EcoHealth Alliance president Peter Daszak to testify at public congressional hearing

By Annette Gartland on April 5, 2024

EcoHealth Alliance (EHA) president Peter Daszak is due to testify at a public hearing before the United States’ Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic on May 1.

He is being invited to “correct the record” regarding alleged discrepancies between his statements in an earlier transcribed interview and comments he made elsewhere.

The five members of Congress who are requesting further testimony from Daszak point in particular to statements he has made about the DEFUSE (Defusing the Threat of Bat-borne Coronaviruses) grant proposal submitted by the EHA to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in the US in March 2018.

“The Committees are alarmed at the divergence between your statements and your comments in the DEFUSE draft,” the chairman of the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, Brad Wenstrup, and four other House committee chairs wrote in a 12-page letter to Daszak dated April 4.

“These revelations undermine your credibility as well as every factual assertion you made during your transcribed interview. The Committees have a right and an obligation to protect the integrity of their investigations, including the accuracy of testimony during a transcribed interview. We invite you to correct the record.”

The five House representatives – Wenstrup; the chairwoman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, Cathy McMorris Rodgers; chairman of the Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations Morgan Griffith; chairman of the Subcommittee on Health Brett Guthrie; and chairman of the Committee on Oversight and Accountability James Comer – have asked Daszak to provide a host of documents before he testifies.

The Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic is a subcommittee of the Committee on Oversight and Accountability.

The EHA confirmed that Daszak will testify voluntarily and said inaccurate allegations had been made about his previous public statements.

“Dr Daszak looks forward to answering the committee’s questions, clarifying the areas of misunderstanding, and informing them about the vital research that EcoHealth Alliance conducts globally,” the EHA said.

On November 14 last year Daszak testified for nine and a half hours behind closed doors in a voluntary, transcribed interview that was requested by Wenstrup, McMorris Rodgers, Griffith, Guthrie, and Comer.

The documents the five representatives have asked Daszak to produce this month include all EHA communications with the US Department of Health and Human Services, including but not limited to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), from January 1, 2014, to date.

The five specifically want to see documents and communications about the reinstatement of the grant entitled ‘Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence’ and documents and communications regarding the suspension or debarment of the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV).

They also want Daszak to produce all documents and communications between or among EHA and the Federal Bureau of Investigation from January 1, 2014, to date and all documents and communications between or among the EHA and the WIV, including any of its subsidiaries, affiliated institutions, or affiliated individuals, from January 1, 2014, to date.

In addition they want to see copies of all grants, contracts, memorandums, and/or other documents executed from January 1, 2014, to date “that involve the following, any iterations thereof, or affiliated individuals as parties”: the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the New York Blood Center, Georgia State University, the WIV, the Wuhan Center for Disease Control, Wuhan University, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, China’s People’s Liberation Army, and the Chinese Academy of Military Medical Sciences.

The five House representatives note in their letter to Daszak that, during the transcribed interview in November last year, he was asked about the DEFUSE research proposal.

When asked about the location of planned experiments involving the reverse engineering and characterisation of coronavirus spike proteins, and whether this work was supposed to happen at the University of North Carolina or at the WIV, Daszak responded: “My understanding for that work, it was going to be done at UNC. I think the proposal says it was going to be done in pseudo type, which is not even live virus.”

Wenstrup, McMorris Rodgers, Griffith, Guthrie, and Comer say a draft of the DEFUSE proposal obtained via a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request calls into question whether Daszak’s testimony omitted a material fact and was misleading.

In January this year, the investigative research group ‘U.S. Right to Know’ (USRTK) released a 1,417-page file of documents that contained early drafts of, and emails about, the proposal. This followed USRTK’s earlier release of 235 pages on December 18 last year.

The final DEFUSE proposal was leaked to the DRASTIC group of investigators, who released the documents in September 2021.

The draft obtained by USRTK via an FOIA request contained the following line: “Isolation will be attempted on a subset of samples with novel SARSr-CoVs. Prof. Ralph Baric, UNC, will reverse engineer spike proteins in his lab to conduct binding assays to human ACE2 (the SARS-CoV receptor). Proteins that bind will then be inserted into the SARS-CoV backbones, and inoculated into humanized mice to assess their capability to cause SARS-like disease …”

However, Daszak wrote the following comment addressed to Baric and Shi Zhengli from the WIV: “If we win this contract, I do not propose that all of this work will necessarily be conducted by Ralph, but I do want to stress the US side of this proposal so that DARPA are comfortable with our team. Once we get the funds, we can then allocate who does what exact work, and I believe that a lot of these assays can be done in Wuhan as well …”

The House representatives wrote in their letter to Daszak: “This comment appears to be materially inconsistent with your testimony assuring the Committees that the proposed work was planned to be done exclusively at UNC.”

