Chinese virus researcher Shi Zhengli (left) in the Wuhan virus research lab.
Freelance Writer Hans Mahncke wrote in the Epoch Times on Monday (March 22) that the only member of the World health Organization (WHO) investigation team responsible for investigating the origins of the Wuhan virus was an American who was approved by the Chinese Communist Party because of his close ties to the Wuhan Virus Institute. Such an investigation is therefore tantamount to “a thief calling out a thief”.
An excerpt from Mahanke’s article is translated below.
The World Health Organization has once again made headlines with its latest visit to Wuhan, China, to investigate the origins of the COVID-19 (Chinese Communist virus) pandemic. But not for positive reasons.
An article published in the Wall Street Journal on March 17 said that the hypocritical investigation was ill-intended from the start because the Chinese Communist Party controlled the decision on who could go to Wuhan to conduct the so-called investigation.
Of the members of the WHO investigation team decided by the CCP, the only American invited to participate was Peter Daszak. He is the president of the EcoHealth Alliance, a government-funded nonprofit organization that purports to conduct research on Epidemic prevention.
It seems no coincidence that Daszak was chosen by the Chinese Communist Party for this work. In fact, given his own possible motives, he may be the CCP’s best hope for covering up the origin of the virus.
To understand why, let’s go back and look at Dazak’s strong ties to the Wuhan Institute of Virus Research (WIV), dating back as far as 2013, when he published research on bat coronavirus with the lab’s director, Zhengli Shi.
Dazak co-authored other papers with Zhengli Shi in 2017 and 2018.
But it’s not just Dazak’s collaboration with Zhengli Shi itself that raises questions, but also their collaborative project. They succeeded in 2013 in attaching a deadly virus to a human cell. The result was widely publicized at the Time in their field of research. The viruses were isolated from horseshoe bats in Yunnan province, which is more than 1,000 miles from Wuhan.
But not everyone was excited about what Dazak and Zhengli Shi had done: in 2015, Shi created “a chimeric virus that expresses the spines of bat coronavirus SHC014 in the SARS-CoV backbone of mice. In layman’s terms, she artificially generated a hybridized version of the bat coronavirus in her lab. The study is based on the 2013 work of Zhengli Shi and Dazak, which was the first time the virus was isolated in the laboratory.
The article, “Modifying bat viruses and the risky research debate,” was published in 2015 in Nature, a leading international weekly scientific journal.
The experiments conducted by Zhengli Shi and Dazak are known as gain-of-function studies, which are studies aimed at increasing the virulence and lethality of viruses. In light of the current plague pandemic, this raises more than a few questions.
Essentially, the questions can boil down to: is it worthwhile to isolate viruses from the wild and study them in the laboratory? The goal is simply to get one step ahead of the game in case the virus might one day naturally mutate along the same path. Or is the danger too great in the event of an accident?
Not only did the scientists who wrote that article in Nature think the risks were too high, but the Obama administration decided that these gain-of-function experiments were too risky and suspended them in the United States in 2014.
Not only did the research itself raise significant concerns, but so did the manner in which the Wuhan Institute of Virus conducted the experiments, and in January 2018, the U.S. Embassy in Beijing sent staff from its Environment, Science and Health Department to the institute to investigate reports of inadequate biosecurity.
Chillingly, a diplomatic cable from the embassy back to Washington, D.C., obtained by The Washington Post, stated that “in interacting with scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virus Research laboratory, they found that the new laboratory had a serious lack of technicians and researchers properly trained to safely operate this high-risk laboratory.”
Dazak himself warned of the risk of lab leaks in a paper he co-authored in Nature in 2015. He said, “Of all the high-risk interfaces and hosts, only in the wildlife trade and in the laboratory is the geographic spread of virus transmission to humans through contact with wildlife likely to be more extensive.”
Shi Zhengli also published a paper in 2010 describing how a leak in a laboratory in Yunnan led to an outbreak of hantavirus. But that’s not all. After the Obama administration banned gain-of-function experiments, Dazak outsourced the work to the Wuhan Institute of Virus Research.
The project Datsak outsourced is called “Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence” and is funded by Dr. Anthony Fauci’s American Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. It is unclear how much of the $3.7 million in U.S. government funding Fauci provided to Dazak ended up at the Wuhan Institute of Virus Research, but many of the articles in Dazak’s research involve experiments with bats at the Wuhan Institute of Virus Research.
In a December 2019 interview on the YouTube channel MicrobeTV, Dazak bragged that he could “easily manipulate [the coronavirus] in the lab.” He also explained how coronaviruses “enter human cells in the lab,” and that he has begun experimenting with chimeras combining coronaviruses with other viruses.
News of the Wuhan bat coronavirus outbreak began to emerge shortly after his interview in December 2019. Despite understanding the Wuhan Virus Institute’s coronavirus experiments through 2020, Dazak led the push to focus the scientific community and the media on the claim of the virus’ natural origin.
In a statement co-published in the medical journal The Lancet on Feb. 18, 2020, Dazak and others claimed that scientists “overwhelmingly concluded that this coronavirus, like many other emerging pathogens, originated in the wild.”
As subsequently revealed under the Freedom of Information Act, Datsyak not only drafted the statement, but also persuaded other scientists to sign it in an effort “to avoid looking like a political statement.”
Datsak further wanted to “release it in a way that would not link it to our partnership, so that we could maximize our appearance as an independent voice.”
The Lancet did not disclose that the four signatories to the statement were Datsak’s affiliates in the EcoHealth Alliance, and on November 23, 2020, instead of withdrawing the statement, The Lancet appointed Datsak as the head of its task force to find the origin of the virus. Half of the people on that task force were signatories to that February 2020 statement.
Also in February 2020, Datsyak published an article in the New York Times in which he preemptively denounced the “misinformation campaign and conspiracy theorists” of the virus, while declaring that “pandemics usually start with viruses in animals and then spread to people when we come in contact with them. It is then transmitted to humans when we come into contact with them”. At a time when we know almost nothing about the origin of such viruses, he claimed that “we know roughly where they originate and what they do.
Datsyak’s appointment to the WHO team was the final insult. Even before he left for China, Datsyak had already established that the laboratory leak theory was a “conspiracy theory” and “nonsense”.
Since his return from China, Datsyak has been working harder to justify the lab leak theory. He recently told National Public Radio (NPR) that “his team found new evidence that the farms were supplying the South China wholesale seafood market in Wuhan, where the earliest outbreak of COVID-19 occurred.”
But after the trip to Wuhan, WHO also acknowledged that “all samples related to animal products or animals were negative.”
When Datsak was asked on a March 10 live show hosted by Chatham House why the Wuhan Virus Institute had deleted a database of more than 16,000 virus sequences and why the WHO had not asked to see them, he responded by defending the Wuhan Virus Institute’s collaborators and claiming that there was nothing relevant in the database.
No one is more unqualified to be the one to investigate the origin of the virus than Dazak. He worked directly with the Wuhan Institute of Virus on dangerous bat virus research, bragged about creating genetically modified bat viruses, published papers at the Wuhan Institute of Virus, and funded the institute. He appears to be a friend of the director of the institute. He also ruled out the possibility of a lab leak immediately before the facts were revealed.
Would anyone other than the CCP have thought it was a good idea to put him in charge of investigating the origin of the virus? As the saying goes, having the fox watch the chicken coop does not keep him righteous.
We will never know what really happened at the Wuhan Virus Institute as long as Dazak is still investigating.
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