Lancet investigation into origin of COVID-19 pandemic shut down over bias risk: BMJ report

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TORONTO — A prestigious medical journal's investigation into the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic has been shut down due to the risk of bias after a team member was found to have ties to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a rival journal says.

The British Medical Journal report lays out how the original task force assembled by prestigious journal the Lancet to investigate the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic fell apart.

The Lancet’s task force chair, economics professor at Columbia University Jeffrey Sachs, previously told the Wall Street Journal that he had shut down the because of his concerns about its ties to a non-profit organization called EcoHealth Alliance, which is run by a then-member of the probe, Peter Dascak.

Dascak was not forthcoming with his ties to the Wuhan Institute of Virology from the outset, the BMJ report says, as EcoHealth Alliance subcontracted some of its research to the Chinese institute after being given millions in dollars in grants by the U.S. government to research viruses for pandemic preparedness.

The task force shutting down was “the correct action,” said biosafety expert and Rutgers University professor Richard Ebright in the BMJ report, who characterized the ties the Lancet’s proposed COVID-19 probe team had to EcoHealth Alliance as “disqualifying conflicts of interest.”

On the Lancet’s website, a list of their current task forces has a notice under the origins of COVID-19 probe stating that “in the interest of ensuring the transparency and objectivity of the Lancet COVID-19 Commission report, the Task Force on the Origins, Early Control of the Pandemic and One Health Solutions has been ended.”

It states that further work on these issues will be addressed in a report by the commission’s secretariat “in consultation with global experts.”

The BMJ report states that Daszak led the charge on a February 2020 statement in the Lancet alleging that it was a “conspiracy theory” to argue that the pandemic could have started from a laboratory leak in Wuhan.

However, the non-profit group U.S. Right to Know published emails gathered from freedom of information requests that showed that Daszak had not disclosed he was funding Shi Zengli from the Wuhan Institute of Virology during the time he published the statement.

In a later addition to their task force statement, the Lancet published an addendum in June about the “competing interests and the origins of SARS-CoV-2,” in which the journal explained that Daszak had changed and expanded his disclosure statements as it related to his work on the project after questions were raised about conflicts of interest.

Daszak reiterated in the addendum that he had no conflicts of interest.

The updated disclosure statement from Daszak includes an acknowledgment that EcoHealth Alliance’s work in China was previously funded by the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the United States Agency for International Development, but stated that Daszak nor EcoHealth Alliance received funding from China.

Dascak resigned from the Lancet task force shortly after the addendum was published.