A researcher in France has identified previously undisclosed genetic data from the Huanan Seafood Market in Wuhan, China, that she and colleagues say support the theory that coronavirus-infected animals there triggered the COVID-19 pandemic. Science has more.
Several of the researchers presented their findings on Tuesday to the Scientific Advisory Group for the Origins of Novel Pathogens (SAGO), an expert group convened last year by the World Health Organisation.
“The data does point even further to a market origin,” says Kristian Andersen, an evolutionary biologist at Scripps Research who attended the meeting and is one of the scientists analysing the new data. If so, the findings weaken the view of a vocal minority that a virology lab in Wuhan was the likely origin of SARS-CoV-2, perhaps when the coronavirus infected a lab worker, who spread it further.
Florence Débarre, a theoretician who specialises in evolutionary biology and works at the French National Centre for Scientific Research, unearthed the data, which consists of genetic sequences posted in GISAID, a virology database, by Chinese researchers. The Chinese team had collected environmental samples from the Huanan Seafood Market, which was connected to a cluster of early COVID-19 cases and despite its name also sold a variety of mammals for food. Since Débarre spotted the sequences, GISAID has removed them, noting that this was at the request of the submitter.
Given that the mystery of SARS-CoV-2’s origin has been a matter of intense global interest and divisive debate, the data’s discovery and subsequent disappearance will certainly raise questions about why the Chinese team — which includes the former head of China’s Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), George Gao — did not make the sequences public earlier. Contacted by Science, Gao said the sequences are “[n]othing new. It had been known there was illegal animal dealing and this is why the market was immediately shut down”.
But Andersen and his colleagues hope Gao’s team will now make the sequences widely available. “We have urged China CDC and our colleagues there to release this data as soon as possible,” he says.
Gao’s team used swabs to collect environmental samples from many of the stalls of the Huanan market between January 1st, the day it was shut down, and March 2nd 2020. The group reported last year that some of the samples that tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 also had human genetic material, but no DNA from other animals. The team concluded in a preprint posted on Research Square on February 25th 2022, that this “highly suggests” humans brought the virus to the market — a finding that Gao and co-authors wrote meant the marketplace was not the origin of the pandemic but simply amplified early spread of SARS-CoV-2.
To some Chinese researchers and officials, that scenario suggested the virus originated outside China and somehow found its way to Wuhan. To lab leak supporters, it implied the pandemic might have started at the Wuhan lab.
Worth reading in full.
Lower down, the article notes that Andersen adds he does not expect the new data to convince everyone that the virus originated at the market as “he suspects some people may interpret the new information to mean simply that humans infected with SARS-CoV-2 transmitted the virus to the animals at the market”.
We’ll have to wait to see the detail when it’s published, but from these reports it sounds like it’s pretty inconclusive. If it did corroborate the wet market theory it would be very surprising at this point, as the evidence that the virus did not originate there is now very strong. It includes not only the fact that no animal reservoirs of the virus were found there but that many of the early sequenced cases had no connection to the market, that the cases at the market were all (except one) of the later lineage B, plus all the evidence that the virus is engineered including being immediately well-adapted to human transmission with a unique (in SARS-like viruses) furin cleavage site in its receptor binding domain. Traces of the virus have also been found in Brazil, England and the U.S. during November 2019, strongly challenging the idea that the December wet market outbreak was the point of origin.
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Oh please shut up Science journalist with your stupid, meaningless distractions. We’re wise to you and your tactics by now. And stop disparaging the animals!
”This story to me would seem to be yet another in the long line of nonsense meant to disctract and divide us. This theory posits that, whilst still arising out of the Wuhan seafood market, it was raccoon dogs that were being offered for sale for human consumption that carried covid, and transmitted it to humans. It creates division by pitting you against each other in the lab leak/animal source debate – a worthless and entirely unnecessary argument.”
https://lawhealthandtech.substack.com/p/how-many-animals-will-they-disparage
P.S I got passed the pop-up wall to the linked article (NYT ) using the ‘Esc’ trick, but here’s a chunk if you can’t do it;
”The genetic data was drawn from swabs taken from in and around the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market starting in January 2020, shortly after the Chinese authorities had shut down the market because of suspicions that it was linked to the outbreak of a new virus. By then, the animals had been cleared out, but researchers swabbed walls, floors, metal cages and carts often used for transporting animal cages.
In samples that came back positive for the coronavirus, the international research team found genetic material belonging to animals, including large amounts that were a match for the raccoon dog, three scientists involved in the analysis said.
The jumbling together of genetic material from the virus and the animal does not prove that a raccoon dog itself was infected. And even if a raccoon dog had been infected, it would not be clear that the animal had spread the virus to people. Another animal could have passed the virus to people, or someone infected with the virus could have spread the virus to a raccoon dog.
But the analysis did establish that raccoon dogs — fluffy animals that are related to foxes and are known to be able to transmit the coronavirus — deposited genetic signatures in the same place where genetic material from the virus was left, the three scientists said. That evidence, they said, was consistent with a scenario in which the virus had spilled into humans from a wild animal.”
