Peter Daszak

Peter Daszak is a British zoologist and an expert on disease ecology, in particular on zoonosis. He is currently president of EcoHealth Alliance, a nonprofit non-governmental organization that supports various programs on global health and pandemic prevention with headquarters in New York City. He is a researcher, consultant, and public expert in the cause and spread of zoonotic disease outbreaks like that of COVID-19, Ebola, Nipah virus, and other zoonoses.[1]

Education

Daszak earned a B.Sc. in Zoology in 1987 at University College of North Wales (UCNW), and a Ph.D. in parasitic infectious diseases in 1994 at University of East London.[2]

Career

Daszak worked at the School of Life Sciences, Kingston University, in Surrey, England in the 1990s. In the late 1990s Daszak moved to the United States and was affiliated with the Institute of Ecology at the University of Georgia and the National Center for Infectious Diseases, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in Atlanta, Georgia. Later he became executive director at a collaborative think-tank in New York City, the Consortium for Conservation Medicine. He holds adjunct positions at several universities in the U.S. and the U.K., including the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health.[2]

He was one of the early adopters of conservation medicine.[3] The Society for Conservation Biology symposium in 2000, had focused on the "complex problem of emerging diseases".[3] He said in 2001 that there were "almost no examples of emerging wildlife diseases not driven by human environmental change...[a]nd few human emerging diseases don't include some domestic animal or wildlife component." His research has focused on investigating and predicting the impacts of new diseases on wildlife, livestock, and human populations, and he has been involved in research studies on epidemics such as the Nipah virus infection, the Hendra virus, SARS-1, Avian influenza, and the West Nile virus.[4]

Daszak has served on committees of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, World Health Organization (WHO), National Academy of Sciences, and United States Department of the Interior.[2] He is a member of the National Academy of Medicine and Chair of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM)'s Forum on Microbial Threats and sits on the supervisory board of the One Health Commission Council of Advisors.[5]

Daszak is the president of the New York-headquartered NGO, EcoHealth Alliance,[6] known for its research on global emergent diseases such as Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), Nipah virus, Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS), Rift Valley fever, Ebola virus, and COVID-19.

In 2021, Daszak was part of the team of scientists who were tasked by the WHO with finding out from where the SARS-Cov-2 virus originated.[7]

Publications

As of 2020 he has authored or contributed to over 300 scientific papers and been designated a Highly Cited Researcher by the Web of Science. In addition to citations in academic publications, his work has been covered in leading English-language newspapers,[8][9] television and radio broadcasts, documentary films,[10] and podcasts.[11]

Media coverage

During times of large virus outbreaks he has been invited to speak as an expert on epidemics involving diseases moving from animals to humans.[5][12][13] At the time of the Ebola outbreak in West Africa in 2014, Daszak said "Our research shows that new approaches to reducing emerging pandemic threats at the source would be more cost-effective than trying to mobilize a global response after a disease has emerged".[14]

In October 2019, when the federal government "quietly" ended the ten-year old program called PREDICT,[15] operated by United States Agency for International Development (USAID)'s emerging threats division,[16] experts like Daszak expressed concern that shutting PREDICT down, could "leave the world more vulnerable to lethal pathogens like Ebola and MERS that emerge from unexpected places, such as bat-filled trees, gorilla carcasses and camel barns."[16] Daszak said that compared to the $5 billion the U.S. spent fighting Ebola in West Africa, PREDICT—which cost $250 million—was much less expensive. As well, Daszak said, "PREDICT was an approach to heading off pandemics, instead of sitting there waiting for them to emerge, and then mobilizing."[16]

COVID-19 pandemic

On February 9, 2020, Newt Gingrich invited Daszak as a special guest along with Anthony Fauci on Newt's World to discuss the coronavirus.[17]

