New report names 3 Wuhan lab employees who got sick from covid
Should we trust the new lab leak claims?
A new story on substack repeats an old claim about the lab leak theory of covid, but adds some new details. The old story said that 3 scientists got sick at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, back in 2019. The new story adds the names of the 3 scientists.
The scientists named are Ben Hu, Yu Ping, and Yan Zhu.
Is this the smoking gun we’ve all been waiting for?
Before I get into all of the details, let me offer one simple trick that can help you guess — it’s often easier to tell if something is false by looking at who is saying it and what other kinds of things they say.
Here’s what Michael Shellenberger reported last week:
The story talks about an “air force whistleblower”, David Grusch:
The whistleblower never saw a spacecraft, and has no photos, videos, or written evidence:
But Shellenberger says it can be confirmed by “multiple sources close to the matter”:
Shellenberger offers one picture of a UFO:
I guess he’s referring to that thing that looks like a sphere?
And then he gets into lots of details about what UFO’s look like, none of which sound particularly like a sphere:
I’m not going to get into much detail about why I think alien UFO’s don’t exist. Physics makes interstellar travel very difficult. You might expect that aliens capable of flying across the galaxy would do more than fly spheres over Iraq or abduct a few random people in America. We have more cameras on planet Earth than ever in history, but the UFO pictures and videos that come out are worse than ever.
Even Shellenberger’s comment section can tell this is bullshit. Here are the top two comments:
As it turns out, the Covid lab leak theory is also some combination of grift, intelligence psy-op, and distraction from our pandemic misery. Many of the lab leak theories were started and perpetuated by the US government.
The reasons why the lab leak theory is false are more complicated. The idea that a lab could make a virus is definitely more plausible than UFO’s, but it’s highly unlikely that a lab actually made Covid. It’s far more likely that people, ranging from substack grifters to members of the Trump administration, simply made up most of the details.
The origin of the lab leak theory
The lab leak theory didn’t go mainstream until 2021, but some form of it existed within weeks of the Covid virus first being discovered in December 2019.
The first article I can find mentioning the lab leak theory is on January 9th, 2020, from Radio Free Asia, a US government media source.
On January 19th, 2020, there was a lab leak video from Wang Dinggang, a critic of the Chinese government.
On January 25th, 2020, there was an article on GNews, blaming the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
GNews is a site run by Steve Bannon and Chinese billionaire Miles Guo:
Bannon has since been sentenced to jail time for contempt of Congress. Miles Guo has since been charged with defrauding people out of 1 billion dollars in crypto scams. When the authorities went to search his apartment, his apartment building was mysteriously lit on fire.
So, within a month of Covid being discovered, there was already a lab leak theory being pushed by some shady people, one of whom is a friend of the Trump administration.
Guo and Bannon later teamed up with Hong Kong scientist Li Meng Yan, who claimed to be exposing the lab leak.
Li Meng Yan is pictured here with Bannon, Giuliani, and Wang DingGang:
In September 2020, she wrote a paper claiming covid is a Chinese bioweapon. There’s a critical review here. None of the details match the modern lab leak theory. For instance, she says that Covid was made from a virus called ZC45, while modern theories often say that Covid was made from a virus called RATG-13. Li Meng Yan claims that RATG-13 is a fake virus, created as a distraction.
Those kinds of details don’t matter to many viewers, who just hear “lab leak” and don’t do much digging.
Li Meng Yan went on Fox News to spread her theory:
In spring 2020, there were rumors on the Chinese internet about a dead Wuhan researcher, a woman named Huang Yanling.
The official story is that Huang Yanling is just someone who quit working for the lab way back in 2015, but the internet rumor is that Huang Yanling is patient zero, who started the pandemic and then died from Covid.
Many people in America first heard about the Huang Yanling theory in a video from Youtuber laowhy86. The video was put out on April 1st, 2020. Laowhy86 has a history of making April Fool’s joke videos in other years. In this case, I’m not sure. Maybe he just ran with the joke after it got millions of views?
I’m not sure if the Huang Yanling story ever got conclusively debunked (as in, is there a video of her alive today?). Peter Daszak says he asked his Chinese colleagues about this rumor when he was in China for the WHO investigation of covid’s origins.
But, I think we can conclude that it’s probably not important because the lab leak theorists today aren’t talking about it anymore. If it were true, they’d keep saying it. Instead, they’ve moved on to other claims like “employees at the Wuhan lab got sick”.
