Almost four years after the onset of the C19 pandemic, the proponents of the Lab Leak theory, that argues that COVID escaped from ‘Gain of Function’ research at the Wuhan Virology Institute – as opposed to have emerged naturally from nature – is gaining ever more credence and followers, to the point where many now believe that a ‘smoking gun’ has just been revealed.
A series of Freedom of Information Act requests, filed by a conservative anti-animal research group ‘White Coat Waste’, has uncovered a treasure trove of documents about the funding of ‘gain of function’ research – engineering a pathogen to make it more infectious to humans.
Daily Mail reported:
“One of the first Covid patients to fall ill with the virus in China had received federal dollars from the US government to fund the research suspected of causing the pandemic.
Ben Hu, one of the scientists who worked at the the Wuhan Institute of Virology and became ill in November 2019 with suspected Covid, had been the recipient of government grant money to research how coronaviruses infect humans.
Last week, it emerged through US intelligence reports that three of the first Chinese patients to come down with symptoms consistent with Covid worked on coronavirus research at the WIV, including Dr Hu.”
That is the clearest piece of indirect evidence so far indicating that the virus escaped from the Wuhan Lab, which was world-renowned for its work on bat viruses.
“White Coat Waste president Anthony Bellotti said: ‘Our FOIA investigation and winning a lawsuit against the NIH have unveiled the pandemic’s ultimate smoking gun: the U.S. government-funded Wuhan gain-of-function experimenter Ben Hu—probable patient zero at the Wuhan Lab—and its wasteful spending on his reckless animal experiments almost certainly caused a lab leak and COVID’.”
If Dr. Hu is – as it appears – the COVID ‘patient zero’, that fact carries tremendous weight, since he is a protégée, a star pupil of Dr Shi Zhengli, a top Wuhan-based virologist called by the press ‘bat woman’ from her years of hunting for coronavirus samples in bat caves.
Out of a total of $8 million in taxpayers’ money from 2014 to 2021 received by New York-based nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance, at least $598,000 went to the Wuhan Institute of Virology to be used in ‘gain of function research’.
Both the Department of Energy and the FBI have concluded that the virus likely leaked from a lab, and Senate Republicans have also shown evidence that Chinese officials and scientists ‘possessed some level of awareness of an outbreak of infectious disease well in advance of the first disclosure of this information to the public on December 31, 2019’.
The Intercept reported:
“The news that U.S. intelligence had learned that three Wuhan Institute of Virology lab workers had been hospitalized with Covid symptoms in November 2019, significantly before the outbreak at the city’s seafood market, was first reported by the Wall Street Journal in May 2021. But the revelation had curiously little impact on the broader debate over the origin of the pandemic, even as it would invalidate, if confirmed, the claim that the pandemic originated at the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market when the virus allegedly jumped from an animal to a human.”
Lately, the Times of London, reported on a worrying development that links the ‘gain of function’ research to the Chinese military:
“That report includes allegations about the Wuhan labs’ collaboration with Chinese military scientists, buttressing what had once been dismissed as a fringe conspiracy theory: that the virus was connected to bioweapons research.
‘In the lead-up to the pandemic, the Wuhan institute frequently experimented on coronaviruses alongside the Academy of Military Medical Sciences, a research arm of the People’s Liberation Army. In published papers, military scientists are listed as working for the Beijing Institute of Microbiology and Epidemiology, which is the military academy’s base’.”
Those new developments confirm previous reporting by Michael Shellenberger, Matt Taibbi and Alex Gutentag at Public, news that Jim Hoft has commented upon here at TGP in the piece below:
The post Dr. Ben Hu, Patient Zero? New FOIA Documents Released Reveal a ‘Smoking Gun’: COVID Was Created at Wuhan Lab, Escaped From ‘Gain of Function’ Research – And Was Financed by US Taxpayer Money! appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.