Running searches on “Ben Hu” at the New York Times and the Washington Post, I can’t find news of the identification of Covid’s patient zero (or patients zero) by Michael Shellenberger, Matt Taibbi, and Alex Gutentag last week. They reported in this Public post on Substack:

According to multiple U.S. government officials interviewed as part of a lengthy investigation by Public and Racket, the first people infected by the virus, “patients zero,” included Ben Hu, a researcher who led the [Wuhan Institute of Virology]’s “gain-of-function” research on SARS-like coronaviruses, which increases the infectiousness of viruses.

The New York Post followed up with a good story here.

Matt Taibbi commented on the story at Racket News:

The implications of this are enormous and represent a major problem for the federal health bureaucracy, several intelligence agencies, and the news media, to say nothing of politicians in both parties (but particularly those on the Democratic side) who’ve deflected public interest from the Wuhan Institute and gain-of-function research. The secrets of both the pandemic’s origin and the reason for America’s at-best-sluggish investigation of same have become the mother of all political footballs, and today’s news is likely to be just the first in a series of loud surprises….

We were told, for instance, that despite longstanding interest in the Wuhan Institute as a potential security concern, at least one intelligence agency overruled a majority of its in-house investigators to produce a report on the pandemic’s origin discounting the lab-leak hypothesis.

The “patient zero” report is likely to focus even more attention on stories by publications ranging from the Washington Post to the Intercept to the Wall Street Journal about U.S.-funded “gain-of-function” research, which sources insist is the likely reason many agencies (with the notable exception of the FBI and the Department of Energy, which both pointed at lab origin as a possible explanation) were steered away from the Wuhan Institute as a possible outbreak source.

Taibbi has now posted a video of his comments on the Public post narrated by Jared Moore. Readers who have followed along with our several posts on the origin of Covid-19 in the CCP’s Wuhan lab may want to check out the linked Public post or the video below.