{"id":4245,"date":"2023-08-01T19:35:04","date_gmt":"2023-08-02T00:35:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/?p=4245"},"modified":"2023-08-01T19:35:08","modified_gmt":"2023-08-02T00:35:08","slug":"has-covids-patient-zero-finally-been-named","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/2023\/08\/01\/has-covids-patient-zero-finally-been-named\/","title":{"rendered":"Has COVID\u2019s Patient Zero Finally Been Named?"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The Atlantic<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

A major revelation about researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology emerged this week. We still can\u2019t say we\u2019re any closer to the truth. The lab-leak theory of COVID\u2019s origin has always been a little squirrelly. If SARS-CoV-2 really did begin infecting humans in a research setting, the evidence that got left behind is mostly of the cloak-and-dagger type: confirmations from anonymous government officials about\u00a0vague conclusions<\/a>\u00a0drawn in classified documents, for example; or leaked materials that lay out\u00a0hypothetical research projects<\/a>; or information gleaned from who-knows-where that certain people came down with who-knows-what disease at some crucial moment. In short, it\u2019s all been messy human stuff, the bits and bobs of intelligence analysis. Simple-seeming facts emerge from a dark matter of sources and methods. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

So it goes again. The latest major revelation in this line emerged this week. Taken at face value, it\u2019s extraordinary: Ben Hu, a high-level researcher at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and two colleagues, Yu Ping and Zhu Yan, could have been the first people on the planet to be infected with SARS-CoV-2, according to anonymous sources cited first in the newsletter Public<\/a> and then in The Wall Street Journal<\/em><\/a>. These proposed patient SARS-CoV-zeros aren\u2019t merely employees of the virology institute; they\u2019re central figures in the very sort of research that lab-leak investigators have been scrutinizing<\/a> since the start of the pandemic. Their names appear on crucial papers related to the discovery of new, SARS-related coronaviruses in bats, and subsequent experimentation on those viruses.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Is this the \u201csmoking gun,\u201d at last, as\u00a0many<\/a>\u00a0now<\/a>\u00a0insist<\/a>? Has the Case of the Missing COVID Origin finally been solved? Hu and Yu each\u00a0denied the allegations<\/a>\u00a0in emails to\u00a0Science<\/em>, saying they did not get sick in autumn 2019. \u201cMy colleagues and I tested for SARS-CoV-2 antibody in early March 2020 and we were all negative,\u201d Hu wrote. But those denials notwithstanding, if these researchers did turn out to be the very first infected people, then their professional activities would mean they almost certainly caught the virus in the lab, not a market stall full of\u00a0marmots and raccoon dogs<\/a>. The origins debate has from the start revolved around a pair of\u00a0dueling \u201ccoincidences.\u201d<\/a>\u00a0The fact that the pandemic\u00a0just happened<\/em>\u00a0to take off at a wet market suggests that the virus spilled over into humans from animals for sale there. But the fact that it also\u00a0just happened\u00a0<\/em>to take off not too far away from one of the world\u2019s leading bat-coronavirus labs suggests the opposite. This week\u2019s information seems to tip the balance very heavily toward the latter interpretation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The only problem is, we don\u2019t know whether the latest revelations can be trusted, or to what extent. The newly reported facts appear to stem from a single item of intelligence, furnished by a foreign source, that has bounced around inside the U.S. government since sometime in 2020. Over the past two and a half years, the full description of the sickened workers in Wuhan has been revealed with excruciating slowness, in sedimenting clauses, through well-timed leaks. This glacial striptease has finally reached its end, but is the underlying information even true? Until that question can be answered (which could be never), the origins debate will be stuck exactly where it\u2019s been for many months: always moving forward, never quite arriving.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The story of these sickened workers has been in the public domain, one way or another, since the start of 2021. Officials in the Trump administration\u2019s State Department, reportedly determined to go public with their findings, put out a\u00a0fact sheet<\/a>\u00a0about various events and circumstances at the Wuhan Institute of Virology around the beginning of the pandemic. Included was a quick description of alleged illnesses among the staff. The fact sheet didn\u2019t name the sickened scientists or what they did inside the lab, or when exactly their illnesses occurred. It didn\u2019t specify their symptoms, nor did it say how many scientists had gotten sick. If you boiled it down, the fact sheet\u2019s revelations could be paraphrased like this:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That vague stub did little to budge consensus views. The lab-leak theory had been preemptively \u201cdebunked<\/a>\u201d in early 2020, and broad\u00a0disregard<\/a>\u00a0of the idea\u2014contempt<\/a>\u00a0of it, really\u2014hadn\u2019t yet abated. The day before the State Department fact sheet was released, a team of 17 international experts dispatched by the World Health Organization arrived in Wuhan to conduct (with the help of Chinese scientists) a comprehensive study of the pandemic\u2019s origins. By the time of their return in February 2021, they\u2019d come out with\u00a0their conclusions<\/a>: The lab-leak theory was \u201cextremely unlikely\u201d to be true, they said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Continue reading at The Atlantic<\/a><\/p>\n

N rQsWH n<\/a><\/div><\/div><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Atlantic A major revelation about researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology emerged this week. We still can\u2019t say we\u2019re any closer to the truth. The lab-leak theory of COVID\u2019s origin has always been a little squirrelly. If SARS-CoV-2 really did begin infecting humans in a research setting, the evidence that got left behind […]<\/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-4245","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\/4245","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=4245"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4245\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4246,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4245\/revisions\/4246"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4245"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4245"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4245"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}