In any infectious outbreak, one of the first steps in the epidemiological response is to locate case one—the first infected patient, also known as the index case or patient zero. This is not a mere clinical curiosity: it is the foundation for reconstructing the chain of transmission.

Modern epidemiology treats this process as a technical priority. As stated in the Dictionary of Epidemiology by the International Epidemiological Association, identifying patient zero is essential to understanding patterns of dissemination and establishing effective control strategies.

Yet in the case of SARS-CoV-2—the virus that unleashed a global pandemic between late 2019 and early 2020—no independent or transparent international investigation was ever conducted to clearly identify where, how, and with whom it all began. The city of Wuhan, China, is widely acknowledged as the epicenter of the earliest cases, but no international health authority was granted free access to clinical records, sample banks, or laboratory data.

This refusal to apply the basic principles of epidemiological inquiry raises a question that is as much technical as it is political: why was the origin of the virus not investigated with the same rigor applied to other pandemics? …

SARS-CoV-2—contrary to the logic of epidemiology—had no officially-recognized father, mother, or cradle. It emerged, killed, and was fought with every technical and political resource—yet its origin was never investigated in an open, independent, and accountable manner. This omission was not due to ignorance, but to an institutional architecture that favors control over truth.

The pandemic was not just a biological or technical challenge. It was an epistemological crisis in which fear was promoted as virtue, ignorance as protection, and authority as dogma. The search for case one was abandoned not because it was irrelevant, but because it threatened to hold accountable those who could not be held accountable.

As Ludwig von Mises taught, truth does not belong to the state, nor to the majority, nor to the experts; it belongs to reason. If reason was silenced during the greatest health crisis of the century, the task of restoring it now falls to those who reject the comfort of obedience in favor of the duty of lucidity. Freedom, after all, does not begin where everything is known—but where everything can be asked.