Slowly, but surely, investigators are worming into the cracks of the Great Firewall of China surrounding the origins of Covid. While Beijing has done its best to erase everything it can over the virus’ shadowy origins, whether a zoonosis that emerged in a “wet market” or an engineered virus that escaped – or was released – from a Wuhan lab, tantalising evidence remains.
One of the most pressing unanswered questions is: just who was “Patient 0”? Where, or rather, who, was the epicentre of the global pandemic? All signs have long pointed to Wuhan. For a time it was thought to possibly be Huang Yanling, a scientist at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, who disappeared from Chinese social media after falling ill with Covid-19 in late 2019.
But Huang was only one of several researchers at the controversial institute, which was conducting dangerous research on bat coronaviruses, that contracted Covid at the time.
Three unknown Chinese scientists working inside the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s coronavirus unit fell sick with Covid-like symptoms around November 2019.
One of them was Ben Hu. Hu was conducting risky gain-of-function research, banned in the US. Gain of function involves deliberately engineering viruses to be more dangerous and virulent, in order to supposedly develop vaccines in anticipation. Hu worked as a protege of “batlady” Shi Zhengli.
Just months into his research, Hu became sick, along with two of his colleagues.
His project was called: “Pathogenicity of 2 new bat SARS-related CoVs to transgenic mice expressing human ACE2” and it was funded by the Natural National Science Foundation of China.
But the results of this study and the details of the two new coronaviruses that Ben Hu was experimenting with were never made public.
Quite the contrary. Instead, they were wiped from the internet.
If Chinese authorities have given all the appearances of suspects wiping down fingerprints at the scene of a crime, it’s not without reason.
America’s top-secret intelligence agency had been concerned about the biological activities at the Wuhan Institute of Virology for at least five years before the Covid-19 pandemic.
The Chinese weren’t without outside help, either. The gain-of-function research at Wuhan was part-funded by money from “EcoHealth Alliance”, a non-government organisation that received money from Anthony Fauci’s National Institutes of Health. It’s alleged Fauci funneled the money to Wuhan after gain-of-function research was banned as too dangerous to be allowed, by the Obama administration.
Fauci’s bag-man at EcoHealth Alliance was scientist Peter Daszak. Daszak was, just coincidentally no doubt, one of the WHO team who travelled to Wuhan and cleared the Chinese of wrongdoing. Daszak personally played down the fact that the Chinese erased a key genetic database.
In the past two years, genuine developments about the origins of the virus have been few and far between. Until now.
The names of the three scientists who fell ill with Covid-like symptoms have been published by overseas independent media outlets called Public and Racket. Those scientists are Ben Hu, Yu Ping and Yan Zhu.
The Australian
Hu was part of Shi Zhengli’s team who had taken bat samples from 22 provinces in China. Which included hundreds of samples of SARS-like coronaviruses.
These samples, and the work of Hu, Zhengli and other scientists at Wuhan, as well as Western collaborators like Daszak, are all part of a nebulous trail of the origins of Covid, winding across China and at least as far back as 2002.
I’ll look at the trail – such as has been uncovered so far, at least – in a series of further posts.