The Jig Is Up: It’s Time for Accountability for the Origin of COVID-19

Responsibility starts with EcoHealth Alliance's Peter Daszak and ends with agency officials who funded and defended his reckless virus research.

8 minute read

Today’s guest essay comes from David Robertson who looks at science officials’ pattern of misleading the public and passing the buck, including possible attempts to create a fall guy to blame for reckless, NIH-funded virus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

When the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic held a recent hearing, viewers beheld an amazing spectacle. For the first time in the Subcommittee’s history, Democrats showed interest in getting to the bottom of the pandemic’s origin and began aggressively interrogating the lone witness: EcoHealth Alliance president, Peter Daszak.

Daszak is a prime candidate for blame in a possible laboratory accident in Wuhan, for an obvious reason: his NIH-funded nonprofit was performing reckless research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) with inadequate safety, right before the Wuhan outbreak. This fact has long been known.

Before working to cover all this up, Anthony Fauci and other virologists stated as much in private emails back in February 2020. Daszak, however, has evaded questions about this for years.

Daszak’s responses to the Subcommittee’s questions did not exactly fill Democrats with confidence. “I remain seriously concerned that you, Dr Daszak, appear to be eluding questions from this Committee in an attempt to avoid consequences,” Democratic Ranking Member, Raul Ruiz, said in his closing statement. “It is important that you and your organization be held accountable.”

In one telling example Daszak claimed that, in a 2020 letter he orchestrated in The Lancet to dismiss claims of a possible Wuhan lab accident as “conspiracy theories”, he was exclusively referring to hairbrained ideas that SARS-CoV-2 had been engineered from snake DNA or had HIV virus inserts. Yet, Daszak made no reference to either of these specifics in The Lancet.

“We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin,” the letter in The Lancet simply states.

Daszak also hid his ties to the WIV in that letter, an act of deceit that compelled The Lancet to revise his conflict of interest statement, and forced Lancet editor Richard Horton to explain this lapse in journal ethics to the British Parliament. To this day, that statement excludes reference to his ties with the WIV.

Dismissing Daszak’s latest attempts to explain away what he had written in a leading medical journal, a Democratic congressional staffer quipped, “It's possible, perhaps, that you are framing issues in a way that is most favorable to you and less so in a way that is confronting the science at any given moment.”

Finally, it seems, politicians on both sides of the aisle are curious enough to ask difficult questions. Questions that virologists and NIH officials have been able to ignore and deflect, to mislead the global public since the pandemic’s beginning over four years ago.

There is a risk, however, that investigators will be content with laying blame exclusively at the feet of Daszak and EcoHealth Alliance. Making Peter Daszak the fall guy would fail to hold accountable the scientists and institutional funders who enabled his reckless research in Wuhan.

Whatever responsibility Daszak and researchers in Wuhan may bear for the pandemic, some of the most prominent officials and science institutions in biomedical research funded and promoted these experiments. Some of those very same officials then consistently misled the public about the possibility that research funded by US agencies may have contributed to the creation of SARS-CoV-2.

A day before Daszak testified, Vanity Fair reported on a previously unseen congressional deposition of University of North Carolina virologist, Ralph Baric. Baric is widely touted as the world’s leading coronavirus virologist and is known for having created techniques for synthesizing novel viruses, including coronaviruses.

Baric is also known for his scientific collaborations with WIV which was also engineering chimeric viruses. In fact, emails show that he helped ghostwrite an essay, widely circulated in the first months of the pandemic, that accused people of promoting a “conspiracy theory” that the pandemic could have started from a Wuhan lab accident.

“Don’t want to be cited in as having commented prior to submission,” Baric emailed the essay’s authors. After requesting that his help be hidden, Baric then submitted text in track changes. “I think the community needs to write these editorials and I thank you for your efforts.”

In 2018, the year before SARS-CoV-2 first infected humans, Baric, Daszak and WIV researchers collaborated on a research proposal for a Department of Defense project known as DEFUSE. The DEFUSE project proposed creating a chimeric virus with features remarkably similar to those of SARS-CoV-2. The Pentagon turned down the project, but speculation remains that the research could still have been done.

Recent documents released through a freedom of information request make clear that Daszak intended some of the DEFUSE work creating chimeric viruses to happen at the WIV. This would have cut time and costs, but increased the danger of a lab accident as those studies would have been carried out in substandard BSL2 biosafety conditions.

Baric responded to this suggestion, noting that in the United States “these recombinant SARS CoV are studied under BSL3, not BSL2”. Researchers in the US, Baric warned, would “likely freak out” if they knew scientists at the WIV were playing around with such viruses under inadequate BSL2 conditions.

