New research points to raccoon dogs in Wuhan market as pandemic trigger. It's controversial

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With genetic samples from the infamous Wuhan market, a new study makes the case that raccoon dogs are likely the animal that infected humans. Proponents of the lab leak theory are dubious.

A vehicle belonging to the Wuhan Hygiene Emergency Response Team drives past the shuttered Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market on Jan. 11, 2020 — the day that the Wuhan health commission reported what is believed to be the first death from SARS-CoV-2. A new study points to raccoon dogs sold in the market as the likely source of the spillover of the virus from animals to humans.

The results of that sampling would arrive after a delayed and circuitous route – it was posted on a public server briefly and then later publishedinto the hands of Western scientists. When Andersen and his colleagues parsed the genetic sequences of thousands of organisms picked up on those swabs from Stall A, they found the genetic footprint of a host of exotic animals: Masked palm civets, Himalayan marmots, Malayan porcupines as well as raccoon dogs and the viral RNA of SARS-CoV-2.

Michael Worobey is a top virus sleuth. He has tracked the origins of the 1918 flu, HIV and now SARS-CoV-2. Worobey is a research professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Arizona.“It doesn't 100% prove that those animals had SARS-CoV-2, but it shows that you can just say goodbye to the idea that these animals weren't even there at the time the pandemic started. The ghosts of their DNA and RNA were certainly there.

The swabs from the market, Metzl says, are not a representative sample but rather a biased one: The Chinese scientists were preferentially collecting data from the west side of the market, where live animals were known to be sold. “These same authors are once again trying to promote a false consensus about science that is at very least debated,” Mertzl says. “It's just not the case, as these guys would have you believe, that this is science and the other side are a bunch of crazy people with agendas. This is disputed science.”The authors of the new paper acknowledge the dataset’s limitations.

“That is the biggest tell that this market wasn't just somewhere the virus eventually got to after spreading widely in Wuhan. There's very clear indications that that's where the jump successfully took place and human-to-human spread began,” says Worobey.Michael Worobey says for all its uncertainty and imperfect data, the new analysis tells a remarkably detailed story of COVID-19’s likely origins.

 

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