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Why is the Government giving more money to Peter Daszak?

Peter Daszak. Credit: Getty

October 3, 2022 - 3:01pm

A familiar Covid-19-related name is back in the news. The NGO run by Peter Daszak has been granted another $600,000 by Anthony Fauci’s agency, NIAID. This, to say the least, has raised eyebrows.

It’s hard to overstate the role Daszak has played in pandemic-related issues. His EcoHealth Alliance is the organisation responsible for funnelling hundreds of thousands of dollars, sourced from US government grants to the now infamous Wuhan Institute of Virology, considered by many to be the likely source of the pandemic.

As I previously reported, he was the go-to source for the American media as they sought to “prove” that the lab leak theory was little more than a Right-wing conspiracy. He also surreptitiously organised a letter in The Lancet, attempting to shut down the debate by labelling this potential origin as a “conspiracy theory.”

Most alarmingly, it was Daszak who submitted a 2018 proposal to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency that called for scientists to insert a furin cleavage site — a key distinguishing and extremely rare feature of SARS-Cov-2 — into SARS-like viruses. In other words: a blueprint for making SARS-2 in a lab.

Daszak’s government funding was shut off in 2020, a move that spooked the EcoHealth Alliance chief, who urged staff and partners to refrain from making key genetic data public by uploading it to NIH’s genetic database, GenBank. Daszak told his colleagues that the genetic information could bring “unwelcome attention” (he was right).

Numerous experts, as well as the Editorial Board of the Washington Post, have called on Congress to subpoena Daszak. Instead, the government has supercharged his funding. While recent headlines about a fresh $600,000 grant are accurate, the reality is that Daszak’s organization was awarded about five times that, $3.3 million, by the NIH to hunt viruses in south-east Asia.

This virus hunting is part of the same approach used by WIV’s Dr. Shi, also known as “bat lady,” who travelled around China searching for viruses that could potentially be harmful to humans and even cause a pandemic.

The rationale for the approach is that by finding these viruses, scientists will be able to monitor for outbreaks and be better prepared when they occur. But leading experts call this a fiction.

“In 20 years of using this method, [EcoHealth Alliance] did not predict a single outbreak, epidemic or pandemic,” Columbia University infectious disease expert Maureen Miller told Vanity Fair.

Why is the government funding an organisation that gave money to a lab the same government considers to be the source of the pandemic?

That’s the question we need to be asking. While we might be relieved that this pandemic is in the rearview mirror, the possibility that it was caused by overly zealous researchers still receiving funding to do the same types of work should give us pause.

If this was nuclear weapons research that resulted in the deaths of more than 10 million and the disruption of billions of lives, we’d be out on the streets demanding answers. So why aren’t we now?

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Tyler 0
Tyler 0
2 years ago

The indolent indifference most people have about this issue I find extraordinary. The success the media have had in getting people to look the other way and concern themselves with other things is remarkable and profoundly depressing.

Ray Mullan
Ray Mullan
2 years ago
Reply to  Tyler 0

The success the media have had in getting people to look the other way …

There was a great deal about this snake oil salesman in the media over the summer of 2021. I posted a list of links to various damning indictments of him only an hour ago (The Daily Mail, Newsweek, New York Post and The Atlantic amongst others — there was even a C-Span video of him from 2016 explaining how his Chinese colleagues successfully sequenced the spike proteins of interesting bat viruses to see if they bind to human cells) but the moderation gnomes took exception.
Therein lies the problem.
Everything in moderation, I say — including moderation.

Glyn R
Glyn R
2 years ago

This clique clearly feels they are untouchable. Why? Because their owners also own vast swathes of the media. We saw how the MSM behaved when people did take to the streets to demonstrate against harmful lockdowns and vaccine passports: they looked the other way, pretended they weren’t happening or would zoom in on an unrepresentative element of the marches and make out all were nutjobs or thugs. Anyone who attended knows the truth. Just as they saw the shameful manner in which the police behaved. I have never been more ashamed of my country nor more untrusting of those who hold power and influence.

joe hardy
joe hardy
2 years ago
Reply to  Glyn R

Glyn, there are millions of people across the globe who feel the same way you do.

Last edited 2 years ago by joe hardy
Ian L
Ian L
2 years ago

A certain bad cat is rather angry with Peter.
https://boriquagato.substack.com/p/peter-daszak-supervillain-origin

Martin Smith
Martin Smith
2 years ago

There are so many millions of people complicit in the Covid overreach. Not just protagonists like Dasak, Fauchi, Ferguson, the WHO, ‘global leaders’ and doctors, but ordinary folk who not only cowered indoors abandoning work, education, family and personal life, but demonised others as evil ‘deniers’ and ‘Covidiots’ who should be fined, locked out of society and even imprisoned. So it will take time, but the ‘narrative’ as we say nowadays is changing, and the pace of the change is beginning to increase. I suspect vaccine induced injury and death will be the tipping factor.

M L Hamilton Anderson
M L Hamilton Anderson
2 years ago
Reply to  Martin Smith

Beautifully worded Martin.
Lifelong resident of Melbourne, Australia – the most locked-down city in the world. Livid, ashamed and bewildered by our leaders in all facets of society.

Last edited 2 years ago by M L Hamilton Anderson
Rose D
Rose D
2 years ago

Silence doesn’t come cheap

Jason Highley
Jason Highley
2 years ago

Again I saw all the oppressions that are done under the sun. And behold, the tears of the oppressed, and they had no one to comfort them! On the side of their oppressors there was power, and there was no one to comfort them. And I thought the dead who are already dead more fortunate than the living who are still alive. But better than both is he who has not yet been and has not seen the evil deeds that are done under the sun.

Norman Powers
Norman Powers
2 years ago

They feel utterly untouchable, obviously. And they are, because our society cannot handle holding scientists to account.

George Knight
George Knight
2 years ago

What is Fauci’s real job? Could it be Head of Germ Warfare? This would indicate that Daszak is really looking for new viruses for military purposes.

LCarey Rowland
LCarey Rowland
2 years ago

It almost seems that this covert cartel of gene-tinkerers could be a current renewal of the mid-20th-century ZPG (Zero Population Growth) movement.