American scientist closely linked to Wuhan lab discussed handling bat-based coronaviruses weeks before outbreak



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  • Dr Peter Daszak described how easy it was to manipulate bat-based coronaviruses in an interview filmed just weeks before the COVID-19 outbreak in Wuhan.
  • Daszak has close ties to the Wuhan Institute of Virology and is said to have refused a request from the National Institute of Health asking him to organize an outside inspection of the laboratory.
  • Daszak orchestrated a statement at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic that condemned “conspiracy theories” that the virus was not of natural origin.
  • Daszak is now part of a World Health Organization panel currently investigating the origins of the pandemic on the ground in China.

A US doctor who is part of the World Health Organization team investigating the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic discussed his work in handling 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 key figure in the direction of taxpayer funds to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, explained how easy it is to change the coronavirus during a podcast interview filmed on December 9, 2019.

“You can handle them quite easily in the lab,” Daszak said. “Spike proteins largely determine what happens with the coronavirus. Zoonotic risk. So you can get the sequence, you can build the protein – and we’re working with Ralph Baric at UNC to do that – and insert the backbone of another virus and do some lab work. “

It is not known where the coronavirus manipulation described by Daszak in the podcast, also known as gain-of-function research, was conducted. Daszak did not return multiple requests for comment.

Daszak said manipulating coronaviruses in labs is a useful tool in developing treatments and vaccines for possible future outbreaks, but some virologists say this research is playing with fire.

“The only impact of this work is the creation, in a laboratory, of a new, unnatural risk,” Rutgers University molecular biologist Richard Ebright told New York magazine.

There is no evidence to suggest that Baric’s lab at the University of North Carolina has anything to do with COVID-19. However, the high-containment lab was the site of a “near-accident” incident in 2016 after a researcher was bitten by a mouse infected with a lab-created variant of the SARS coronavirus, according to ProPublica.

And Baric told New York magazine he couldn’t rule out the possibility that COVID-19 was unintentionally leaking from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

“Can you rule out a lab breakout?” The answer in this case is probably not, ”Baric said.

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Daszak also said in the podcast that he and his team discovered “more than 100 novel coronaviruses linked to SARS” after seven years of bat surveillance in southern China.

“We even found people with antibodies in Yunnan to the SARS-related coronaviruses, so there is human exposure,” Daszak said. “We’re just starting another five years of work to look at the southern Chinese cohorts and see how often the fallout occurs.”

Chinese researcher Shi Zhengli, known to her colleagues as the “lady bat,” reported in early 2017 that she and her colleagues at the Wuhan Institute of Virology discovered 11 new strains of the SARS-linked virus from of horseshoe bats in Yunnan Province, located over 1,000 miles from Wuhan. (RELATED: EXCLUSIVE: Coronavirus Expert Says Virus May Have Leaked From Wuhan Lab)

Shi told Scientific American in March that she had lost sleep over fears COVID-19 may have leaked from her laboratory in Wuhan after learning of the outbreak in December 2019.

“I never expected this kind of thing to happen in Wuhan, in central China,” Shi said.

Daszak funneled funds from former President Barack Obama and the National Institute of Health’s Predict program to Shi’s bat monitoring 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 detected in one of Yunnan’s horseshoe bats.

Former President Donald Trump’s State Department said on Friday it had obtained evidence showing researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology fell ill with flu-like symptoms in the fall of 2019 before the The earliest known cases of COVID-19, a sign that experts previously said would be evidence pointing to the theory that the virus unintentionally leaked from the Wuhan laboratory.

Daszak was a key figure in driving the charge at the start of the pandemic against the theory that COVID-19 unintentionally leaked 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 spokesperson for Daszak told The Wall Street Journal on Friday that his statement, which was cited by numerous news outlets – and by de facto monitoring organizations to censor unwanted claims – at the start of the pandemic, was aimed at protect Chinese scientists.

The Lancet letter was written at a time when Chinese scientists were receiving death threats and the letter was meant to show their support as they were caught between important work to stop an outbreak and the crushing of online harassment. Daszak said. the spokesperson told the Journal.

Daszak is part of the 10-person WHO panel that began investigating the origins of COVID-19 on the ground in China on Thursday.

Daszak got a job on the investigative committee despite his previous objection to NIH stopping funding the Wuhan Institute of Virology until he arranged an outside inspection of the lab.

“I don’t have any training as a private investigator,” Daszak said, according to New York magazine.

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