Why Does Peter Daszak Tell Lies?

In court, a jury instruction you often see is that if a witness is shown to have lied in one part of his testimony, the jury is entitled to doubt his veracity about any other part of his testimony. This is one reason I'm scratching my head about all the public statements key figures in the Wuhan scandal keep making, when people in their situation should be maintaining a low profile. This applies to Peter Daszak, CEO of EcoHealth Alliance, which bundles grants from US agencies and allocates them to Chinese virology labs.

In a post last week, I noted that Daszak has insisted he didn't fund gain-of-function research that made viruses worse and more contagious, when he's on video explaining that gain of function is exactly what those labs do. Now, over the past weekend, Sky News Australia found video of live bats in cages at the Wuhan virology institute, when Daszak had previously denied this was done:

A member of the W.H.O. team investigating the origin of the pandemic in Wuhan, zoologist Peter Daszak said it was a conspiracy to suggest bats were held at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and no evidence existed to support the allegation.

In one tweet dated December, 2020 he said: “No BATS were sent to Wuhan lab for genetic analysis of viruses collected in the field. That’s now how this science works. We collect bat samples, send them to the lab. We RELEASE bats where we catch them!”

Two things strike me. The first is that the guy is simply telling an outright untruth. But the second is that the untruth is dressed up in animal-rights virtue signaling -- no bats are harmed in our research! We gather their viruses and release them! The fact that millions of humans have been harmed in the course of this same research goes unmentioned. This goes to the strange anti-humanist environmentalism that seems to surround this whole field of pandemic research. It's more important that we seem to care about animals than that we recklessly endanger humans. But the whole pose is a lie.

The poster at the top of this post reveals another puzzling aspect of pandemic research. One of Daszak's colleagues in this tight little group, Ralph Baric, gave a presentation in 2018 entitled "Imagining the Next Flu Pandemic – and Preventing it!”. Isn't it odd that both Daszak and Baric represent their field as helping us to prevent flu pandemics, when in fact they seem to have funded the lab whose leak resulted in one of the worst flu pandemics ever?

At minimum, if I attended either of the presentations by Daszak or Baric, I think I'd ask for my money back. There's something really hinky here, and it's not just Daszak.