Peter Daszak - EcoHealth + Gain of Function

A short clip from 2016, with Daszak talking about bats, China, SARS & making "killer" viruses.
Plus a longer interview from May 2020, where Daszak is perhaps a little more candid than usual, talking about virology like a Wall Street wanker.

"Pandemics"
Sonia Shah moderated a forum on emerging infectious diseases and the next pandemic.
23rd February 2016

While describing how his organization sequences deadly viruses, Daszak describes the process of “inserting spike proteins” into viruses to see if they can “bind to human cells” as being carried out by his “colleagues in China”:

“Then when you get a sequence of a virus, and it looks like a relative of a known nasty pathogen, just like we did with SARS. We found other coronaviruses in bats, a whole host of them, some of them looked very similar to SARS. So we sequenced the spike protein: the protein that attaches to cells. Then we…

Well I didn’t do this work, but my colleagues in China did the work. You create pseudo particles, you insert the spike proteins from those viruses, see if they bind to human cells. At each step of this you move closer and closer to this virus could really become pathogenic in people.

“You end up with a small number of viruses that really do look like killers,” he adds.

(1 hr 35mins)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AksKoMZon6Y
https://www.c-span.org/video/?404875-1/pandemics

TWiV 615
Vincent (This Week in Virology) speaks with Peter Daszak, President of EcoHealth Alliance, a global nonprofit organization dedicated to protecting wildlife and public health from the emergence of disease...... and making money.
19th May, 2020

https://www.microbe.tv/twiv/twiv-615/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IdYDL_RK--w

Daszaks' daddy was from Ukraine?....hmmmmmmm, can't help but wonder what side of the "ultra fascist" fence his family stood in the 1940s??