Monday 3 October 2022 07:30 PM Peter Daszak has received $6.5MILLION in US taxpayer money since ties to China ... trends now
The debate around the origins of Covid has been ongoing since the virus first began causing chaos in early 2020.
Some top virologists believe the coronavirus spread to humans from an infected animal, potentially in a wet market in the Chinese city of Wuhan.
Others think it leaked from a secretive laboratory in the same city. Whether or not it was deliberate or accidental is an even more contentious part of the 'lab leak' theory.
One of the most stringent deniers of the man-made hypothesis is British zoologist Dr Peter Daszak, who is known among friends as a 'funny northerner' but considered a potential orchestrator of the pandemic by advocates of the lab-leak theory.
He became renowned for his role in facilitating 'risky' coronavirus research in China through EcoHealth Alliance, the non-profit he is president of.
The New York-based organisation has secured $60million (£53million) of US Government funds for scientific research over the past decade.
Some of this cash, it has emerged, has since ended up in the pocket of researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), the lab at the centre of lab leak claims. Some of this research involved manipulating Covid-like viruses.
Now, it has been revealed that EcoHealth Alliance has gained another $650,000 (£580,000) from the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) to trawl through caves in Southeast Asia looking for bats carrying coronaviruses, despite fears similar work sparked the pandemic.
The new contract gives the green light to project leader Dr Daszak and his team to analyse the behaviour and environmental risk factors for coronaviruses to spillover into humans from animals.
It warns that that part of the world has a 'high diversity of
