New and hotly debated genetic evidence from a curious doglike animal is adding some crucial pieces in the puzzle of how and where the virus that causes COVID first infected humans. The pieces don’t solve the puzzle—and haven’t entirely quelled the controversy over speculations about a “lab leak”—but they do help clarify the bigger picture.
The findings are “not a ‘smoking raccoon dog,’ but it is pretty indicative that in exactly the same part of the market that our other analyses ... suggested we would find the animals, now we found them in that exact spot—with the virus and without, importantly, much human [DNA present],” says Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at the Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization–International Vaccine Center in Saskatchewan and one of the collaborators on the international report.
Many of the virus-positive samples were clustered in the market’s southwest corner, in the same place where stalls selling live animals were previously reported. Half a dozen virus-positive samples were also positive for raccoon dog DNA or RNA, often at higher amounts than human DNA. One sample contained no human DNA at all. Additionally, the report’s authors found genetic material from Amur hedgehogs, Malayan porcupines, masked palm civets, Siberian weasels, hoary bamboo rats and other animals.
If the market was not the original origin of the SARS-CoV-2 outbreak but rather just the site of a superspreader event caused by people who were already infected, “you’d have to ask, Why there?” Crits-Christoph says. “If humans brought it there, why did they bring it to the place in Wuhan with the most stalls selling wild animals?”
The next step, Crits-Christoph and his colleagues say, would be searching for the virus in wild raccoon dogs and some of the other animals that were being sold when the pandemic began—as well as wild bat populations, which are known to harbor related coronaviruses. But finding an infected animal remains a difficult task. Even if one were found, it wouldn’t be clear that the animal hadn’t been infected by a human.
Meanwhile, in a lab nearby ...
It was the virus factory specializing in the gain of function research on the Covid virus that was a block away. Anything other than that is just you trying to cover for the CCP's incompetence.
So as ususal you post nothing 'animals were present...but stop short of proving' is not Science should prpbably return to proving the Science versus conjecture For those igonorant: conjecture= an opinion or conclusion formed on the basis of incomplete information.