Covid’s ‘Patient Zero’ identified, adds more weight to Wuhan lab leak theory

New evidence proves that lab workers manipulating coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology kicked off the pandemic, vindicating what was once called a conspiracy.

The Covid pandemic’s patient zero may have been identified – and he was not the unlucky consumer of a dodgy soup at a Wuhan wet market.

Instead, according to new reports this week three separate Chinese government officials have all named scientist Ben Hu, who was in charge of gain of function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, as the first human to be infected with the new disease.

The well sourced report confirmed earlier reporting that the Covid pandemic had its origins in a Chinese virology lab at Wuhan, a story that was first broken by The Daily Telegraph’s Sharri Markson.

Ms Markson would eventually go on to write a book, What Really Happened in Wuhan, which detailed the work Ben Hu and fellow scientist Shi Zhengli researching bat coronaviruses and their potential to infect humans.

The Daily Telegraph’s coverage of the Wuhan lab leak, which the ABC rubbished.

At the time, Ms Markson and this newspaper’s reporting attracted heavy criticism from those who believed it was little more than a conspiracy theory driven by then-president Donald Trump.

Not long after Media Watch host Paul Barry devoted two episodes of his taxpayer funded broadcast to squashing The Daily Telegraph and Ms Markson’s reporting, calling it as a “conspiracy theory” that was “hard to kill.”

“So, how likely is it that the virus escaped from that Chinese lab? Well, in short, it’s not. Despite concerns expressed by the Americans in 2018 about lax standards, and despite what President Trump has been saying,” Mr Barry said.

“When we at The Daily Telegraph first started running front pages investigating whether Covid came from a lab in Wuhan or had a natural origin, we were labelled conspiracy theorists by the taxpayer funded national broadcaster,” Ms Markson said.

“Three years on, much of what we investigated and reported is now emerging in mainstream media outlets globally.”