Need debunking: Strong evidence implicates these scientists, Ben Hu, Yu Ping, and Yan Zhu, as patient zero?

[redolympus]

Is there strong evidence that one of these scientists, Ben Hu, Yu Ping, and Yan Zhu, working at the Wuhan Institute of Virology were patient zero? I came across this claim in a report authored by independent journalists Matt Taibbi, Michael Shellenberger, and Alex Gutentag, and published on Substack involving the testimony of Alina Chan and other anonymous government officials.

A few quotes from the report mention an investigation that led to these names:

"According to multiple U.S. government officials interviewed as part of a lengthy investigation by Public and Racket, the first people infected by the virus, "patients zero," included Ben Hu, a researcher who led the WIV's "gain-of-function" research on SARS-like coronaviruses, which increases the infectiousness of viruses."

"Public and Racket are the first publications to reveal the names of the three sick WIV workers and place them directly in the lab that collected and experimented with SARS-like viruses poised for human emergence."

It's my first time posting on Metabunk but I'm very curious because this seems like a serious assertion.

 

[Mendel]

A few quotes from the report

Initial thoughts:

Next week, the Directorate of National Intelligence is expected to release previously classified material, which may include the names of the three WIV scientists who were the likely among the first to be sickened by SARS-CoV-2.

The article was published on June 13th, so any "hard evidence" from the DNI should be forthcoming this week. Let's wait and see.

The narrative is not new, and has never had enough evidence going for it. One of the weak points is that the WIV is miles away from the seafood market, on the other side of the river.

symptoms consistent with COVID-19

That covers anything from a runny nose to a full-blown influenza, not an uncommon condition to have in the fall. The wording suggests that there aren't any actual samples that tested positive for SARS.

we had little idea what viruses were being held at the Wuhan Institute of Virology

That's untrue. The WIV's reasearch into SARS and their bat virus collection were well known. The WIV is internationally well connected, and regularly hosted international researchers.
There are other research institutes all over the world with similar collections.

The WIV research with live SARS-like viruses was performed at too low of a safety level, "BSL-2," explains Chan, "When we now know that the pandemic virus is even capable of escaping from a BSL-3 lab and infecting fully vaccinated young lab workers."

The WIV has BSL-4 labs, and trained personnel. I would look long and hard at what kind of evidence we have about any research being done at a lower level. It requires expertise to judge which level would be appropriate.

I do know that a TV team looking for footage would not be allowed inside a BSL-4 lab, and might have to settle for a less secure lab to shoot their background footage while reporting on work at a higher level. Think of the TV team visiting as a movie shoot, they're not operating a surveillance camera, they're looking to shoot footage that fits their script.

The "gain-of-function" narrative is not new either, and has in the past been based on exaggeration (a denied grant application, and research actually carried out in Maryland). The article mentions a Times article which is behind a paywall.

 

[Mendel]

The article mentions a Times article which is behind a paywall.

More on that (excerpted):

Article:

A recent report by the Sunday Times claims the newspaper has seen evidence that China was developing dangerous coronaviruses in collaboration with the Chinese military for the alleged purposes of biowarfare. This research programme was the likely source of the pandemic, the report asserts.

Claims that China was developing biological weapons have been made by Dany Shoham, a former Israeli intelligence officer and biowarfare expert. Others staunchly reject this accusation. A US National Intelligence Council report said of COVID-19: "We judge the virus was not developed as a biological weapon."

It is also easy to hide biowarfare research. Scientific experiments typically happen in small and secretive facilities, using equipment that can be dismantled quickly if there is any suspicion that inspectors are about to come knocking.

Source: https://theconversation.com/what-if-china-really-did-develop-covid-as-a-bioweapon-here-are-the-issues-involved-207579

The WIV is anything but small and secretive.

We've not seen evidence so far. I expect it won't be "strong" once we get to see it, but we'll find out.

 

[Ann K]

Whether or not the journalists are independent, they're still of necessity working with unverified (and probably unverifiable) testimony. You mention Alina Chan, for example:

Chan became known during the COVID-19 pandemic for co-authoring a preprint according to which the virus was "pre-adapted" to humans and suggesting COVID-19 could have escaped from a laboratory.[2][4] The preprint has not been accepted for publication by a scientific journal, but received a significant reception in the popular press.[2]

The reaction of virologists and other specialists to Chan's hypothesis has been largely, but not exclusively, negative. The New York Times noted in October 2021 that Chan's view has been "widely disputed by other scientists", but some have commended her willingness to advance alternative hypotheses in the face of controversy.[5] Jonathan Eisen of UC Davis praised Chan for raising the lab-origin discussion, but said her views remain conjecture, as not enough disease outbreaks have been traced in enough molecular detail to know what is normal, noting also that the virus continues to change and adapt.[2] Sixteen months after Chan's preprint was shared online, a scientific review article published in Cell described the pre-adaptation theory as "without validity."[6]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alina_Chan

 

[Ann K]

One of the reporters, Alex Gutentag, has come in for some serious criticism herself, including on this very subject.

