Agency Says Lab Leak Most Likely Origin of Covid-19

[womanofthehills]

44. Jeffrey Sacks was commissioned by the Lancet to look into the origins of the virus

The work of a task force commissioned by the Lancet into the origins of covid-19 has folded after concerns about the conflicts of interest of one its members and his ties through a non-profit organisation to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Task force chair Jeffrey Sachs, economics professor at Columbia University in New York, told the Wall Street Journal that he had shut down the scientist led investigation into how the covid-19 pandemic started because of concerns about its links to the EcoHealth Alliance, a non-profit organisation run by task force member Peter Daszak.1 “A lot is going on around the world that is not properly scrutinized or explained to the public,” Sachs told the newspaper, adding that the task force would broaden its scope to examine transparency and government regulation of risky laboratory research.

The decision came as evidence continued to accumulate that Daszak had not always been forthright about his research and his financial ties to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

It is clear that the NIH co-funded research at the WIV [Wuhan Institute of Virology] that a freedom of information request that showed he had orchestrated the Lancet statement without disclosing that he was funding Shi Zhengli through grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Daszak’s credibility took a further hit this June when Sachs published an essay that called for an independent investigation of the pandemic’s origin and charged that both China and the NIH should be transparent about virus research, including “gain-of-function” studies that make viruses more transmissible and virulent.5 “It is clear that the NIH co-funded research at the WIV [Wuhan Institute of Virology] that deserves scrutiny under the hypothesis of a laboratory-related release of the virus,” Sachs wrote.
https://www.bmj.com/content/375/bmj.n2414