On January 18, Peter Daszak, born and raised in the mill and mining town of Dukinfield, near Manchester, awoke to a winter’s dawn in central China, 5,500 miles away. “Sunrise in Wuhan — my early morning view on day 4 of quarantine — beautiful,” he tweeted, with a photograph of skyscrapers against a hazy orange sky.
His presence there in a delegation from the World Health Organisation (WHO) on a mission of global significance showed a remarkable rise for the 55-year-old parasitologist with a PhD from the University of East London.
Ostensibly he was visiting the city to find the truth about where the coronavirus pandemic began before it swept across the world — killing nearly four million people. Five months later, however, the trip
