[11] Starting in 2014, Daszak was Principal Investigator of a six-year NIH project which was awarded to the EcoHealth Alliance and which focused on the emergence of novel zoonotic coronaviruses with a bat origin.

[12] Among the aims of the project was to characterize the diversity and distribution of Severe acute respiratory syndrome–related coronavirus (SARSr-CoV) in bats, viruses with a significant risk of spillover, in southern China, based on data from spike protein sequences, infectious clone technology, infection experiments (both in vitro and in vivo), as well as analysis of receptor binding.

[12] Daszak has served on committees of the International Union for Conservation of Nature, World Health Organization (WHO), National Academy of Sciences, and United States Department of the Interior.

[14] During times of large virus outbreaks Daszak has been invited to speak as an expert on epidemics involving diseases moving across the species barrier from animals to humans.

[17] In October 2019, when the U.S. federal government "quietly" ended the ten-year old program called PREDICT,[18] operated by United States Agency for International Development (USAID)'s emerging threats division,[19] Daszak said that, compared to the $5 billion the U.S. spent fighting Ebola in West Africa, PREDICT—which cost $250 million—was much less expensive.

"[24] Prior to the pandemic, Daszak and EcoHealth Alliance were the only U.S.-based organization researching coronavirus evolution and transmission in China,[26] where they partnered with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, among others.

The move met with criticism,[20][32][33] including by a group of 77 Nobel Prize laureates who wrote to NIH Director Francis Collins that they "are gravely concerned"[34] by the decision and called the funding cut "counterintuitive, given the urgent need to better understand the virus that causes COVID-19 and identify drugs that will save lives.

[38] Daszak had previously collaborated for many years with Shi Zhengli, the director of the Wuhan Institute of Virology,[39] on efforts to trace SARSr-CoV viruses to bats after the 2002–2004 SARS outbreak.

Some critics, including journalist Nicholas Wade[40] and biologist Richard H. Ebright,[41] alleged that Daszak had a conflict of interest investigating the virus' origins in China.

[6] After the questioning, professor Lawrence Gostin warned the episode might imperil needed international collaborations, while virologist Angela Rasmussen called it "an attack on science" and "dangerous" to scientific inquiry.

[6] Later in May, the United States Department of Health and Human Services suspended all federal funding for Daszak and the EHA, saying that he did not properly monitor research activities at the WIV and failed to report on their high-risk experiments.