“The recent news about so-called ‘patient zero’ in WIV are absolutely rumors and ridiculous,” Ben Hu emailed Science in his first public response to the charges, which have been attributed to anonymous former and current U.S. Department of State officials. A WIV colleague who has also been named as one of the first COVID-19 cases denies the accusation as well.
Hu and two of his WIV colleagues were thrown into the furious COVID-19 origin debate on 13 June when an online newsletter called Public said the three scientists developed COVID-19 in November 2019. That was prior to the outbreak becoming public when a cluster of cases surfaced at the end of December 2019 that were linked to a Wuhan marketplace.
Public’s report was quickly embraced by a camp that argues COVID-19 came from a virus stored, and possibly being studied, at WIV, rather than from infected animal hosts, perhaps being sold at the Wuhan market. A Wall Street Journal (WSJ) article on 20 June that said it had “confirmed” the allegations against the three, without referring to any public evidence or named sources with direct knowledge, fueled the flames even more. Social media and other publications spread the charges—and the scientists’ names.
