By Andrew Kerr
Daily Caller News Foundation
A U.S. doctor who is part of the World Health Organization team
investigating the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic discussed his
work manipulating bat-based coronaviruses in labs just weeks before
the COVID-19 outbreak in Wuhan.
Dr. Peter Daszak, a close associate with China’s premier
bat-based coronavirus researcher and a key figure in directing
taxpayer funds to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, explained how
easy it was to alter coronaviruses during a podcast interview
filmed Dec. 9, 2019.
“You can manipulate them in the lab pretty easily,” Daszak
said. “Spike protein drives a lot of what happens with the
coronavirus. Zoonotic risk. So you can get the sequence, you can
build the protein — and we work with Ralph Baric at UNC to do
this — and insert the backbone of another virus and do some work
in the lab.”
It’s unclear where the coronavirus manipulation Daszak
described in the podcast, also known as gain of function research,
was conducted. Daszak did not return multiple requests for
comment.
Daszak said that manipulating coronaviruses in labs is a useful
tool in developing treatments and vaccines for potential future
outbreaks, but some virologists say such research is playing with
fire.
“The only impact of this work is the creation, in a lab, of a
new, non-natural risk,” Rutgers University molecular biologist
Richard Ebright told
New York magazine.
There’s no evidence suggesting that Baric’s lab at the
University of North Carolina had anything to do with COVID-19.
However, the high-containment lab was the site of a “near-miss”
incident in 2016 after a researcher was bitten by a mouse infected
by a lab-created variant of the SARS coronavirus, according to
ProPublica.
And Baric told New York magazine that he can’t rule out the
possibility that COVID-19 unintentionally leaked from the Wuhan
Institute of Virology.
“Can you rule out a laboratory escape? The answer in this case
is probably not,” Baric said.
WATCH:
Daszak also said in the podcast that he and his team had
discovered “over 100 new SARS-related coronaviruses” after
seven years of surveilling bats across southern China.
“We’ve even found people with antibodies in Yunnan to
SARS-related coronaviruses, so there’s human exposure,” Daszak
said. “We’re just beginning another five years’ work to look
at cohorts in southern China to see how frequent does spillover
happen.”
Chinese researcher Shi Zhengli, known by her colleagues as the
“bat lady,” reported in early 2017 that she and her colleagues
at the Wuhan Institute of Virology had discovered 11 new strains of
SARS-related viruses from horseshoe bats in the Yunnan Province,
situated over 1,000 miles away from Wuhan.
Shi told the Scientific American in March that she lost sleep
worrying that COVID-19 could have leaked from her lab in Wuhan
after first learning of the outbreak in December 2019.
“I had never expected this kind of thing to happen in Wuhan,
in central China,” Shi said.
Daszak routed funds from former President Barack Obama’s
Predict program and the National Institute of Health to Shi’s
bat-surveillance team through his nonprofit, 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 that was
detected from one of the Yunnan horseshoe bats.
Former President Donald Trump’s State Department announced on
Friday that it had obtained
evidence showing that researchers at the Wuhan Institute of
Virology became sick with flu-like symptoms in Fall 2019 prior to
the first known cases of COVID-19, a sign that experts have
previously stated would be evidence pointing to the theory that the
virus unintentionally leaked from the Wuhan lab.
Daszak was a key figure in leading the charge at the onset of
the pandemic against the
theory that COVID-19 unintentionally leaked from the Wuhan
Institute of Virology.
Daszak orchestrated a statement published in
The Lancet medical journal in February, prior to any serious
research on the origins of COVID-19, condemning “conspiracy
theories” that suggest the virus doesn’t have a natural
origin.
A spokesman for Daszak told
The Wall Street Journal on Friday that his statement, which was
cited by numerous news outlets — and by
fact check organizations to censor unwelcome inquiries —
during the onset of the pandemic, was meant to protect Chinese
scientists.
“The Lancet letter was written during a time in which Chinese
scientists were receiving death threats and the letter was intended
as a showing of support for them as they were caught between
important work trying to stop an outbreak and the crush of online
harassment,” Daszak’s spokesman told The Journal.
Daszak is a part of the WHO’s 10-person panel that began
investigating the origins of COVID-19 on the ground in China on
Thursday.
Daszak obtained a position on the investigative panel despite
his previous objection to the NIH to cease funding the Wuhan
Institute of Virology until he arranged an outside inspection of
the lab.
“I am not trained as a private detective,” Daszak said,
according to New York magazine.
This story originally was published by the Daily Caller News
Foundation.
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U.S. doctor: Manipulating bat-based coronaviruses easy appeared
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