Danielle Anderson received her PhD from Curtin University of Technology in 2007, majoring in virology. She was a post-doctoral scientist at Intitut Armand-Frappier, Canada. At Duke-NUS Medical School in Singapore, she served as the Scientific Director of the ABSL3 laboratory, providing expertise, and support for research with pathogens requiring high containment.

At the Doherty Institute, she is a Senior Research Fellow whose research is directed toward determining and understanding viral pathogenesis, particularly the influence of cellular host factors on paramyxovirus replication. Dr Anderson focuses is on pathogen discovery and aims to identify and characterise novel and emerging viruses and develop diagnostic platforms for the identification clinically relevant emerging pathogens, such as coronaviruses.

Dr Danielle Anderson studies viral pathogenesis in animal models. In addition to molecular and virological laboratory expertise, she has extensive experience in designing high throughput studies and has trained and worked at BSL3 facilities in Singapore (Duke-NUS Medical School), Germany (Paul-Ehrlich-Institute) and the USA (Duke University), and a BSL4 facility in China (Wuhan Institute of Virology).

Dr Anderson was part of the team that discovered SADS-CoV and Mengla filovirus. Her laboratory in Singapore was the fourth worldwide to isolate SARS-CoV-2. CIA Anderson is a co-inventor of cPass, a surrogate neutralization assay commercialized by GenScript that allows the detection of SARS-CoV-2 antibodies without the need for BSL3 containment. ¹⁾

Danielle Anderson is a virologist often cited as a “biosafety expert” by journalists seeking to debunk the lab-leak theory for the SARS-CoV-19 virus.

Virologist Danielle Anderson paints a very different picture of the Wuhan Institute. Bloomberg By Michelle Fay Cortez - June 27, 2021

However, others possessing far greater credibility and scientific expertise have also recently challenged the lab-leak hypothesis on much stronger grounds. The day before Cho’s article appeared, Bloomberg had run a long interview with Danielle Anderson, an experienced Australian virologist who had been the only Westerner working at the Wuhan lab during the period in question. By her account, the description of the lab and its operations provided by the Western media had been totally at odds with what she had seen working there, and the likelihood of a virus leak seemed nil.

Based upon a few sentences in American government cables, our media has repeatedly alleged that the operating standards of the Wuhan lab were poor, but Anderson’s own experience had been entirely different, with the safety protocols so impressive that she later suggested they be adopted at her own research organization. For many months, former members of the Trump Administration had been promoting some questionably-sourced “third party” intelligence claiming that three lab workers became seriously ill in November 2019 with Covid-like symptoms, but Dr. Anderson could recall no such cases, and believed that she would have heard about them. She had generally enjoyed a very friendly and open relationship with her Chinese colleagues, with scientific gossip regularly being shared back and forth. Under these circumstances, she felt certain that if a suspected lab-leak had occurred, she would have heard about it, but there had never been a hint of any such incident.

Furthermore, the creation of a dangerous virus such as Covid would have required many layers of official authorization by lab administrators, and she doubted that a decision of such importance could have been taken without word getting around. While she admitted that it was theoretically possible for some rogue Chinese lab researcher to have secretly undertaken such a project and bioengineered the virus, then accidentally infected himself or others, she rated the likelihood as “exceedingly slim.”

So based upon her personal experience at the Wuhan lab, she thought it very unlikely that the Covid virus was developed there and equally unlikely that any lab-leak had ever occurred. For these reasons, she still leaned towards a natural source for the viral outbreak. ²⁾

Newsweek By Soo Kim On 6/28/21

Dr. Danielle Anderson, an Australian researcher who was reportedly the only foreign scientist to have conducted research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV)'s BSL-4 lab in the weeks leading up to the first known cases of COVID-19 were detected in China, has said: “What people are saying is just not how it is.”

In an interview with Bloomberg published Sunday, Anderson said the lab's functions and activities were more routine than how they have been portrayed in the media.

“It's not that it was boring, but it was a regular lab that worked in the same way as any other high-containment lab,” she told Bloomberg. ³⁾

Researchers who talk about COVID cover extensive abuse and death threats, the study finds

October 13, 2021

WARNING: This story contains strong language that some people may find offensive.

Professor Leask recently received an email stating:

- Push that shit vaccine propaganda up your ass, Julie … Your hypochondria, OCD and insecurity are pathetic … What a fucking, nasty useless talk you are.

Another reading:

- You have lost all ethical credibility and history will show people like you as the enabler of the most vengeful, evil and corrupt regime in these countries [sic] history.

- We humans will remember you and your comrades and when this is over we will take everything from you all just as you advocate doing to us.

But Professor Leask, at the University of Sydney’s nurse and midwife, says this is “nothing” compared to the attacks others have received.

Virologist Danielle Anderson of the Peter Doherty Institute received intense abuse, including an email urging her to “eat a bat and die, bitch”, after criticizing an article suggesting that SARS-CoV-2 leaked from a laboratory in China. ⁴⁾

Disinformation Chronicles by Paul D. Thacker - September 20, 2022

For over two years, the virologist posed as a fact checker and biosafety expert on China, without disclosure of grants involving risky gain of function studies.

Shortly after people began dying from the COVID-19 virus in early 2020, virologist Danielle Anderson began attacking media accounts that questioned if the pandemic could have started in a lab in Wuhan, China.

In a fact check for Health Feedback, Anderson repudiated a New York Post article that questioned if the “coronavirus may have leaked from a lab” claiming it was false to label the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) a bioweapons research lab, while adding that the Post article was “appalling.” This censorial fact check helped limit the audience for the Post article on social media—but then, less than a year later, Anderson’s claims fell apart when the State Department declassified information on the WIV’s ties to military research and Facebook ceased censoring statements that COVID-19 was man-made or manufactured.

Unpersuaded by facts, Anderson stuck to her story, making a media splash throughout the summer of 2021 as the “last—and only—foreign scientist in Wuhan” and the victim of an online harassment campaign by “conspiracy theorists.” Anderson’s tale of online persecution then made its way into a Nature Magazine article last October that went on to win a journalism award.

There is, however, a glaring omission from the media’s portrayal of Anderson as brave truth speaker. None of the fact checks or news stories disclose that her name has appeared on multiple grants for projects aiming to manipulate coronaviruses, including a National Institutes of Health award to Peter Daszak of EcoHealth Alliance, and a grant that was rejected by the U.S. military research agency DARPA, in part for risky gain of function research. ⁵⁾