The five House representatives also point to alleged discrepancies between what Daszak said during the November transcribed interview and what Shi Zhengli wrote in the draft DEFUSE proposal.

In the draft, Shi Zhengli wrote that she planned to perform the work in biosafety level two (BSL-2) conditions.

“In response to Dr. Shi’s proposal, Dr. Baric wrote the following alarmed comment: IN [sic] the US, these recombinant SARS CoV are studied under BSL3, not BSL2, especially important for those that are able to bind and replicate in primary human cells. In [C]hina, might be growin [sic] these viruses under bsl2 [sic]. US researchers will likely freak out,” the House representatives wrote in their letter to Daszak.

“It appears Dr. Baric then edited the document to reflect that the experiments should be carried out in BSL-3. Pursuant to the BMBL [Biosafety in Microbiological and Biomedical Laboratories], the chimeric virus experiments in the DEFUSE proposal should have been conducted in BSL-3 or enhanced BSL-3.”

The Committee on Oversight and Accountability and the Energy and Commerce Committee issued press releases in which they said Daszak’s statements required correction and clarification.

“During his closed-door transcribed interview with the committees on November 14, 2023, Dr Daszak made multiple statements inconsistent with documents and evidence reviewed by the committees,” the committees said.

“This raises serious questions about the veracity of EcoHealth ’s public statements, including their insistence that the research they funded at the WIV could not have caused the pandemic.”

The documents obtained via FOIA requests suggested that the EHA intended to conduct research at laboratories with weaker biosafety measures set by the Chinese government instead of at laboratories with higher biosafety standards required by the US, the committees added.

“Scientific evidence and available intelligence indicate that a research-related incident at a lab in Wuhan remains a plausible cause of the Covid-19 pandemic,” they said.

“EcoHealth’s negligent, haphazard approach to biosafety and grant compliance, coupled with the misleading statements by Dr. Daszak to the committees, raise serious concerns that must be further addressed at the hearing.”

In the final DEFUSE proposal it is stated: “Experimental work using bats and or transgenic mice will be conducted at the BSL-3 lab in WIV, Duke-NUS, UNC, or NWHC [the USGS’s National Wildlife Health Center].”

It is also stated that live bats would be used at the WIV and labs in Singapore and the US for infection experiments, often using captive bat colonies.

When asked during the November transcribed interview whether the EHA ensured that the WIV followed the BMBL reference book that the NIH and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) put out, Daszak said that it did.

Asked how the EHA monitored this compliance he said it did this by requesting information about which biosafety levels the WIV used for which parts of the work. “And we found that they use the same biosafety levels that were used in the US and were directed by the CDC and the BMBL,” he said.

Daszak has been under the spotlight since early on in the Covid-19 pandemic. There were serious concerns about his presence in the World Health Organisation team that went to Wuhan in January/February 2021.

The NIH has given the EHA millions of dollars in funding to conduct research in collaboration with scientists at the WIV.

Daszak led the Lancet Covid-19 Commission’s task force that was set up to investigate the origins of SARS-CoV-2, but, in June 2021, it was announced that he was recused from commission work on the origins of the pandemic.

In his testimony to the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability on March 6 last year, the chairman of the Lancet Covid-19 Commission, Jeffrey Sachs, said that NIH leaders, including Francis Collins and Anthony Fauci, kept gain-of-function research hidden from the Congress and the public and repeatedly misled the Congress and the public about the subject.

Sachs added: “They did not properly disclose the NIH work that supported dangerous genetic manipulation of SARS-related coronaviruses.”

He said of the EHA’s DEFUSE proposal: “The grant proposal was not funded by DARPA, but the research may have been, and quite possibly was, carried out using other resources.

“They did not disclose the DARPA proposal and its possible relevance to the origin of SARS-CoV-2. In fact, the public learned of the DARPA proposal only through a leak.”

In September 2021 an international group of ten scientists and health experts called on the board of the EHA to remove Daszak as the organisation’s president.