Peter Daszak — the Elizabeth Holmes of Pandemic Prevention?
Neil L. Harrison
At first glance, Peter Daszak, self-styled Virus Hunter, President of EcoHealth Alliance and a member of the National Academy of Medicine, would seem to have little in common with Elizabeth Holmes, the one-time Silicon Valley biotech entrepreneur who was the public face of Theranos Inc.
Holmes is presently on trial for fraud. For those who haven’t followed the story, Holmes became a media darling after the success of her fund-raising efforts for biotechnology start-up Theranos. Daszak became perhaps equally famous, at least within the scientific world, partly due to his efforts to champion the prevention of future pandemics, to raise the profile of his charitable foundation, the EcoHealth Alliance, and partly for his own special brand of entrepreneurial skills and indefatigable fund-raising efforts.
A Stanford University dropout, Ms Holmes was labeled “the next Steve Jobs” and her features graced the cover of Forbes, Fortune, Inc, Bloomberg Business Week, Glamour and many other publications, usually in her Silicon Valley entrepreneurial uniform of black turtleneck sweater. A graduate of the little known University College of North Wales, Dr Daszak earned his PhD at the decidedly obscure University of East London, and then studied Crohn’s Disease with research fraudster and anti-vaxxer Andrew Wakefield. After a series of unremarkable research positions in the United States, Daszak rose to prominence as “The Virus Hunter”. Although less photogenic than Holmes, Daszak has nevertheless been widely profiled and photographed, often posed dramatically in khaki shorts - the scientist as outdoorsman - during a variety of daring field expeditions. He has been fêted by a variety of magazines, albeit of slightly lower profile than those that fawned over Holmes. Daszak has rarely been short of a quote for a decade or so, broadcasting the terrors of future pandemics, and he remains a favorite of many prestigious newspapers such as The New York Times, as well as the news sections of high-profile scientific outlets, including Scienceand Nature.
Holmes enjoyed a rapid rise to prominence, and her charisma, hard-charging business persona and ability to blend business jargon with aspirational gender politics were key to her fund-raising success in the demanding environment of the Valley. Not only did venture capitalists and corporate partners eagerly pony up for a piece of the action, but rich and influential individuals also flocked to invest in Theranos, to the point where Holmes was briefly a billionaire. Daszak also enjoyed a meteoric rise to the top, accumulating more than 120 million dollars in research funds for his organization. EcoHealth Alliance was formed in 2010 and superseded The Wildlife Trust, a charity that began in 1971. EcoHealth started its new life with strong support from USAID, the US Agency for International Development, and was soon the beneficiary of large grants from a variety of US agencies, including DTRA, (a division of the Department of Defense), and NIAID, a division of the NIH. Success bred success for Daszak, as individuals and foundations were keen to support his organization and its One Health mission to save endangered animal species and prevent pandemics. Corporate punters were eager to join the action, unable to resist the combination of saving cute furry animals and battling nasty microorganisms. Daszak was able to partner with many universities around the U.S., including the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston. He also became an adjunct Professor at the prestigious Mailman Institute for Public Health at Columbia University. Seasoned skeptics wondered how someone with no formal training in virology, and no actual laboratory (EcoHealth has offices, but no labs at its New York City HQ) was swinging such a large bag of research funding. Indeed, EcoHealth seems to function primarily as what is commonly known as a “pass-through” (this is funding agency speak for a kind of mailbox), gathering funding from a variety of sources and disbursing these research monies to its partners at a number of scientific institutions around the world, with the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China as its main partner.
More recently, both Holmes and Daszak have experienced a fall from grace, and this came as no surprise to a minority who had always been skeptics. The entry of Holmes (as a young female disruptor) into the highly competitive biotechnology arena was greeted as a welcome breath of fresh air by many on the capital side, but raised eyebrows among grizzled veterans of the engineering and biotechnology fields. The development of new diagnostic tools and machines is usually a slow grind for the engineers and biologists who develop these technologies on behalf of, or in competition with, the established instrumentation and pharma companies. Seasoned veterans of the industry could be forgiven for asking how someone like Holmes (without a background in biology or engineering, let alone a pedigree in the notoriously demanding biotechnology arena) could succeed almost overnight in producing a machine that was orders of magnitude faster than its established competitors? Similarly, there were those who wondered what Special Sauce had propelled the apparently under-credentialed Peter Daszak to the top of the heap in the field of emerging pathogens. Not everyone was a true believer in the idea that EcoHealth, nestled comfortably in the warm embrace of the laudable One Healthphilosophy, was suddenly the answer to all of the world’s problems associated with new epidemics, zoonotic events and global pandemics. It must be said that there were always skeptics in the scientific world. Several top virologists questioned whether EHA’s large scale and very expensive projects for the prediction of potential pandemics would actually work any better than standard animal and public health surveillance : “Trust is undermined when scientists make overblown promises about disease prevention” was the money quote from the 2018 commentary in Nature.
