I’m a medical student working on a project that a previous medical student had worked on. I am taking over where they left off and since they had done some parts incorrectly I have to redo the entire project.

There’s a draft of the paper that the old student had written up that the PI forwarded me to edit to submit to a journal. I’ll have to edit that as well since the data would be inaccurate.

The interesting thing was that the PI’s assistant said that the other student would need first-authorship. I emailed the PI to clarify since I understand they did the work originally, but without me right now redoing all the work there will be no paper. Is this normal? Should I ask for co-first authorship?