‘We’ve done nothing wrong.’ EcoHealth leader fights charges that his research helped spark COVID-19

Peter Daszak’s life took a turn for the worse on the evening of 17 April 2020. It has yet to recover.

Daszak, a conservation biologist, heads the EcoHealth Alliance, a nonprofit research group based in New York City that aims to prevent new infectious diseases from emerging. His family had been in a COVID-19 lockdown in their home outside the city for 1 month, and Daszak had spent long days working from a wood-paneled basement office, occasionally giving interviews as a pandemic expert.

That Friday evening, he went upstairs for a cup of tea with his wife, who was in the kitchen watching a White House Coronavirus Task Force press conference on her iPad. A reporter asked then-President Donald Trump about supposed U.S. intelligence reports that SARS-CoV-2 came from a lab in Wuhan, China, which she claimed received $3.7 million from the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH).

Daszak hushed his wife and children. “No one in the family could understand why I was getting so touchy about a press conference—it was just the usual circus,” he says.

Trump only had a wobbly grasp of the details and wrongly blamed the grant on his predecessor, former President Barack Obama, but his answer was emphatic: “We will end that grant very quickly.”

That grant had actually gone not to China, but to EcoHealth. NIH had just renewed the award, which provided $3.7 million over 5 years to find and study bat coronaviruses related to SARS-CoV, which causes severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), the disease that nearly triggered a pandemic in 2003. During the first 5 years of the grant, EcoHealth had sent roughly 16% of the funds to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). One week after the press conference, NIH followed Trump’s orders and canceled the grant.

The move put EcoHealth—and Daszak—at the center of an incendiary debate about whether SARS-CoV-2 has a natural origin or is the result of a “lab leak” from the research EcoHealth had supported. Daszak’s emails, tweets, letters, journal articles, and media interviews have been scrutinized; he has received blistering criticism in Congress, on social media, and in major news outlets; he has been accused of conflicts of interest, a lack of transparency, being a China apologist, and conducting reckless experiments. He has received death threats, including a letter holding white powder resembling anthrax, and journalists have staked out his home to shoot photos and videos. Two high-profile commissions to study the pandemic’s origin have collapsed in part because he was a member.

Daszak is exasperated. “This is an antiscience attack and, unfortunately, we’re the target,” he says. He sees it as particularly unfair that, after warning about the risk of a coronavirus pandemic for more than 15 years, he is being vilified. “If a small group of scientists were absolutely correct in their predictions, why are we now putting them on the pyre in the middle of the village, dancing around, and burning them alive?” Daszak asks. “That’s what really sickens me to my stomach.”

Daszak’s journey from oracle to pariah has appalled many colleagues. “Poor Peter is being crucified,” says Lam Sai Kit, an emeritus professor at the University of Malaya who has long worked with EcoHealth. “It’s really awful to see this kind of witch hunt,” says Peter Hotez, a Baylor College of Medicine global health researcher who has faced intense attacks himself for challenging the antivaccine movement. David Morens, an influenza researcher at NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), says Daszak should be celebrated. “Peter is the smartest guy in the room with respect to these coronaviruses,” Morens says.

But some scientists, even those dismayed by the attacks, say Daszak is in part a victim of his own making. They argue he failed to reveal important information that later surfaced through embarrassing Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests and leaks, and some accuse him of making false statements. “Daszak has been far from forthcoming about EcoHealth’s research, much of which is highly relevant to the pandemic origin discussion,” says Filippa Lentzos, a social scientist at King’s College London who specializes in biosecurity. “It is the pattern of continuing obfuscation and deceit that I find alarming.”

Edward Holmes, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Sydney who’s solidly in the natural origins camp—he calls the debate a “tempest in an espresso cup”—says Daszak has been “unfairly vilified.” But EcoHealth “is guilty of shockingly poor communication and a naïvete that it would not come under scrutiny,” Holmes says.

