After years of official pronouncements to the contrary, strong new evidence has emerged suggesting the virus known as SARS-CoV-2 escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). 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 WIV’s “gain-of-function” research on SARS-like coronaviruses, which increases the infectiousness of viruses. More than three years after the pandemic’s outbreak, many around the world had given up on learning the origin of SARS-CoV-2, the highly infectious respiratory virus that...
