Washington Post: New study links Covid-19 pandemic origin to Wuhan market animals
Research from an international team of scientists found that genetic evidence indicates that the coronavirus pandemic most likely originated from an animal or animals sold in a market in Wuhan, China, where many of the first human cases of the virus were identified, Joel Achenbach reports for The Washington Post.
Achenbach takes a deep dive into the research, published in the journal Cell, writing that the paper does not prove conclusively that the pandemic began in the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market.
“The results we see are consistent with infected animals, but we cannot prove that they were,” Florence Débarre, an evolutionary biologist at the French National Center for Scientific Research and a co-author of the new paper, told Achenbach.
The ongoing debate has been whether the pandemic’s origin was the result of a natural spillover from animals or a leak from a laboratory experimenting on the virus, Achenbach reports.
“The new report bolsters the natural spillover theory, but it does not rule out other origins. A key limitation of the research is that the genetic data, obtained by Chinese investigators in the early days of the pandemic after the market was closed, cannot reveal whether any animal was actually infected with the virus,” he writes.
Achenbach reports in some detail about the debate of where the virus originated, including varying analyses of this issue. However, he closes the story with a quote from Kristian Andersen, an infectious disease researcher at Scripps Research in La Jolla, Calif., and a co-author of the report.
“To the question — Did it come from a lab or come from a market? — I think we already knew the answer to that,” Andersen said. “Yep, it’s the market. It’s natural, as we’ve previously seen happen.”
Kentucky Health News is an independent news service of the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues, based in the School of Journalism and Media at the University of Kentucky, with support from the Foundation for a Healthy Kentucky.