In his February 27, 2020 New York Times article, entitled "We Knew Disease X Was Coming", Daszak said R&D Blueprint group of experts to which he belonged, had in February 2018 warned the WHO of the "next pandemic, which would be caused by an unknown, novel pathogen that hadn't yet entered the human population." The Blueprint group coined this hypothetical pathogen "Disease X" and was included it on a list of eight diseases which they recommended should be given highest priority in regard to research and development efforts, such as finding better diagnostic methods and developing vaccines.[18] He said, "As the world stands today on the edge of the pandemic precipice, it's worth taking a moment to consider whether Covid-19 is the disease our group was warning about."[8]

On March 20, 2020 Daszak was featured in a PBS Newshour special podcast "Understanding the Coronavirus".[19]

In April and May 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, Daszak was interviewed by National Public Radio (NPR),[20] CNN,[21] NBC News,[22] CBS News,[23] and other outlets.

Daszak and EcoHealth Alliance were the only U.S. organization researching coronavirus spread and transmission in China[24] until the project's funding was "abruptly terminated" by the National Institutes of Health in a move that was widely reported to be politically motivated.[23][25] A May 8, 2020 article in the journal Science, said that the unusual April 24 decision to cut EcoHealth's funding, occurred shortly after "President Donald Trump alleged—without providing evidence—that the pandemic virus had escaped from a Chinese laboratory supported by the NIH grant, and vowed to end the funding."[26]

The move has been roundly criticized, including by a group of 77 Nobel laureates who wrote NIH Director Francis Collins that they "are gravely concerned"[27] by the decision and called the funding cut "counterintuitive, given the urgent need to better understand the virus that causes COVID-19 and identify drugs that will save lives."[28]

Daszak was part a segment of the May 11, 2020 broadcast of 60 Minutes.[29]

Daszak was interviewed for a June 2020 Scientific American article on "China's bat woman" Shi Zhengli, a principal investigator at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. He praised her and defended her staunchly in the article, which notes that Shi and he are "long-term collaborators". Daszak said: "Shi leads a world-class lab of the highest standards... It’s crystal clear that bats, once again, are the natural reservoir."[30]

Daszak was named by the World Health Organization as the sole U.S.-based representative on a team sent to investigate origins of the COVID-19 pandemic,[31] a team that also includes Marion Koopmans, Hung Nguyen, and Fabian Leendertz.[31]

Awards and honors

In 2000 Daszak received the CSIRO medal for work on amphibian disease.

In October 2018, Daszak was elected to the National Academy of Medicine (NAM),[32] which the New York Times has been called the "most esteemed and authoritative adviser on issues of health and medicine" whose "reports can transform medical thinking around the world."[33]

