“From my perspective, your comments are brave, and coming from your trusted voice, will help dispel the myths being spun around the virus’ origins.”
The backlash against the main public figurehead of America’s response to the COVID pandemic, Dr. Anthony Fauci, continues to intensify this week.
The situation overall renewed its traction after Fauci publicly flip-flopped late last month on the theories about where COVID came from.
For someone who is attempting to stay vague and hold on to some ignorance, he’ll be having a harder time with that thanks to newly uncovered evidence.
Today we’re learning of the close relationship between Peter Daszak and Fauci.
This all comes via a BuzzFeed deep dive into over 3,200 pages of emails granted to them after winning a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit. The outlet got their hands on a boatload of communications between Fauci talking with numerous influential public figures all trying to respond to the outset of the COVID pandemic.
It’ll likely take some time to sift through it all. But Daily Caller has already zeroed in on the interesting exchange.
Peter Daszak, who was deeply involved both in Wuhan coronavirus research & in misleading the public about the likelihood of a lab leak, thanked Fauci for helping "dispel the myths" around COVID origins and blamed Fox News for targeting his grant. From the @JasonLeopold FOIA batch pic.twitter.com/LgloFVaFZX
— Sarah Westwood (@sarahcwestwood)
Peter Daszak sent the following to Anthony Fauci on April 18th, 2020:
“As the PI of the R01 grant publicly targeted by Fox News reporters at the Presidential press briefing last night, I just wanted to say a personal thankyou 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.”
Fauci responded the very next day, thanking Daszak for the “kind” note.
Peter Daszak is the President of the EcoHealth Alliance, a research firm with connections to the Wuhan Lab in China that people are increasingly believing was the origin of the Coronavirus pandemic. That it was experimented on at this facility and escaped containment.
Early last year Daszak tried to pre-empt any consideration that the COVID pandemic was the result of a lab leak. He did so by publishing a statement in the leading medical journal, The Lancet.
It later came to light that Daszak called the lab leak theory a “conspiracy theory” because he wanted to protect Chinese scientists.
EcoHealth Alliance had given $600,000 to the Wuhan Institute of Virology to “conduct risky experiments on bat-based coronaviruses,” as described in Daily Caller reports on the subject.
For Fauci’s faults, under his leadership at the NIAID the EcoHealth grant wasn’t flagged for an independent review that theoretically should have been conducted. It fits the “gain-of-function” research circumstances that call for one.
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