Tre af de allerførste mennesker, der blev smittet med coronavirus, var forskere ved Wuhan-laboratoriet, fortæller kilder i den amerikanske regering til et uafhængigt journalistisk websted grundlagt af Michael Shellenberger – kendt fra Twitter Files.

De tre videnskabsmænd – Ben Hu, Yu Ping og Yan Zhu – arbejdede på forskningsresultater om sars-lignende vira ved Wuhan Institute of Virology, da de blev syge i november 2019, skriver Michael Shellenberger, Matt Taibbi og Alex Gutentag i Public, som udgives på den efterhånden ganske velkendte platform Substack.

En af journalisternes kilder er sikker i hans sag:

When a source was asked how certain they were that these were the identities of the three WIV scientists who developed symptoms consistent with COVID-19 in the fall of 2019, we were told, “100%”

En af de tre videnskabsmænd, der blev syge, var Shi Zhenglis stjerneelev, nogle gange omtalt som “Batwoman”.

“Ben Hu is essentially the next Shi Zhengli,” said Alina Chan, a molecular biologist at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, and coauthor with Matt Ridley of Viral: The Search for the Origin of Covid19. Shi is known as “the bat woman of China,” and led the gain-of-function research at the WIV. “He was her star pupil. He had been making chimeric SARS-like viruses and testing these in humanized mice. 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.”

En WHO-rådgiver, der var tidligt til at pege på Wuhan-laboratoriet, mener, at denne nye information kan sammenlignes med en rygende pistol:

Jamie Metzl, a former member of the World Health Organization expert advisory committee on human genome editing who raised questions starting in early 2020 about a possible research-related pandemic origin, said, “It’s a game changer if it can be proven that Hu got sick with COVID-19 before anyone else. That would be the ‘smoking gun.’ Hu was the lead hands-on researcher in Shi’s lab.”

Den amerikanske efterretningstjeneste forventes snart at frigive tidligere klassificeret materiale om sagen, skriver Public:

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.

Den tidligere amerikanske infektionskontrolchef Anthony Fauci, som selv finansierede forskningsresultater ved Wuhan-laboratoriet, har sagt, at verden måske aldrig kender sandheden om virussens oprindelse, efter først at have afvist hypotesen. I begyndelsen af ​​2020 gav Fauci instruktioner til udarbejdelsen af ​​et videnskabeligt papir, der konkluderede, at coronavirus ikke kunne være lækket fra et laboratorium.

Spørgsmålet, som få store medier stiller sig selv, er, om Fauci ikke måske er mere optaget af sit eget omdømme. Når nettet strammer rundt om laboratoriet, kan det også blive ubehageligt for ham. Metzl fortsætter med at foreslå, at netop det kan være nært forestående:

Said Metzl, “Had US government officials including Dr. Fauci stated from day one that a COVID-19 research-related origin was a very real possibility, and made clear that we had little idea what viruses were being held at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, what work was being done there, and who was doing that work, our national and global conversations would have been dramatically different. The time has come for a full accounting.”

Et sådant forlig vil næppe være begrænset til Fauci, men komme til at omfatte en hel industri, der involverer både statslige, kommercielle og videnskabelige aktører – muligvis også medierne. Kina og WHO må ellers påregne forklaringsproblemer.

Mange gik imod laboratoriehypotesen, fordi Donald Trump promoverede den, sagde professor emeritus i medicin og tidligere overlæge Stig Frøland i en podcast med NRK den 5. maj.