Why are the lab escape denialists telling such brazen lies?

Why are the lab escape denialists telling such brazen lies?

A recent Guardian headline instructs us to “ignore the conspiracy theories” about the potential role of a Wuhan biolab in the emergence of the virus that triggered the current pandemic. The accompanying article is just the latest broadside from what the investigative journalist Sam Husseini has called the “loud crowd” involved in dangerous work with viruses, who have been busily denouncing any effort to scrutinise their work. Of these loud denialists, no one has been more vocal than the article’s author: Peter Daszak.
Since the start of the pandemic, Daszak has been all over the world’s media, as well as social media, decrying suggestions that SARS-CoV-2 might have come out of a lab as “preposterous”, “baseless”, “crackpot”, “conspiracy theories”, and “pure baloney”. And he has backed up these complete dismissals with a welter of questionable claims.
According to Daszak:
* Zoonotic jumps, where viruses cross species from animals to infect humans, “occur every day”, and
* Evidence shows bats infect large numbers of people with SARS-related coronaviruses, so “It's utterly illogical to think that this did not lead to the current outbreak”
* By contrast, “only a handful of people work on bat coronaviruses in labs in China” and they are well protected
* Plus there are “huge piles of rules and regulations governing what they do”
* In any case, people always say disease outbreaks “could have come from a lab”
* But in reality “lab accidents are extremely rare”, and
* Lab escapes “have never led to largescale [disease] outbreaks”
* Anyway, there are no relevant live viruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, only data on computers, so nothing could escape
* Meanwhile the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s work on bat coronaviruses has been valuable for developing treatments, and
* “I have no conflicts of interest”.
The mainstream media have challenged very few, if any, of Daszak’s assertions. And judging by the deletion from The Guardian website of virologist Dr Jonathan Latham’s brief comment[1] on Daszak’s recent article, they don’t want anyone else to challenge his narrative either.
Far from facing critical scrutiny, Daszak has been presented as a hero – a brave virus hunter on a quest to locate and understand dangerous pathogens and alert the world to their dangers. In this narrative, he and his colleagues are experts racing against time to identify and mitigate the threat of pandemics. And sympathy for them has been amplified in the liberal media by the perception that they’re the victims of Trump and the China-bashers, who are deflecting from the President’s lamentable performance in tackling the pandemic.
But a number of well-informed scientific commentators are far from willing to give Daszak a free pass. One of them is the American biologist and evolutionary theorist Prof Bret Weinstein, who recently commented, “In looking at all of the sources that claim to put the idea of a lab leak to rest, I find the name Peter Daszak… shows up all over the place. He’s everywhere the idea is mocked.” But the information Daszak presents invariably does not check out, Weinstein says, and as a result, “I have begun to regard him as Patient Zero for misinformation.”
Another staunch critic is Rutgers University microbiologist Prof Richard Ebright, who has publicly accused Daszak of lying brazenly and “on a Trumpian scale”. Ebright has repeatedly subjected Daszak’s statements to the kind of forensic scrutiny many of his scientist colleagues and the media have been unwilling to provide. His incisive criticisms of Daszak’s assertions have largely been made on Twitter and so we draw heavily on his tweets in what follows.
“No conflicts of interest”
Back in mid-February, when the world was still counting COVID-19 deaths in the hundreds and almost all the deaths were still in China, a letter signed by Daszak and 26 co-signatories was published in The Lancet, condemning “conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin”. An article in Science explained that the signatories were “pushing back against a steady stream of stories and even a scientific paper suggesting a laboratory in Wuhan, China, may be the origin of the outbreak of COVID-19”.
The signatories all declared they had “no competing interests” – but that certainly wasn’t true in the case of Peter Daszak. Daszak is the founder and President of EcoHealth Alliance, a US non-profit that among other things has been a conduit for US funding for research on bat coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, including the gain-of-function research banned in the US from 2014-2017. Gain-of-function research seeks to study viruses by making them more virulent or transmissible, but has come under heavy scientific criticism for risking creating pandemics via leaks from the labs where it is carried out.
When Daszak similarly told the Washington Post, “I have no conflicts of interest,” Richard Ebright pointed out that Daszak was Project Leader on a $3.7 million “grant supporting bat coronavirus surveillance at Wuhan Institute of Virology and … bat coronavirus gain-of-function research at Wuhan Institute of Virology. If that is not a material conflict of interest,” Ebright tweeted, “then nothing is.”
And he’s right. If it emerged that this type of research created a global pandemic it could be immensely damaging for Daszak and his organisation, both reputationally and financially. And the financial impact would almost certainly go wider than just the Wuhan grant that was recently suspended.
Commenting on an attempt to compile a fuller picture of the funding EcoHealth Alliance has received from US government agencies, Ebright noted that it totalled $99.8 million “for federal contract awards, contract subawards, grant awards, and grant subawards to EcoHealth”. Most of this money, he said, came from US defence, homeland security and intelligence agencies.
In fact, according to their most recently available financial report, over 90% of EcoHealth Alliance’s funding ultimately derives in this way from US taxpayers. Incidentally, Daszak’s salary and other compensation amounted in that same year to just over $400,000. ...
Read on and access linked sources:
https://www.gmwatch.org/en/news/latest-news/19437

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