Daszak acknowledges minor mistakes, but says EcoHealth has not broken any rules, guidelines, or laws. “We have done nothing wrong,” he says. “We’ve done everything that any normal scientist would do, and in fact we’ve gone above and beyond that.” And yet, he says, the organization he has led for 2 decades and helped flourish is now “under existential treat.”

Daszak, who turns 56 this month, favors hiking pants and a hiking shirt, even in his New York City office. He is gregarious, funny, and unguarded, an avuncular type who can make complicated ideas engaging to nonscientists. But during a 7-hour interview he’s also intense and at times prickly when discussing the flood of allegations. After a cricket that has escaped from one of the terrariums in the office—home to a dozen snakes and lizards—hops by his feet, I make a joke about lab leaks. He is not amused.

Daszak grew up in Dukinfield, England, a coal-mining town outside of Manchester. His father was a Ukrainian conscripted to serve in the German army when the Nazis invaded who wound up a British prisoner of war in Italy, which eventually led him to Scotland and a job in a chocolate biscuit factory. He later worked as a draftsman and married a woman from Dukinfield. The young Daszak shared his room with his brother John, who listened to Luciano Pavarotti and Plácido Domingo—he’s a professional opera singer today—while Peter was into punk bands such as the Sex Pistols, The Damned, and other punk bands.

The Dukinfield area, Daszak wrote in an essay in the journal EcoHealth, was a “post-industrial apocalypse” of decrepit factories “with little room for nature,” where acid rain was “laying waste to our forests.” The river he crossed going to school “changed color weekly as different dyes were poured into its waters by clothing manufacturers.” He called it an “Eco-hell.”

Daszak had 18 cages of reptiles at home. “I’m a lizard guy,” he says. In a primary school essay, he wrote that he wanted to become a zoologist and study marmosets in the Amazon. He studied zoology at Bangor University and earned a Ph.D. in infectious diseases at the University of East London with a thesis on electron microscopy of a parasite that caused an intestinal disease in chickens.

A postdoctoral stint at Kingston University led to a collaboration with former surgeon Andrew Wakefield, now infamous for his role in the antivaccine movement. Wakefield asked Daszak to do electron microscopy of gut segments removed from Crohn disease patients. They found evidence of the measles virus, and Wakefield—“a charismatic guy,” Daszak says—went on to argue that the measles vaccine might be to blame for the disease. Subsequent studies made Daszak question the findings. “No one could repeat it,” he says. Wakefield was later discredited for a fraudulent study that linked vaccines to autism and has become a touchstone for vaccination skeptics.

Daszak’s early work focused on disease outbreaks in animals. One caused the extinction of the tiny tropical snail Partula turgida, which had been wiped out in its natural range on South Pacific  islands by 1991, collateral damage of a campaign to control another snail species that destroyed crops. Only one captive P. turgida population remained, part of a genetics study at the London Zoo. Then those survivors died as well; Daszak helped identify a unicellular parasite of the genus Steinhausia—which the snails caught and spread to one another in captivity—as the culprit. It was the first definitive evidence that an infectious disease could exterminate an entire species, he and Andrew Cunningham of the Zoological Society of London wrote. It also set the stage for Daszak’s life’s work: studying the link between human activity and devastating diseases.

In 1998, he and others published a study that fingered a fungal disease, chytridiomycosis, as the culprit behind a mysterious global wave of frog deaths. “The frog story is more important than any other disease ever researched in a way, because it caused extinction of more than 30 species,” he boldly asserts. “We’re humans, so we think our species is more important.” Daszak and Cunningham later showed the international trade in bullfrogs, which are resistant to chytridiomycosis, helped spread the disease worldwide. “There were a bunch of folks saying it was caused by climate change,” Daszak says. “It was clearly caused by us.”

