World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus expressed surprise at the conclusion of the 2021 WHO-commissioned mission to Wuhan that a lab leak was “extremely unlikely” and may have sought a change in the mission’s report, but he faced resistance from a collaborator of the Wuhan Institute of Virology in a “very ugly” Zoom call.
The Feb. 15, 2021, call was revealed for the first time in an email obtained through the Freedom of Information Act.
Tedros took issue with the “extremely unlikely” ranking and sought to acknowledge as credible the hypothesis that the COVID-19 pandemic began at one of the city’s virology labs in the March 2021 WHO-convened study of the origins of SARS-CoV-2.
But EcoHealth Alliance President Peter Daszak, perhaps the Wuhan lab’s closest American collaborator, strongly opposed Tedros, “openly arguing” with the WHO leader on a call with other members of the mission and senior WHO leadership present, according to a 2021 email Daszak sent colleagues.
“By the way, at one point after we returned from Wuhan, the DG [Director-General] openly tried to get us to change the conclusions of our poll that we held in China re: lab leak, so it would be more likely than ‘extremely unlikely’. Utterly shameless,” Daszak wrote in an August 19, 2021, email. “This led to us (in particular myself and [REDACTED]) arguing with the DG in a very ugly 2 hour zoom call.”
“Most of the senior staff around DG are ashamed of his political maneuverings,” Daszak continued. “[REDACTED] and others were very quiet on the zoom call when the DG announced to the team that he’d be setting up a new structure and we’d have to reapply for membership for Phase 2 through our governments this time.”
The call occurred a few days after the February 9, 2021, press conference in Wuhan in which the mission announced their conclusions, the WHO confirmed.
As Daszak favored, the joint WHO-China study, published a few weeks later on March 30, 2021, reported that “introduction through a laboratory incident was considered to be an extremely unlikely pathway.”
A spokesperson for the WHO disputed the characterization that Tedros attempted to alter the language of the report and emphasized that though the team was commissioned by the WHO, it worked independently. Tedros underscored that the “extremely unlikely” label had no supporting evidence. However the spokesperson characterized the Zoom meeting as a disagreement among scientists rather than an “ugly” argument.
The “extremely unlikely” conclusion “had come as a surprise to WHO leadership,” said WHO spokesman Tarik Jasarevic. “The call was arranged because members of the Wuhan mission were complaining that we didn’t support their position.”
“During the call, Dr. Tedros shared his surprise at ‘extremely unlikely,’ explained his thinking and listened to the scientists, but his position remained consistent: They had reached an unsubstantiated position, and without access and information from China, all hypotheses remain on the table and it is not possible nor scientific to conclude ‘extremely unlikely,’” Jasarevic continued. “We did not ask the scientists to change their position, which they had already publicly announced on Feb. 9. The call focused on the members’ complaints and requests that we support their position.”
Regardless, Daszak expressed negative feelings about Tedros in his email, speculating that the director-general had voiced openness to the lab leak theory in order to gain support from the Biden administration for his reelection.
“Slick politician, awful public health guy,” Daszak wrote.
The WHO pushed back on this characterization as well.
“It is inaccurate – but also illogical – to allege that Dr. Tedros’s position was a political act aimed at the U.S. due to the upcoming DG reelection. There’s ample evidence that Dr. Tedros did not take political stands around the pandemic – neither during the last year of the previous administration amid threats of U.S. withdrawal, nor during the subsequent administration,” Jasarevic said.
Daszak served on the mission to Wuhan to uncover the pandemic’s source despite the fact that joint EcoHealth-WIV ventures included research to engineer combined coronaviruses more deadly and infectious than their natural backbone viruses.
The Feb. 15 Zoom call underscored the importance of a more credible second phase investigation, the Scientific Advisory Group for the Origins of Novel Pathogens or SAGO.
Daszak was the only American citizen represented on the mission. But his actions appear to have been at cross purposes with the aims of the U.S. government.
Upon the report’s release, the U.S. State Department released a joint statement with 13 other countries to express concern that the mission “lacked access to complete, original data and samples.”
“Together, we support a transparent and independent analysis and evaluation, free from interference and undue influence, of the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic,” the statement read.
“The poll” mentioned by Daszak in his email refers to a vote by the mission — with 10 international delegates and 17 Chinese scientists — conducted under the supervision of Chinese authorities.
“The politics was always in the room with us on the other side of the table,” team lead Peter Ben Embarek, a Danish food scientist who formerly directed the WHO One Health Initiative, said in a media interview after the trip. “We had anywhere between 30 and 60 Chinese colleagues, and a large number of them were not scientists, not from the public health sector. We know there was huge scrutiny on the scientific group from the other sectors.”
The month-long mission to Wuhan was hamstrung by lengthy negotiations with the Chinese government and a two-week quarantine.
The visit to the Wuhan Institute of Virology only lasted a few hours and did not involve an independent inspection of lab records. The report indicates the visit to the Wuhan Institute of Virology involved little more than presentations by the lab’s leadership.
“The WIV Director raised the issue of conspiracy theories, reiterating that the Institute had worked with the media to stress the need to respect science in the fight against COVID-19 and to rebut the theories,” the report reads. “The international team’s visit could help to defuse some of the theories that were circulating.”
