Wuhan lab staff had Covid-like symptoms before China reported outbreak, says US intelligence document

Three researchers from China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) were hospitalised as early as November 2019 after they fell ill with Covid-like symptoms, according to a previously undisclosed US intelligence report.

The report, seen by The Wall Street Journal, will intensify calls for a comprehensive probe into the origins of the pandemic, one which seriously considers the possibility that the virus could have escaped from the Wuhan laboratory where research is conducted on coronaviruses in bats. 

According to the report: “The U.S. government has reason to believe that several researchers inside the WIV became sick in Autumn 2019, before the first identified case of the outbreak, with symptoms consistent with both Covid-19 and common seasonal illnesses.”

According to the Chinese government, the first confirmed Covid-19 case was on 8 December 2019. Yet some experts believe the virus began infecting people in Wuhan in November. 

The WSJ’s reporting comes after Jen Psaki, the White House Press Secretary, renewed calls for an “independent, transparent investigation” into the origins of the virus on Thursday. 

On 11 May, Dr Anthony Fauci, the leading infectious diseases expert in the US, also said he is “not convinced” that the virus developed naturally, and that there is still “a lot of cloudiness around the origins of Covid-19”. He said he could not rule out the so-called “lab leak” theory. 

“Certainly, the people who investigated it say it likely was the emergence from an animal reservoir that then infected individuals, but it could have been something else, and we need to find that out,” he added. 

The WHO-led investigation into the origins of the pandemic is ongoing. But in the initial phase of the investigation, the team concluded that a lab leak was extremely unlikely after they visited the virology institute in February. They issued a report which said that zoonotic transmission from animals to humans was “likely to very likely” the cause. 

Since then, however, a host of countries, including the US, Norway, Canada and Britain have all voiced concerns about the integrity of the report and called for a fuller investigation. 

In February, one member of the WHO-led team told Reuters that the investigation was limited by the Chinese authorities’ refusal to give raw data on early Covid-19 cases. The WIV has also not made its data or lab records public. 

A US National Security Council spokeswoman declined to comment directly on the newly-leaked report, insisting the government is “not going to make pronouncements that prejudge an ongoing WHO study into the source of SARS-CoV-2.” But it has “been clear that sound and technically credible theories should be thoroughly evaluated by international experts.”

Crucially, she added, we need an expert-driven evaluation “that is free from interference or politicisation.”