- Dr. Peter Daszak described how easy it was to manipulate bat-based coronaviruses in an interview filmed just a few weeks before the outbreak of COVID-19 in Wuhan.
- Daszak has close ties to the Wuhan Institute of Virology and reportedly rejected the National Institute of Health’s request that he organize an external inspection of the laboratory.
- Daszak orchestrated a statement at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic that condemned “conspiracy theories” that the virus had no natural origin.
- Daszak now serves on a World Health Organization panel that is currently investigating the origins of the pandemic in China.
A US doctor on the World Health Organization team investigating the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic discussed his work on manipulating bat-based coronaviruses in laboratories just weeks before the COVID-19 outbreak in Wuhan.
Dr. Peter Daszak, a close associate of China’s leading bat-based coronavirus researcher and a key figure in directing taxpayer funds to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, explained how easy it was to change coronavirus during a filmed podcast interview on December 9, 2019.
“You can manipulate them in the laboratory quite easily,” said Daszak. “The protein Spike drives a lot of what happens with the coronavirus. Zoonotic risk. So, you can get the sequence, you can build the protein – and we worked with Ralph Baric at UNC to do that – and insert the backbone of another virus and do some work in the lab. ”
It is unclear where the manipulation of the Daszak coronavirus described in the podcast, also known as function gain research, was conducted. Daszak did not return several requests for comment.
Daszak said manipulating coronaviruses in laboratories is a useful tool in developing treatments and vaccines for potential future outbreaks, but some virologists say this research is playing with fire.
“The only impact of this work is the creation, in the laboratory, of a new and unnatural risk,” Rutgers University molecular biologist Richard Ebright told New York magazine.
There is no evidence to suggest that the Baric laboratory at the University of North Carolina has anything to do with COVID-19. However, the high-containment laboratory was the site of a “near accident” incident in 2016, after a researcher was bitten by a mouse infected by a laboratory-created variant of the SARS coronavirus, according to ProPublica.
And Baric told New York magazine that he cannot rule out the possibility that COVID-19 leaked involuntarily from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
“Can you rule out a leak from the lab? The answer in this case is probably not, ”said Baric.
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Daszak also said in the podcast that he and his team discovered “more than 100 new SARS-related coronaviruses” after seven years of bat surveillance in southern China.
“We even found people with Yunnan antibodies to SARS-related coronaviruses, so there is human exposure,” said Daszak. “We are just beginning another five years of work to analyze cohorts in southern China and see how often overflow occurs.”
Chinese researcher Shi Zhengli, known to her colleagues as the “bat lady”, reported in early 2017 that she and her colleagues at the Wuhan Institute of Virology discovered 11 new strains of SARS-related viruses in horseshoe bats in Yunnan province , located more than 1,600 kilometers from Wuhan. (RELATED: EXCLUSIVE: Coronavirus expert says the virus may have leaked from Wuhan’s lab)
Shi told Scientific American in March that she lost sleep worried that COVID-19 might have leaked from her laboratory in Wuhan after learning about the outbreak in December 2019.
“I never expected this kind of thing to happen in Wuhan, in central China,” said Shi.
Daszak directed funds from former President Barack Obama’s Predict program and the National Institute of Health to Shi’s bat surveillance team through his non-profit organization, EcoHealth Alliance, according to New York magazine.
Shi contributed to a study published in February 2020, reporting that COVID-19 is 96.2% identical to a viral strain detected in one of Yunnan’s horseshoe bats.
Former President Donald Trump’s State Department announced on Friday that it obtained evidence that researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology fell ill with flu-like symptoms in the fall of 2019, before the first known cases of COVID-19, a signal that experts had already made would be evidence pointing to the theory that the virus leaked involuntarily from Wuhan’s laboratory.
Daszak was a key figure in leading the attack at the start of the pandemic against the theory that COVID-19 leaked involuntarily from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Daszak orchestrated a statement published in the medical journal The Lancet in February, ahead of any serious research into the origins of COVID-19, condemning “conspiracy theories” that suggest the virus has no natural origin.
A spokesman for Daszak told The Wall Street Journal on Friday that his statement, which was cited by various media outlets – and fact-checking organizations to censor unwanted investigations – during the beginning of the pandemic, was made to protect Chinese scientists.
“The Lancet letter was written during a time when Chinese scientists were receiving death threats and the letter was meant to show support for them, as they were caught between an important job of trying to prevent an outbreak and the crushing of online harassment” said Daszak. spokesman told the newspaper.
Daszak is part of the WHO 10-person panel that began investigating the origins of COVID-19 in China on Thursday.
Daszak obtained a position on the investigative panel, despite his earlier NIH objection to ceasing funding from the Wuhan Institute of Virology until he arranged for an external inspection of the laboratory.
“I was not trained as a private investigator,” said Daszak, according to New York magazine.
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