Latest science says Covid jumped species – why that’s deeply troubling but doesn’t rule out the Lab Leak

Covid-19: Scientists narrow down list of pandemic-sparking animals

Scientists have fresh evidence to help answer the Covid-19 pandemic’s most contentious question: what started it?

Nearly five years since the novel coronavirus began spreading in Wuhan, China, researchers still haven’t been able to conclusively pinpoint its origins – but they’re now a step closer.

A major new study adds more weight to the likelihood the pandemic began in the Huanan Seafood Wholesale market, rather than from a lab leak, as has been widely debated in the US.

And it narrows down the list of animals that plausibly could have carried the virus before it jumped to humans, beginning the global crisis that’s caused more than 7 million confirmed deaths so far.

The common raccoon dog, a susceptible species that carried the preceding SARS-CoV virus in 2003, was found to be the most genetically abundant animal among the more than 800 samples.

Other animals picked up in the sampling included masked palm civets, hoary bamboo rats and Malayan porcupines.

On January 1, 2020, after the animals were removed, and just hours after the market was closed, investigators from the Chinese Centre for Disease Control and Prevention sampled floors, walls and other surfaces.

A new analysis of those samples, published in scientific journal Cell, presents the shortlist of animal species most likely to have been the virus’ intermediate hosts before it “spilled over” into humans.

While the data couldn’t prove whether the animals may have been infected, the researchers say it could now be used to help trace where the potential hosts came from.

“This paper adds another layer to the accumulating evidence that all points to the same scenario: that infected animals were introduced into the market in mid to late November 2019, which sparked the pandemic,” said study author professor Kristian Andersen, of US-based Scripps Research.

University of Otago evolutionary virologist professor Jemma Geoghegan said it was “very likely” from the new study that one of the species sold at the market passed on the virus to humans.

“Indeed, all of the evidence regarding the origins of SARS-CoV-2 that has been peer-reviewed and published in reputable journals to date, also supports this finding.”

I couldn’t disagree more.

I have always been open to the possibility of zoonosis to explain how Covid came to be.

The Wet Markets of China have always been a deep concern when it comes to a novel virus spillover between species. This potential spillover grows daily as massive industrial scale farming of wild animals builds apace as large Commercial Ag Business Corporations push local farmers out of the agricultural industry for Monocultural harvests.

These farmers are left to only harvest the wild animal trade for a meagre living as China’s weird devotion to feasting at the table of Kubla Khan drives a market for exotic meats.

This barely regulated trade driven by desperation creates the perfect environment for species transfer and demands far more focus on stopping those large Commercial Ag Business Corporations pushing local farmers out of the agricultural industry for Monocultural harvests, (and the basic welfare of the animals) in the first place.

That species cross over however ha not been as proven as the above article claims it to be.

The counter argument has far more weight to it that the lab leak is STILL the best explanation of how Covid came about…

Did COVID come from an animal market? Here’s what the new evidence really tells us

Proponents of the market hypothesis have been aggressively vocal in recent weeks. In August, an anonymous editorial in a leading medical journal talked about the “hubris needed to underpin alternative hypotheses” and “fanciful ideas … more in keeping with popular movies”.

A commentary in another journal lamented that scientists were being harassed for rejecting the lab leak hypothesis. With breathtaking hypocrisy, the same commentary then attacked a junior researcher who favours that hypothesis, dismissing her work as “conjecture, correlation and anecdote”.

We can at least agree that the virus was present in the Wuhan market. Samples collected from market stalls and drains in early January 2020 contain SARS-CoV-2 genetic material. A recent analysis of this material, published in the journal Cell, claimed to show that the common ancestor of the viruses at the market was the common ancestor of the whole pandemic.

That sounds compelling, until you realise that all of these samples were collected weeks after the pandemic began and none came from a live animal. Unaccountably, no samples were collected before the market was closed and the animals destroyed. Primarily for this reason, most commentators – including me – consider these latest results suggestive but not definitive.

The lack of samples from animals is a problem. No one believes that this virus originated in Wuhan. The natural reservoirs of SARS-like coronaviruses are horseshoe bats, and no infected colonies have been found within 1,500km of the city.

So it must have been brought into the market from somewhere. Yet no SARS-CoV-2 has been found along the supply chains for the animals sold there.

Could a person rather than an animal have brought SARS-CoV-2 into the market in late 2019? That’s entirely possible. Many of the viruses near the base of the SARS-CoV-2 ancestral tree came from people with no links to the market. Several, including a cluster from Guangdong Province, were not even from Wuhan.

Despite the many uncertainties and unanswered questions, it would be much easier to accept the market hypothesis if the pandemic had begun in one of the hundreds (or possibly thousands – no one seems to know for sure) of other Chinese cities that had similar markets in 2020.

After all, the 2002 outbreak of the original SARS coronavirus (a very close relative of SARS-CoV-2) began in a market selling civet cats and other animals in, as it happens, Guangdong.

Yet the epicentre of the COVID pandemic was less than 20 kilometres from China’s pre-eminent coronavirus research lab, the Wuhan Institute of Virology. That is an extraordinary coincidence, and you’d need compelling evidence that the market was the source (or that the lab wasn’t) to dismiss it. The evidence we have simply isn’t that strong.

That said, there is no evidence – at least, not that the Chinese authorities have shared – that SARS-CoV-2 was present in the Wuhan Institute of Virology, though some closely related viruses were. I cannot know if it was or wasn’t, but it didn’t have to be.

Scientists from the institute went on coronavirus-hunting expeditions to places such as Guangdong. Scientists from the Wuhan Center for Disease Control and Prevention – just a five-minute walk from the market – were making their own expeditions, too. There’s an obvious and plausible alternative route to the first human case.

…Mark Woolhouse, Professor of Infectious Disease Epidemiology at The University of Edinburgh is correct in his analysis.

The first article proclaiming a slam dunk for the Wet Market theory simply doesn’t stack up, we are still left with the real possibility that the Lab Leak theory is still the best explanation, that the Lab leaked TO THE WET MARKET, and that from the Wet Market it infected other animals and bounced back to humans.

Sometimes, there really are conspiracy theories that work out to be true…

Yet as far back as March 2020, on a bare minimum of evidence, the idea that a lab was involved in any way was already being dismissed as a conspiracy theory.

Two years ago, one of the most strident proponents of the market hypothesis claimed that his latest research “lays to rest the idea that the virus escaped from a laboratory”. An author of the new analysis in Cell says alternative explanations are “fanciful” and “absurd”.

Who is all this bombast supposed to win over? Not scientists who can read the research papers, take note of the caveats and make their own judgments. Not politicians who have taken an ideological stance on the issue, particularly in the US. And not the intelligence agencies who many believe are our best hope for getting at the truth.

I have studied the origins of human viruses for 25 years but, having examined the evidence, I still don’t know how the COVID pandemic began. I do know that the question is important and that debating it should be encouraged, not stifled.

…TDB will continue following this vital debate.

Over 7million lives were lost because of Covid and an enormous amount of social damage caused. We need to know the truth of how it started.

 

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