Peter Daszak

Peter Daszak      (virologist)
Born	UK
Nationality	US
Alma mater	Bangor University, University of East London
Member of	"Team Worst Case Scenario", EcoHealth Alliance, Global Virome Project, Lancet/COVID-19 Commission
Perpetrator of	DEFUSE
Interests	• zoonosis • Covid-19 • coronaviruses • “climate change” • diseases
Interest of	David E. Martin
One of Zhengli Shi’s "longtime partners" on the development of new coronaviruses. Appeared with Bill Gates in November 2019. Energetic proponent of the "lone bat" theory and supporter of the creation of synthetic viruses as research tools.

“We don’t think twice about the cost of protecting against terrorism... We need to start thinking about pandemics the same way.”
Peter Daszak (21 April 2020) 

Dr. Peter Daszak is a UK educated virologist who for years has worked with Zhengli Shi on the development of new coronaviruses. He is president of EcoHealth Alliance, which disbursed NIH funds for the investigation of emerging viruses to laboratories including the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

He has appeared with Bill Gates on multiple occasions to promote the zoonotic theory of COVID-19. After the NIH cut his funding, CBS named him "a scientist whose work is helping in the search for a COVID-19 cure" and that it was "being undercut by pandemic politics."

Background

Peter Daszak took a B.Sc. in Zoology with applied zoology in Bangor University in 1987, followed by a Ph.D. from the University of East London,

Activities

In 2005, Daszak co-authored Bats Are Natural Reservoirs of SARS-Like Coronaviruses with a group of co-authors including Zhengli Shi.

Daszak has worked with the WHO.

Peter Daszak's EcoHealth Alliance was awarded $666,442 to carry our research into "Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence."

Media appearances

In November 2019 Daszak appeared in The Next Pandemic with Bill Gates, Joel Montgomery, Maryn McKenna, Allison McGeer, Allan Detsky.

“The real risk is in the wild in the way people interact with wildlife around the world,”
Peter Daszak

In June 2020, after Richard Dearlove stated that he believed that Covid-19 was man made, an articled headlined Ignore the conspiracy theories: Scientists know Covid-19 wasn't created in a lab appeared in The Guardian, which initially made no mention of Daszak's long term working relationship with Zhengli Shi and the Wuhan Institute of Virology BSL-4 lab.

Opinions

“Pandemics are like terrorist attacks: We know roughly where they originate and what’s responsible for them, but we don’t know exactly when the next one will happen. They need to be handled the same way — by identifying all possible sources and dismantling those before the next pandemic strikes.”
Peter Daszak (27 February 2020) 

Origins of Covid-19

Full article: COVID-19/Origins

On 9 June 2020 Daszak was published by the Guardian entitled Ignore the conspiracy theories: scientists know Covid-19 wasn't created in a lab. The article stated that "Most people (including former heads of intelligence agencies) aren’t trained in how to decipher genetic codes". The first version of the article made no mention of Daszak's work with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, although the article was amended to include this on 11 June.

Daszak has promoted the zoonotic theory of the origins of COVID-19, arguing that accidental release from a BSL-4 lab is unlikely:

“The point is that, let’s look at a balance of probability. That’s what you have to do. We have a few hundred technicians and scientists working in these labs. They do not have a problem with staff or with security or with loose controls. These are very well-run labs. They’ve been inspected by the U.S. CDC, by people working in BSL-4 labs, high-security labs, in the U.S., in France and internationally. They’re accredited by the U.S. So, it’s ironic that now we’re saying they’re not very well organized. We actually inspected them properly and allowed them to open. You know, the cables that were reported in the — [interrupted]]”
Peter Daszak (16 April 2020) 

Publications

Peter Daszak has published many papers on the emergence of viruses.

• 31 May 2020 - Origin and cross-species transmission of bat coronaviruses in China with Alice Latinne, Ben Hu, Kevin J. Olival, Guangjian Zhu, Libiao Zhang, Hongying Li, Aleksei A. Chmura, Hume E. Field, Carlos Zambrana-Torrelio, Jonathan H. Epstein, Bei Li, Wei Zhang, Lin-Fa Wang, Zheng-Li Shi and Peter Daszak

 

An event carried out

Event	Description
DEFUSE	A rejected proposal from Peter Daszak of EcoHealth Alliance to weaponise naturally occuring bat coronaviruses, to preempt "zoonotic spillover". Authenticity questionable.

 

A Quote by Peter Daszak

Page	Quote	Date
EcoHealth Alliance	“Once we’ve got a good group of around 20 well-known people, I will then circulate this via social media and email, with a link to a webserver for others in the greater science community (and interested public) to sign on to this statement. I will then present this to the ISID meeting in KL, Malaysia in 2 weeks and I think we’ll get a big impact from that community and it should then take off. Please note that this statement will not have EcoHealth Alliance logo on it and will not be identifiable as coming from any one organization or person, the idea is to have this as a community supporting our colleagues.”	6 February 2020

 

Related Quotation

Page	Quote	Author	Date
Global Virome Project	“The seeds of the [Global Virome] project were sown between 2009 and 2019, when the US government funded a big push into virus hunting in wildlife in tropical regions through a programme called PREDICT. When this funding came to an end, the main players got together to seek private and charitable funding to continue the work. These included, from government, Dennis Carrol, director of the Emerging Pandemic Threats Division within the United States Agency for International Development; from academia, Jonna Mazet of the University of California at Davis, who had been director of the PREDICT project; from the non-profit world, Peter Daszak, head of the EcoHealth Alliance, who became treasurer of the new project; and from the private sector, Nathan Wolfe, founder of the DNA database firm Metabiota.”	Matt Ridley Prasenjit Ray	22 April 2022

 

Related Documents

Title	Type	Publication date	Author(s)	Description
Document:DEFUSE project funding rejection letter	letter	2018	DARPA
Document:Was there a Wuhan lab leak?	blog post	1 June 2021	Jonathan Cook	No meaningful lessons will be learnt about what really happened in Wuhan. Maintaining the illusion of truth will continue to take precedence over uncovering the truth. And for that reason we are doomed to keep making the same screw-ups. As the next pandemic will doubtless attest.

Rating

11 November 2021 Terje 

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