If the Covid-19 virus had escaped from research that he funded, Daszak would be potentially culpable. Daszak’s organization funded coronavirus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. In May 2021, science reporter Nicholas Wade published a lengthy article in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists stating that the Lancet letter had been organized and drafted by Peter Daszak, president of the EcoHealth Alliance of New York. The Lancet op-ed stated, “We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that Covid-19 does not have a natural origin.”
The ‘consensus’ that Covid-19 had an entirely natural origin was established by two op-eds in early 2020 – The Lancetin February and Nature Medicine in March. However from the beginning, the possibility that this virus accidentally escaped from the lab was dismissed quite forcefully by prominent virologists. The Covid-19 virus first appeared in Wuhan, China, where there is a laboratory that conducts research on bat coronaviruses. The concerning saga of the creation, enforcement and collapse of a ‘consensus’ on Covid-19 origins.
