Peter Daszak, the Communist Chinese Party's favorite bio-weapons researcher and Anthony Fauci's go-to guy for keeping the world safe from deadly pathogens he helped create, has been awarded $653,392 of your money through the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) to go find more deadly bat viruses now that Covid-19 has kind of run its course and people are starting to get all freedom-y again.

Now, before you get all worked up, Peter Daszak is not going to China to manipulate bat coronaviruses into deadly pandemics.

That would be crazy.

He's going south of China, to Myanmar, Laos, and Vietnam, to manipulate bat coronaviruses into deadly pandemics.

Why, those are totally different countries!

Yes, yes, there has clearly been quite a bit of controversy surrounding Daszak and his EcoHealth Alliance research organization's involvement with the Chinese Communist Party's virology lab in Wuhan and the emergence of the Covid-19 pandemic, but he cleared all that up in an extensive interview earlier this year with The Intercept.

Did EcoHealth Alliance or the Wuhan Institute of Virology, through its partnership with EcoHealth Alliance, ever insert a furin cleavage site into a bat coronavirus genetic sequence?

Of course we did not do that. I really don't understand how that could be a question at this point — it's beyond the pale. That's not in our plans and it's not any of our reports, so of course we didn't do that.

See? There is no way he ever inserted a furin cleavage site into a bat coronavirus genetic sequence.

Why, it's preposterous and beyond the pale to even suggest such a thing!

But isn't it the case that you submitted a grant proposal to DARPA to do so?

We did submit a proposal to DARPA. I've not checked through the one that's online that it's the correct document....

He does not recall whether or not the thing that is "beyond the pale" was part his proposal, and hasn't gotten around to checking if the documents that suggest it fell well short of the pale are accurate.

Look, he's a busy guy. He doesn't have time to look into whether or not his research could have played some role in one of the greatest human tragedies of all time.

Those bat coronaviruses aren't going to find themselves, you know!

When we asked if you had ever inserted a furin cleavage site to a coronavirus, you responded with outrage. But that is what was described in the DARPA proposal.

No. What you said is, did we insert a furin cleavage site? And what I said was, of course not! If we had done that work with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, it would have been published by now. It would have been made public in our reports to the NIH. The DARPA proposal was not funded. Therefore, the work was not done. Simple.

See, simple!

The work of inserting furin cleavage sites was not done.

But you acknowledge that you proposed to DARPA to insert a furin cleavage site?

I refute that that was the goal of the DARPA proposal. The idea was not to insert a furin cleavage site in a virus to see what happens. That's not what was proposed. The proposal was to look for those polybasic cleavage sites in nature because we knew that that was the potential to make a virus more able to infect people and move from person to person. If we found mutations around that polybasic cleavage site that looked like it could be evolvable, the idea was then that Ralph Baric's lab at UNC would do some work to see how evolvable that site was. So that work never happened. The proposal was not funded.

You remember how he wasn't sure whether his proposal included inserting furin cleavage sites about 40 seconds ago?

Now he's sure it kinda was.

But only sort of.

Inserting furin cleavage sites wasn't part of the goal per se.

All they were doing was taking a quick looky-see at how bat coronaviruses could be made to infect people with a totally natural insertion of furin cleavage sites without Chinese Communist Party involvement.

Did you find any of these cleavage sites in naturally occurring viruses that you collected?

The proposal was not funded so we didn't do that work. We've not found polybasic cleavage sites. However, they are in many coronaviruses from bats. Papers from Europe show mutations around that cleavage site that suggest strongly that that furin cleavage site could evolve very easily in nature. I'm sure there are viruses out there with it. I'm convinced that it could have easily evolved during the first stages of the pandemic, as the virus got from bats, perhaps into an intermediate host in a wildlife farm, or into people.

Okay, so they didn't find any examples of such a mutation occurring naturally in a furin cleavage site but there are 100% definite suggestions that it could happen probably maybe in fact he's convinced that it is quite possibly likely perhaps.

And based on that, he still maintains that it "extremely unlikely" that the origin of Covid-19 was anything other than natural because shut up already about that.

When asked if you had done this work with the furin cleavage site, you said no.

For the furin cleavage site, you should really ask Ralph Baric. He wrote that section of the DARPA grant.

Hey, he didn't write that part.

Ralph's your guy for this, okay?

So you're saying that that would be a good question for Ralph Baric, whether he has done any of these insertions?

I don't know what Ralph Baric has done. But I doubt that he would go ahead and do that work without the funding.

Who knows what Ralph has done? He's a crazy guy, but lovable, you know?

Sure, Daszak worked with him closely for years, but he has no idea what he has done. Zero. Nada. But you can still put him down as 100% "doubtful" that he did the work.

Some virologists were dismayed to see the insertion of furin cleavage sites in this proposal.

I don't know why anyone would be dismayed at that because furin cleavage sites were first researched in influenza viruses.

See, other people have done the thing I absolutely did not do so it would have been okay if I had done it which I didn't.

And I think the proposal stands as a valid and actually quite predictive effort to understand the risk of viruses. You've got to look at the big picture of why we do this research. We're not doing it as a sort of academic interest, "what would happen if you put a cleavage site there?"

Exactly, this kind of research has a higher purpose.

If you totally ignore the past two-plus years, much of what is in Daszak's proposal actually makes sense. We should be proactive in seeking out potential future infections and monitor closely the interaction between humans and wild animal populations that are known sources of cross-species jumps the better to prepare and possibly prevent future pandemics.

But you can't ignore the past.

Daszak, and much of the health research industrial complex, has been anything short of forthcoming, but rather dissembling, evasive, and in some cases outright untruthful.

People like Daszak may very well be sincere at some level (no one is all good, or all bad) and his outrage over the questioning of his motives might be genuine, but he, and most public health officials, have forfeited their right to the benefit of the doubt.

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