Lab leak advocates and skeptics are in the same leaky boat. The lab-leak scenario had to be put back on the table as a potential hypothesis there’s now widespread agreement that it can’t be totally ruled out, but China no longer has any interest in “exonerating” itself by investigating a zoonotic crossover that must have happened, if it happened, in China.
Covid origin free#
The free world outside China is at a dead end. Colby Cosh: Whiffs of suspicion that the deadly 'Russian flu' was a coronavirus pandemic.Colby Cosh: Clues emerge in the mysterious global outbreak of hepatitis in young children.The WHO made plans for a proper wildlife investigation after its rigged team report fell apart embarrassingly, but these have been ignored: an author of the report now professes “embarrassment” at the “derailment” of the quest she hoped to keep alive. One of Cohen’s virologist interviewees describes China as “trapped” in an attempt to shift the narrative to fantastic, implausible foreign-origins scenarios: “It’s almost like being caught in a childish lie.” Chinese biologists who research wildlife disease have been told to put down their tools. The question everybody in the West was arguing over was: did millions of people die because of bad Chinese biosecurity, or did they die because the Chinese, despite having bat populations which are a giant engine of coronavirus evolution, can’t relinquish the habit of buying raccoon dogs and other wild mammals for culinary use in the heart of its major cities? It seems the Chinese political class took a look at the origins debate happening in the free world and didn’t like what they saw. Chinese scientists have begun to blitz the literature with zany hypotheses suggesting an extra-Chinese origin for the pandemic. This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below. Manage Print Subscription / Tax Receipt.In further research, the authors say scientists and public officials should seek a better understanding of the wildlife trade in China and elsewhere and promote more comprehensive testing of live animals sold in markets to lower the risk of future pandemics. “Additionally, no line list of early Covid-19 cases is available and we do not have complete details of environmental sampling,” the authors added. “We also lack direct evidence of an intermediate animal infected with a SARS-CoV-2 progenitor virus either at the Huanan market or at a location connected to its supply chain, like a farm,” they wrote.
The new findings suggest a scenario in which the two lineages of the coronavirus jumped from animals into humans on separate occasions, both at the Huanan market.Ĭiting some of the limitations of the study, researchers say while they could recover location data for most of the December-onset Covid cases identified by the WHO, they could not access the precise latitude and longitude coordinates of all these cases. This indicates there may have been many other animal-to-human transmissions of the virus at the market that failed to manifest in recorded Covid-19 cases. They found that the pandemic, which initially involved two subtly distinct lineages of Sars-CoV-2, likely arose from at least two separate infections of humans from animals at the Huanan market in November 2019 and perhaps in December 2019. Researchers combined epidemic modeling with analyses of the virus’s early evolution based on the earliest sampled genomes. This content is not available due to your privacy preferences. Scientists found a striking percentage of early Covid patients with no known connection to the market – who neither worked there nor shopped there – lived near the market. In the research, scientists could determine the locations of almost all of the 174 cases identified by the WHO that month, 155 of which were in Wuhan.įindings revealed that these cases were clustered tightly around the Huanan market, whereas later cases were dispersed widely throughout the city, home to over 11 million people. It examined the geographic pattern of Covid-19 cases in December 2019 – the first month of the outbreak. One of the studies assessed the locations of the first known human Covid-19 cases, as well as swab samples taken from surfaces at various locations at the market. In the research, scientists, led by virus evolution expert Michael Worobey from the University of Arizona in the US, conclude that the Sars-CoV-2 virus first spread to humans from animals likely in two separate transmission events in the Huanan market in late November 2019. The findings of the studies were reported as pre-prints in February, and have passed peer-review to be published in the journal.
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