Global Courant
A Chinese scientist funded in part by US grants and working in Wuhan was one of three researchers who fell ill with a mysterious illness early in the coronavirus pandemic, a former US official confirmed on Tuesday.
Ben Hu was working at the Wuhan Institute of Virology when he and the other two scientists fell ill with an unspecified illness in late 2019, lending credence to the theory that the pandemic may have originated from a lab leak rather than a wild animal market in Wuhan.
Hu had been researching coronaviruses in the lab when he fell ill with an illness that mirrored the symptoms of COVID-19, US intelligence reports said, the Wall Street Journal first reported.
Some of Hu’s projects were funded by U.S. grants, according to a Freedom of Information Act issued by the nonprofit White Coat Waste Project, the Journal reported.
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Ben Hu and the other two scientists who fell ill in November 2019 worked at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. (Photo by Hector Retamal/AFP)
Between 2014 and 2019, $1.4 million was awarded to the Wuhan laboratory by the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and the National Institutes of Health, the Government Accountability Office said in a report last week. The grants ended in 2019.
Fox News Digital has reached out to NIH and USAID.
Hu’s projects included in the funding were a study on animal viruses that can be transmitted to humans and cause a pandemic, and a study on bat coronaviruses.
Robert Kadlec, a former Health and Human Services Department official, told the Journal that Hu and the other two scientists “published SARS-related coronavirus experiments conducted at inappropriately low biosafety settings that could have resulted in a laboratory infection.”
Along with Hu, the other scientists were identified as Yu Ping and Yan Zhu. All three researchers were alive.
Ping had written a report on coronaviruses found in bats before they got sick, the Journal reported.
The researchers were first identified last week in a Substack article, citing US government sources and referring to the scientists under “patients zero.”
The Substack article said the revelation “strengthens the case that the SARS-CoV-2 virus accidentally escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.”
A Wuhan man who fell ill on December 8, 2019, had previously been identified by Chinese authorities as the first official case. Hu and the other two scientists fell ill in November.
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From the beginning of the pandemic, there was no transparency about the virus in China.
“The lack of data disclosure is simply unforgivable,” Maria Van Kirkhove, an epidemiologist with the World Health Organization, wrote in an April op-ed for the journal Science. “The longer it takes to understand the origins of the pandemic, the harder it becomes to answer the question and the more unsafe the world becomes.”
President Biden signed a bill into law in March that would allow more information about the pandemic and its origins to be released — as early as this week.
Neither experts nor the US government are sure whether the pandemic is the result of a lab leak or not.
The Wuhan Institute of Virology told the Journal it had nothing new to report. Fox News Digital has reached out for comment.
Senator Roger Mashall of Kansas, a Republican, said the revelations show a need for greater scrutiny of US subsidies.
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“Not only must we better oversee the scientists and types of research we support, but we must also reform the U.S. global research grant administration to ensure oversight, transparency and accountability,” he said, according to the Journal.
Rich Edson of Fox News contributed to this report
