> It later turned out that the Lancet letter had been organized and drafted by Peter Daszak, president of the EcoHealth Alliance of New York The controversy ar

> It later turned out that the Lancet letter had been organized and drafted by Peter Daszak, president of the EcoHealth Alliance of New York The controversy around Peter Daszak goes deeper. First off, he was the only American on the WHO team that visited Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) earlier this year. Per the WSJ (https://www.wsj.com/articles/who-china-hunt-covid-origins-11616004512 https://www.wsj.com/articles/who-china-hunt-covid-origins-11...) the WHO rejected three different nominees from the Trump administration and instead chose Daszak. That seems suspicious to me, because Daszak's prior work with WIV means there is a clear conflict of interest, and it puts the WHO's judgment into doubt since it would seem like a convenient pick for the CCP, given how tightly they managed the WHO's visit and subsequent report. Furthermore, Daszak's name appears as an author on a WIV paper that concerns coronavirus research (https://jvi.asm.org/content/jvi/90/6/3253.full.pdf https://jvi.asm.org/content/jvi/90/6/3253.full.pdf), and the text within suggests WIV was actively performing gain of function research with SARS-like (SL) viruses: > "We recently isolated a bat SL-CoV strain (WIV1) and constructed an infectious clone of another strain (SHC014); significantly, these strains are closely related to SARS-CoV and capable of using the same cellular receptor (angiotensin-convert-ing enzyme 2 [ACE2]) as SARS-CoV" Note that EcoHealth's grant was omitted from the oversight process concerning research involving dangerous pathogens (https://news.yahoo.com/hhs-board-never-approved-wuhan-155055142.html https://news.yahoo.com/hhs-board-never-approved-wuhan-155055...). Per this article, Rutgers University professor of chemical biology Richard H. Ebright said that NIH and NIAID "systematically thwarted — indeed systematically nullified — the HHS P3CO Framework by declining to flag and forward proposals for review." - While all of this could just be strange coincidence, incorrect speculation, or reasonably explained with more information, it has all the markers of something that deserves scrutiny and transparency. I feel like everyone who was and still is quick to shut down the lab leak possibility is acting against the spirit of open inquiry and thwarting the best understanding that we could have from this entire saga.