Peter Daszak Discusses Directed Evolution of Viruses

On Dec. 9, 2019, three weeks before Wuhan officials announced an outbreak of a new form of pneumonia, Peter Daszak (President of Ecohealth Alliance) implied that the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) was modifying coronaviruses in the lab.

“You can manipulate them (coronaviruses) in the lab pretty easily. Spike protein drives a lot of what happens with coronavirus and zoonotic risk. So you can get the sequence, you can build the protein—and we will with Ralph Baric at UNC to do this. Insert into backbone of another virus, and do some work in the labs.”

Earlier in the spring of 2018, leaked documents show that EcoHealth Alliance (EHA) in concert wIth the WIV were looking towards implementing an advanced human pathogenicity BatCoV research project that clearly qualifies as Gain-of-Function research, in a grant proposal submitted to a funding proposal call by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). The proposal was ultimately rejected for full funding (but leaving open the door for partial funding), in part because it skirted the Gain-of-Function guidelines.

The lifting of the gain-of-function moratorium in late 2017, via the Potential Pandemic Pathogen Care and Oversight framework (P3CO), has allowed GOF research with SARS-like coronaviruses to resume. The P3CO framework was designed to allow greater flexibility for vaccine development, and in June of 2018 the NIH’s (with Fauci’s approval) Vaccine Research Center (VRC) expanded its existing partnership with Moderna to include full-scale research into a pan- coronavirus (CoV) vaccine platform. EcoHealth Alliance repeatedly took advantage of this flexibility to continue their work with the Wuhan Institute of Virology. On December 20, Nature published an article that named Daszak as part of a team of scientists in charge of investigating the origins of the COVID pandemic.