The man who worked on coronaviruses with Wuhan Institute of Virology’s “Bat Woman” Dr. Shi Zhengli as long ago as 2013, whose company gave WIV $800,000 in funding to study bat coronaviruses from 2014-2019, and who served as a Facebook COVID fact-checker, is bitterly clinging to the narrative that the pandemic originated at the wet market in Wuhan.

Really.

Oh, yeah. This guy, Peter Daszak, also controlled more than $120 million in research grant funding from the US government, to conduct research on viruses and potentially create a universal flu vaccine. After listening to his comments on this week’s episode of “60 Minutes,” I’m not sure I trust this scientific mind. After everything that’s been published over the last month, including a letter signed by virologists he’s worked with for decades asking for an impartial look into a potential lab leak origin and a Wall Street Journal piece outlining the scientific evidence tending to show that SARS-CoV-2 was man-made, Daszak still unequivocally believes that the virus originated naturally and that the pandemic started at the Wuhan wet market.

Insanity.

So, here’s how it went down. Lesley Stahl and her CBS News colleagues decided to finally air an episode about the credibility (or lack thereof) of the lab leak origin theory. The episode started with Stahl decrying China’s lack of transparency throughout the entire pandemic as if she and all of the others in the MSM hadn’t been covering for the Chinese Communist Party for the past 18 months and admitting that the recently-released WHO report was a sham because of that lack of transparency. Her first guest, Jamie Metzl, who is a former NSC official who served in the Clinton administration and member of a WHO advisory committee on genetic engineering, signed an open letter along with two dozen colleagues in March 2021, calling for a new and independent investigation into the pandemic’s origin.

Metzl told Stahl:

“Everybody around the world is imagining this is some kind of full investigation. It’s not. This group of experts only saw what the Chinese government wanted them to see.

“While they were there they didn’t demand access to the records and samples and key personnel.

“It was agreed first that China would have veto power over– over who even got to be on the mission….On top of that, the WHO agreed that in most instances China would do the primary investigation. And then just share its findings with these international experts. So these international experts weren’t allowed to do their own primary investigation.”

That’s where our friend Peter Daszak comes into the picture. Daszak, incredibly, was a member of the WHO “mission,” and believes that the group made a big discovery during their time in China – the 1,000-mile “pathway” the virus took from bat caves in southern China to Wuhan. If that were true, why haven’t we heard about it before now?

What we found as part of this WHO mission to China is that there is a pathway.

The theory is that somehow that virus got from a bat into one of these wildlife farms. And then the animals were shipped into the market. And they contaminated people while they were handling them, chopping them up, killing them, whatever you do before you cook an animal.

Eighteen or so months later this world expert in viral transfer only just now has a theory, and it’s one they came up with during a trip in which the only “evidence” they investigated were summaries provided by the Chinese Communist Party and not original data? Um, okay.

All right, Dr. Daszak, let’s hear what animal was the intermediary.

Civets, these are like ferrets. There’s also an animal called a ferret badger. Rabbits, which we know can carry the virus. Those animals were coming into the market from farms over 1,000 miles away.

So Daszak couldn’t even come up with a specific animal that they were looking at; he just throws out possibilities. Why doesn’t he know? If they found a pathway, isn’t there testing or something to rely on? Stahl asked if the team studied any animals from the Wuhan market, and Daszak bent over backward to defend China.

Well, the China team had done that, and they found a few animals left in freezers. They tested them, they were negative. But the fact that those animals are there is the clue.

The clue to what? Stahl, to her credit, doubled down and made Daszak confirm that there was no direct evidence that any of the animals at the Wuhan wet market were infected with the virus or something close to it.

If animals from these “wildlife farms” were the intermediary animal, surely there are tests proving at least one of them had a COVID-like infection, right? Wrong. Of course, like the grifter who makes a living spending taxpayer dollars that he is, he needs to do more investigation. Likely funded by you and me.

“Now what we’ve gotta do is go to those farms and investigate. Talk to the farmers. Talk to their relatives. Test them. See if there were spikes in virus there first….No one knows yet. No one’s been there. No one’s asked them. No one’s tested them. That’s to be done.”

What? You found the pathway but no one’s investigated? And who believes that those farmers and their relatives will say anything but, “Yeah, definitely, we lost some animals in that time frame and I think they were really congested and couldn’t breathe…”? Since the ChiComs now have abundant quantities of the COVID-19 virus, it’s not beyond the realm of possibility that scientists have gone to whatever farms that will be investigated and placed animals they’d infected there. The farmers sure as hell aren’t going to blow that cover.

Yet, Daszak, his colleagues on the WHO “investigative” team, and the Chinese government say that’s the most likely explanation and more credible than the lab leak theory. Why is Daszak so confident?

“There’s a limit to what you can do and we went right up to that limit. We asked them tough questions. They weren’t vetted in advance. And the answers they gave, we found to be believable– correct and convincing.”

Tough questions, sure. Daszak then completely lies to Stahl, saying:

For an accidental leak that– that then led to COVID to happen, the virus that causes COVID would need to be in the lab. They never had any evidence of a virus like COVID in the lab.

When Stahl presses him, he reiterates that there is no evidence of a COVID-like virus at WIV. It’s as if Daszak has never heard of RaTG13, the closest known virus to SARS-CoV-2 (96.2% genetic identity), which was at the WIV when the outbreak occurred. But given that Daszak spoke about that very virus – and the fact that Dr. Shi took it out of the freezer at WIV on numerous occasions – his claim that there was never any evidence of a virus “like” COVID in the lab can only be described as complete and utter horses**t.

But sure, let’s take this world-renowned virologist at his word – the pandemic originated when some unknown species somewhere in southern China was infected by a bat, then taken to the Wuhan wet market (but no human transfer happened in southern China or among truckers), where some unlucky person didn’t cook their meat to the appropriate temperature and set off a worldwide pandemic. Sounds legit.

Oh, and don’t miss the Lancet investigation into Wuhan flu origins he was just asked to lead. El-oh-el.