You have commented 339 times on Rantburg.

Your Name
Your e-mail (optional)
Website (optional)
My Original Nic        Pic-a-Nic        Sorry. Comments have been closed on this article.
Bold Italic Underline Strike Bullet Blockquote Small Big Link Squish Foto Photo
-Lurid Crime Tales-
Peter Daszak, major funder of Wuhan lab, faces growing scrutiny amid COVID origins probe
2021-06-26
[Just The News] As interest in the Wuhan "lab-leak theory" has intensified, a man at the center of the controversy has undergone a dramatic reversal of public and professional fortune.

Peter Daszak funded the Wuhan Institute of Virology from NIH grant awards that were largely shielded from wide public view. Later he posed as an ostensibly disinterested expert on the origins of COVID-19 in his roles as official international investigator, scientific researcher, and media commentator.

A British-born zoologist, Daszak is the president of EcoHealth Alliance, a New York-based research nonprofit focused on emerging infectious diseases. Closely involved with the global response to SARS-Cov-2 since early last year, Daszak was among the organizers and signatories of an influential letter in February 2020 condemning "conspiracy theories" surrounding the potential laboratory origin of the COVID-19 virus. He was given space in major international newspapers to argue vehemently against the lab-leak theory. And he was eventually selected to participate in the World Health Organization's investigation into the origins of SARS-Cov-2.

Yet in recent months, Daszak has suffered a fall from public grace: He has been sidelined from further investigations into COVID-19's origins; his earlier advocacy of the "natural origin" theory of COVID-19 has been retroactively footnoted to acknowledge (with varying degrees of transparency) his links to the Wuhan lab; and he has been subject to harsh media criticism as those links have become more widely known.

The editors of the renowned British medical journal The Lancet, for instance, this month published an addendum to the letter Daszak coauthored in March of last year, expanding on Daszak's "competing interests" regarding the subject of SARS-Cov-2's origins. The note did not mention the Wuhan Institute of Virology specifically — instead obliquely referring to "EcoHealth Alliance's work in China" — but more than a year after the letter was first published, his conflicting interests were tacitly acknowledged.

This was not the first time editors were forced to issue an update to clarify Daszak's associations. His June 2020 article in the Guardian originally made no mention of his link to the Wuhan Institute of Virology; that clarification was added about a week after the article was first published.

Even in cases where the research links between Daszak and the WIV were initially acknowledged, Daszak's heavy funding of the Wuhan lab was left unspoken, as in reports in the Wall Street Journal and in Vox.
Related:
Peter Daszak: 2021-06-23 What happened when Trump tried to stop U.S. funding for the Communist Chinese Wuhan Lab
Peter Daszak: 2021-06-20 Google indirectly funded Wuhan Labs via Peter Daszak for over a decade!
Peter Daszak: 2021-06-17 A Chinese Lab Virus? So Now What?
Posted by:Besoeker

#2  This guy needs to be put on trial along with his funders before he's killed.
Posted by: Thing From Snowy Mountain   2021-06-26 08:46  

#1  Predictions on when he might join Epstein and McAfee ?
Posted by: Besoeker   2021-06-26 08:15  

00:00