The fall of Theranos began in 2015 not long after several major corporate partners had signed up and others, before following suit, decided to pursue due diligence in the industry’s usual way. The blood analysis machine that had threatened to disrupt the industry was often unavailable for outsiders to inspect, and inquiries to see “inside the box” were met with polite denials.
Eventually, the whispers about Theranos rose to a crescendo around the Valley, and rumours reached major investors and prominent individuals that they might have been taken for a ride. Whistleblowers emerged from within Theranos, who were able to confirm that the technology as outlined by Holmes didn’t perform as advertised, and that in all likelihood no machine performing to these exacting specifications had ever existed. The Wall Street Journal questioned the company and its technology repeatedly in print in 2015. The financial situation of Theranos deteriorated quickly, leading to the company closing its doors in 2018. Investors who had been left holding the bag were understandably displeased, and demanded that Holmes be investigated, leading to the trial that is taking place today.
Peter Daszak’s fortunes began to take a turn for the worse after the emergence of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Despite the vaunted power of the (“Bayesian”) EcoHealth pandemic prediction programs, the appearance in 2019 of the novel pneumonia outbreak in Wuhan was a problem for EHA. The appearance and identification of the new virus as a member of the betacoronavirus family presented a scientific conundrum for the world’s premier virus hunting and pandemic predicting operation. Their detailed and very expensive analyses (usually illustrated by maps of animal habitats, marked with colored blobs), had suggested that the “zoonotic” transfer of viruses from animals to humans would be observed in rural areas, where frontier activities of man encroach upon animal habitats, bringing farmers and animal traders into contact with bats and other animals likely to be harboring novel pathogens. This was certainly in keeping with the prevailing consensus, and was consistent with One Health principles. Doubling down on the EHA bloviation, Daszak recently claimed that such zoonotic events occur “up to 40,000 times a year”.
The appearance of a new virus in Wuhan was a shock. Wuhan, as we all now know, is a vibrant but decidedly non-exotic city, the industrial heart of Hubei province in the middle of China, and a transportation hub for railway, airline and river traffic within the country, analogous to cities like Birmingham, UK and Chicago. At no time did the EHA models predict the abrupt appearance of a novel virus in a city of 11 million people, and Wuhan is far from the rural areas studied by EcoHealth that are proposed to act as critical interfaces between animal and human habitats and serve as breeding grounds for epidemics. In particular, Wuhan is >1000 miles from the habitat of most of the bat species that are thought to form the reservoir for these viruses. This was an existential problem for Daszak. A second problem was the fact that the virus began to sicken people in the one city in Asia with which EcoHealth has had the closest experimental and financial connections. Scientists are fond of dark humour, and while one colleague mused that EcoHealth has predicted and prevented “zero pandemics” in its history, another added “or perhaps minus one?”. If EcoHealth was a company, the stock and bond prices would have fallen precipitously. Markets like to get out ahead of bad news, and the market usually knows what’s coming before you do.
The Holmes trial has only just begun in San Jose, and it may last several weeks, as cases of corporate fraud can be slow and long-winded. Evidence in such cases can become very technical as forensic accountants pore over the financial activities of the company and scientists and technologists give extremely detailed testimony on the pros and cons of Theranos’ miracle machine. Nevertheless, Holmes’ best chance of avoiding conviction may lie in taking the stand and attempting to leverage her own notoriety and personal charisma in persuading the jury that she is innocent of fraud and guilty only of a business failure, that her dreams of helping millions with medical testing were well intentioned, but that she was misled by her own scientists. We will see if Holmes also uses the “Rittenhouse approach”, and whether a few well-timed tears can prevent the jury from convicting her.
Daszak has yet to appear in a court of law, and he may never do so. It is clear, however, from a recent profile in Science, (“Prophet in Purgatory”)
that he feels he has already been tried, convicted and martyred in the court of public opinion and in the press, and he has proclaimed his innocence: “we did nothing wrong” he asserted to Science’sJon Cohen, adding, “we went above and beyond what normal scientists would do”. Daszak complains to Cohen that there is an “anti-science attack” and that EHA is the target. In fact, it would be more accurate to say that among scientists (even virologists) there is something of a silent “anti-Daszak” movement, albeit of modest proportions. It is worth noting that we rarely hear from Daszak about variants and vaccines, antivirals and other therapeutics, or about the ICU physicians and other clinicians who continue to save lives by treating critically ill COVID-19 patients. Instead, we hear a lot about the big Ps: pandemic prediction, prevention and, of course, Peter.
The problem for Daszak is that he invited undue attention wth constant media appearances, and therefore brought suspicion on himself. His TV appearances on 60 Minutes, and with Sanjay Gupta on CNN were at times excruciating, and rivaled the infamous Prince Andrew interview in terms of uncomfortable body language and credibility. Daszak angrily dismissed suggestions that labs in Wuhan could be involved in the appearance of the virus, and early in 2020 he organized what can only be described as an intense propaganda campaign, one that denigrated and politicized any and all of his critics as far-right “conspiracy theorists”. This had a chilling effect on free discussion among scientists, and as a result few have thus far spoken out in public. In private, however, scientists both in and outside the discipline of virology will admit that they are very unhappy with Peter Daszak.