References
  1. "Peter Daszak Profile on ResearchGate". ResearchGate.
  2. "Peter Daszak, PhD". Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health. Retrieved April 20, 2020.
  3. Norris, Scott (January 1, 2001). "A New Voice in ConservationConservation medicine seeks to bring ecologists, veterinarians, and doctors together around a simple unifying concept: health". BioScience. 51 (1): 7–12. doi:10.1641/0006-3568(2001)051[0007:ANVIC]2.0.CO;2. ISSN 0006-3568. Retrieved May 10, 2020.
  4. "Peter Daszak". TEDMED. Retrieved April 20, 2020.
  5. "Dr. Peter Daszak". EcoHealth Alliance. Retrieved April 20, 2020.
  6. "Wildlife Conservation and Pandemic Prevention - EcoHealth Alliance". EcoHealth Alliance. Retrieved October 14, 2016.
  7. Hernandez, Javier C. (January 13, 2021). "Two Members of W.H.O. Team on Trail of Virus Are Denied Entry to China". The New York Times Company.
  8. Daszak, Peter (February 27, 2020). "We knew Disease X was Coming. It's here now. We need to stop what drives mass epidemics rather than just respond to individual diseases". The New York Times. Retrieved April 20, 2020.
  9. Williams, Shawna (January 24, 2020). "Where Coronaviruses Come From (Interview)". The Scientist. Retrieved April 20, 2020.
  10. "The Next Pandemic". Explained. Season 2. Episode 7. November 7, 2019.
  11. "Why Humans Are Responsible for the Coronavirus". Slate. December 23, 2020.
  12. Gorman, James (January 28, 2020). "How do bats live with so many viruses?". The New York Times. Retrieved April 20, 2020.
  13. Bruilliard, Karin (April 3, 2020). "The next pandemic is already coming, unless humans change how we interact with wildlife, scientists say". Washington Post. Retrieved April 20, 2020.
  14. "Ebola, Dengue fever, Lyme disease: The growing economic cost of infectious diseases". National Science Foundation. December 16, 2014. Retrieved April 20, 2020.
  15. "Scientists Were Hunting for the Next Ebola, Now the U.S. Has Cut Their Funding". The New York Times.
  16. McNeil, Donald G. Jr (October 25, 2019). "Scientists Were Hunting for the Next Ebola. Now the U.S. Has Cut Off Their Funding". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved May 10, 2020.
  17. "Newt's World Ep 56: China's Coronavirus (Dr. Anthony Fauci and Dr. Peter Daszak)". February 9, 2020. Retrieved April 21, 2020.
  18. 2018 Annual review of diseases prioritized under the Research and Development Blueprint (PDF) (Report). February 2018. p. 449.
  19. "Special podcast: Understanding the coronavirus". PBS NewsHour. March 20, 2020. Retrieved May 10, 2020.
  20. "Virus Researchers Cast Doubt On Theory Of Coronavirus Lab Accident". National Public Radio (NPR). April 23, 2020. Retrieved May 11, 2020.
  21. On GPS: Tracing pandemics back to their source - CNN Video, retrieved May 7, 2020
  22. "Did the coronavirus really escape from a Chinese lab? Here's what we know". Retrieved May 11, 2020.
  23. Pelley, Scott (May 9, 2020). "Trump administration cuts funding for coronavirus researcher, jeopardizing possible COVID-19 cure". Retrieved May 11, 2020.
  24. Latinne, Alice; Hu, Ben; Olival, Kevin J.; Zhu, Guangjian; Zhang, Libiao; Li, Hongying; Chmura, Aleksei A.; Field, Hume E.; Zambrana-Torrelio, Carlos; Epstein, Jonathan H.; Li, Bei (August 25, 2020). "Origin and cross-species transmission of bat coronaviruses in China". Nature Communications. 11 (1): 4235. doi:10.1038/s41467-020-17687-3. ISSN 2041-1723. PMC 7447761. PMID 32843626.
  25. "Coronavirus: US cuts funding to group studying bat viruses in China". May 9, 2020. Retrieved May 10, 2020.
  26. Wadman, Meredith; Cohen, Jon (May 8, 2020). "NIH move to ax bat coronavirus grant draws fire". Science. 368 (6491): 561–562. doi:10.1126/science.368.6491.561. Retrieved August 21, 2020.
  27. "Nobel laureates and science groups demand NIH review decision to kill coronavirus grant". Science.
  28. "Letter to Francis Collins Urging to Reconsider Decision to Cut Coronavirus Research Funding" (PDF).
  29. Trump administration cuts funding for coronavirus researcher, jeopardizing possible COVID-19 cure CBS News 11 May 2020
  30. Qiu, Jane (June 1, 2020). "How China's 'Bat Woman' Hunted Down Viruses from SARS to the New Coronavirus". Scientific American.
  31. Mallapaty, Smriti (December 2, 2020). "Meet the scientists investigating the origins of the COVID pandemic". Nature. 588 (7837): 208–208. doi:10.1038/d41586-020-03402-1.
  32. "EcoHealth Alliance's Dr. Peter Daszak Elected to National Academy of Medicine". EcoHealth Alliance. October 15, 2018. Retrieved May 10, 2020.
  33. Harris, Gardiner (August 25, 2011). "Vaccine Cleared Again as Autism Culprit". The New York Times.
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