Has COVID’s Patient Zero Finally Been Named?

Updated at 9:45 p.m. ET on June 23, 2023

The lab-leak theory of COVID’s origin has always been a little squirrelly. If SARS-CoV-2 really did begin infecting humans in a research setting, the evidence that got left behind is mostly of the cloak-and-dagger type: confirmations from anonymous government officials about vague conclusions drawn in classified documents, for example; or leaked materials that lay out hypothetical research projects; or information gleaned from who-knows-where that certain people came down with who-knows-what disease at some crucial moment. In short, it’s all been messy human stuff, the bits and bobs of intelligence analysis. Simple-seeming facts emerge from a dark matter of sources and methods.

So it goes again. The latest major revelation in this line emerged this week. Taken at face value, it’s extraordinary: Ben Hu, a high-level researcher at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and two colleagues, Yu Ping and Zhu Yan, could have been the first people on the planet to be infected with SARS-CoV-2, according to anonymous sources cited first in the newsletter and then in . These proposed patient SARS-CoV-zeros aren’t merely employees of the virology institute; they’re central figures in the very sort of research that since the start of the pandemic. Their names appear on crucial papers related to the discovery of new, SARS-related coronaviruses in bats, and subsequent experimentation on those viruses.