Friday, March 29, 2024

WATCH: Wuhan Lab Partner Daszak Admits He ‘Didn’t Really See Many Bats’ In Wet Market While Describing Studies ‘Using U.S. Taxpayer Money.’

Despite the mainstream media and Chinese Communist Party narrative that COVID-19 originated from a wet market in China, EcoHealth Alliance President and Wuhan Institute of Virology collaborator Peter Daszak insisted that he “didn’t really see many bats” in these markets while speaking on a podcast unearthed by The National Pulse.

Daszak – a “longtime collaborator” of the Wuhan Institute of Virology – also admitted that U.S. taxpayer dollars funded his research at the Chinese Communist Party-controlled laboratory during his appearance on a June 3rd, 2020 episode of the show “This Week In Virology.”

The unearthed remarks come amidst increased scrutiny over Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance funneling money to the Wuhan Institute Virology under the auspices of a $3.7 million grant from the Anthony Fauci-led National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID).

As he admits on the podcast, “we have 16,000 bat samples in a freezer in China that we collected using U.S. taxpayers’ money.” “We’re the last organization funded by the federal government to work with Wuhan Institute of Virology,” Daszak reiterated.

And Despite Fauci’s attempts to distance his National Institutes of Health (NIH) agency from the military-linked Wuhan lab, Daszak admits on the podcast that his collaboration with the facility and its “bat woman” Shi Zhengli since at least 2013 was bankrolled by the NIH:

“By then we were up and running doing repeated fieldwork in China. We had a field team. We were doing more work with Zhengli at the time and really honing in because we had funding to go out and do that work from NIH.” 

When asked about “recover[ing] infectious isolates” of SARS, Daszak even admits “I didn’t do that work” before adding “that’s what Zhengli was doing, and yeah, growing viruses from what I know about it is really hard to do.”

During the hour-long interview, Daszak also reveals that he “didn’t really see many bats” in Chinese markets – another blow to the theory that COVID-19 originated in a wet market in Wuhan:

“So we were also doing a huge amount of work on the wildlife trade, and what we found was by then it had changed. The big markets, you didn’t really see many bats in them, but we did know that people were hunting and eating bats. They were selling them directly to restaurants, so it was a more localized issue. We thought that the risk had shifted to the rural parts of China.”

Daszak also attacks Donald Trump on the podcast, noting the then-President was “in really dire straits and has an ability to lash out” before an interviewer adds “hopefully after we have a change of administration, you can reapply for some NIH support.” The interview followed the Trump administration’s termination of the NIH grant that allowed Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance to collaborate with the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

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