That same year, a biotech company in Georgia hired Daszak’s wife, an immunologist, and they moved to the United States. He wound up on the faculty at the University of Georgia as a research scientist, and in 2001 became head of the Consortium for Conservation Medicine, a nonprofit that sought to show how biodiversity loss, logging, wetland destruction, and other activities could drive the spread of disease in animals and humans. “It was an opportunity to work on my dream,” Daszak says. Nine years later, the group merged with the Wildlife Trust and rebranded itself as the EcoHealth Alliance.

In his early years at the group, Daszak set up research collaborations in Australia and Southeast Asia to study the emergence of Nipah and Hendra, viruses that originate in fruit bats and occasionally cause outbreaks in humans. “He and his EcoHealth researchers have played a pivotal role in developing the network of Asian scientists in the surveillance and investigation of zoonotic infections,” says Lam, whose team helped discover Nipah virus.

Daszak proved an astute leader and fundraiser, as well. When he took over the consortium, its annual budget was about $600,000; in 2020, EcoHealth spent some $11 million, most of it from government and foundation grants. It employs 33 scientists and 17 support staff, takes part in research in 41 countries—EcoHealth does not have its own lab—and boasts it has detected more than 1000 viruses.

Daszak has long warned that some may pose a grave threat. “What worries me the most is that we are going to miss the next emerging disease,” he told 60 Minutes, “that we’re suddenly going to find a SARS virus that moves from one part of the planet to another, wiping out people as it moves along.” That was 16 years before COVID-19.

Also in 2004, a Chinese researcher asked Daszak whether he could aid in the hunt for Nipah in China, as well. Daszak sent a young veterinarian he had hired, Jonathan Epstein, who teamed up with Shi Zhengli, a virologist at WIV who then specialized in diseases of shrimp. They didn’t find Nipah but stumbled on coronaviruses similar to SARS-CoV, leading to a widely cited Science paper the next year that first tied bats to SARS.

Daszak himself met Shi in 2006. They struck up a long scientific collaboration that resulted in 18 joint papers, most describing SARS-related bat coronaviruses. “Peter has a Chinese name, Da Xia Ke, which is homophonic to his family name and means ‘swordsman’ of the ancient China—a person adept in martial arts and having a strong sense of justice and ready to help the weak,” Shi says. “I think his Chinese name reflects very well his character.”

The admiration is mutual, and Daszak bristles at assertions that Shi, who now leads bat coronavirus research at WIV, is hiding data about viruses or experiments in her lab—or a lab leak. “She is not lying,” he says. “Anyone with half a brain can tell when a person is faking it at this level.”

Daszak first learned of what would later be named COVID-19 on 30 December 2019. “I got a heads up from folks in China: Have you seen what’s going on Weibo?” he says. “So you Google Translate Weibo”—a social media app—“and it’s all over the place, people gossiping about this new outbreak.” He made a few phone calls to Chinese scientists and learned about unconfirmed reports of a new coronavirus. He mentioned them in a tweet on New Year’s Eve and sent a barrage of other messages about “important and disturbing information coming out of China.”

Over the next month, chatter on Chinese social media, articles in right-wing news outlets, and even a U.S. senator—Tom Cotton, (R–AR)—began to tie the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 to WIV and Shi. Some even claimed Shi’s group had bioengineered the virus, and she received death threats. “I was really shocked and upset by that,” Daszak says. “This will do nothing more than undermine the incredible openness and transparency we’ve built up that’s critical for protecting all of us from pandemics!!!” he tweeted on 2 February 2020.

He decided to organize a statement of support for colleagues in China, which The Lancet published a few weeks later. “We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin,” 27 signatories from nine countries wrote.

It became the first of many lightning rods. By branding suggestions of a lab leak as “conspiracy theories,” the statement helped stifle what should have been an open discussion, former New York Times science writer Nicholas Wade wrote in a savage critique of scientists and the media published in May 2021. The letter also helped make Daszak himself a target. It did not disclose his own links to WIV, and emails obtained under FOIA by U.S. Right to Know, a watchdog group focusing on public health issues, later revealed he sought to downplay his role in orchestrating it.