In response to criticism of the report for prematurely ruling out a lab leak, the international team wrote a commentary in Nature pointing out that a laboratory origin hypothesis schema is presented on page 119 of the 120 page report. (The report then describes the scenario as “extremely unlikely.”)
“We held frank discussions with key scientists in the relevant Wuhan institutions — a line of inquiry that exceeded our original mandate,” the team wrote. “When we reviewed the responses to our questions on this issue, and all other available data, we found no evidence for leads to follow up; we reported this fact.”
Tedros’s influence
The international team presented its rankings of various hypotheses at a press conference from Wuhan on Feb. 9, 2021.
The conclusion that the lab origin theory had been ranked as “extremely unlikely,” or was considered at all, came as a surprise to the WHO, according to a spokesman.
The World Health Assembly resolution calling for the mission had narrowly called for studies “to identify the zoonotic source of the virus,” in other words, to identify the natural source.
But Embarek had done some horsetrading to allow for consideration of the lab hypothesis in the final report, provided the possibility was ranked as “extremely unlikely,” according to an interview he gave to a Danish documentary crew. Embarek has since distanced himself from those comments, blaming a mistranslation.
OneShared.World Founder Jamie Metzl, a former advisor to the WHO on human genome editing, texted the director-general within hours of the Feb. 9 press conference, encouraging him and the WHO to put out a statement acknowledging that the lab hypothesis had not been adequately examined by the international group and that it deserved full consideration.
On February 10, Tedros responded, thanking Metzl for his message and committing to following up.
On February 11, Tedros clarified in a meeting with WHO member states that “all hypotheses remain open.”
“Some questions have been raised as to whether some hypotheses have been discarded,” he said. “I want to clarify that all hypotheses remain open and require further study.”
The Zoom call occurred on Feb. 15.
The report was released on March 30, 2021.
The raw data underlying the March 2021 mission report have never been released. Nonetheless, some Western virologists have asserted that the early COVID-19 cases in the report show the pandemic began with a zoonotic spillover at the Huanan Wholesale Seafood Market.
Metzl, a frequent critic of the Chinese government, said that Tedros “saved the WHO from the shameful work of the Chinese-International joint study which had been a propaganda tool of the Chinese government.”
The email suggests that Tedros emphasized the importance of the Phase Two investigation that would consider a possible lab origin on the Feb. 15 Zoom call, even before the mission’s report was published on March 30. Reports from on the ground in Wuhan to WHO headquarters in Geneva indicated key data was not being shared.
Two nomination and selection processes for SAGO followed, with the prerequisite that at least one member be an expert in laboratory accidents.
However the SAGO has not released any information since a preliminary report in 2022.
In February 2024, Tedros met with representatives on the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic investigating the origins question, including a probe into Daszak and EcoHealth Alliance.
Tedros told the lawmakers then that “understanding the origin of COVID is a scientific and moral obligation, and it requires China to cooperate, share data, access and information fully and urgently,” the WHO said.
Daszak’s influence
Daszak has had an extraordinary influence on the public conversation about the pandemic.
An influential letter in the prestigious medical journal The Lancet in Feb. 2020 cast the lab origin hypothesis as a conspiracy theory that unfairly stigmatizes Chinese scientists.
An email obtained by U.S. Right to Know uncovered that Daszak organized the letter as an apparent public relations tool.
Daszak also influenced the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine as a member of the academies’ standing committee on COVID-19.
“I don’t think this committee will be getting into the lab release or bioengineering hypothesis again any time soon,” Daszak said in a March 13, 2020, email.
Yet over the subsequent years, independent reporters, online sleuths and congressional investigators have unspooled the depth of Daszak’s conflict of interest when it comes to the pandemic’s origins.
Daszak currently faces possible debarment from federal funding for both his organization and himself personally pending an investigation by the Department of Health and Human Services. HHS initiated debarment proceedings following revelations that EcoHealth submitted a progress report detailing its research in China two years late, claimed it had no access to lab notebooks kept by its subcontracted lab in Wuhan, and would not or could not turn over unpublished data requested by the National Institutes of Health, which underwrote the research collaboration.
Separately, U.S. Right to Know reported that Daszak apparently misled intended funders at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency by writing in a grant proposal that coronavirus engineering research would occur at a relatively secure biosafety level in the U.S. while apparently concealing an intention to perform the research in Wuhan at a lower biosafety level.
An aim of the DEFUSE proposal — as made explicit in drafts and project notes obtained by U.S. Right to Know — was to engineer coronaviruses with the attributes of SARS-CoV-2, leading some scientists to liken it to a blueprint for the novel coronavirus.
DARPA never funded the proposal. Daszak has insisted the work was never conducted.
As the government completes its debarment investigation, federal funding to the group has been suspended. Nonetheless, some dollars from the Defense Threat Reduction Agency continue to flow to the group, the New York Post reported Thursday.
Peter Daszak did not respond to a request for comment.
The email reported in this story was obtained through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the National Institutes of Health. The full document set is here.
