Posted originally on the CTH on June 20, 2023 | Sundance 

The Wall Street Journal confirms earlier independent reporting today that three Chinese scientists from the Wuhan lab fell ill in November 2019 with a likely COVID-19 viral transmission.  WSJ writes, “the researchers’ names were noted last week in an article in Public, which publishes on the Substack platform, and were independently confirmed by the Journal.”

WSJ – […] “Ben Hu, a scientist at the Wuhan Institute of Virology who had done extensive laboratory research on how coronaviruses infect humans, was identified in U.S. intelligence reports as one of the researchers who became ill in November 2019 with symptoms that American officials said were consistent with either Covid-19 or a seasonal illness. None of the researchers died.

[…] The current and former U.S. officials told the Journal the three who fell ill were Hu; Yu Ping, a Chinese scientist who wrote a 2019 thesis on SARS-related coronaviruses found in bats; and another scientist named Yan Zhu.

[…] November 2019 is roughly when many epidemiologists and virologists think SARS-CoV-2, the virus behind the Covid-19 pandemic, first began circulating around Wuhan, a city in central China. China has said that the first confirmed case was a man who fell ill on Dec. 8, 2019.

Hu is a leading researcher on coronaviruses who worked closely with Shi Zhengli, the leading expert on bat coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Much of Hu’s research focused on modifying coronaviruses so they could bind to human cells.

The stated purpose of the research was to identify viruses that could lead to a pandemic and facilitate the development of a vaccine. Critics say that such research requires stringent precautions because such work can make the viruses in the lab more infections for humans.

Yu Ping, who also worked for the institute along with Zhu, is an expert on the geographic spread of coronaviruses and wrote a thesis that was the first to describe a new family of SARS-like coronaviruses that are most closely related to SARS-CoV-2. (read more)

With additional mounting evidence of the lab leak in Wuhan as the originating source of the pandemic, it is worth revisiting the statements from former Acting CIA Director Mike Morrell back in 2020 when the intelligence community was dismissing the lab leak theory.

2020 – Politico […] Morell noted separately on Thursday that if the virus leaked from a Wuhan lab, the U.S. would shoulder some of the blame since it funded research at that lab through government grants from 2014-2019.

The National Institutes of Health said in a statement on Thursday that a $3.4 million grant awarded to EcoHealth Alliance, which in turn awarded funds to the Wuhan Institute of Virology over the last 6 years, had been terminated but didn’t say why. “Any questions related to the origins of the outbreak should be directed to ODNI,” the statement said.

“If it did escape from the lab, not only bad on China but also bad on the U.S. for giving funding to a lab with safety concerns,” Morell said, referring toState Department cables from early 2018 that warned of the lab’s risky coronavirus experiments and shortage of trained technicians.

“So if it did escape,” he added, “we’re all in this together.” (link)

Thus, the motive for the U.S. government to deny any role in creating the virus that was unleashed unto the world.

Move along… move along…