New Daszak Emails: GOP Missing the Forest for All the Trees

By Hans Mahncke & Jeff Carlson

Peter Daszak is on a mission to protect himself from the fallout of the Wuhan lab leak. Daszak is the president of a shady organization called EcoHealth Alliance which was used by Anthony Fauci and his National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), to funnel US taxpayer funds to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). Daszak has been pushing the natural origin propaganda since December 2019, when he wrote a long thread about the new virus having come from a market, even though – at the time – no one had ever heard of him or of Covid-19 (Imagine if, instead of posting his natural origins cover-your-back thread, Daszak had shared the truth that the virus had been modified to infect humans. China would have been shut down in two milliseconds, averting a lot of death and destruction).

The ostensible purpose of the Fauci and Daszak scheme to create synthetic coronaviruses at the WIV was to circumvent a federal moratorium on gain-of-function experiments. Neither man appears to have been bothered by the fact that this outsourcing involved the transfer of advanced Western biotechnology which went to a hostile country with no restrictions on reckless experiments. Even worse, even before Covid, it was known that the WIV was operated by the Chinese Communist Party (as is the case with all major organizations in China) and had strong connections to the People's Liberation Army.

So far, the federal government has pulled out all the stops to protect Daszak. First and foremost, Fauci and Francis Collins, the director of NIAID’s parent organization, the National Institutes of Health (NIH), instigated the Covid origin cover-up on February 1, 2020. Then, when President Trump terminated EcoHealth’s WIV grant in April 2020 due to the lab’s suspected role in seeding the Covid pandemic, Fauci quickly bestowed a new grant on Daszak’s organization. The media has been similarly complicit in helping Daszak by covering up both his organization’s suspected role in creating Covid and his many incriminating statements over the years. The intelligence community has done its part as well, with the now infamous April 2020 declaration from Richard Grenell’s Office of Director of National Intelligence, which asserted that the Covid virus had a natural origin. 

But the good times appear to be over for Daszak with his scheduled appearance, under oath, before Congress on May 1. Daszak may have hoped that one of his backers, be it Fauci and his ilk, the intelligence community, or the media, would step in to spare him from having to testify, but it appears as if they have moved on to something more important: protecting themselves. That it has come this far at all is mainly the achievement of the GOP’s Covid Select Committee, which has pursued the origin issue for the past year or so, and more importantly, a loose-knit group of people on Twitter who have doggedly kept the origin issue alive from day one in January 2020.

Perhaps unsurprisingly for those who have been following Daszak in recent years, he has decided that he will not be thrown under the bus quietly. It previously became known from an email released under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) that Daszak had effectively threatened UC Davis, USAID and US government funding program PREDICT in April 2020 by claiming that releasing Chinese virus sequences would bring unwelcome attention to those three parties. 

But now, in a shocking new move, Daszak has released stunning new evidence that hundreds of virus sequences have been withheld since Covid arrived. In one of the emails released by Daszak, Daszak can be seen confirming to NIAID in April 2020 that EcoHealth and the WIV "have 15,000 samples in freezers in Wuhan, and could do the full genomes of the 700+ CoVs we've identified."

This contradicts Daszak’s previous false claims that EcoHealth and the WIV had published all of the coronavirus sequences which they had identified.

Given the negative repercussions for himself and his own previous story, it appears as if Daszak has now decided to preempt his superiors by implicating NIAID and the NIH, releasing emails that document communications between EcoHealth and senior NIAID official David Morens. Morens has been in trouble for a while for deliberately using Gmail to circumvent federal records laws, such as FOIA.

Daszak's organization released the emails, claiming that a New York Post article had compelled EcoHealth to publish the emails to counter allegations against EcoHealth. The problem is that the article cited by EcoHealth was not about EcoHealth, but rather about Morens' legal issues. It appears that Daszak simply used the article as a pretext for releasing the emails. The ostensible purpose of his scheme was to fire off a shot across the bow: “I go down. You go down.”

The fact that it is now proven by documentary evidence that NIAID knew in April 2020 of the existence of many hundreds of unknown coronavirus sequences at the WIV is highly significant. This is so crucial because Fauci's main argument against the lab leak theory has always been that the Covid virus does not contain previously known virus backbones. In fact, the fraudulent Proximal Origin paper, which had been commissioned by Fauci to dismiss the lab leak theory, is built on the argument that "the genetic data irrefutably show that SARS-CoV-2 is not derived from any previously used virus backbone."

One can only wonder what other emails lurk in Daszak's archive. He would not have shot all his powder at once. He undoubtedly kept extremely incriminating information in reserve, anticipating that he might need it at some point. In fact, the notion that Daszak is adept at creating CYA strategies for future use already became apparent a few years ago when an email was released under FOIA. The email showed that on January 27, 2020, before most people had even heard of Covid, Daszak sent Fauci talking points about how to deflect attention from the Fauci-funded experiments at the WIV. While that email might have sounded like a friendly heads-up, it was actually a preemptive CYA.

As for the GOP, while they appear to be getting closer to the target, their “🚨BREAKING🚨” response to Daszak's email dump shows that they are still missing the forest for the trees. Instead of recognizing the immense significance of the disclosure of over 700 unpublished virus sequences from the Wuhan lab and understanding Daszak's true intentions, they congratulated themselves and, indirectly, Daszak, for confirming that David Morens used Gmail.