"African diplomats are becoming exasperated by China's demands for diplomatic support on every issue from Covid-19's origins to the human rights of the Uighurs in Xinjiang province,.."
"..whether it's in the World Health Organization, the UN Human Rights Council, diplomatic sources told Africa Confidential."
"Chinese diplomats email, text and call their African counterparts directly to get them to sign joint letters, support motions and other measures.."
"..to back Chinese positions, we have been told, circumventing their own chain of command.
A text is often provided by Beijing's diplomats for African envoys to sign on the dotted line."
"The latest issue to join the list on which African countries are also expected to line up behind Beijing is that of Covid-19's origins."
"We Africans thought that China was much better than France in dealing with us. They came with money, never asked for anything in exchange. Well, now we have to vote the way they want. If we don't, they call our government and you know what will happen to us if we don't obey."
As China was started to steam ahead on its own in 2017-18, be it sampling, GoF or various synthetic biology experiments, EHA was starting to be left behind.
EHA tried to stay on the train with the GVP and DEFUSE. That failed, as the risk-reward equations looked bad.
But within the NIH grants framework, Daszak was able to obfuscate his difficulties just enough, while the NIH was clueless enough to keep the game going into new territories.
Then as the degrading picture became more clear, some on the Track II Biodefense side thought that this was basically the only chance left to keep a seat on that train.
So, just at the time when it was losing control, the NIH looked the other way.
The result is a screw-up that was predictable from day one (back in 2002/3).
Now the NIH finds itself with grant and policy breaches, with Fauci demonstrably trying to prevent an investigation.
But the fact is that this was a Track II Biodefense game, played within the NIH, with imperatives of its own.
It’s like trying to fit a square plug in a round hole.
1/8 The story of one of the worst policy failures in US history in a nutshell, as an introduction to my latest work on the USAID and EHA grants in South East Asia:
Left Behind:
@emilyakopp @natashaloder @zeynep @KatherineEban
How come that Daszak's R01 AI110964 lists San Pya clinic (Myanmar) and Institut Pasteur (Cambodia) as in-country partners, when in fact these confirmed that they were NEVER contacted by EHA and have no idea why they are showing up on the grant?
2/11 Not only that, but the April 2020 update by EHA positively states that San Pya Clinic and Institut Pasteur Cambodia performed their assigned tasks and sent their samples to the WIV.
@emilyakopp @KatherineEban
3/11 I am not sure how you call this, but mis-reporting and likely fraud come to mind..
Not exactly a typo:
These entities were listed over and over in the grant documents, and are even attested as having done their work by EHA, but were never contacted by EHA!
@R_H_Ebright
Daszak did 4 months of detention in 1986 for stealing a TV set, a hi-fi, a statue and some other items, so that he could indulge in his alcohol fuelled ‘fun’ at other people’s expense.
This fraud later managed to get hold of 100s millions of US taxpayers money.
I may be losing track, but it is at least his third retraction.
There is also on expression of concern for one of his papers.
@thackerpd @KatherineEban @emilyakopp
Here is an important reminder to the Kindergarten epidemiologists who aim to compare themselves to John Snow.
Epidemiology 101:
John Snow never considered his map as proving anything. He relied on fortuitous control groups and cases reviews to establish causality
@mvankerkhove
See for instance this image and extract from a recent paper:
Confirmation of the centrality of the Huanan market among early COVID-19 cases
Reply to Stoyan and Chiu (2024) arxiv.org/pdf/2403.05859…
John Snow was not a colourist of maps, sorry.
I know that popular culture has transformed the Broad Street map into a meme, but that is totally wrong and can only hurt the discipline.
@RichardKock6 @JamieMetzl