What follows is an eclectic set of conspiratorial ravings that make only peripheral contact with reality, and none at all with obvious objections or counterarguments. Gutentag suggests that the lockdowns of March 2020 were consciously intended to boost "financial assets and monopolistic giants at the expense of taxpayers and small businesses," not protect public health. The fact that lockdowns are an intuitive and well-established means of containing the spread of a novel virus; that they were implemented in one form or another by virtually every nation where COVID took root, and proved extremely successful in some contexts; that pandemic-era economic policy brought America's poverty rate to record lows and household wealth to record highs all go unmentioned. Gutentag's concern with wealth inequality is well founded. But her belief that COVID-era public-health policies are central to that phenomenon would not withstand a glance at Thomas Piketty's data sets. So she does not take one. Similarly, the reality that America's most progressive cities are doing away with vaccine passports makes Gutentag no less certain that such policies are really intended as the first step in the elite's plan to establish a totalitarian "social credit" system.

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2022/03/compact-magazine-makes-a-strong-case-for-liberalism.html

 

[Agent K]

Article:

'Ridiculous,' says Chinese scientist accused of being pandemic's patient zero

Ben Hu denies he was sick in late 2019, or that his coronavirus work led to COVID-19, and newly declassified U.S. intelligence doesn't substantiate allegations against him

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.

As for Hu, he categorically denies having anything to do with the origin of SARS-CoV-2. "I did not get sick in autumn 2019, and did not have COVID-19-like symptoms at that time," Hu wrote. "My colleagues and I tested for SARS-CoV-2 antibody in early March 2020 and we were all negative."

Yu emailed Science that the charges are "fake news" and similarly insisted there was no basis for the allegations. "In autumn 2019, I was neither sick nor had any symptoms related to COVID-19," Yu wrote. Zhu did not reply to email requests for comment.

Source: https://www.science.org/content/article/ridiculous-says-chinese-scientist-accused-being-pandemic-s-patient-zero

 

[Mendel]

"My colleagues and I tested for SARS-CoV-2 antibody in early March 2020 and we were all negative."

This kind of test was frequently used in 2020 to assess the spread of the virus: even if a person was not tested while sick (perhaps they were asymptomatic), an infection would leave them with antibodies that could be detected months later, fairly reliably, to get good numbers on how much the virus had spread. So a negative test for these antibodies is indeed evidence that the people involved had not been infected previously. (Without that evidence, and Covid being often asymptomatic, you couldn't say for sure.)

 

[Mendel]

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),

 

[Mendel]

For a full discussion, see https://www.metabunk.org/threads/claim-natural-covid-19-broke-out-of-wuhan-lab-not-man-made.11212/

Key points:
• There is no evidence that the WIV held SARS-CoV-2 or a precursor.
• There is no evidence that a WIV employee was infected with Covid in 2019.

For A to leak from B, A has to be at B or it's impossible. And the "A at B" point, in the form of "SARS-CoV-2 at WIV", has only ever been made as accusation, never with actual evidence. People wanting it to be true, and claiming that it is true, doesn't make it so.

 

[Agent K]

One of the reporters, Alex Gutentag, has come in for some serious criticism herself, including on this very subject.

Another reporter, Michael Shellenberger, said sources told him about a UFO coverup, and he told Michael Shermer, "There was one person who did describe the entities, the alleged non-human pilots, but I decided not to write about that because I just felt like you gotta draw the line somewhere. (laughs) The other people didn't know about that part."
So, he doesn't believe his own sources, and just leaves out the parts that make them sound crazy or dishonest.


Source: https://youtu.be/tPHETzCHtCg?t=584

 

[Mendel]

Another reporter, Michael Shellenberger, said sources told him about a UFO coverup, and he told Michael Shermer, "There was one person who did describe the entities, the alleged non-human pilots, but I decided not to write about that because I just felt like you gotta draw the line somewhere. (laughs) The other people didn't know about that part."
So, he doesn't believe his own sources, and just leaves out the parts that make them sound crazy or dishonest.

Another way to spin it is that reporters don't use sources that sound crazy or dishonest (unless they're known public figures), which feels like common sense to me.
Ideally, an investigative reporter tries to get multiple sources for a specific claim (or hard evidence), before reporting on it.

 

[Agent K]

Another way to spin it is that reporters don't use sources that sound crazy or dishonest (unless they're known public figures), which feels like common sense to me.
Ideally, an investigative reporter tries to get multiple sources for a specific claim (or hard evidence), before reporting on it.

He said his UFO sources are serious people with high level security clearances.

 

[Mendel]

He said his UFO sources are serious people with high level security clearances.

Yes. And he wasn't reporting on the one outlandish claim that nobody else corroborated. So, if we assume for a moment that the UFO coverup story is plausible, then he's applying common journalistic standards. You and I would obviously draw the line somewhere else. My point is, his selection of what he's reporting doesn't sound manipulative to me.

 

[Domzh]

just imagine having your name attached to a new conspiracy theory with some of the craziest tinfoil head followers on earth, knowing that this will probably never fully go away.

 

[Lu Ann Lewellen]

One of the first things done at the lab was a check to see if the novel coronavirus was one they had studied. It was not.

Shi instructed her group to repeat the tests and, at the same time, sent the samples to another facility to sequence the full viral genomes. Meanwhile she frantically went through her own lab's records from the past few years to check for any mishandling of experimental materials, especially during disposal. Shi breathed a sigh of relief when the results came back: none of the sequences matched those of the viruses her team had sampled from bat caves. "That really took a load off my mind," she says. "I had not slept a wink for days."

https://www.scientificamerican.com/...wn-viruses-from-sars-to-the-new-coronavirus1/

 

[Mendel]

I started a separate thread on the Removal of Wuhan Virus Sequences at https://www.metabunk.org/threads/claim-wiv-removed-virus-sequences-from-public-database.13093/ .