The first video I could find of Trump talking about sick WIV employees is from mid-April 2020:
In that version of the rumor, it wasn’t 3 scientists getting infected, nor was it “dead researcher Huang Yanling”. In this case, it was “a lab intern, who infected her boyfriend, who went to the market in Wuhan”.
Trump later changed his story. Next, the key piece of evidence was “body bags dumped outside the Wuhan lab”:
The lab leak theory became more mainstream in 2021. I’m not sure what the exact catalyst was. An article from Nicholas Wade was influential. It became more acceptable for liberals to talk about the theory after a TV appearance from Jon Stewart. A lot of new research came from authors like Alina Chan, Jamie Metzl, and the DRASTIC group.
Since then, the theory has been perpetuated both by those writers and occasional leaks from “anonymous government sources” which are probably just people from the Trump administration.
The origin of the “3 sick Wuhan lab workers” claims
Trump was already hinting at sick Wuhan lab employees in that video from April 2020. But the clearest version of the modern claim comes from a state department fact sheet released on January 15th, 2021. That is, 5 days before the end of the Trump administration, and a few weeks after Trump tried to convince people that the election was stolen.
The memo stated:
The memo suggests that gain of function research on RATG-13 created the pandemic:
So, it’s a new theory that conflicts with Li Meng Yan’s theory. She claimed RATG-13 was a fake virus. In reality, it would be hard to create SARS-CoV-2 from RATG-13—there are over a thousand mutations separating the two viruses. ZC45, the virus Li Meng Yan blamed, is even more distant, with over three thousand mutations.
Most people ignored the state department memo, but it was brought back to light in mid-2021, by an article in the Wall Street Journal:
The article claims that:
“One person said that [the intelligence] was provided by an international partner and was potentially significant but still in need of further investigation and additional corroboration.”
“Another person described the intelligence as stronger. “The information that we had coming from the various sources was of exquisite quality. It was very precise. What it didn’t tell you was exactly why they got sick,” he said, referring to the researchers.”
Every other newspaper reported this, after the Wall Street Journal did, and the lab leak theory started to go mainstream.
It just so happens that the reporter, Michael Gordon, is the same guy who first reported that Iraq has Weapons of Mass Destruction.
There was still no information about who got sick, how we know any of this is true, or anything like that.
Biden’s declassified intelligence summary later said that this information about the sick WIV employees was unconfirmed, it’s not clear if they got sick at all, or if they had Covid:
The US Senate report on covid doesn’t mention anything about 3 people getting sick. The House GOP report on covid mentions it, but lists the WSJ article as the source. The House report also claims that Covid leaked from the lab in September 2019, two months before these 3 researchers supposedly got sick in November.
At congressional hearings, a member of the Trump state department was asked for more details about these 3 sick researchers. He gave an evasive answer with no new details. He said that he hoped the state department memo would “raise interest” in the lab leak theory (at 1:13:30 in this video):
Reasons to doubt that 3 people got sick
First off, there are the inconsistencies. The Wall Street Journal article says the 3 got sick in November. Trump’s Director of National Intelligence, John Ratcliffe, says that the 3 researchers got sick in October. David Asher, the state department researcher who supposedly discovered the intelligence, refuses to confirm which month it happened.
Next, there’s the severity of the illness. The Wall Street Journal article specifically states that the 3 researchers were hospitalized.
Covid is not a deadly virus for most young people. The hospitalization rate, across the full population, is only about 5%. For younger people, like these researchers, it’s much lower than that. For 3 people to go to the hospital, you’d think that at least 60 people, or probably even more than that, would have to get sick. Maybe if the entire lab got sick, then 3 people could have been hospitalized.
A different version of the “3 sick researchers” story, reported by David Asher from the Trump state department, says that the wife of one of the researchers died from covid. It’s not impossible for a young person to die from covid, but it’s also unlikely.
Although the death rate is low, for young people, Covid is a highly infectious virus. So, we have to believe that 3 people at the Wuhan lab got sick, or maybe the entire lab did. Then the virus started spreading in Wuhan, but then the only other place it showed up is a seafood market across town, and it showed up there a few weeks later.
There was one foreign scientist working at the Wuhan lab in November 2019, Australian virologist Danielle Andersen. She says she was never sick, never had antibodies, and didn’t know of anyone else at the lab falling ill.
In early 2020, Danielle Andersen co-authored a paper with Yan Zhu, one of the 3 WIV scientists that the new substack post says got sick. You’d think she would know if Yan Zhu got hospitalized from a lab-created virus. She would have to be in on the conspiracy to hide the virus.
