*New reporting, attributed to U.S. government sources, identified a coronavirus researcher at the Wuhan Institute of Virology who fell ill in November 2019. *

One of the first Wuhan researchers reportedly sickened with Covid in fall 2019, Ben Hu, was getting U.S. financial support for risky gain-of-function research on coronaviruses, according to documents obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request by the transparency advocacy organization White Coat Waste Project.

The funding came in three grants totaling $41 million, doled out by USAID and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, or NIAID, the agency then headed by Dr. Anthony Fauci. Hu is listed as an investigator on the grants.

The news that U.S. intelligence had learned that three Wuhan Institute of Virology lab workers had been hospitalized with Covid symptoms in November 2019, significantly before the outbreak at the city’s seafood market, was first reported by the Wall Street Journal in May 2021. But the revelation had curiously little impact on the broader debate over the origin of the pandemic, even as it would invalidate, if confirmed, the claim that the pandemic originated at the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market when the virus allegedly jumped from an animal to a human. No such animal has been identified, but new reporting by Michael Shellenberger and Matt Taibbi, sourced to three government sources familiar with a State Department investigation, has identified the three lab workers as Ben Hu, Yu Ping, and Yan Zhu. Two of the grants ran from 2014 through 2019. The third was cut off in 2020 by President Donald Trump after the outbreak in Wuhan.

The NIAID and USAID grants list Hu as an investigator in the projects being funded. Hu is a top deputy to Shi Zhengli, known in the virology world as “batwoman” for her work extracting samples of viruses from bats in Chinese caves. The FOIA documents were first obtained by White Coat Waste in 2021 but given new relevance with the reporting of Hu’s involvement.

The Times of London, meanwhile, also recently reported new details about activity in the Wuhan Institute of Virology in the run-up to the pandemic, similarly sourced to three investigators with the U.S. State Department. That report includes allegations about the Wuhan labs’ collaboration with Chinese military scientists, buttressing what had once been dismissed as a fringe conspiracy theory: that the virus was connected to bioweapons research. “In the lead-up to the pandemic, the Wuhan institute frequently experimented on coronaviruses alongside the Academy of Military Medical Sciences, a research arm of the People’s Liberation Army,” the Times reported. “In published papers, military scientists are listed as working for the Beijing Institute of Microbiology and Epidemiology, which is the military academy’s base.”

Much of the focus of the Times investigation is on a virus found in a mine where workers were sickened in 2012, leading to hospitalizations and deaths. Another key question probed by the State Department investigators relates to a project proposed to the Pentagon by Shi and two collaborators, Ralph Baric of the University of North Carolina, and Peter Daszak of EcoHealth Alliance. The proposal, submitted to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, entailed inserting a furin cleavage site into a coronavirus. It was rejected, but speculation remains as to whether some of the research was conducted anyway.

“The investigators spoke to two researchers working at a US laboratory who were collaborating with the Wuhan institute at the time of the outbreak,” the Times reported. “They said the Wuhan scientists had inserted furin cleavage sites into viruses in 2019 in exactly the way proposed in Daszak’s failed funding application to Darpa.” A key hallmark of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19, is its furin cleavage site (FCS).

“The significance of the fact that ‘patient zero:’ Ben Hu received US funding from NIH and USAID in 2018-2019 is that NIH and USAID support to Hu potentially directly funded the insertion of FCS sequences into SARS-ike coronaviruses that had been proposed in EcoHealth’s/WIV’s unsuccessful 2018 DARPA grant application,” said Dr. Richard Ebright, a molecular biologist and laboratory director at the Waksman Institute of Microbiology. “Just as USAID and NIH support to Shi potentially funded the insertion of FCS sequences into SARS-ike coronaviruses that had been proposed in EcoHealth’s/WIV’s unsuccessful 2018 DARPA grant application.”

Congress has mandated the U.S. government to declassify information related to the pandemic’s origin and the Wuhan Institute of virology by Sunday, June 18.

  • TrashGoblin [he/him, they/them]
    ·
    1 year ago

    I mean, this refers to the same anonymous US intelligence sources as all the other lab-leak stories. So who knows?

  • Mindfury [he/him]
    ·
    1 year ago

    hey look, another ghost paper trail that puts blame on wuhan and ensures no one is looking at fort detrick

    cool

  • JoeByeThen [he/him, they/them]
    ·
    1 year ago

    Timeline of SARS-CoV-2 Spread in Italy: Results from an Independent Serological Retesting

    We investigated the presence of SARS-CoV-2 Receptor-Binding Domain (RBD)-specific antibodies in blood samples of 959 asymptomatic individuals enrolled in the SMILE prospective lung cancer screening trial (clinicaltrials.gov ID: NCT03654105) between September 2019 and March 2020 and across all the Italian regions. SARS-CoV-2 IgM/IgG RBD-specific antibodies were detected in 111 of 959 (11.6%) subjects, starting from September 2019 (14%), with a cluster of positive cases (>30%) on the 2nd week of February 2020 and the highest number (53.2%) in Lombardy [10]. The publication of our report generated a lively debate on the possibility that the virus circulated months earlier in Italy without surveillance programs that were able to identify any signs of its presence. To validate these findings, we were encouraged to blindly retest a selection of our samples and paired controls in an external WHO-affiliated laboratory (Erasmus Medical Center, Rotterdam) by using different serological assays. Here, we report the results of this cross-validation study.

    • Dolores [love/loves]
      ·
      1 year ago

      every time a new article about wuhan comes up i think about this, thank you for including the timetable. lab-leak is such a weird discourse because a bunch of people seem to want it to be true but blame it on the US, even if it actually happened in Wuhan? US putting money into international research is not as exonerating for China as the people loudly citing 'US-funded' seem to think

      fort detrick or italy or just, completely unknown are much more reasonable. i enjoy the ghost story aspect of covid going around for an unknown period unnoticed by battered, healthcare-less yankees until a sophisticated nation found it and raised the alarm

      • JoeByeThen [he/him, they/them]
        ·
        1 year ago

        Welcome. I totally feel ya, there's a lot more to the story than Wuhan and the more western media tries to ignore it the more I imagine it's something like Fort Detrick. That place is a time bomb waiting to happen.

        • berrytopylus [she/her,they/them]
          ·
          1 year ago

          What's crazy is that it doesn't have to be Fort Detrick. It could have just been spreading already in a less noticeable form and Wuhan, being coronavirus experts were the ones that picked it up.