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Peter Daszak (born ) is a British Zoology, consultant and public expert on disease ecology, in particular on zoonosis. He is a member of the Center for Infection and Immunity at the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health. "Faculty" , Columbia Public Health Daszak was the president of EcoHealth Alliance, a nonprofit non-governmental organization that supports various programs on global health and pandemic prevention, until January 2025. "Dr. Peter Daszak" bio , EcoHealth Alliance
Daszak and other virologists long warned of the potential of SARS-like coronavirus to cause epidemics like those seen in the 2002–2004 SARS outbreak or the 2012 MERS outbreak, and Daszak collaborated with the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) to study coronaviruses in China. After the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, Daszak became a member of the World Health Organization team sent to investigate the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic in China. Daszak became a frequent victim of criticism, accusations, and threats, obscuring research into the origin of SARS-CoV-2.
In 2024, Daszak was questioned by members of U.S. congress, in what virologist Angela Rasmussen warned was "essentially an attack on science." In 2025, the United States Department of Health and Human Services debarred Daszak for five years, alleging reporting irregularities and criticizing Daszak's research in China.
He was one of the early adopters of conservation medicine. The Society for Conservation Biology symposium in 2000, had focused on the "complex problem of emerging diseases". He said in 2001 that there were "almost no examples of emerging wildlife diseases not driven by human environmental change...and few human emerging diseases don't include some domestic animal or wildlife component." His research has focused on investigating and predicting the impacts of new diseases on wildlife, livestock, and human populations, and he has been involved in research studies on epidemics such as the Nipah virus infection, the Australian Hendra outbreaks, the 2002–2004 SARS outbreak, Avian influenza, and the West Nile virus.
Daszak has served on committees of the International Union for Conservation of Nature, World Health Organization (WHO), National Academy of Sciences, and United States Department of the Interior. He is a member of the National Academy of Medicine and Chair of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM)'s Forum on Microbial Threats and sits on the supervisory board of the One Health Commission Council of Advisors.
During times of large virus outbreaks Daszak has been invited to speak as an expert on epidemics involving diseases moving across the species barrier from animals to humans. At the time of the Ebola outbreak in West Africa in 2014, Daszak said "Our research shows that new approaches to reducing emerging pandemic threats at the source would be more cost-effective than trying to mobilize a global response after a disease has emerged".
In October 2019, when the U.S. federal government "quietly" ended the ten-year old program called PREDICT, operated by United States Agency for International Development (USAID)'s emerging threats division, Daszak said that, compared to the $5 billion the U.S. spent fighting Ebola in West Africa, PREDICT—which cost $250 million—was much less expensive. Daszak further stated, "PREDICT was an approach to heading off pandemics, instead of sitting there waiting for them to emerge, and then mobilizing."
Daszak's research focuses on global emergent diseases such as Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), Nipah virus, Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS), Rift Valley fever, Ebola virus, and COVID-19. While Daszak led EcoHealth Alliance, the organization administered more than $100 million in U.S. federal grants to fund overseas laboratory experiments.
An open letter co-authored by Daszak, signed by 27 scientists and published in The Lancet on 19 February 2020, stated: "We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin...and overwhelmingly conclude that this coronavirus originated in wildlife." It further warned that blaming Chinese researchers for the virus' origin jeopardised the fight against the disease. In June 2021, The Lancet published an addendum in which Daszak listed his cooperation with researchers in China, and he also recused himself from The Lancets inquiry commission focused on COVID-19 origins.
EcoHealth Alliance's project funding was "abruptly terminated" on 24 April 2020, by the National Institutes of Health. The move met with criticism, including by a group of 77 Nobel Prize laureates who wrote to NIH Director Francis Collins that they "are gravely concerned" by the decision and called the funding cut "counterintuitive, given the urgent need to better understand the virus that causes COVID-19 and identify drugs that will save lives." An article on 8 May 2020 in the journal Science stated that the unusual 24 April decision to cut EcoHealth's funding had occurred shortly after "President Donald Trump allegedwithout providing evidencethat the pandemic virus had escaped from a Chinese laboratory supported by the NIH grant, and vowed to end the funding."
In May 2020, Daszak "said there was 'zero evidence' that the virus" was created in the Wuhan Institute of Virology during an appearance on "60 Minutes."
Some critics, including journalist Nicholas Wade and biologist Richard H. Ebright, alleged that Daszak had a conflict of interest investigating the virus' origins in China. In 2021, a complaint was issued by a few Republican representatives asking for Daszak to be expelled from the National Academy of Medicine (NAM) based on conduct allegations. In 2022 this request was denied by the NAM, citing "no evidence" of the alleged breach in conduct. The conduct probe by NAM to exonerate Daszak drew wider circles as the Republican minority staff of a bipartisan Senate committee led by Senator Richard Burr stated "that the pandemic most likely began when the virus somehow escaped from WIV". Some NAM members called the probe into Daszak "frivolous and political", and wrote that such accusations against China are detrimental to pandemic preparedness, and hinder international collaboration to confront pandemics effectively.Cohen, J. (28 OCT 2022). "Conduct probe exonerates scientist accused of obscuring pandemic's origin" SCIENCE|INSIDERHEALTH science.org. Retrieved 17 November 2022.
Daszak, Linfa Wang, and Shi Zhengli are three scientists featured in a 2025 documentary by Swiss filmmaker Christian Frei called Blame. The film focuses on how misinformation and conspiracy theories spread about the COVID-19 pandemic.
target="_blank" rel="nofollow"> Peter Daszak profile, NIH grant 12891702, p. 43: "1999 Meritorious service award, CDC . . . 2002 Honored by the naming of a new species of centipede, Cryptops daszaki (J Nat Hist 36: 76–106) . . . 2013 Honored by the naming of a new parasite species, Isospora daszaki (Parasit. Res. 111: 1463–1466) . . . 2018 Member, National Academy of Medicine (NAM), USA" In 2018, he was elected to the National Academy of Medicine. He is commemorated in the names of the centipede Cryptops daszaki, as well as the apicomplexan parasite Isospora daszaki.
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