Jeffrey Sachs' Flip on Covid Origins, My 2020 Letter to Him

His concrete actions actually demand more scrutiny. The first, obvious question, which I put to him in 2020: “How can you justify having Daszak in this role?”

The celebrated economist Jeffrey Sachs is now saying that he thinks the pandemic had lab origin. This raises a number of serious questions to Sachs. In 2020, he, as chair of the Lancet Commission on Covid, named Peter Daszak, president of EcoHealth Alliance, to head the Lancet committee on pandemic origins.

This was a remarkable because EcoHealth Alliance had funded the Wuhan Institute of Virology. A brazen conflict of interest. Also, of course, Daszak had signed and organized the Lancet letter of February 2020 dismissing the possibility of lab origin as a “conspiracy theory”. He was also on the WHO Committee on lab origins. And, he claimed he had no conflicts of interest. It was beyond parody.

So, I sent a letter, below, on Sept. 18, 2020 to Sachs after he named Daszak as I was working on a piece which would be published by Independent Science News in December 2020.

I outlined the facts and asked Sachs for comment. I never recieved a response. I emailed him again recently, on May 30, 2022, after he co-wrote an article calling for an independent inquiry. I attached my first letter and asked him for an interview. Again, he didn't respond. 

Sachs recently said in Spain: "I’ll add one provocative statement … I chaired a commission for the Lancet for two years on Covid. I'm pretty convinced it came out of US lab biotechnology — not out of nature — just to mention after two years of intensive work on this. So it's a blunder, in my view, of biotech — not an accident of a natural spillover. We don't know for sure, I should be absolutely clear. But there is enough evidence that it should be looked into. And it's not being investigated, not in the United States, not anywhere. And I think for real reasons, that they don’t want to look underneath the rug control.” (Some of his utterance is unclear and the subject of some debate, see full video and clip.)

As welcome as his recent comments — which got play on Twitter and in the Daily Mail but not much media coverage otherwise — may seem, his concrete actions actually demand more scrutiny. Much more can be said, but for now: The first, obvious question, which I put to him in 2020: “How can you justify having Daszak in this role?” That move helped eat up a year regarding pandemic origins.

My letter to Sachs began by noting a strong mutual association — and then I wrote:

I'm writing you because I just saw that Peter Daszak was named chair of the The Origins of COVID-19 and Future Threats Task Force for the Lancet Commission. I understand you are the chair of the Commission. 

I've been writing about the origin of the pandemic. Earlier this year, I wrote a piece in Salon which noted:

Following the Ebola outbreak in west Africa in 2014, the U.S. government paused funding for what are known as "gain-of-function" research on certain organisms. This work actually seeks to make deadly pathogens deadlier, in some cases making pathogens airborne that previously were not. With little notice outside the field, the pause on such research was lifted in late 2017.

During this pause, exceptions for funding were made for dangerous gain-of-function lab work. This included work jointly done by U.S. scientists from the University of North Carolina, Harvard and the Wuhan Institute of Virology. This work — which had funding from USAID and EcoHealth Alliance not originally acknowledged — was published in 2015 in Nature Medicine. 

In a follow up piece I noted:

Then, on April 16, "Democracy Now" had Peter Daszak of the earthy crunchy sounding EcoHealth Alliance. It was just after John Roberts of Fox asked Trump about a possible lab origin, because it doesn't matter what the actual cause of the pandemic is, it matters what Trump says and we have to attack what Trump says because that's what progressives are supposed to do.

Daszak is an interested party. He has worked with and helped fund the work in Wuhan and he of course dismissed the prospect of lab release in the most patronizing manner possible. The piece was headlined: “'Pure Baloney': Zoologist Debunks Trump’s COVID-19 Origin Theory, Explains Animal-Human Transmission." Notice the audience of "Democracy Now" are now told this is "Trump's theory" -- not a concern of many people for months before Trump publicly uttered a word on the subject. 

Listeners to "Democracy Now" were not given elementary facts about the history of lab accidents. They were not told that among the policy advisors for EcoHealth Alliance are David Franz, a former commander at Fort Detrick, the main U.S. government biowarefare/biodefence facility, who spoke in 2018 at the rightwing Hudson Institute, and Thomas Geisbert, who is doing biodefence/biowarfare work at Galveston. Its partners include universities as well major corporations like Johnson & Johnson and Colgate Palmolive. And it has worked with USAID in funding lab dangerous work in between scientists in the U.S. and in Wuhan. 

Daszak of course defended the work without hesitation. They ostensibly are trying to defend against pandemics. This general process involves collecting and even creating dangerous pathogens for the stated purpose of defending against them. They at least got the first part down. 

Indeed, to Richard Ebright, at Rutgers University, an eminent scientist and one of the few who scrutinize the well funded biodefense/biowarfare work, this is all incredibly dangerous:. Ebright calls it "Not 'vaccine research.' Not research that provides information useful for preventing or combatting outbreaks. Just reckless pseudo-scientific Indiana-Jones adventurism with high risk of infection of collector, and from there, infection of public." He also charges that collecting thousands of such viruses is the "Definition of insanity."

Interestingly, even the researcher Daszak's group supports at the Wuhan Institute of Virology says that she was initially quite concerned that the lab was the source. Shi Zhengli was profiled by Scientific American, (March 11, 2020) "How China’s 'Bat Woman' Hunted Down Viruses from SARS to the New Coronavirus": "If coronaviruses were the culprit, she remembers thinking, 'could they have come from our lab?' ... Shi breathed a sigh of relief when the results came back: none of the sequences matched those of the viruses her team had sampled from bat caves. 'That really took a load off my mind,' she says. 'I had not slept a wink for days.'"

She seems more self reflective than Daszak, but why should the world take her word? As Ebright at Rutgers states: "A denial is not a refutation.

--

I'm currently writing a piece on EcoHealth Alliance's funding -- neither Daszak nor his colleagues at EcoHealth Alliance have responded to queries about their funding, though they state on their website that they would. Still, plowing through government databases, I've found an enormous amount from the DoD which the group clearly seeks to obscure by focusing on far smaller funds from NIH and other agencies.

This recent Boston Magazine piece also has useful information about Daszak. 

I'd be interested in your comments, either on or off the record. How can you justify having Daszak in this role? I'd be happy to supply you with more information I am currently finalizing for my upcoming piece. 

best regards, 

--Sam Husseini 

husseini.org