Gunning for Daszak
January 22, 2025
THE U.S. House Oversight Committee decided last week to cut off all funding to the notorious EcoHealth Alliance and “debar” its former President, Peter Daszak.
While a pre-emptive pardon from Biden is likely to protect Anthony Fauci from any charges arising from his funding approvals, Daszak seems still to be very much on the hook for allegedly facilitating the “gain of function” research in Wuhan that supposedly led to the pandemic. The chairman of the committee even described Daszak as “corrupt”. Hostile voices on social media are calling for him to be jailed.
In the Spectator, Matt Ridley writes:
There is something approaching full-scale panic in the American scientific bureaucracy at what the Trump administration may reveal in the coming months about what went on in Wuhan with the support of American grants and American expertise.
Well, let’s hope that whatever it is that remains in the dark can be brought into the light at last. Will we ever know, beyond any reasonable doubt, what happened in Wuhan in late 2019? Ridley and others already seem utterly convinced. But on the other side of the argument, no one appears to be backing down. The full answer is in China, and of course, they aren’t telling.
I have always thought that the question boils down to this: if the origins of COVID-19 had been unambiguously zoonotic, if there was clear evidence supporting the notion that SARS-CoV-2 passed into humans via an animal, would China have allowed the evidence to be disclosed in full? Would they have been happier to own up to negligence in their wet markets instead of their biolabs? I think they would have been: there was no equivalent cover-up over SARS 1.
U.S. politicians have vilified Daszak and the organisation he led, saying EcoHealth Alliance “routinely” refused to abide by oversight requests or tell anyone what they were really doing with the money they had received. Rushing to their defence, Marion Koopmans - who was part of that notorious WHO mission to Wuhan alongside Daszak back in 2021 - insists they have been scapegoated, that the various anomalies in their funding requests were trivialities uncovered in retrospect by investigators scouring for evidence that something nefarious was going on.
Running Dog interviewed Daszak twice during the early stages of the pandemic. If he did indeed play a bigger role than we first suspected, he was certainly a shrewd dissembler and a very convincing actor, plausibly positioning himself as no more than a scientist and impartial observer, giving dispassionate assessments about the likely origins of COVID-19 and discussing the dangers of zoonotic infections in an era of mass global interconnectedness and the uncontrolled intermingling of previously isolated species.
Speaking as if he had no direct involvement at all, he didn’t quite rule out a lab leak, and also intimated that China might not be prepared to dig very deeply to uncover the coronavirus’s true origins, though in any case, he said he believed that the zoonotic explanation would eventually prove to be more robust.
My instincts tell me that Daszak’s role in the global pandemic is at best trivial, but what do my instincts count for?