Daszak disclosed his “competing interests” in a somewhat testy addendum this past June. In retrospect, he agrees he should have done so earlier, but he says the letter was a statement of support, not a scientific study, and the link was obvious from the many papers he and Shi co-authored. As to the conspiracy theories, “We wanted to show support for scientists who have been threatened because of the idea that they’d designed, bioengineered, and released a weaponized virus,” he says. “That was the conspiracy theory at the time and that clearly has been shown to be false.” He blasts the notion that the statement, subsequently signed by more than 20,000 people, stymied the debate.

Daszak acknowledges not all lab-leak scenarios involve ill intent. “The lab-leak idea morphed from one thing to another,” he says. “Every time that happens, I think, ‘Oh my god, is this true? Could this be real?’ And we go and check. We do what you’re supposed to do.”

After bioengineering accusations came the idea that WIV was hiding a bat virus that sickened six men cleaning an abandoned mine in Mojiang, China, in 2012. Then allegations gained traction that WIV tweaked bat viruses to study their pandemic potential, creating SARS-CoV-2 by accident. There’s also a scenario that begins with a researcher becoming infected by sampling bats in the field or working at the WIV lab and spreading the virus to colleagues. Finally, there’s the possibility that WIV unwittingly had a bat sample with SARS-CoV-2, which somehow leaked. “Of course it’s possible—things have happened in the past,” Daszak says. But he has seen no evidence.

“People are more intrigued by the nefarious story than the boring story that it spilled over,” Epstein says.

The axing of the NIH grant, in April 2020, left about a 6% dent in EcoHealth’s budget, but the wound cut much deeper. “It’s the total disparaging of our integrity, our character as an organization, discrediting me and everybody else who works here,” Daszak says. “It’s just untenable.” Many scientists assailed NIH for capitulating to the White House and cutting a grant that peer reviewers deemed a high priority; 77 Nobel laureates wrote a letter in protest. (NIH offered to reinstate the grant 5 months later, but attached conditions that EcoHealth says it can’t possibly meet.)

The attacks intensified after Daszak decided to join a mission to study the pandemic’s origin, organized by the World Health Organization (WHO). The group traveled to China in January for 1 month of work with Chinese colleagues. “I didn’t want to go, and I said no initially,” Daszak says. A sense of duty prevailed: “If you want to get to the bottom of the origins of a coronavirus outbreak in China, the No. 1 person you should be talking to is the person who works on coronaviruses in China who’s not from China,” he says. “So that’s me, unfortunately.”

But the trip was “awful,” Daszak says. The team spent half of the time locked up in a quarantine hotel and faced nonstop work and political pressure. Its report ranked the lab-origin theory as “extremely unlikely” but called natural spillover “possible-to-likely.” Even the head of WHO criticized what he saw as a “premature push” to scuttle the probe of a lab leak. And Daszak was slammed for his conflicts of interest.

Mission member Marion Koopmans, a virologist at Erasmus Medical Center whose department collaborates with EcoHealth, says Daszak “was tough” with the Chinese scientists and dismisses the notion he drove the “extremely unlikely” conclusion. “It’s really overestimating the dominance of Peter in this group,” she says. Daszak says he now wishes he had stayed home. “It’s hard to say, but do I think it was a mistake from my health and family security point of view?” he asks. “Absolutely.” WHO has since disbanded the team and proposed a new panel—which includes Koopmans but not Daszak—to study the origins of emerging viruses, including SARS-CoV-2.

Daszak also agreed in November 2020 to chair a task force organized by a Lancet commission to study the pandemic’s origins. Again his ties to WIV—and other task force members’ links to EcoHealth—stoked criticism. He resigned from the chair position this past June, but remained a member until the Lancet commission decided to disband the entire task force.

