In February 2020, a group of scientists signed a statement published in The Lancet denouncing speculation about potential nonnatural origins of the virus as “conspiracy theories.”

Only following the publication of leaked emails did it become clear that the scientist who brought his colleagues together to co-sign the Lancet statement was Peter Daszak, head of EcoHealth Alliance, the nonprofit that secured U.S. government funding for controversial research on bat-borne coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Daszak assured his co-signers that the EcoHealth logo wouldn’t appear on the letter and wrote that he hoped “to avoid the appearance of a political statement.”

https://reason.com/video/2021/11/18/was-it-a-lab-leak-the-mysterious-origin-of-covid-19/