Peter Daszak Seemingly Perjures Himself Before Congress: Criminal Prosecution Imminent?

Originally published via Armageddon Prose Substack:

COVID Propaganda Roundup: The latest updates on the “new normal” – chronicling the lies, distortions, and abuses by the ruling class.

Not being naïve to how this all works, I’ll hold out any definitive hope that anything in the way of justice will come of this, given how compromised the feckless GOP is and how downright criminally complicit the Democrat Party is in the context of the greatest, yet-unpunished criminal conspiracy in world history.

But, on the surface at least, recent developments appear to be progress toward that end.

It came to light that month that the Republican House had successfully cajoled EcoHealth president Peter Daszak — the dutiful conduit through which Anthony Fauci funneled gain-of-function research cash to the Wuhan lab from whence COVID likely emerged — to subject himself to questioning under oath (meaning, importantly, under threat of perjury) on May 1.

Via House Energy and Commerce Committee (emphasis added):

“House Energy and Commerce Committee (E&C) Chair Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-WA), E&C Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations Chair Morgan Griffith (R-VA), and E&C Subcommittee on Health Chair Brett Guthrie (R-KY), Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic Chair Brad Wenstrup (R-OH), and House Oversight and Accountability Committee Chair James Comer (R-KY) announced that EcoHealth Alliance (EcoHealth) President Dr. Peter Daszak will appear for a public hearing on May 1, 2024.

EcoHealth—a U.S.-based non-profit whose mission is to prevent pandemics—used taxpayer dollars to fund dangerous gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV).

During his closed-door transcribed interview with the Committees on November 14, 2023, Dr. Daszak made multiple statements inconsistent with documents and evidence reviewed by the Committees. This raises serious questions about the veracity of EcoHealth’s public statements, including its insistence that the research it funded at the WIV could not have caused the pandemic.

The Chairs are calling on Dr. Daszak to address the discrepancies in his testimony and publicly explain EcoHealth’s relationship with the WIV.”

That testimony came to fruition on May Day, culminating in a recommendation of criminal prosecution by the GOP majority on the committee.

Via Nature (emphasis added):

“Republicans in the US House of Representatives publicly grilled infectious-disease specialist Peter Daszak today during a long-awaited hearing on Capitol Hill. In their questioning they suggested that Daszak and the non-profit organization he heads, EcoHealth Alliance in New York City, knowingly conducted dangerous research by studying coronaviruses in partnership with a virology laboratory in Wuhan, China, the city in which the first COVID-19 cases were reported…

At the start of the hearing, subcommittee chairman Brad Wenstrup, a Republican representative from Ohio, announced the findings of a report evaluating EcoHealth’s research activities, which was issued earlier in the day. The interim report, released by the subcommittee’s Republican members, states that EcoHealth failed to disclose high-risk, ‘gain-of-function’ research that it conducted in partnership with the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). Furthermore, the report recommends that the organization should be barred from receiving future federal funds and criminally investigated.”

The two-pronged defense that Daszak, like his comrade Fauci, has repeatedly employed through convoluted sophistry is that:

souping up coronaviruses to make them more infectious and deadly — the obvious, common-sense, universally understood definition of “gain-of-function” — is somehow not gain-of-function research
criticizing scientists personally for breach of ethics and lying to Congress and likely killing more people than the Third Reich and maybe even Mao is tantamount to “attacking science”

The Science™ apologists have continued that grand tradition in defense of their superiors in the clergy — upon whom they, surely entirely coincidentally, rely on for financial sponsorship.

Continuing via Nature:

“Daszak disagreed that the work carried out by EcoHealth and the WIV met the definition of gain-of-function research. To fall under that category, he said, an experiment would need to be likely to increase a virus’s transmission or pathogenicity, and the virus would already have to be known to infect humans. ‘Because the work we were doing was on bat coronaviruses, it was not covered by those rules,’ Daszak said, referring to a definition used by the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) to evaluate grants involving research with pathogens…

Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon, Canada, says she was disappointed that the Democrats joined the Republicans in what she describes as ‘essentially an attack on science’. ‘It’s a very dangerous situation because most scientists who are approaching any problem — whether it’s the origins of the pandemic, whether it’s anything else — are going to think twice: should I actually get involved in research that is high impact but potentially politically controversial?’”