Show Notes
Note: This is a freely accessible serialized version of Lab Leak Fever. Audio voiceover was AI generated for accessibility. Find an overview of all chapters here or consult the book website for further information. Heavy breaths followed a claustrophobic chase around the hotel room. Peter Daszak was doing his workout run from the showers through the bedroom to the antechamber and back, again and again and again. The Chinese hosts in Wuhan had placed him in quarantine for two weeks, and the pressure, isolation, and restrictions were difficult to deal with at times. He was an outdoor person. Twice daily, a team in full hazmat gear would knock on his door to take his temperature. “It really makes you feel dirty. Contagious,” he remembered thinking. He was not the only one. Marion Koopmans was two rooms away. “It was amazing; they were so strict. I really thought, ‘Okay, this is how plague victims must have felt.’ You really felt like contaminated waste, almost.” She showed me photos she’d taken at the time. “It’s dystopia; they have made a plastic corridor for us.” Plastic sheeting completely covered the hallway from top to bottom. They were sampled as per instructions: 5-second swabs and not a millisecond less. Everyone was suited up except them. Warning signs and restriction bands were everywhere. China had been COVID-free for months. She just hoped she would not get a fever from anything else because it was not clear what would happen if she did. And yet, they, along with eight other international experts, were finally there, where it all happened. “We had been asked before to be quiet about where we would go before,” she laughed, “then we landed in China and had an escort everywhere and a charade of media following us.” Peter Daszak and Marion Koopmans were two obvious scientists to reach out to when the WHO was assembling a mission to Wuhan in January 2021. Peter, the British zoologist, and head of the non-profit EcoHealth Alliance, had worked for decades on understanding viral spillover from bats, identified the origin of SARS with Shi Zhengli from WIV, and worked together with various emergent disease collaborators all over the world. He would be on the WHO’s animal and environment working group, trying to make sense of what happened at the Huanan market. I did not particularly want to serve. It irritated me. My big grant was canceled by Trump, and we went through months and months of misery. And I thought, “Why the hell should I help WHO? Doing the work that we should be doing for them?” That just seemed cruel, and then I am asked to volunteer for them? On the phone, he told Peter Karim Ben Embarek, who had assembled the mission, that he didn’t want to do it. On top of that, his participation would invite terrible political attacks on the WHO. Embarek just replied, “What’s new?” The WHO has been under attack on a daily basis; he naively believed it wouldn’t matter. Then, the WHO mission chief reiterated the enormous significance this work would have for the world. After some back and forth, Peter said that he would be available to the group, but he did not want to do fieldwork. “Ben said okay, but he did not take this as an answer; he kind of treated me like I was on the team.” Peter shrugged at how he ended up on the mission. The WHO team knew what they were doing and why they wanted him. “They wanted access to Chinese scientists, not just [because of] the lab issue, but because George Gao and the Wuhan Institute of Virology were investigating the outbreak… so the WHO needed somebody close to them.” Reports suggested that Beijing had indicated he would be a good person to have on the team. As best I can tell from Embarek’s comments, the suggestion came from Shi Zhengli herself. “It’s obvious if you got a researcher who you’ve been working with for 20 years who has not ripped you off, who had been honest with them,” Peter explained the likely rationale. It is worth retelling how Peter came to be on the WHO team because ma
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