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” • “Pandemic/Preparation” • Biological weapon/Research
Interest of	David E. Martin
A "completely discredited, conflict-plagued", "longtime partner" of Zhengli Shi, moved US money to the WIV to weaponise bat coronaviruses but didn't mention this in the influential joint statement he secretly got published in The Lancet to promote the "lone bat" theory. Later "investigated" COVID-19's origins.

“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 virologist who for years worked with Zhengli Shi on gain-of-function research to create 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, about which he has refused to provide paperwork requested by US congress. In December 2021, Glenn Greenwald termed him a "completely discredited, conflict-plagued scientist".

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." He anonymously drafted a statement to The Lancet that strongly condemned "conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin".

In January 2021 he was "facing calls to step down from two key inquiries into the origins of Covid-19 after leading the global battle to dismiss suggestions that it might have leaked from a Chinese laboratory linked to his charity."

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

Peter Daszak and Zhengli Shi.

“Well I think... coronaviruses — you can manipulate them in the lab pretty easily. Spike protein drives a lot of what happen with coronavirus, in zoonotic risk. So you can get the sequence, you can build the protein, and we work a lot with Ralph Baric at UNC to do this. Insert into the backbone of another virus and do some work in the lab.”
Peter Daszak (9 December 2019) 

Peter Daszak toasting Zhengli Shi.

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 April 2020 Daszak stated on Democracy Now! that "The idea that this virus escaped from a lab is just pure baloney."

On 3 June 2020, The Telegraph reported Richard Dearlove's belief that Covid-19 was man made. On 9 June an article 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

Daszak has consistently promoted the zoonotic theory of the origins of COVID and obstructed real research into the topic.

“Instead of providing public health authorities with the plentiful information at his disposal, [Peter Daszak] immediately launched a public relations campaign to persuade the world that the epidemic couldn’t possibly have been caused by one of the institute’s souped-up viruses.”
Peter Daszak (2021) 

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 omitted to mention Daszak's intimate connections to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, although it was amended to include this on 11 June. The article did not contemplate the idea of a deliberate release, and claimed that an accidental release from a BSL-4 lab was 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) 

Daszak emailed Fauci in 2020 to thank him for publicly discrediting the possibility that Covid was man made.

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 

Many thanks to our Patrons who cover ~2/3 of our hosting bill. Please join them if you can.