A team of scientists say it is “beyond reasonable doubt” the Covid pandemic started with infected animals sold at a market, rather than a laboratory leak.
They were analysing hundreds of samples collected from Wuhan, China, in January 2020.
The results identify a shortlist of animals – including racoon dogs, civets and bamboo rats – as potential sources of the pandemic.
Despite even highlighting one market stall as a hotspot of both animals and coronavirus, the study cannot provide definitive proof.
The samples were collected by Chinese officials in the early stages of Covid and are one of the most scientifically valuable sources of information on the origins of the pandemic.
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Their analysis was published last year and the raw data made available to other scientists. Now a team in the US and France says they have performed even more advanced genetic analyses to peer deeper into Covid’s early days.
I know this is off topic, but - why didn’t anyone tell me there’s a species called a raccoon dog?!
Look up some of the Japanese lore about Tanuki (the Japanese name for the raccoon dog). It involves magic, giant scrotums, and all sorts of delightful stuff.
If you like anime, Studio Ghibli (famous for a lot of classics including Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away, and others) did a movie called Pom Poko, which is about tanuki. If you don’t care for subtitles, the English dub is pretty good, and the voice cast stars a lot of well known (for the time) American actors.
You might know of the tanuki, which is specifically the Japanese raccoon dog.
If you’ve ever played Super Mario Bros 3 (or other Mario games where this same suit is found) there’s a Tanooki suit, which is the one that lets you fly!
Wasn’t this known already?
There’s a bunch of indications / conspiracy theories that it might have been a lab leak. Basically there’s not really a way to know unless the Chinese government starts being more forthcoming with information.
The main reason the conspiracy theory started is because the city where it started had a world renowned virus research facility in it.
Of course, the reason the facility is there in the first place is because Wuhan province is a place where a lot of viruses originate naturally (in bat colonies), so it makes sense you research the viruses close to their natural reservoir.
Wuhan province is a place where a lot of viruses originate naturally (in bat colonies)
This is disingenuous. RaTG13 was sourced in Tongguan in Mojiang Hani Autonomous County 1800km from Wuhan.
… what? Bats are virus factories due to how their biology/immune system works. They opened a lab in Wuhan to study any novel viruses coming out of the local bat population. That’s what that person is referencing. Your counter is basically a non sequitar.
I don’t have any information to add one way or the other, but it kinda sounds like you’re saying the fact that one bat-bourne illness was found elsewhere, it’s impossible that Wuhan has many or any such viruses too, which seems pretty fallacious.
Yeah but the US media was too busy implying that China manufactured the virus in a bio lab.
Funnily enough China still suffered because it failed to lock down early enough because the government tried to ignore and detain doctors in an effort to control the narrative that everything would be fine.
The US suffered because they nuked their Pandemic emergency pla only like a few years before covid because Trump thought Spanish Fever wouldn’t reincarnate to finish the job on its 100th anniversary lol.
So it was easy to vaguely point at China instead of actually solving the problem.
I don’t know what US media you were consuming in 2020/21, but it was pretty much understood it came from something exotic in a wet market.
Most of us didn’t know what a wet market existed or what it was until COVID. There was some conspiracy shit that the right ate up, and some editorial and opinions on the idea, but the whole bioengineered super virus escaping a lab wasn’t taken that seriously
the whole bioengineered super virus escaping a lab wasn’t taken that seriously
Excellent evidence why there is such a battle over misinformation.
Wasn’t this disproven already? Covid has been detected in human waste matter samples from Autumn 2019 in Italy.
Overall, the results of this blind retesting of a selected set of samples indicate the presence of SARS-CoV-2 antibodies in some SMILE samples collected in the prepandemic period. The oldest samples found positive for IgM by both laboratories were collected on 10 October 2019 (Lombardy), 11 November 2019 (Lombardy) and 5 February 2020 (Lazio), the latter with neutralizing antibodies. Two additional samples collected on 17 December 2019 (Campania) and 28 January 2020 (Lombardy) tested as IgG positive by VisMederi and positive for IgG S1 and IgG S1+NP by Erasmus. Additional IgM positive cases could have been detected also by Erasmus by lowering the cut-off of the commercial IgM assay. The older among these putative additional IgM positive samples was collected on 3 September 2019 in the Veneto region, one of the first and mostly severely affected COVID-19 regions.
I don’t really understand what this is actually saying?
Surely, if this were saying “covid started in italy” or “covid was around in 2019” that would rate more song and dance than a single obscure research paper?
These findings do not at all suggest that the virus originated in Italy, but they endorse the idea that the virus was likely spreading in China before the first known cases and that could have been circulated by travelers given direct the connections between China and European and US countries, particularly the Northern West and East Italian regions, which are among the most industrialized and connected areas of Italy.
There’s a lot more than a single obscure research paper but that’s the best one in terms of science in my opinion. It was quite broadly covered news (in Europe at least?) when the virus was first found in waste water samples from Milan from the same period.
