Newly released government emails show the FBI ordered Customs and Border Protection not to question Dr. Peter Daszak, the man whose nonprofit funneled millions to the Wuhan lab, when he flew back from China in February 2021.
Border agents at JFK Airport had flagged Daszak as "an extremely high person of interest." They had assembled a Tactical Terrorism Response Team exam, a formal questioning protocol, to press him on his 15-year research partnership with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, his contact with WIV personnel, whether he had ever visited the lab, and whether he was carrying biological samples. Then, three days before Daszak's scheduled arrival from Doha, Qatar, on February 5, 2021, the order came down from FBI New York: stand down.
Senate Homeland Security Committee Chairman Rand Paul released the CBP email package on Monday as part of what he called a COVID-era "Reading Room", a broader document release aimed at exposing how federal agencies handled the pandemic's origins investigation. The emails paint a picture of one arm of the federal government actively trying to scrutinize Daszak while another arm quietly shut the effort down, with no explanation given.
The internal CBP correspondence begins on January 11, 2021, when an agricultural specialist circulated an email noting that Daszak "was responsible for funding WIV with NIH grant money for research." By February 2, a CBP National Targeting Security Specialist added a sharper assessment:
"Much of the funding DASZAK receives is put towards gain of function research."
That same day, February 2, a separate email from a CBP Joint Terrorism Task Force Liaison delivered the kill order on the planned questioning:
"Please be advised FBI New York requested we do not stop the subject."
No reason accompanied the instruction. The emails released by Paul's committee contain no justification from the FBI for why agents should let Daszak pass without so much as a conversation. CBP had prepared specific questions: Why was Daszak chosen for the World Health Organization team investigating the pandemic's origins in China? What was the nature of his contact with WIV virologists? Had he brought biological material back to the United States?
None of those questions, based on the released records, were ever posed.
Daszak ran EcoHealth Alliance, a Manhattan-based nonprofit that received more than $4 million from the National Institutes of Health under a grant titled "Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence." More than $500,000 of that grant flowed directly to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where Dr. Shi Zhengli, WIV's chief virologist, listed the grant on her own resume.
During the 2010s, Daszak and Shi published research on bat-derived, SARS-like coronaviruses "capable of directly infect[ing] humans." Other public health officials, lawmakers, and scientists have said the EcoHealth research proposal could have served as a blueprint for SARS-CoV-2, a characterization that remains disputed but has gained traction as more records surface.
An NIH official testified before Congress in 2024 that some EcoHealth-funded research at WIV involved gain-of-function experiments, work that could have made viruses more infectious. The official denied that the research started the pandemic, but the admission itself marked a significant shift from years of institutional dismissal.
Paul framed the newly released emails as part of that pattern of institutional evasion:
"For years, Americans were told a lab origin wasn't just unlikely, it was dismissed outright by the very people funding and reviewing this research."
Internal CBP documents show that NIH itself had asked Daszak to retrieve the original type-specimen used by WIV for genetic analysis and return it to the United States. The agency also asked him to explain several aspects of his collaboration with WIV, including matters related to cell phone data, a reference the documents do not elaborate on.
Daszak's response, as characterized in CBP records: he called the requirements "outrageous" and did not appear to intend to comply with them. So here was a man who took millions in federal grant money, routed a substantial portion to a Chinese virology lab at the center of a global pandemic investigation, and then balked when the agency that funded him asked for basic accountability. And the FBI's response was to make sure border agents left him alone.
The institutional fallout eventually caught up, though years after the FBI cleared Daszak's path through JFK. In January 2025, the Department of Health and Human Services banned EcoHealth Alliance from receiving US government funding for five years after the organization failed to fully disclose its research results. The nonprofit subsequently fired Daszak and ordered him to dismiss all employees.
Daszak sued EcoHealth Alliance over his termination. He has since joined Nature Health Global, another pandemic-prevention health group based in Rockland County, New York. Representatives of Nature Health Global did not respond to a request for comment.
The timeline is worth sitting with. In early 2021, federal border agents identified Daszak as a high-priority subject and prepared to question him about his deep financial and scientific ties to a lab under global suspicion. The FBI blocked that effort without explanation. It took four more years for HHS to cut off EcoHealth's funding, and longer still for the internal emails to reach the public.
Paul has promised additional document releases through his Reading Room initiative, but the emails already in hand raise questions that no one in the FBI has publicly answered. Why did FBI New York intervene? Was Daszak ever questioned by any federal agency about his work with WIV, then or later? Did CBP comply fully with the FBI's instruction, or did any agent push back?
The nature of the "cell phone data" referenced in CBP documents remains unexplained. So does the full scope of what NIH wanted Daszak to hand over, and why he felt comfortable refusing.
When the people who funded the research, dismissed the lab-leak theory, and shielded the man at the center of it all from routine border questioning are the same constellation of federal agencies, the problem is not one bad decision. It is a system that protected its own at every checkpoint, and left the public waiting years for answers that should have been demanded at the gate.
