Victorian explorer Sir Richard Burton, who drank from the Fountain of Youth and now works as a taxidermist at the Toronto Natural History Museum, is doing research on ‘Patient Zero’, a gay flight attendant who allegedly brought HIV to North America. Meanwhile, the ghost of Patient Zero materializes and in a comedy of errors, encounters Burton. They fall in love and attempt to figure out what to do about the scientist's past attempts to defame Patient Zero as a "sexual serial killer".

Directed by gay activist and figure of the Toronto New Wave John Greyson (Lilies), Zero Patience delivers a bold critique of the stigma surrounding the origins of HIV and of the myth of the patient zero, less than a decade after the death of Gaëtan Dugas, an early HIV patient long regarded as the primary US case.