The nonprofit exec whose organization sent nearly $600,000 in US taxpayer money to a Chinese lab that may have been the source of COVID-19 masterminded an effort near the start of the pandemic to squelch the notion that the coronavirus was man-made, a new report reveals. Peter Daszak, president of the New York City-based EcoHealth Alliance, secretly organized a statement issued by the influential British medical journal The Lancet in February 2020, according to Vanity Fair. A total of 27 scientists — including Daszak, 55, who trained as a zoologist — signed the statement, which expressed “solidarity with all scientists and health professionals in China.” “We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin,” the statement affirmed. “Conspiracy theories do nothing but create fear, rumours, and prejudice that jeopardise our global collaboration in the fight against this virus.” During Daszak’s efforts to arrange the Lancet statement, he reportedly emailed two scientists, including Dr. Ralph Baric of the University of North Carolina, who’d worked with the lead coronavirus researcher at China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology, located at the epicenter of the coronavirus outbreak. Daszak told the scientists that they “should not sign this statement, so it has some distance from us and therefore doesn’t work in a counterproductive way,” Vanity Fair said, citing emails obtained by the group US Right to Know. “We’ll then put it out in a way that doesn’t link it back to our collaboration so we maximize an independent voice,” Daszak reportedly added. Baric didn’t sign the Lancet statement, but last month was among 18 international scientists who signed a statement in Science Magazine calling for a “transparent, objective” investigation into the origins of COVID-19. And while the Lancet statement included a claim that its signatories had “no competing interests,” at least six others had either worked at or been funded by EcoHealth Alliance, according to Vanity Fair. SEE ALSO Dr. Anthony Fauci said the NIH had given the Wuhan Institute of Virology $600,000 for a coronaviruses study. Fauci admits ‘modest’ NIH funding of Wuhan lab but denies ‘gain of function’ Daszak received more than $410,000 in annual compensation from EcoHealth and “related organizations” during the fiscal year that ended on June 30, 2019, according to an IRS filing posted online by the ProPublica news organization. The nonprofit, which says it’s “dedicated to protecting wildlife and public health from the emergency of disease,” has received as much as $15 million a year in grant money from various federal agencies, Vanity Fair said. EcoHealth has used those grants to fund controversial “gain-of-function” research — which can increase the infectiousness and virulence of viruses — at facilities that include the Wuhan Institute of Virology, according to Vanity Fair. The WIV received about $600,0000 from a five-year, $3 million-plus grant that Vanity Fair said EcoHealth got from the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which is headed by Dr. Anthony Fauci. According to Fauci’s official emails, which were posted online this week by BuzzFeed, Daszak wrote him on April 18, 2020, to express gratitude for Fauci’s public statements backing the theory that the coronavirus evolved naturally. “I just wanted to say a personal thank you on behalf of our staff and collaborators, for publicly standing up and stating that the scientific evidence supports a natural origin for COVID-19 from a bat-to-human spillover, not a lab release from the Wuhan Institute of Virology,” Daszak wrote.