Wuhan scientist Ben Hu, Covid’s ‘patient zero’, an explosive development in pandemic origin story

Lab workers inside the P4 laboratory in Wuhan, China.

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, a relatively junior scientist, had started a new project earlier that year that was examining whether two new bat coronaviruses could infect humans.

Just months into his experiments, that involved risky gain-of-function research, that can make viruses more transmissible and more virulent to humans, he fell sick, along with two of his colleagues.

The scientist, Ben Hu, reported to the woman who became a household name during the pandemic – often called ‘batlady’ Shi Zhengli.

The P4 laboratory (C) on the campus of the Wuhan Institute of Virology in Wuhan. Picture: AFP.

He was known as one of her proteges.

We first reported on Ben Hu for my book, What Really Happened in Wuhan, where one of my brilliant young researchers, Luke McWilliams uncovered the scientific experiment he was working on.

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.

More than two years ago, on Sky News and on the front page of The Australian, we revealed the intelligence that three workers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology had fallen sick with Covid-like symptoms.

Five Eyes intelligence analysts suspected this may have been the first cluster of the pandemic.

This intel led US President Joe Biden to announce a probe into the origins of Covid-19.

The probe ultimately found that agencies were divided in their assessment of how the pandemic started; via a laboratory leak or whether the virus crossed the threshold from animals to humans naturally.

As I reported in my book, What Really Happened in Wuhan, and in The Australian, 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.

Chinese virologist Shi Zhengli inside the P4 laboratory in Wuhan. Picture: AFP.

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.

This is as close as we’ve come to explosive intelligence about patient zero.

Ben Hu and Shi Zhengli’s team had taken bat samples from 22 provinces in China, detecting 200 positive samples of SARS-like coronaviruses.

The United States, British and Australian governments should demand answers from China about whether these experiments at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, funded by Beijing, did in fact lead to the creation and spread of Covid-19.

Answers about how the first pandemic in a century started are still as important now as they were the day our lives descended into chaos and lockdowns.