Is He Trying to Mislead Congress?

The editors of the Washington Post call for Congress to subpoena and question Peter Daszak:

Last week, it was disclosed that the EcoHealth Alliance in August filed a report on its research in 2018-2019 — the report was two years late. This just happens to be the two-year period of the pandemic and intense debate about the virus origins. No reason has been given. Mr. Daszak did not respond to our query. The tardy report describes experiments, approved in advance by the NIH, to test the infectivity of the genetically-manipulated viruses on mice with cells resembling those of the human respiratory system. The manipulations made the viruses more lethal to the mice. Although the NIH continues to insist this did not fit the definition of “gain of function” research, and could not have led to the pandemic strain, it certainly should have met the U.S. government’s own requirements for stricter oversight.

Still, much is unknown. There is no direct evidence of zoonotic spillover, nor of a laboratory leak.

But unanswered questions keep emerging about Mr. Daszak and the WIV. He was at the center of public debate over virus origins, the only American appointed to the joint World Health Organization-China mission. Why did he not disclose his 2018 proposal to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) for research on bat coronaviruses with the WIV and others, which called for engineering a modification onto spike proteins of chimeric viruses that would make them infect human cells in the way the pandemic strain did? What does he know about the databases of viruses that WIV took offline in 2019 and never brought back? Does he know what research the WIV may have done on its own, during or after their collaboration? What was being done at WIV in the months before the pandemic?

Mr. Daszak must answer these questions before Congress. His grants were federal funds, and it is entirely appropriate for Congress to insist on accountability and transparency. He might also help the world understand what really happened in Wuhan.

They’re right that questioning Dr. Daszak is within Congress’s oversight scope. I don’t know that anybody has actually done anything wrong but there appears to be a lot of plausible deniability excuse-making going on. Nonetheless I’m unconvinced we’ll know more after his testimony that we do now. I’m more critical of the vast number of NGOs that basically live from one government grant to the next.