Explosive government documents reveal that Dr. Anthony Fauci’s NIAID and USAID funneled over $40 million in taxpayer funds to a Wuhan scientist—just before he became COVID’s infamous “patient zero” and the virus ignited a global pandemic.
As damning new evidence emerges, calls for a criminal investigation into Fauci’s role in the COVID pandemic continue to grow.
The documents, obtained through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request by the nonprofit White Coat Waste Project, confirm that U.S. funding supported research into “bat coronavirus emergence” at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV).
The completion date for this funding? 2019—the same year the coronavirus began to spread around the world.
Let me get this straight. Fauci’s NIAID and @USAID sent over $40M in U.S. taxpayer “support” to a scientist in Wuhan who was working on “bat coronavirus emergence” research, who also became “patient zero” for COVID-19?
— Chief Nerd (@TheChiefNerd) February 3, 2025
And the completion date for that funding was … in 2019???… pic.twitter.com/FJF92pcmp1
Ben Hu, a Chinese scientist working at WIV, was among three researchers who became sick with a mysterious illness in late 2019, according to U.S. intelligence reports.
This revelation lends further credibility to the theory that the pandemic originated from a lab leak rather than a wild animal market in Wuhan.
The Wall Street Journal first reported on these findings, which were later confirmed by Robert Kadlec, a former Health and Human Services Department official.
Hu had been actively studying coronaviruses when he fell ill, with symptoms closely resembling those of COVID-19. Alongside Hu, researchers Yu Ping and Yan Zhu also contracted the unknown illness.
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The only known photo of Ben Hu, the Wuhan Institute of Virology scientist directly funded by Dr. Anthony Fauci with US tax payer dollars |
According to a Substack article citing U.S. government sources, these three individuals were likely the true “patient zero” cases of the pandemic.
Some of Hu’s projects at WIV received direct U.S. grant support, according to findings from the Government Accountability Office (GAO). Between 2014 and 2019, USAID and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) collectively funneled $1.4 million to WIV.
The grants, which officially ended in 2019, funded research on animal viruses capable of jumping to humans and causing pandemics, as well as specific studies on bat coronaviruses.
Kadlec noted that Hu and his colleagues had previously “published on SARS-related coronavirus experiments done at inappropriately low biosafety settings that could have resulted in a laboratory infection.”
China’s lack of transparency has fueled global concerns about the true origins of the pandemic. While Chinese authorities initially identified a Wuhan resident who fell ill on December 8, 2019, as the first official COVID-19 case, reports suggest that Hu and his fellow researchers became sick a month earlier, in November 2019.
“The lack of data disclosure is simply inexcusable,” Maria Van Kerkhove, an epidemiologist with the World Health Organization (WHO), wrote in an April op-ed for the journal Science. “The longer it takes to understand the origins of the pandemic, the harder it becomes to answer the question, and the more unsafe the world becomes.”