(Ken Silva, Headline USA) A bombshell report Tuesday revealed that three of the first people to become infected with COVID-19 were scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where the virus is suspected by some to have originated.
Citing unnamed sources within the U.S. government, the report—published by journalists Michael Shellenberger, Matt Taibbi and Alex Gutentag—identified Wuhan scientists Ben Hu, Yu Ping and Yan Zhu as the three who were first infected.
“As such, not only do we know there were WIV scientists who had developed COVID-19-like illnesses in November 2019, but also that they were working with the closest relatives of SARS-CoV-2, and inserting gain-of-function features unique to it,” the report said.
Tuesday’s report is the latest evidence that COVID-19 originated in the Wuhan Institute of Virology—and not at a nearby wet market, as originally claimed by many establishment authority figures.
In February, FBI Director Chris Wray reportedly said his bureau “has for quite some time now assessed that the origins of the pandemic are most likely a potential lab incident in Wuhan.” And last week, Times of London reported that State Department investigators “found evidence that researchers working on these experiments were taken to hospital with Covid-like symptoms in November 2019.”
As noted by Shellenberger, Taibbi and Gutentag, various publications have uncovered suggestive details over the last year-plus, including the fact that the NIH awarded funding for at least 18 gain-of-function research projects between 2012 and 2020, and NIH scientists in 2016 expressing concern about supposedly paused hybrid “chimera” virus research.
However, much of that reporting was done after 2020, when anyone who promoted the lab-leak theory was censored, de-platformed and cast as a conspiracy theorist.
Alina Chan, a molecular biologist at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, expressed frustration that the lab-leak theory is only now being vindicated.
“Ever since I put out my [May 2020] preprint [research paper] saying that an accidental lab origin was possible, I was criticized as a conspiracy theorist,” Chan told Shellenberger, Taibbi and Gutentag.
“If this info had been made public in May of 2020, I doubt that many in the scientific community and the media would have spent the last three years raving about a raccoon dog or pangolin in a wet market.”
The Directorate of National Intelligence is expected to release previously classified material next week. Shellenberger, Taibbi and Gutentag said this material may include the names of the three WIV scientists who were the likely among the first to be sickened by SARS-CoV-2.
Ken Silva is a staff writer at Headline USA. Follow him at twitter.com/jd_cashless.
