{"id":3967,"date":"2023-06-27T19:17:40","date_gmt":"2023-06-28T00:17:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/?p=3967"},"modified":"2023-06-27T20:05:24","modified_gmt":"2023-06-28T01:05:24","slug":"ridiculous-says-chinese-scientist-accused-of-being-pandemics-patient-zero","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/2023\/06\/27\/ridiculous-says-chinese-scientist-accused-of-being-pandemics-patient-zero\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018Ridiculous,\u2019 says Chinese scientist accused of being pandemic\u2019s patient zero"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Science<\/a> – <\/p>\n\n\n\n

A scientist at China\u2019s 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\u2019s origin<\/a>, 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe recent news about so-called \u2018patient zero\u2019 in WIV are absolutely rumors and ridiculous,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hu and two of his WIV colleagues were thrown into the furious COVID-19 origin debate on 13 June when an online newsletter called\u00a0Public<\/a>\u00a0said 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\u2019s 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\u00a0Wall Street Journal\u00a0(WSJ)\u00a0article<\/a>\u00a0on 20 June that said it had \u201cconfirmed\u201d 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\u2014and the scientists\u2019 names. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Public\u2019s 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\u2019s report does not substantiate Public\u2019s or WSJ\u2019s accounts in any major way. It says that some at WIV were ill in the fall of 2019 with \u201csymptoms consistent with but not diagnostic of COVID-19.\u201d But it doesn\u2019t identify the three scientists and it further states, \u201cWe have no indications that any of these researchers were hospitalized because of the symptoms consistent with COVID-19.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u00a0pandemic origin debates<\/a>\u00a0because of the possibility that SARS-CoV-2 could have leaked from her lab\u2019s samples of natural viruses or is a genetically engineered virus created as part of what critics have branded as \u201cgain-of-function\u201d experiments\u2014research 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\u00a0fact sheet<\/a>\u00a0that said, without offering any proof, it had \u201creason to believe that several researchers inside the WIV became sick in autumn 2019.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Continue reading<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Science – A scientist at China\u2019s 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, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[21],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3967","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-featured"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3967","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/11"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3967"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3967\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3968,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3967\/revisions\/3968"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3967"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3967"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3967"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}