The public drubbing continued when additional FOIA requests turned up thousands of pages of documents related to EcoHealth and Daszak. First came an email, obtained by BuzzFeed and The Washington Post, that Daszak sent to NIAID Director Anthony Fauci the day after Trump pledged to cut the grant. “I just wanted to say a personal thankyou [sic] on behalf of our staff and collaborators, for publicly standing up and stating that the scientific evidence supports a natural origin for COVID-19 from a bat-to-human spillover, not a lab release from the Wuhan Institute of Virology,” Daszak wrote.

NIH blacked out one paragraph in the email, claiming it could interfere with law enforcement, which fanned lab-leak proponents’ suspicions. But the redacted material, which Daszak shared with Science, is innocuous, stressing the value of his collaboration with virologists in China and saying, “We’re fighting to keep the communications open with our Chinese colleagues, so that we can better address future pandemics like COVID-19.” The FOIA process had evidently created smoke where there was no fire. “Bizarrely, it created its own conspiracy,” Daszak says.

But in September, a FOIA request to NIH from The Intercept—which required a lawsuit to obtain documents—also yielded details about controversial experiments done at WIV by Shi during her collaboration with EcoHealth. Her lab has more than 2000 samples of bodily fluids from bats that have tested positive for coronaviruses. To assess the risk of those viruses to humans, Shi’s team took sequences coding for their viral surface protein and stitched them into a bat coronavirus called WIV1, one of only three she has succeeded in growing in lab cultures. Daszak and Shi described these chimeric viruses in a 2017 paper. None of them has a close relationship to SARS-CoV-2. But some lab-leak proponents believe Shi, possibly with Daszak’s knowledge, hid other chimeric virus experiments that led to SARS-CoV-2.

The same batch of documents also showed that in “humanized” mice, some of the chimeric viruses grew better and were more lethal than WIV1. An NIH official, in response to an inquiry from a member of Congress, claimed EcoHealth had “failed to report” the worrisome results immediately, as the grant required. Daszak sent NIH a detailed letter strongly rebutting that accusation.

The documents also included a grant report that described an additional experiment, in which Shi added bat coronavirus surface proteins to the coronavirus that causes Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS), a highly lethal human pathogen. Ferocious debates erupted about whether this work and the WIV1 studies constituted gain of function (GOF), the type of experiment that can make disease agents more transmissible or pathogenic and that requires extra layers of review. Richard Ebright, a biochemist at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, who has long lobbied against GOF research, tweeted that both “unequivocally” met the definition of GOF.

This month, the White Coat Waste Project, a group that opposes animal experimentation, obtained correspondence between NIH and EcoHealth showing that protracted discussions over the experiments led to the decision that they were outside the GOF definition and could go ahead. The Daily Caller, co-founded by Fox News’s Tucker Carlson, suggested the agency had capitulated to its grantee, reporting that “NIH dropped the issue after nonprofit group EcoHealth Alliance downplayed the concerns.” The headline on an Intercept story about the correspondence said NIH officials “worked with EcoHealth Alliance to evade” GOF restrictions. In an email to Science, NIH wrote that its GOF review followed a “standard process.” “Any indication that EcoHealth Alliance crafted oversight language for its own award is false,” the agency wrote.

Even some scientists sympathetic to EcoHealth were dismayed when a rejected grant proposal for other studies came to light only after it was leaked to an internet-based group named DRASTIC that supports the lab-leak theory. The application, which Daszak and others submitted to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in 2018, outlined a variety of research projects to address the threat of bat coronaviruses. One experiment, to be done by Ralph Baric and colleagues at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, would make it easier for human enzymes to cleave their viral surface proteins, increasing infectiousness and thus their pandemic potential. (Baric did not respond to requests for comment.)