For the most part, the Wuhan lab scientists were acting normally in late 2019. In December, Shi Zhengli traveled to a foreign conference (on Nipah virus) like nothing was wrong:
Even in January, the Wuhan lab scientists were still acting like life was normal. Here they are, on January 15th, sitting at a restaurant in Wuhan:
That’s a month after the first case at the Huanan market, and two weeks after the market got shut down. So, we’re supposed to think they created a dangerous virus, 3 of them already went to the hospital, they now know for sure the virus was loose in Wuhan, and now they’re all just going out to dinner without concern?
The Wuhan lab claims that all employees have been tested and none of them have Covid antibodies. Of course, they would lie if someone had gotten sick.
The sick employees story seems highly questionable.
What’s new, in the substack article?
The article names 3 people at the lab as the workers who got infected: Ben Hu, Yu Ping, and Yan Zhu.
Chinese and Western languages list first names and family names in different order. Ben Hu and Yan Zhu’s names are in Western order. Yu Ping’s name is given in the Chinese order, it would be Ping Yu to be consistent with the others.
One lab leak debunker, Zhihua Chen, guesses that this is because whoever picked the names just copied them from various papers they’ve written:
Many lab leak theories are too vague to test, one way or another.
Since we have 3 names of people that got sick, this specific theory could be tested and eventually proven true or false. One scientist on Twitter claims one of those 3 scientists wasn’t even in Wuhan, at the time, but in Beijing. I’m not sure yet how to verify that, one way or another.
The substack article goes on to quote various lab leak theorists to set the tone for how to think about these sick researchers:
That’s funny, because you think Alina would have made a guess before that he was the one who got sick. Or maybe mentioned how important he is, since he’s Shi Zhengli’s “star pupil”. Alina tweets all the time, but it looks like she’s only ever mentioned Ben Hu once, and it wasn’t in either of these contexts.
The substack article also quotes Jamie Metzl:
Jamie Metzl also has only ever mentioned Ben Hu once on Twitter.
The substack article criticizes the U.S. government for not sharing this intelligence earlier.
As we’ve seen, it’s not very likely that they’re withholding the evidence. It’s more likely that the Trump administration created it.
The article writes that Covid could have gone differently, if we’d known it was a lab leak:
That also has it backward. The Trump administration’s response to Covid was terrible. The lab leak theory is more likely a distraction from that. If China made the virus, someone is to blame. If it’s a natural virus, well, China’s still to blame for a poorly regulated wildlife trade, but it’s harder to pin the poor outcomes on some malicious person. If it’s a natural virus, then China didn’t know what was coming either, and the United States’ failure to prepare rests on the US government.
Either way, the US simply let a lot of people die with a poor response to it. Trump downplayed the virus, likened it to the flu, held huge rallies of unmasked supporters. Would Trump look better if we knew he was letting those people catch a manufactured virus, not a natural one?
What comes next?
One lab leak debunker on Twitter has an interesting guess.
Congress wrote a new law demanding that all covid origin’s intelligence be declassified, including information on the sick researchers:
When the intelligence gets declassified, 3 names could be revealed. Those might be the same 3 names reported by Michael Shellenberger.
The reason they’re the same 3 names might just be because the information came from the same place: Trump’s state department.
If the names are the same ones given by Shellenberger, then the next news cycle might say, “declassified intelligence confirms rumors about lab leak”.
I’m not sure. It’s an interesting theory, but maybe the declassified intelligence will have no names in it, or 3 different names. In that case, the substack writers will say that the US government is still hiding something, or that Biden is working with China to cover up the evidence.
[Edit: the US government did not end up releasing the 3 names, but that Iraq WMD’s reporter instead “confirmed” the 3 names in the Wall Street Journal.]
Either way, most articles won’t stop to ask why this doesn’t match the story about “an intern who got her boyfriend sick and went to the wet market” or “the body bags dumped outside the Wuhan lab” or “dead WIV researcher Huang Yanling”.
They won’t ask why the US government can’t even decide which month it is that covid leaked from the Wuhan lab, whether it happened in September or November.
They won’t ask why all the earliest known cases are at a market in Wuhan on the other side of town from the lab.
They won’t ask how you could turn RATG-13 into Covid, even if you wanted to.
The details don’t really matter. Some people click on any headline with “lab leak” in the title.
Some people click on UFO headlines, too.
The truth is out there.