We knew it was in Europe before 2020 all the way back in June 2020: https://www.reuters.com/article/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/italy-sewage-study-suggests-covid-19-was-there-in-december-2019-idUSKBN23Q1J8/
By November 2020 it was pushed back as far as September 2019: https://newseu.cgtn.com/news/2020-11-17/COVID-19-was-spreading-in-Italy-by-September-2019-study-indicates-VuSqUttP8s/index.html
As someone else replied, it isn’t saying Covid started in Italy, but rather that it definitely didn’t start because someone ate bat soup from a wet market in Wuhan in December 2019. Well, the science is just stating as a fact that Covid was in these samples from Italy in 2019. Everything else is inferred.
It was 2020. We had people shouting about “the China Virus” and others defending the cultural importance of wet markets and others saying it was a bioweapon from a lab and others saying it didn’t exist at all.
It seemed to suit absolutely nobody’s narrative that
- it took longer to be detected than previously thought, and lots of doctors missed it
- we don’t really know where it started exactly, and can’t really ever know without a concerted investigation of the same sort done in Italy
- international travel and globalisation as well as illegal trade of exotic animals and their carcasses makes it all pretty much guesswork, since Indonesian civit poachers on Filipino boats in the South China Sea don’t submit wastewater samples
- ultimately its source was inconsequential compared to how we actually responded and what we retained afterwards (nothing, it seems)
Off topic, but “Genetic Ghosts” would be a sweet band name. I’d go see them.
I’m not into conspiracy theories, but I find the confidence that is used in the defense of this origin just as Shakey as the lab leak theory.
The lab location and research done means there is a lot of potential incentive for the Chinese government, the lab and even researchers in the field to not have it be a lab leak… As this would potentially cause an entire (important) field of study and their methods be regulated into oblivion by poorly written knee jerk laws.
I’m fine with this as the accepted consensus on the subject, but I’ll keep my reservations for whatever good those do me.
So how’s the abolishing of wet markets going? And the reduction of antibiotics use in industrial scale farming?
People have been saying for decades before covid that the wet markets were a ticking time bomb. There has probably been viral outbreaks in the past, but the local population could have died off before it spread.
I think a lab leak of a natural virus is plausible, but irrelevant.
I think lax saftey when experimenting with highly infectious coronaviruses is very relevant.
Either improve the protocols or don’t experiment.
There are wet markets all over China and have been for…ever?
Sure, and they all result in zoonotic illness.
The lab location and research done means there is a lot of potential incentive for the Chinese government, the lab and even researchers in the field to not have it be a lab leak…
They also have incentive for the origin not to be a live animal market that they very publicly had claimed to have already shut down.
It’s equally embarrassing either way, so the embarrassment proves nothing.
Equally embarrassing? Doubtful. One is a market which can be blamed on illegal activity even after being shut down and ‘little’ people arrested. One represents Chinas first foray into LVL 4 containment bio research and cost billions to build and government officials would have to be held accountable and foreign science assistance to that research program likely cuts off… I’m not pleading the case of a conspiracy theory here, but the lab’s proximity to the outbreak is incredibly suspect.
Equally embarrassing? Doubtful.
Why does it have to be equally embarrassing? It just has to be embarrassing enough that they’d take steps to conceal it. Which they did. It doesn’t have to be the most embarrassing situation, just one of the ones that would spur them to act.
One is a market which can be blamed on illegal activity even after being shut down and ‘little’ people arrested.
But they did shut it down and they did arrest people and they even seized and incinerated every animal at the market without taking samples or even identifying and logging the species.
On the other hand they didn’t shut down WIV, or really do anything to it at all.
but the lab’s proximity to the outbreak is incredibly suspect.
It’s 8km away, across a river.
Eating animals causes pandemics from zoonotic diseases. More at 11.
You don’t even need to eat them; just being in close proximity to them and interacting with them is enough.
On the other hands, cows, chickens, and humans came together to create a smallpox vaccine, so there’s that at least.
Yes, it’s just that eating animals has a distinct history of causing horrible pandemics in humans. See e.g. the 1918 H1N1 pandemic which killed tens of millions and was likely started by hogs or chickens farmed in rural Kansas, swine flu which killed hundreds of thousands and whose name speaks for itself, and COVID-19 which killed millions and is well-understood to have originated in a wet market.
Besides all the other reasons that it’s terrible, animal agriculture is a hotbed for transmitting zoonotic diseases to humans and combining existing human diseases with animal ones.
Points to the bar. “You see this bar? I built this bar with my bare hands from the finest wood in the county. Gave it more love and care than my own child. But do they call me MacGregor the bar builder? No.”
Points out the window. “You see that stone wall out there? I built that stone wall with my bare hands. Found every stone, placed them just so through the rain and the cold. But do they call me MacGregor the stone wall builder? No.”
Points out the window. "You see that pier on the lake out there? I built that pier with my bare hands. Drove the pilings against the tide of the sand, plank by plank. But do they call me MacGregor the pier builder? No.
But you fuck one bat …
Would have far less human/animal face time if we didn’t eat so much of them, don’t you think?
Face time probably isn’t the main factor.
If we didn’t eat so many birds and swine then there would be less animals in close quarters and less chance of new bird/swine flus developing.