As spokesperson for the widely discredited WHO inquiry that visited Wuhan in January 2021, Daszak aggressively diverted investigations away from the WIV lab and any discussion of the inventory of its freezer contents, and towards a carefully curated set of epidemiologic data describing patients observed in December (probably 4 to 8 weeks later than the time of the first infections), and a focus on infection-related events that may have occurred in and around the now infamous market, Hua Nan Haixian Pifa Shichang. Even frozen fish were unable to escape the attentions of the WHO panel. Not everyone was impressed by these efforts of the initial WHO team, and many called for Daszak to be removed from the team for any subsequent inquiries.
Daszak came under the microscope again later this year, when details of EHA grant proposals became public, in response to a series of requests under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) by US Right to Know and The Intercept, or as a result of inquiries by a much-maligned group of independent researchers (DRASTIC) who have often focused with laser-like intensity on the role of Daszak in these investigations. The grant proposals are extremely technical and impenetrable to most lay readers, but their significance has been explained quite well on Twitter by a number of very articulate scientists and lab safety experts. A lot of the material that was revealed in these proposals was a bit frightening, even to scientists, especially when one realizes that some of the work has already been performed, or might be performed in the future, and this has led to renewed calls for a moratorium on such “gain of function” experiments, from within and outside science. These revelations were deeply embarrassing to NIH, when it was shown (after a bit of pushing and shoving between the parties) that EHA had in fact been doing many things that were against NIH’s own rules and regulations. Experiments were done at WIV and elsewhere, in contravention of a “pause” or moratorium on “gain of function” experiments, and it later appeared that these were resumed in spite of the pause, and that EHA and NIH had agreed on this course of action. As one after another of these proposals were revealed, it emerged that Daszak and EHA had often been “economical with the truth”, and were exposed as having repeatedly made untrue or incomplete statements, a situation aptly described by Dr. Filippa Lentzos (a biosafety expert at King’s College London) as “a pattern of obfuscation and deceit”.
The verdict is still out on the origin of the pandemic, and EHA has both defenders and detractors in the scientific community. Many scientists will not dicuss the matter in public, wary of the bullying tactics employed by Daszak in 2020 when, among other manipulative feats, he managed to persuade 77 Novel Laureates to sign a letter campaigning for the reinstatement of a suspended grant. Not many scientists would be willing stand up against that. There is also a strange and slightly sinister climate of intimidation that hangs around Daszak. Scientists are seriously spooked by Daszak and are unwilling to discuss EHA, which has become a kind of third rail, not only because of its extensive funding from NIH and DoD, but also due to the public relations offensive that has cast a dark spell over this field of biology. Daszak has repeatedly engaged in a PR campaign marked by disinformation, intimidation and distraction. These are not usually thought of as the tools of a scientist, but they are certainly central to the craft of a rather different trade, one that is coincidentally represented on the Advisory Board of EHA.
The defense attorneys for Holmes have elected to put her on the stand to testify in her own defense, and the indications are that the strategy will be to throw other Theranos employees under the bus,and to suggest that she had noble intentions but was betrayed by misinformation from others. Perhaps this is a warning sign that should be heeded by EHA employees and their collaborators? At the time of writing, the jury in the Holmes trial has yet to deliberate, but we will soon know whether her legal team’s strategy was a success. It is likely that Daszak’s first opportunity to testify under oath will be in Congress, although that event may not be in the immediate future.
The worlds of Silicon Valley biotechnology and Global Pandemic Prediction are obviously different, but one can see some obvious parallels in the Rise and Fall of EcoHealth and Theranos. Both entities featured charismatic leaders with the ability to be “rainmakers” in the fundraising universe, who developed extremely important connections with highly influential people. In each case, the organization promised to disrupt existing paradigms and leverage ground-breaking technology to deliver outstanding service and assist in bringing peace and prosperity to the world. In each case, a pattern of deceit, denial and obfuscation served to obscure the revelation that the Imperial Leader may not after all have been wearing a magnificent suit, or even a black turtleneck, and that the technological advance they promised was in reality much less substantive than had been advertised.
The author is a Professor at Columbia University. He graduated with a degree in Natural Sciences from Cambridge University and completed a PhD at London University, before doing postdoctoral work at the National Institutes of Health. The author has recently published work on the cell biology of the envelope protein of SARS-CoV-2 and on specific biomarkers of abnormal coagulation in patients with COVID-19. He does not know the proximal origin of the virus, but in his opinion frozen lobsters from Maine were unlikely to be involved. The author thanks several colleagues for helpful comments. The views expressed are his own. This article was edited and amended 11/28/21 to correct typographical errors.
