Three Wuhan lab scientists who were researching Covid-19 were the first to test positive, a new investigation has claimed.
So-called Patients Zero included Ben Hu, Ping Yu and Yan Zhu who were all researching SARS-like viruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, according to an investigation.
Journalists Michael Shellenberger and Matt Taibbi published their findings in a Substack newsletter.
The three scientists are claimed to have been researching "gain-of-function" experiments with the virus when they became unwell in the autumn of 2019, multiple US government officials reportedly told the journalists.
Gain of function research is medical research that genetically alters an organism and increases its infectiousness and makes pathogens stronger in order to better understand their dangers.
In 2019, two of the allegedly infected scientists, Hu and Yu, co-authored a paper about the genetic lineage of SARS-related coronavirus in bats across China that they had studied.
“The US government has reason to believe that several researchers inside the [Wuhan Institute of Virology] became sick in autumn 2019, before the first identified case of the outbreak, with symptoms consistent with both COVID-19 and common seasonal illnesses,” the department stated in a now-archived, but still available to read, fact sheet published in January 2021.
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But then later in February the Department of Energy concluded that they had “low confidence” that the virus responsible for the pandemic originated in a Chinese laboratory.
Hu studied under virologist Shi Zhengli who has repeatedly denied the allegations and told the New York Times that her lab did not hold any source of the strain that caused the pandemic.
Meanwhile, it was claimed on Sunday that scientists in Wuhan also worked alongside the country’s military to combine the world’s most deadly viruses before the Covid pandemic began.
An investigation by The Sunday Times claimed that US investigators believe that one of the reasons why there is no published information on the work is because it was done in collaboration with researchers from the Chinese military.
An investigator told the newspaper: "The trail of papers starts to go dark. That’s exactly when the classified programme kicked off. My view is that the reason [it] was covered up was due to military secrecy related to [the army’s] pursuit of dual-use capabilities in virological biological weapons and vaccines."
Another person said: "It has become increasingly clear that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was involved in the creation, promulgation and cover-up of the Covid-19 pandemic."