These discussions took place roughly eighteen months before a novel coronavirus outbreak was detected but a few miles from the WIV. But the emails were hidden from the public until just a few months ago.

Another uncovered email from Baric to Daszak reveals that Baric continued to worry about substandard biosafety standards at the WIV long after the pandemic began. “You believe this was appropriate containment if you want but don’t expect me to believe it,” Baric wrote to Daszak, in May 2021. “Moreover, don’t insult my intelligence by trying to feed me this load of BS.”

In a private deposition earlier this year to the Subcommittee, Baric reiterated his concerns about substandard biosafety standards at the WIV, testifying that a Wuhan lab leak cannot be ruled out “because they work at BSL-2.”

Baric’s testimony contained another critical insight.

Asked whether EcoHealth Alliance engaged in gain-of-function virus work at the WIV prior to the pandemic, he vacillated over interpretations of the term “gain-of-function.” The Obama White House ended this type of dangerous research in 2014, much to Baric’s chagrin, although there were certain loopholes, and the moratorium was lifted in 2017.

Echoing the semantic games already played on this topic, Baric implied that NIH’s funding for EcoHealth Alliance’s virus research at the WIV was potentially exempt from the moratorium, but then stated, “But is it a gain of function phenotype? Absolutely. You can’t argue with that.”

Baric’s testimony contradicts Anthony Fauci’s insistence—under oath before Congress—that the NIH “has not ever and does not now fund gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology”.

Daszak certainly saw the connection between the gain-of-function moratorium and his own research interests at the WIV. In an email to an NIH project officer in 2016, Daszak wrote: “We are very happy to hear that our Gain of Function research funding pause has been lifted.”

Why has Baric, the world’s foremost expert on coronaviruses, been privately outraged, yet publicly silent about dangerous biosafety standards at the WIV and his scientific view that a lab accident might have caused the pandemic? Why has he not explained his personal knowledge and involvement in the DEFUSE proposal? This curious silence, alongside his testimony contradicting Fauci’s sworn congressional testimony, leave many questions unanswered.

Why did fifteen US government agencies know about the DEFUSE proposal to engineer a dangerous virus much like SARS-CoV-2, but fail to alert the public, forcing someone inside the Defense Department to leak it to the media?

Why has the Office of National Intelligence continued to defy President Biden’s order to release specific intelligence data, including evidence that three WIV employees fell ill with symptoms consistent with COVID-19 in the Fall of 2019?

Why have US intelligence services still not explained allegations that the CIA bribed its own analysts to alter their assessment of the origins of the virus?

These – and many, many more – are all unresolved questions that Peter Daszak cannot answer, meaning responsibility begins, but does not end with him.

Does the Democrats’ harsh questioning of Daszak mean that we have reached a turning point in the investigation of COVID’s origins? Over the last four years, influential scientists colluded to mislead the public and labeled anyone digging up facts and emails as a “conspiracy theorist”—even targeting academic critics by filing grievances with their universities. They were aided in this by a mainstream media that provided distorted reporting ignoring inconvenient facts to buttress those experts’ preferred narratives.

This cannot continue. The jig is up.

Most of the global public have long thought that a lab accident is the most parsimonious explanation for the origin of SARS-CoV-2. Along with a few prominent experts, people outside of academia were never convinced by the incessant deluge of misleading media narratives. Nor should they have been.

The notion that anyone and everyone was a “conspiracy theorist” for asking obvious questions about the outbreak of a novel coronavirus a few miles from a laboratory studying coronaviruses will likely be remembered as one of the original sins of the COVID era. It is made all the more glaring by the fact that, in 2018, US Embassy staff in China twice warned Washington officials that the WIV’s “work on bat coronaviruses and their potential human transmission represented a risk of a new SARS-like pandemic.”

Anthony Fauci will soon appear again before Congress, presenting another opportunity for him to dodge questions about COVID’s origin as he has in the past. But once Fauci is sworn in, both Republicans and Democrats will have the opportunity to give the public what they deserve: a ruthless, transparent inquiry into how this pandemic began.

Anything less than full transparency will embolden researchers and their overseers to continue reckless research funded by institutions which continue to shirk accountability and circle the wagons to protect themselves, rather than us.

Alternatively, Congress can lob softball questions at Fauci, allow Daszak to be the fall guy, and declare fake victory in another public charade that will convince no one.

David Robertson recently obtained a PhD in the History of Science Program at Princeton University. He has previously written about COVID-19 for The Washington Post, The BMJ, The Boston Globe, STAT, and The American Journal of Public Health.