The good news from all this is that [Peter] Daszak finally recused himself from a COVID-19 commission that was established by the medical journal The Lancet after his conflicts of interest with the WIV came to light. The bad news is that up until then, Daszak had been functioning as an apologist for the Beijing regime, parroting its nonsense that the SARS-CoV-2 originated somewhere else and somehow made its way to China.
Worse still, Daszak was the only representative of the U.S. appointed to a 10-person panel convened by the World Health Organization (WHO). That panel's report, which was released in February, was dismissed even by the Biden administration as superficial and unpersuasive. The joint WHO-China team's report asserted strong conclusions about how the pandemic started based on very little supporting evidence. Nor did Chinese authorities fully cooperate with its investigation.
For public confidence, however, the worst part may be that we only learned of Daszak's conflict of interest because of the FOIA request of Anthony Fauci's email archive. This means that no one at WHO seemed to think that Daszak's direct financial ties to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which he had funded with $600,000 of grant money to perform research on bat coronaviruses, might make him unsuitable to participate in thoroughly scrutinizing its procedures, record-keeping, anti-contamination habits, and other practices.
Rutgers University professor of chemical biology Richard H. Ebright, who is frequently quoted in media reports as an expert on coronaviruses and public health, said in April it "would be hard to imagine a more brazen lie" that Daszak has no conflict of interest with the WIV.
Peter Daszak functioned as an apologist for the Beijing regime, parroting its nonsense that the SARS-CoV-2 originated somewhere else and somehow made its way to China. Pictured: Daszak waves to the media from inside the Wuhan Hilton Optics Valley hotel in Wuhan, China on February 6, 2021. (Photo by Hector Retamal/AFP via Getty Images)
Peter Daszak is in many ways typical of the international world of disease prevention. As the president of EcoHealth Alliance, Daszak has spent millions of dollars of grant money from the National Institutes of Health in recent years. His organization's special focus is on preventing the outbreak of emerging diseases, such as coronaviruses. He was deeply involved with the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) because his organization had funded bat coronavirus research that lab was doing when the COVID-19 outbreak occurred in late 2019.
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