CBP Flagged Peter Daszak at the Border. The FBI Told Them to Stand Down.
Newly released documents show Customs built a terrorism-response inspection for Daszak's Feb 2021 return from the WHO's Wuhan mission — then the FBI's New York office told them not to stop him.
In early February 2021, Peter Daszak was on his way home.
You might recall our article from the other day with the video talking about Daszak.
The president of EcoHealth Alliance had just spent weeks in China as part of the World Health Organization’s team investigating the origins of COVID-19 — the mission that took him, however briefly, to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the lab his own organization had helped fund with U.S. taxpayer money. His flight was booked: Qatar Airways 701, Doha to New York’s JFK, landing February 5 at 2:25 p.m.
Waiting for him, on paper, was U.S. Customs and Border Protection.
According to documents released this month by Senator Rand Paul — chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee — and first reported by Bill Melugin, officers at CBP’s National Targeting Center had built a formal targeting event around Daszak’s arrival and prepared a Tactical Terrorism Response Team examination. They had a plan, and they had questions.
Then, days before he landed, the plan died. Not because anyone at CBP changed their mind — because another agency intervened.
Why they wanted him
CBP’s interest in Daszak wasn’t a hunch. The internal referral, dated January 11, 2021, called him “an extremely high person of interest” and recommended “a thorough inspection either outbound/inbound.” Officers noted a specific worry: that Daszak “could hand carry and/or mail samples back from China.”
The targeting package laid out why. It cited Daszak’s role as principal investigator on NIH grants tied to bat-coronavirus research — including grant R01AI110964, “Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence” — and his 15-year collaboration with Zhengli Shi, the Wuhan virologist known as “Bat Woman.” It flagged his co-authorship, with Shi and UNC’s Ralph Baric, of the 2013 paper reporting a bat SARS-like virus that could infect human cells, and the 2015 Nature piece on “engineered bat virus” research. And in the officers’ own blunt phrasing:
“Much of the funding DASZAK receives is put towards gain of function research.”
The package even noted that NIH had asked Daszak to retrieve the original virus type-specimen used by the Wuhan lab and return it to the United States — a request Daszak reportedly called “outrageous” and did not appear to intend to honor.
What they planned to ask
This is the part that reads like a checklist someone actually wanted answered. CBP’s recommended questions for the exam included:
Why was Daszak chosen for the WHO investigative team?
Where in China did he go, and where did he stay?
Did the team visit the Wuhan Institute of Virology? What areas did they inspect, and whom did they meet?
Did the team visit the Chinese CDC?
Did Daszak collect any biological samples during the trip? Is he traveling with any? Did he mail any samples back to the U.S.? Did he take any materials with him to China?
Has Daszak maintained contact with anyone at the WIV — and what do they discuss?
The exam was also slated to “include review of media” — that is, a search of his phones and devices, with the search level to be set at the port of entry.
In other words: this was not a wave-through. Customs had assembled the framework to question a returning WHO investigator about whether he was physically carrying biological material across the U.S. border, and to look at what was on his phone.
The intervention
It never happened. And the documents are unusually clear about why.
On February 2, a National Targeting Center message rescinded the inspection request, noting the “subject may be of interest to the FBI” and instructing colleagues to “please disregard request for inspection.” Then, on February 4 — the day before Daszak’s flight — a CBP Deputy Chief Officer serving as the agency’s Joint Terrorism Task Force liaison sent the line that anchors the whole release:
“Please be advised FBI New York requested we do not stop the subject below.”
The final disposition record puts it even more plainly:
“FBI requested not to stop subject. No further NTC action.”
Daszak landed at JFK. As far as these records show, no one from CBP questioned him, and no one searched his devices or his luggage.
Read it honestly
Here is what the documents establish, and here is what they don’t — because the gap matters.
They establish that career Customs officers, on their own initiative, identified Daszak as a high-priority subject, built a counterterrorism-style inspection around his return, wanted to ask whether he was moving biological samples, and were called off by the FBI’s New York field office at the last minute.
They do not establish why the FBI made that call. And there’s an innocent reading worth stating out loud: when a Joint Terrorism Task Force asks CBP to “not stop” someone, it is sometimes precisely because the Bureau has its own active interest in that person and doesn’t want a border stop to tip them off or interfere. A stand-down order is not automatically a cover-up; it can be the opposite. But the track record during the Biden years is not great for calming our suspicions.
The redactions hide the names, the office details, and the FBI’s stated reasoning — so the single most important question here, why, is exactly the thing blacked out.
What’s not in dispute is the shape of it: in February 2021, one arm of the federal government wanted to search Peter Daszak at the border, and another arm told it to stand down. For a figure already at the center of the COVID-origins conflict-of-interest story — the man who funneled NIH money to Wuhan, secretly organized the Lancet letter branding lab-leak a “conspiracy theory,” and then sat on the WHO team sent to investigate the very lab he funded — that is a document set worth having in the public record.
The files are public now. The one line still hidden is the one that would explain everything.
About the source. Drawn from a package of internal CBP records released in July 2026 by Senator Rand Paul, Chairman of the U.S. Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, and reported by Bill Melugin. The records are marked Law Enforcement Sensitive / For Official Use Only and were released in redacted form; blacked-out specifics — including names and the FBI’s stated rationale — are left blank here. Quotations are taken from the released text.
What was wrong with the Full Bucket of Idiots (FBI)? Did they think that if Daszak was released, he would lead them to der Fauscista? Daszak should have been arrested by CBP and handed over to the FBI, where that scum could have been prosecuted for his criminal activity. He deserves a fate worse than death.
I’m glad someone continues to pursue this. I read Nick Wade’s article in The Bulletin about 6 months into the pandemic. He had his hands around the general outline of the catastrophe that early on. Hubris is the downfall of man, and irresponsible twiddling of virus material is the one thing most likely to end humanity. Not an asteroid. Not a nuclear war. Not climate change. During the pandemic I often thought what if this highly contagious airborne virus had a different impact, maybe something like AIDs. No symptoms for a couple months and then a slow wasting eventually followed by certain death. Civilization, and possibly the human race ended by a small handful of arrogant virologists and bureaucrats.