Ben Hu, a scientist at China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), who recently faced allegations that He was ‘patient zero’ with coronavirus, flatly denies that he was sick in late 2019 or that his work was related to the appearance of the SARS-CoV-2. In addition, a US report on the origins of covid-19 does not name or point out that any WIV scientist had a link to the virus.

“The recent news about the so-called ‘patient zero’ in WIV is absolutely hearsay and ludicrous,” Ben Hu emailed Science in his first public response to the allegations, which have been attributed to anonymous US State Department officials. has been cited as one of the first cases of COVID-19 also denies the claim.

Hu and two of his WIV colleagues became embroiled in the furious debate on June 13 about the origin of the virus when an online bulletin called Public said the Three scientists developed covid-19 in November 2019. That was before the outbreak became public in late December 2019, when cases emerged in people linked to a Wuhan market.

Variants of COVID-19 Hyperion, Acrux and XBB.1.9.2 are detected in the region

Hu and two other WIV scientists named in media reports, Yu Ping and Zhu Yan, conducted research in the lab of Shi Zhengli, who has long collected and studied bat coronavirus. Shi has been at the center of debates over the origins of the pandemic over the possibility that SARS-CoV-2 may have leaked from his lab’s natural virus samples or is a genetically engineered virus. Former President Donald Trump repeatedly blamed the pandemic on a WIV virus leak, and a few days before his administration left, the State Department released a fact sheet stating, without providing any evidence, that had “to assume that several researchers within the WIV fell ill in the autumn of 2019”.

In an evaluation of the origins of COVID-19 released by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) on October 29, 2021, it indicated that four intelligence agencies and the National Intelligence Council believe it was of natural origin with one spread from animals to humans, but with “little confidence”, while one intelligence agency, at the time said to be the FBI, had “moderate confidence” in the lab leak hypothesis, and three entities were undecided.

The new ODNI report says the debate over the origins of COVID-19 remains unresolved. “All agencies continue to assess that both laboratory-related and natural origin remain plausible hypotheses to explain the first human infection.”