(Headline USA) A government watchdog confirmed this week that a subcontractor for EcoHealth Alliance, a scientific research organization funded by the U.S. government, was one of the first to catch COVID-19 in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
The White Coat Waste Project obtained federal accounting records through a Freedom of Information Act request that revealed EcoHealth Alliance’s Ben Hu was being paid by the National Institutes of Health to conduct research in the WIV at the time of the COVID-19 outbreak. Hu was the WIV’s lead on the gain-of-function research believed to have produced the contagious COVID-19 virus.
“Ben Hu is essentially the next Shi Zhengli. … He was her star pupil. He had been making chimeric SARS-like viruses and testing these in humanized mice,” said Alina Chan, a molecular biologist at the Broad Institute of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University.
“If I had to guess who would be doing this risky virus research and most at risk of getting accidentally infected, it would be him,” Chan added.
According to the grant form obtained by White Coat Waste, Hu was working for EcoHealth Alliance at the time. EcoHealth Alliance received a $3.5 million grant from NIH titled “understanding the risk of bat coronavirus emergence” for work to be undertaken from June 2019 through May 2024.
A U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) spokesperson insisted that the funding had been ended by NIH in 2019. Still, the WIV received at least $815,000 in U.S. funding through EcoHealth Alliance, according to government records.
A report by journalists Michael Shellenberger, Matt Taibbi and Alex Gutentag identified earlier this week Ben Hu, Yu Ping and Yan Zhu as the three Wuhan scientists who were first infected.
“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.
