Peter Daszak is a British zoologist, consultant and public expert on disease ecology, in particular on zoonosis. He is the president of EcoHealth Alliance, a nonprofit non-governmental organization that supports various programs on global health and pandemic prevention. He is also a member of the Center for Infection and Immunity at the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health. He lives in Suffern, New York.
Daszak was involved in investigations into the initial outbreak which eventually developed into the COVID-19 pandemic and became a member of the World Health Organization team sent to investigate the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic in China.
Education
Daszak earned a B.Sc. in zoology in 1987, at Bangor University and a Ph.D. in parasitic infectious diseases in 1994 at University of East London.
Career
Daszak worked at the School of Life Sciences, Kingston University, in Surrey, England in the 1990s. In the late 1990s Daszak moved to the United States and was affiliated with the Institute of Ecology at the University of Georgia and the National Center for Infectious Diseases, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in Atlanta, Georgia. Around 2001 he became executive director at a collaborative think-tank in New York City, the Consortium for Conservation Medicine. He has adjunct positions at two universities in the U.K. and three universities in the U.S., including the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health.
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...[a]nd 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.
Starting in 2014, Daszak was Principal Investigator of a six-year NIH project which was awarded to the EcoHealth Alliance and which focused on the emergence of novel zoonotic coronaviruses with a bat origin. Among the aims of the project was to characterize the diversity and distribution of Severe acute respiratory syndrome–related coronavirus (SARSr-CoV) in bats, viruses with a significant risk of spillover, in southern China, based on data from spike protein sequences, infectious clone technology, infection experiments (both in vitro and in vivo), as well as analysis of receptor binding. The six 1-year projects received $3.75 million in funding from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the U.S. National Institutes of Health agency.
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."