Three Wuhan lab scientists who genetically altered the Covid virus were the first to get sick from it, a new study claims.
According to multiple US government officials interviewed as part of a lengthy investigation by an independent news outlet Audience and racketthe first people to be infected with the virus are said to be Ben Hu, Ping Yu and Yan Zhu.
They were all members of the Wuhan laboratory suspected of leaking the pandemic virus and participated in function enhancement research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) on SARS-like coronaviruses.
Gain-of-function research involves altering animal viruses in a lab to make them more contagious.
Shi Zhengli — dubbed the “Bat Lady” or “Bat Woman” for her work on bat coronaviruses — was investigating the possibility of Covid emerging from her lab in 2020, according to colleagues. Here she is pictured in collaboration with other researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in 2017
The Wuhan Institute of Virology (pictured) conducted risky experiments on coronaviruses just before the Covid-19 outbreak
Alina Chan, a molecular biologist at MIT and Harvard’s Broad Institute, and co-author with Matt Ridley of Viral: The Search for the Origin of Covid-19 said, “Ben Hu is essentially the next Shi Zhengli.
‘He was her best student. He had created chimeric SARS-like viruses and tested them in humanized mice. If I had to guess who would do this high-risk virus research and be most at risk of accidentally getting infected, it would be him.’
Ms. Zhengli, known as “the bat woman of China,” led the WIV job gains study.
One of her colleagues revealed last week that Dr. Shi at the start of the pandemic feared the possibility that Covid could have emerged from experiments conducted in the laboratory in Wuhan.
Professor Wang Linfa, described by the BBC as a friend of hers, said the respected scientist spent “sleepless nights” sifting through frozen virus samples at the IPH, fearing “what might happen” if she found an exact match for Covid would find in her lab.
Mr. Hu and Mr. Yu co-author of a scientific article with Ms. Zhengli in 2019 on the ‘Geographical structure of bat SARS-related coronaviruses’.
Jamie Metzl, a former member of the World Health Organization’s advisory committee on human genome editing, who raised questions about a possible research-related pandemic origin in early 2020, said: “It’s a game changer if it can be proven that Hu fell ill with Covid-19 for someone else. That would be the “smoking gun.” Hu was the lead hands-on researcher in Shi’s lab.’
On Saturday, The Times quoted an anonymous US State Department researcher as saying, “It is becoming increasingly clear that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was involved in creating, pronouncing and covering up the Covid-19 pandemic.”
The Wall Street Journal reported in May 2021 that three researchers from China’s WIV sought hospital care in November 2019, months before China announced the Covid-19 pandemic.
The newspaper said a previously undisclosed report from US intelligence provided new details about the number of researchers affected, the timing of their illnesses and their hospital visits.
A State Department fact sheet released toward the end of the Trump administration said, “The U.S. government has reason to believe that several researchers within the WIV fell ill in the fall of 2019, before the first identified case of the outbreak, with symptoms consistent with both Covid-19 and common seasonal illnesses.” It was not said how many researchers.
China refused to provide raw data on early Covid-19 cases to the WHO-led team investigating the origins of the pandemic, one of the team’s researchers said, Reuters reported in February, impeding efforts to understand how the outbreak may have started difficult.
David Asher, a former U.S. official who led a State Department task force on the origins of the virus for then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, told a Hudson Institute seminar in March 2021 that he doubted the lab researchers were getting sick from the common flu.
He said: “I very much doubt that three people in highly protected conditions in a level three laboratory working on coronaviruses would all fall ill in the same week with flu requiring hospitalization or be in serious conditions, and it also “have nothing to do with the coronavirus.”
He added that the researchers’ illness may represent “the first known cluster” of Covid-19 cases, the WSJ reported.
President Biden signed an invoice which earlier this year specifically called for the release of the names and roles of the WIV researchers who fell ill in the fall of 2019, their symptoms and date of symptom onset, plus whether or not they were involved in or exposed to were on Covid research.
On December 29, 2017, two years prior to the pandemic, China’s state television showed a video of allegedly Ben Hu supervising a lab worker handling samples. Neither is wearing a mask.