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Peter Daszak mentions coronavirus research in video

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In this interview, Peter Daszak shares his background and how he works.

At 8:35, the talk turns toward funding.  At 8:55, Vincent Racaniello asks, “How do you pay for all this?”  Peter Daszak talks about his history with the wildlife conservation charity.  He found it easier to get funding when he tied his work to health.  He finds that health is a better motivator overall.

Beginning at 11:13:

We get money from foundations. We get money from private sector. So one of the things we’ve been trying to do is we work a lot on the underlying causes of pandemics—deforestation, climate change, wildlife hunting. That’s our conservation side as well. So we go to foundations and say, “Look, you’ve been trying to stop the wildlife trade in China for 20 years. You put all this money into it. If you have a health angle to that, it really does work. The markets, the wildlife markets in China were never closed down because of, you know, ethical concerns. But the minute SARS emerged, they closed them down. So that’s the argument we use, and we’re trying to put the health in conservation.

In other words, Peter Daszak’s primary motivation is conservation.  He sees health as an effective motivator to get governments to act on conservation issues.

EcoHealth Alliance headquarters are in New York.  At that office, there are people doing economic modeling, analytics, and gene sequence crunching.  The labs are all around the world.  On the relationship with labs, beginning at 12:07:

Usually, we subcontract to labs, but we usually try and have in every country a country Program Officer who manages the work we do in that country and sometimes regional. And we often hire technicians in labs or PhD students, you know, to have a have a presence in the lab. There’s more of a buy-in when you’ve got a person.

EcoHealth Alliance is in 30 countries.  Peter Daszak is in charge of China and Malaysia.

At the 28:10 mark of the podcast interview with Vincent Racaniello, Peter Daszak states that researchers found that SARS likely originated from bats and then set out to find more SARS-related coronaviruses, eventually finding over 100. He observed that some coronaviruses can “get into human cells in the lab,” and others can cause SARS disease in “humanized mouse models.”

Peter Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance had previously been named Wildlife Trust because it is easier to get funding for health.  80% of his funding comes from government.

Given Peter Daszak’s comments about tying health to conservation issues to get results, we could later find that key players try to tie the pandemic to climate change initiatives.

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