"COVID-19 origin theorists could be right about a Chinese government cover-up," reports The Week, "but they might have their sights set in the wrong direction, an American virologist suggested to Bloomberg."
When an international group of experts organized by the World Health Organization traveled to Wuhan, China, earlier this year to research the origins of the coronavirus that sparked the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, they visited the Baishazhou market, which is larger, but perhaps less well-known (internationally, at least) than the Huanan market, where many people initially believed the virus first jumped from wild animals to humans.
The research team was told only frozen foods, ingredients, and kitchenware were sold there. But a recently released study that had previously languished in publishing limbo showed, thanks to data meticulously collected over 30 months, that at least two vendors there regularly sold live wild animals, Bloomberg reports. Bloomberg also notes that one of the earliest recorded COVID-19 clusters in Wuhan [December 19th] involved a Huanan stall employee who traded goods back and forth between the two markets.
A link between them would be "very intriguing," Stephen Goldstein, an evolutionary virology research associate at the University of Utah, told Bloomberg...
[I]t seems likely to Goldstein that some authorities didn't want the presence of a thriving wildlife trade to become public knowledge. "It seems to me, at a minimum, that local or regional authorities kept that information quiet deliberately. It's incredible to me that people theorize about one type of cover-up," he said, likely referring to the hypothesis that the virus actually leaked from a nearby government-run lab, "but an obvious cover-up is staring them right in the face."
The paper contains "meticulously collected data and photographic evidence supporting scientists' initial hypothesis — that the outbreak stemmed from infected wild animals..." according to Bloomberg's article. (Alternate URL here.)
According to the report, which was published in June in the online journal Scientific Reports, minks, civets, raccoon dogs, and other mammals known to harbor coronaviruses were sold in plain sight for years in shops across the city, including the now infamous Huanan wet market, to which many of the earliest Covid cases were traced... [Researcher Xiao Xiao's] animal logs included masked palm civets and raccoon dogs — both involved in the 2003 SARS outbreak — and other species susceptible to coronavirus infections, such as bamboo rats, minks, and hog badgers. Of the 38 species Xiao documented, 31 were protected.
Anyone caught violating China's wild animal conservation law faces fines and up to 15 years of imprisonment. But enforcement was lax, as evidenced by the fact that many of the Wuhan shops displayed their wares openly, "caged, stacked and in poor condition," Xiao observed in the report.
Xiao estimated that 47,381 wild animals were sold in Wuhan over the survey period.
Collaborating with four more scientists (including three from the University of Oxford), Xiao had submitted their manuscript to a journal for publication in February of 2020 — only to have it rejected. "Had the study been made public right away, the search for the origins of the virus might have taken a very different course..." Bloomberg writes:
Disease detectives arriving from Beijing on the first day of 2020 ordered environmental samples to be collected from drains and other surfaces at the market. Some 585 specimens were tested, of which 33 turned out to be positive for SARS-CoV-2... All but two of the positive specimens came from a cavernous and poorly-ventilated section of the market's western wing, where many shops sold animals....
As other nations began blaming the Chinese Communist Party for the pandemic, the government grew defensive. It may have been embarrassed that its citizens were still eating wild animals bought in wet markets — a well-known path for zoonotic disease transmission that China tried unsuccessfully to outlaw almost 20 years ago...
Geng Shuang, a spokesman for China's Foreign Ministry, denied "wildlife wet markets" existed in the country...
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
