The Highwire with Del Bigtree - NEW INFO ALLEGES FIRST COVID CASES CAME FROM WUHAN LAB

Episode Date: June 22, 2023

Breaking news now names the first three cases of COVID as Wuhan Institute of Virology scientists working directly with the SARS virus lending more weight to the lab leak reality.Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-highwire-with-del-bigtree--3620606/support.

We've been tracking since just days after the first coronavirus case in the United States in late January of 2020. We've been tracking this story from thousands of internal emails showing how the scientific community manufactured the conversation away from lab origins. We had evidence at that time early January that this thing may have even came from a lab. And so our reporting on this has been, where did it come from, who knew what, and when did they know it? And some more information has now dropped. This is some breaking news this week. there's been a lot of chatter. Last, this past weekend, the Times reported from the U.S. State Department officials.

This was the headline, what really went on inside the Wuhan lab weeks before COVID erupted. So in this article, they're saying that in 2016, Chinese researchers discovered a new type of coronavirus in a mine shaft in Unan province. And the people there, some of the people there had died of with symptoms similar to SARS. So what they did, you know, again, this is according to investigators. U.S. State Department investigators, not named, so these are just sources at this point, but they're saying that that virus there was recognized as the earliest member of this COVID-19 before the pandemic. So that was taken to the Woonha Institute of Virology at that point. And they're saying that the paper trail starts to go dark at that point. This is the investigator

saying this. Now, we do know that the National Institutes of Health in 2021 revealed in a letter to the House Oversight Committee that in 2018 and 2019, remember NIH was funding EcoHealth Alliance and they were doing that coronavirus research out of the Wuhan Institute of Virology. And so NIH revealed in this letter in 2021 that the Wuhan Institute of Virology created a coronavirus and it was more infectious in mice, but they did not report that as they were supposed to do in the grant to NIH in a timely manner. So there was some shenanigans going on there. And now what we have here, so during this time, as this story has been unfolding, we have a, we have a 2021 headline here. And this again, this is Intel, this Intel agencies,

like internal reports, but this is ABC News. 2021 U.S. Intel report identified three Wuhan researchers who fell ill in November of 2019. So this is a big, this is a big deal. And until, until now, the three have never been named. So we have, uh, journal, journalists using their substack, Matt Taibi, Michael Schellenberger, and Alex Gutendtog, and they have written a paper, a substack article now. The U.S. government sources claim that the first people sickened by COVID-19 were Chinese scientists at Wuhan Lab Institute forology, and they're saying that they have the names now. So we go into this article, and this is kind of the addition to this story now, the latest edition, says, according to multiple U.S.

government officials interviewed as part of a lengthy investigation by public and racket, those are the names of their publications. The first people, infected by the virus. Patient Zero included Ben-Hoo, a researcher who led the WIV's gain-of-function research on SARS-like coronavirus, which increases the infectiousness of the viruses. Now, Ben-Hu is a researcher at that organization, but we go on and read this. Now answers increasingly look within reach, it says. Sources within the U.S. government say that three of the earliest people that become infected with SARS-CoV-2 were Ben-Hu, Yuping, and Yanzu. All were members of the Wuhan lab suspected to have leaked the pandemic virus. And who is Ben Hu? So he works at the,

we worked at the Wuhan Institute of virology. And he was a researcher specialty of SARS-CoV related viruses. And he even has papers with his name on it. So in 2017, he co-authored a paper called the discovery of a rich gene pool of that SARS-related coronavirus provides new insights into the origin of SARS-coronavirus. And on that paper are the other two people who fell ill. They're also co-authors. And then in 2019, he co-authored another paper, Geographical structure of BAT SARS-related coronaviruses. So this is the latest information. And according to that substack article, next week, there's an expected release by the Director of National Intelligence. He's apparently supposed to release classified information. You know, again, this is all kind of hearsay from sources

as journalists. This is how we work. But, you know, this is still government intelligence agencies feeding information. So it'll be really interesting to see next week of this, if this national intelligence report does come out. If these three individuals are named, this would add a lot of information to this. And it begs the question, the Biden administration kind of went cold on really researching the origins of this virus. So it's interesting that the State Department officials, U.S. investigators, intel agencies are now coming forward and using journalists to leak this type of information. So this is a really interesting development at this point. Wow, wow. Well, I mean, there it is. And I remember, you know, those were some of the arguments made when we've been attacked by, you know, these fact checkers like NewsGuard. We were questioning the validity of the natural origin story. You weren't allowed to do it. We were spreading misinformation by saying that this looks like it came from the lab or certainly seem to have, you know, fair and cleavage sites and things like that, HIV inserts, you know, by some scientists. And as I've said,

from the beginning, you know, and we are, this is a breaking story. It may change. When you're watching the high wire, what we're doing is we're bringing you all the latest breaking information. Many of the scientific studies that we're bringing you and things like that are preprints. It's just being released for people to look at it. They want scientists to challenge it. So this story may also keep changing, but so far from the beginning, it really has looked like this thing came out of the lab and now the world is moved in the high wires direction.