By Peter Daszak

“I know (that origin investigation requires logic and reason), because this is exactly what our organisation, EcoHealth Alliance, does. We work around the world to identify the origins of pandemics, map them and analyse them, and use these results to predict where the next pandemic will likely emerge.

"We then target these “hotspots” for enhanced surveillance, capacity-building and risk-reduction programmes to prevent diseases emerging."

Rewind to 2017 BC, EcoAlliance produced their heatmap - lets see how they went with their “enhanced surveillance, capacity-building and risk-reduction programmes to prevent diseases emerging” Pic a

“Heat maps of predicted relative risk distribution of zoonotic EID (Emerging Infectious Diseases) events. Pic a shows the predicted distribution of new events being observed (weighted model output with current reporting effort)”

Most likely areas of new zoonotic crossover events were Europe, the US and Japan. China barely registers.

Here’s a close up of Asia:

We’ve got three hotspots in China - Hong Kong, Shanghai and Beijing. Wuhan was not on the radar. It should have been. Given WIV was/is housing “more than 16 000” bat viruses, it should be coloured blazing red.

Daszak's research partner, Shi Zheng-li (Batwoman) commented when first told of the outbreak:

“I wondered if [the municipal health authority] got it wrong. I had never expected this kind of thing to happen in Wuhan, in central China.”

Shi had pegged Guangdong, Guangxi and Yunnan to be China’s hotspots for a bat to human crossover event. Her first thoughts were: “Could they have come from our lab?”

The bottom-line is none of EcoHealth’s scientists (with all their millions in funding) predicted an outbreak in Wuhan. So either their research has been a waste of money - or - there’s another explanation for why it happened in Wuhan. So why is Daszak still insisting that WIV be excluded from any investigation?