Arguments that a lab had engineered SARS-CoV-2—the “conspiracy theories” Daszak had attacked in the early days of the pandemic—hinged on just such an artificial introduction of what’s known as the furin cleavage site. “I’m just absolutely stunned that Daszak and Baric had not made this public,” Holmes says. Holmes is quick to add that the revelation does not make the lab origin any more credible for him. “It hasn’t changed my view that the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 is entirely natural.” But, he says, “It’s appalling from the perspective of transparency, which is clearly critical if we are going to figure out what happened.”

Virologist Angela Rasmussen of the University of Saskatchewan, who has assailed the lab-leak theory, agrees. “The failure to be forthcoming with all of this information and to let it instead come to the public’s attention through these weaponized FOIA requests have really led to this perception that there’s something untoward going on,” Rasmussen says.

Daszak says he didn’t even remember the five sentences that describe the Baric experiment in the 43-page DARPA proposal that describe the experiment and says scientists do not routinely make failed grant proposals public. “If we’d have released it, how would that have helped people understand the origins of COVID?” he asks. “It would have just allowed more mud to be thrown into the truth.” Making NIH grants and annual updates public could have further imperiled an already strained relationship with the agency, he adds: “If I start releasing stuff about NIH, how does that play in the Office of the Director?”

Daszak does acknowledge having made a few mistakes. He once said WIV did not house live bats—calling it another “conspiracy theory” in a tweet—but later admitted he was misinformed; the lab did have bats at one point for immunological studies, but they were not of a species that harbors SARS-related coronaviruses. An EcoHealth spokesperson gave inaccurate information about the MERS study, Daszak says. And the late filing of a grant report with NIH, which he blames on a misunderstanding, could have been handled better. “We just assumed everything was fine and, well, that was a mistake,” he says. By and large, however, Daszak remains unshaken. “People can disparage us because of what other folks say, but we have maintained our integrity.”

ALMOST 2 YEARS into the pandemic, its origins are still a mystery. Daszak contends his collaboration with WIV might already have figured out the origin of SARS-CoV-2 if “U.S. geopolitics” hadn’t “crushed” it. “Our one last chance to keep open scientific collaboration with that lab was canceled. That’s a real tragedy,” he says. Of course, this presumes China would have allowed the collaboration to follow the leads, and Daszak readily acknowledges the Chinese government’s lack of transparency. “Do I think China’s done a lousy job of openly discussing what happened? Oh, absolutely,” he says. He says he also has encouraged WIV to make public its audits of Shi’s lab. Daszak’s bottom line, which he repeats frequently: “You mix politics with science and you just get politics.”

Even if scientists do eventually find a convincing precursor to SARS-CoV-2 in animals or humans, Daszak expects suspicions it escaped from a lab will live on. “You can never prove a negative,” he says. But as evidence for a natural origin piles up and the current pandemic winds down, the storm will subside, he predicts.

What will not go away is the threat posed by emerging pathogens and the need for prevention efforts. That’s why EcoHealth will persevere, he says, and he hopes to continue leading it. Another NIH grant still brings in $1.5 million a year to organize teams of researchers in the United States, Thailand, Singapore, and Malaysia to search for humans and animals infected with novel viruses, providing an early warning and response system for new outbreaks. Multiyear, multimillion-dollar grants from the U.S. Department of Defense are funding collaborations to study Rift Valley fever in South Africa, the spillover potential of Nipah-related viruses and filoviruses in Malaysia and hemorrhagic fever in Tanzania, and the risks to humans of bat-borne diseases in western Asia.

Daszak acknowledges that EcoHealth and other like-minded research groups did not prevent the COVID-19 pandemic. “We’ve clearly failed,” he says. But that’s in part because the world ignored the 2003 warning from SARS, which originated at Chinese wildlife markets and quickly spread globally, he adds. “And we never shut down the markets. That’s the problem,” he says.

“We’re in this pandemic era where COVID is not the last one—I mean, give me a break,” Daszak says. “And there’s worse out there.”

Source: Science Mag