A Sri Lankan virologist with strong connections to the questions surrounding the origins of the COVID-19 virus and the role of the Wuhan Institute of Virology is about to receive an award for his work. But the evidence shows that Joseph Sriyal Malik Peiris should be investigated and required to answer questions about his role in the development and release of the virus that has wreaked so much havoc and death across the globe.
Peiris is a Sri Lankan virologist working at the University of Hong Kong. He is currently Professor and Chair in Virology at The University of Hong Kong; Honorary Consultant Microbiologist, Queen Mary Hospital, Hong Kong; Co-Director, WHO (World Health Organization) H5 reference laboratory and SARS reference laboratory at Hong Kong University; and Co-Director of WHO reference laboratories, also at The University of Hong Kong. Peiris and Hong Kong University have also been close partners with the Institut Pasteur International Network since 1999.
Peiris is in Chicago, IL this fall for two happy occasions: he’s a new grandfather and also the recipient of the 2021 John Dirks Canada Gairdner Global Health Award. The Gairdner Award is for “significantly contributing to understanding the origins and options for control of newly emerging infectious disease outbreaks in Asia, notably zoonotic influenza and severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS).” In fact, yes, Peiris has been deeply involved in SARS-CoV-2 pandemic matters thanks to decades of close relationships with the civilian-military partnership that defines the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)’s extensive biological weapons (BW) program. Rep. Mo Brooks (R-AL) reported on the CCP-PLA (People’s Liberation Army) BW collaboration after meeting in July 2021 with the courageous Chinese defector, virologist Dr. Li-Meng Yan. Her report and Rep. Brooks’ interview with her can be found at his Congressional website.
In June 2020, Peiris joined with 11 other scientists who led the now-defunct Lancet medical journal’s study into a broad investigation of the SARS-CoV-2. Dr. Jeffrey D. Sachs of Columbia University and a United Nations (UN) advisor was named to chair the commission. By November 2020, the commission had formed a task force to study the origins of the by then global SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. Dr. Peter Daszak, the president of EcoHealth Alliance, was named its chair. Unfortunately, Daszak and EcoHealth Alliance have been closely affiliated with the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) for many years, having channeled substantial grant funding to its gain-of-function work from the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) and its National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), headed by Dr. Anthony Fauci. Peiris claims that Fauci is one of his personal heroes because of the way he is “standing up for science.”
Appointing someone like Daszak with such close financial connections to the WIV to investigate whether the SARS-CoV-2 could have emerged from one of its labs, however, proved rather problematic. By June 2021, Daszak recused himself from the Lancet task force over his obvious financial conflicts of interest, although much less was made of his attempts to shift blame away from China with February 2020 claims in the Lancet of ‘natural origin’ for the virus and ‘conspiracy theory’ for any other hypothesis. In fact, as the non-profit group US Right to Know learned in November 2020 from emails acquired through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, Daszak had actually personally orchestrated the misleading Lancet statement, all while concealing the fact that he and EcoHealth Alliance were actually funding WIV Key Lab Director Shi Zhengli through grants from the NIH. Sachs himself decided to completely disband the Lancet commission by the fall of 2021, a year after his own conflict of interest—direct personal links with Peter Daszak and EcoHealth Alliance—was first revealed in November 2020. The Lancet website had earlier declared in February 2020 that “we declare no competing interests.”
And Malik Peiris was associated with all of this. In apparent recognition of his role in the fraudulent Lancet effort to cover up the CCP-PLA and WIV roles, the CCP honored him as one of four 2021 Life Science Prize Laureates. The award is sometimes called China’s “Nobel Prize” and comes with a $1 million prize that is funded by several Chinese Communist Party-linked companies such as Baidu, Hillhouse Capital, and Sequoia Capital China, according to a 21 October 2021 article at the National Pulse. The CCP-run Global Times claimed the award was for “major discoveries” about the SARS-CoV-1 outbreak in 2003 that contributed to “combating COVID-19” more recently. We may note that the outlet also crows about how Peiris’ research helped support the SARS-CoV-2 bat origin narrative that he and others dutifully disseminated.
Now Peiris is in Chicago to receive yet another award, this one coming with a $100,000 in Canadian prize money. The Gairdner Global Health Award is given “for scientifically based research that has improved the health and well-being of those facing health inequities worldwide.” It is difficult to reconcile the illness and death of millions worldwide from a virus that emerged from gain-of-function studies in CCP-PLA laboratories and was deliberately spread to the rest of the world with “the health and well-being” of anyone. Given Malik Peiris’ clear connections to the CCP and its network of BW laboratories all over China, and the CCP’s obvious gratitude to him for his research work, it is likewise difficult to understand how he could have been granted a visa to come to the U.S.
The threat posed to a truth-teller like Dr. Li-Meng Yan, who at the time was working at the WHO H5 Reference Lab at the University of Hong Kong—which was run by Dr. Malik Peiris—is also patently obvious. In late 2019, when she first spoke to her supervisor Dr. Leo Poon about her concerns regarding the virus then spreading across Wuhan, she was warned “not to cross the red line” or she would be “disappeared.” Dr. Yan fled Hong Kong to the U.S. in April 2020 and has been crossing the red lines of truth ever since.
Given the CCP’s intensive focus on development of its “biotechnology” sector within the context of a tight military-civil fusion system and with open aspirations for global domination, that threat extends to all of us.
The views expressed in CCNS member articles are not necessarily the views or positions of the entire CCNS. They are the views of the authors, who are members of the CCNS.
