coronavirus experiments at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, Daszak became a driving force to focus the scientific community and media on natural origins."
"In a co-authored statement published in the medical journal, The Lancet on Feb. 18, 2020, Daszak and others claimed that scientists had “overwhelmingly conclude[d] that this coronavirus originated in wildlife, as have so many other emerging pathogens.”"
"In retrospect, the last part of this sentence looks particularly contrived. As does the next part of his statement: “Conspiracy theories do nothing but create fear, rumors, and prejudice that jeopardize our global collaboration in the fight against this virus.”"
"Daszak not only drafted this statement but persuaded other scientists to sign and sought to “avoid the appearance of a political statement.” Daszak further wanted to “put it out in a way that doesn’t link it back to our collaboration so we maximize an independent voice.”"
"The final insult came when Daszak was appointed as a member of the WHO team that was supposed to get to the bottom of where the virus came from. Even before he set off for China, Daszak had already determined that the lab leak theory was a “conspiracy theory” and “pure baloney.”
"How did anyone other than the CCP think that it would be a good idea to put Daszak in charge of investigating the origins of the virus?...As long as Peter Daszak is investigating himself, we will never find out what really happened at the Wuhan Institute of Virology."
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