The nonprofit exec whose organization sent nearly $600,000 in US taxpayer money to a Chinese lab that may have been the source of COVID-19 masterminded an effort near the start of the pandemic to squelch the notion that the coronavirus was man-made, a new report reveals.
Peter Daszak, president of the New York City-based EcoHealth Alliance, secretly organized a statement issued by the influential British medical journal The Lancet in February 2020, according to Vanity Fair.
A total of 27 scientists — including Daszak, 55, who trained as a zoologist — signed the statement, which expressed “solidarity with all scientists and health professionals in China.”
“We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin,” the statement affirmed.
“Conspiracy theories do nothing but create fear, rumours, and prejudice that jeopardise our global collaboration in the fight against this virus.”
During Daszak’s efforts to arrange the Lancet statement, he reportedly emailed two scientists, including Dr. Ralph Baric of the University of North Carolina, who’d worked with the lead coronavirus researcher at China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology, located at the epicenter of the coronavirus outbreak.
Daszak told the scientists that they “should not sign this statement, so it has some distance from us and therefore doesn’t work in a counterproductive way,” Vanity Fair said, citing emails obtained by the group US Right to Know.
“We’ll then put it out in a way that doesn’t link it back to our collaboration so we maximize an independent voice,” Daszak reportedly added.
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