Headline Roundup • June 21st, 2023
US-Funded Scientist Fell Ill in Wuhan Shortly Before COVID Outbreak
Summary from the AllSides News Team
A Chinese scientist partially funded by United States grants was one of three scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China to fall ill with COVID-19-like symptoms in November 2019, prior to the outbreak of COVID-19 in Wuhan that sparked the COVID-19 global pandemic.
Details: A report co-authored by Matt Taibbi (Center bias) identified Ben Hu as one of the researchers who fell ill at the Wuhan lab. An investigation conducted by the White Coat Waste Project, a watchdog organization working to “cut federal spending that hurts animals and Americans,” cited government records obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests to state that “Ben Hu was a lead experimenter on the dangerous gain-of-function experiments funded by taxpayers via Dr. Fauci’s National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).” According to a Newsweek (Center bias) article, gain-of-function research involves “taking a pathogen and mutating it so that it has a new aspect to it. Often, that new aspect of a virus that it's more transmissible or deadly to humans.”
For Context: The origin of COVID-19 has been a point of debate since the pandemic began. Certain U.S. agencies, such as the FBI and the Department of Energy, have concluded the virus leaked from a lab in Wuhan, China with low to moderate confidence.
How The Media Covered It: The new developments in the search for COVID-19’s origins are being covered moderately, mostly in right-rated outlets.
Featured Coverage of this Story
Hector Retamal/ AFP
A Chinese scientist partially funded by U.S. grants who was working in Wuhan was one of three researchers who fell sick with a mystery illness early on in the coronavirus pandemic, a former U.S. official confirmed Tuesday.
Ben Hu had been working at the Wuhan Institute of Virology when he and the other two scientists were sickened with an unspecified illness in late 2019, potentially lending credibility to the theory that the pandemic could have originated from a lab leak rather than from a wild animal market in Wuhan.
Hu had...
Hector Retamal/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
A prominent scientist who worked on coronavirus projects funded by the U.S. government is one of three Chinese researchers who became sick with an unspecified illness during the initial outbreak of Covid-19, according to current and former U.S. officials.
The identity and role of the researchers is one piece of intelligence that has been cited by proponents of the judgment that the pandemic originated with a lab leak, though the nature of their illness hasn’t been conclusively established.
Ben Hu, a scientist at the Wuhan Institute of Virology who had...
AP
One of the first Wuhan researchers reportedly sickened with Covid in fall 2019, Ben Hu, was getting U.S. financial support for risky gain-of-function research on coronaviruses, according to documents obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request by the transparency advocacy organization White Coat Waste Project.
The funding came in three grants totaling $41 million, doled out by USAID and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, or NIAID, the agency then headed by Dr. Anthony Fauci. Hu is listed as an investigator on the grants.
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