Peter Daszak isn't impartial, and quite frankly his presence on the team alone makes its conclusions suspect. From this [1] excellent investigation into the subject from New York Magazine:
> Peter Daszak, is a zoologist and bat-virus sample collector and the head of a New York nonprofit called EcoHealth Alliance — a group that [...] has channeled money from the National Institutes of Health to Shi Zhengli’s laboratory in Wuhan, allowing the lab to carry on recombinant research into diseases of bats and humans.
> [...]
> Daszak, for his part, seems to have viewed his bat quests as part of an epic, quasi-religious death match. In a paper from 2008, Daszak and a co-author described Bruegel’s painting The Fall of the Rebel Angels and compared it to the contemporary human biological condition. The fallen angels could be seen as pathogenic organisms that had descended “through an evolutionary (not spiritual) pathway that takes them to a netherworld where they can feed only on our genes, our cells, our flesh,” Daszak wrote. “Will we succumb to the multitudinous horde? Are we to be cast downward into chthonic chaos represented here by the heaped up gibbering phantasmagory against which we rail and struggle?”
There's much more in there; it's clear that he's good friends and business partners with the WIV and it would be deeply his interest to suppress any consideration of the lab-escape hypothesis.
Wow, they're really assassinating his character here. They're taking a metaphorical interpretation of a painting that he made out of context, and spinning it so it seems like he's a religious nutcase. This is the paper in question, it's nothing like they're making it out to be: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7087640/
Besides it seeming like this guy has a big conflict of interest (but do the other members of the team?) that quote from the paper is wild. On one hand I like it. On the other hand, the conspiratorial religious ideas start to look slightly less wild in this context.
> Peter Daszak, is a zoologist and bat-virus sample collector and the head of a New York nonprofit called EcoHealth Alliance — a group that [...] has channeled money from the National Institutes of Health to Shi Zhengli’s laboratory in Wuhan, allowing the lab to carry on recombinant research into diseases of bats and humans.
> [...]
> Daszak, for his part, seems to have viewed his bat quests as part of an epic, quasi-religious death match. In a paper from 2008, Daszak and a co-author described Bruegel’s painting The Fall of the Rebel Angels and compared it to the contemporary human biological condition. The fallen angels could be seen as pathogenic organisms that had descended “through an evolutionary (not spiritual) pathway that takes them to a netherworld where they can feed only on our genes, our cells, our flesh,” Daszak wrote. “Will we succumb to the multitudinous horde? Are we to be cast downward into chthonic chaos represented here by the heaped up gibbering phantasmagory against which we rail and struggle?”
There's much more in there; it's clear that he's good friends and business partners with the WIV and it would be deeply his interest to suppress any consideration of the lab-escape hypothesis.
[1] https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/coronavirus-lab-esca...