Science –
A scientist at China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) who has recently faced media allegations that he was the first person with COVID-19 and his research on coronaviruses sparked the pandemic strongly denies that he was ill in late 2019 or that his work had any link to the emergence of SARS-CoV-2. Moreover, a newly released U.S. report of declassified information on COVID-19’s origin, from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), fails to name him or substantiate that any WIV scientists had the initial cases of COVID-19.
“The recent news about so-called ‘patient zero’ in WIV are absolutely rumors and ridiculous,” Ben Hu emailed Science in his first public response to the charges, which have been attributed to anonymous former and current U.S. Department of State officials. A WIV colleague who has also been named as one of the first COVID-19 cases denies the accusation as well.
Hu and two of his WIV colleagues were thrown into the furious COVID-19 origin debate on 13 June when an online newsletter called Public said the three scientists developed COVID-19 in November 2019. That was prior to the outbreak becoming public when a cluster of cases at the end of December 2019 surfaced in people linked to a Wuhan marketplace. Public’s report was quickly embraced by a camp that argues COVID-19 came from a virus stored, and possibly manipulated, at WIV, rather than from infected animal hosts, perhaps being sold at the Wuhan market. A Wall Street Journal (WSJ) article on 20 June that said it had “confirmed” the allegations against the three, without referring to any public evidence or named sources with direct knowledge, fueled the flames even more. Social media and other publications spread the charges—and the scientists’ names.
Public’s account came just before the 18 June deadline for a law enacted on 20 March that required ODNI to declassify documents about the origin of COVID-19 within 90 days. The law specifically asked for the names and other details of any sick WIV researchers before the Wuhan outbreak surfaced. The deadline passed without any response from ODNI, but today it released its declassified information, hours after an initial version of this story was published. ODNI’s report does not substantiate Public’s or WSJ’s accounts in any major way. It says that some at WIV were ill in the fall of 2019 with “symptoms consistent with but not diagnostic of COVID-19.” But it doesn’t identify the three scientists and it further states, “We have no indications that any of these researchers were hospitalized because of the symptoms consistent with COVID-19.”
Hu and the two other WIV scientists named in media reports, Yu Ping and Zhu Yan, conducted research in the lab of Shi Zhengli, who long has collected and studied bat coronaviruses. Shi has been at the center of pandemic origin debates because of the possibility that SARS-CoV-2 could have leaked from her lab’s samples of natural viruses or is a genetically engineered virus created as part of what critics have branded as “gain-of-function” experiments—research that makes pathogens with pandemic potential more harmful or transmissible. Former President Donald Trump repeatedly blamed the pandemic on the leak of a virus from WIV, and a few days before his administration left, the Department of State issued a fact sheet that said, without offering any proof, it had “reason to believe that several researchers inside the WIV became sick in autumn 2019.”