The president of the New York-based EcoHealth Alliance has refuted all allegations that his organisation and its work with a lab in Wuhan had anything to do with causing the Covid-19 pandemic, the South China Morning Post reports. Disease ecologist Peter Daszak was grilled at a House select subcommittee hearing in Washington on Wednesday.
US Republican Party lawmakers have accused Daszak and his non-profit group of using US government grants to fund “dangerous research” at the Wuhan Institute of Virology without sufficient oversight – endangering national security. Some US politicians and intelligence agencies have claimed that the novel coronavirus escaped from the institute to cause the pandemic, a scenario vehemently denied by Chinese officials.
While EcoHealth Alliance had worked with the Wuhan institute for years before the outbreak – including on research related to bat viruses infecting human populations – Daszak has repeatedly argued that there is no solid evidence Covid-19 originated in a lab.
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There is “incredibly substantial evidence that this virus emerged through so-called natural zoonotic origins,” he stated on Wednesday, referring to the spread of pathogens between animals and people outside a laboratory environment.
He told the House that his work in China “provided direct public health benefits to the American people.”
Democrats in the House, meanwhile, described the Republicans’ arguments that EcoHealth Alliance was implicit in the pandemic’s origins as weak. Michigan Democrat Debbie Dingell noted that the US congress needed to focus on protecting “all Americans from and against future pandemics.” She added that “sowing distrust in the scientific and medical communities is not a way to accomplish this goal.”
