This piece, mostly from Michael Shellenberger and with a few contributions by Matt Taibbi, is doing the rounds on right-wing media. So far mainstream outlets aren’t touching it. The claim is that those three people from WIV who went to hospital with flu-like symptoms in November 2019 were people directly working on gain-of-function research with coronaviruses. One of them was allegedly awarded a grant by a funding body in China to work on a project titled “Pathogenicity of Two New Bat SARS-Related Coronaviruses to Transgenic Mice Expressing Human ACE2 Receptor” which was never published.
This is a huge story if true. We will have to wait and see if any documentary evidence emerges. It is credited to “multiple sources within the US government”. I don’t consider Shellenberger very credible, but the Times of London published a piece a few days ago in which they allude to much the same thing:
This changed in 2016 after researchers discovered a new type of coronavirus in a mineshaft in Mojiang in Yunnan province where people had died from symptoms similar to Sars.
Rather than warning the world, the Chinese authorities did not report the fatalities. The viruses found there are now recognised as the only members of Covid-19’s immediate family known to have been in existence pre-pandemic.
They were transported to the Wuhan institute and the work of its scientists became classified. “The trail of papers starts to go dark,” a US investigator said. “That’s exactly when the classified programme kicked off. My view is that the reason Mojiang was covered up was due to military secrecy related to [the army’s] pursuit of dual use capabilities in virological biological weapons and vaccines.”
According to the US investigators, the classified programme was to make the mineshaft viruses more infectious to humans.
They believe this led to the creation of the Covid-19 virus, and that it leaked into the city of Wuhan after a laboratory accident. “It has become increasingly clear that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was involved in the creation, promulgation and cover-up of the Covid-19 pandemic,” one of the investigators said.
They found evidence that researchers working on these experiments were taken to hospital with Covid-like symptoms in November 2019 — a month before the West became aware of the pandemic — and one of their relatives died.
An investigator said: “We were rock-solid confident that this was likely Covid-19 because they were working on advanced coronavirus research in the laboratory. They’re trained biologists in their thirties and forties. Thirty-five-year-old scientists don’t get very sick with influenza.”
The researchers are not named here, but this looks like much the same information, this time in a reputable newspaper. So I’ll be watching this story with interest.