Wuhan clan: we finally know the identity of the scientists in the lab linked to Covid

That a pandemic caused by a bat coronavirus started in the city with the world’s largest programme of research into bat coronaviruses was always intriguing. That among the first people to get ill with allegedly Covid-like symptoms in the month the pandemic began were three scientists working in that lab was highly suspicious. Now that we know their names, we find one of them was collecting what turned out to be the closest cousins of Sars-CoV-2 at the time, and another was doing the very experiments that could have created the virus. These revelations make it almost a slam dunk for the coronavirus lab-leak hypothesis.

On 10 June the author and free-speech campaigner Michael Shellenberger broke the news at his Substack site that the three sick scientists were Ben Hu, Yu Ping and Yan Zhu, as confirmed to him by multiple US intelligence sources frustrated by the Biden administration’s refusal to release this key fact. This week I was with him when the Wall Street Journal announced it had independently confirmed his story with its intelligence sources.

Who is Dr Hu? The Wuhan Institute of Virology has hundreds of scientists but there is one team, the Center for Emerging Infectious Diseases, with a focus on bat coronaviruses, headed by Shi Zhengli. Her right-hand man and star pupil is Ben Hu, who runs the lab experiments. Hu was lead author on the institute’s most remarkable achievement, published in 2017, that it had grown three bat viruses in the lab and then created eight new hybrid viruses with the spike genes from wild bat viruses spliced into the genetic backbone of one of these lab-grown viruses.

Yu Ping is a student who worked as one of the lab’s virus-hunters, collecting the bat viruses in caves all over southern China.