“Oh please shut up Science journalist with your stupid, meaningless distractions. We’re wise to you and your tactics by now. And stop disparaging the animals!”
That’s all that needs to be said Mogs.
I am weary of seeing, because I am not going to read, tripe like this. I firmly believe the C1984 was manufactured in a lab but wherever it came from I no longer care greatly. The C1984 was in reality the excuse for the greatest propoganda fear campaign that the world has ever witnessed outside war time. And the purpose of the campaign? To soften up billions of people into accepting a poisonous injection. These injections were designed to maim and kill in both the short and long term. This campaign was unleashed across most of the Western world. I need not extrapolate from here as I have done so often enough.
Articles such as this are as you rightly state, “meaningless distractions.” We cannot undo what has been inflicted on us but we must be prepared for Billy’s next one and all the rest of the shyte that’s being attempted such as ULEZ, 15 minute ghettos, CBDC’s and their ultimate goal – digital ID’S.
So you believe that the elites sat down and colluded to hatch a plan to “kill and maim” millions with a drug?
What on earth would be the purpose of doing that?
What would they gain?
Why now? Why didn’t they do it 10 years ago? or 20?
They already have money, power and influence, what more could they want?
It’s ludicrous, paranoid nonsense.
And do you believe that the elites are acting in their interests or in ours? Do you not feel the constant lies and traducing of legitimate scientific viewpoints shows huge arrogance as a minimum. It also shows disdain. A conspiracy isn’t needed if we’re already viewed as cattle. It’s inbuilt.
Lockdown made them way way richer and turned the fearful proles against the thinking types. They learned how to push us around and make us beg for more.
Yes they are guilty. No, I don’t know exactly who, but I know their stooges.
Agreed. Smoke to distract from FBI support of lab-leak. No trustworthy evidence will come from China. “Our thorough investigation into our own behaviours has exonerated us.”
Some western media still show the long discredited video of the man collapsing ‘dead’ in the street. The Beeb even refer to the joke stats of 8k deaths in China as proof that their lockdown was successful.
The problem isn’t simply whether the initial spreading event was the wet market or not.
The problem is that government scientists spread misinformation in early 2020 that it definitely wasn’t a lab leak, resulting in there being no efforts to gain information about the lab and gather evidence for there being a lab leak.
We’d certainly have a much better idea of the origins of Covid if we did have similar samples from the local biolab and its staff.
As it stands we’ve only got ‘inconclusive’. As far as I can tell this only helps the Chinese government is deflecting blame away from themselves.
If it was a leak from the biolab, then it is likely that the world suffered additional deaths numbering in the millions just because the Chinese authorities didn’t inform the world in a timely manner exactly what it was that their research was trying to achieve (ie, some deaths would have been inevitable, but we could have saved more with additional information).
Indeed. Surely there are a lot of people who know exactly where the virus came from, and lots of other people who probably have the power to find out. Surely the USA either knows or could find out. If they know, why are they not saying? If they don’t know, why are they not trying to find out?
I agree there are people who know exactly where it came from. It was US technology, but exactly who created it needs to be verified. The best way to prevent the next pandemic is to punish the people responsible for the last one..
“The best way to prevent the next pandemic”
I don’t know of one in my lifetime.
Maybe I should have said media pandemic. The next one will have a big affect on us all real or not.
They’ll all be wriggling out from under as fast as possible.
why are they not trying to find out?
Who cares tof? It won’t change anything.
Oh I’ve got a strong suspicion why they are not trying to find out!
The whole thing is reported to all be part of US Department of Defense activity in the area of biological research with potential weapons uses. They don’t want an investigation because of the likelihood of some fairly dodgy things coming to light.
I dunno about you but my money’s on the “cats are the carriers of the Mass Hysteria scamdemic” theory.
I’m not sure that knife will come out Mogs, it’s in too deep
I suspect that the reason why China is used for this sort of research is the fact that when it all goes pair shaped everybody can deny and the Chinese will not be forth coming with information.
Precisely so
How much do you think Fauci bunged them to say that?
Anybody care to place a bet as to where the Scripps Research Institute received a large dollop of its funding from?
https://www.gatesfoundation.org/about/committed-grants/2020/06/inv002916
Yes, and Kristian Andersen (Scripps) was included Fauci’s emails in 2020 when he said “(we) find the genome inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory”. Two days later he changed his mind.
“he suspects some people may interpret the new information to mean simply that humans infected with SARS-CoV-2 transmitted the virus to the animals at the market”. You don’t say. And it is extremely odd that the link between human and animal transmission has been found in samples from the wet market three years after the Chinese started desperately looking for that link in that market.
Animals don’t generally genetically splice their own DNA!
“The Covid-19 pathogen has a genetic footprint that has never been observed in a natural coronavirus.”
‘…an expert group convened last year by the World Health Organisation.’
The WHO. We should believe anything associated with that bag of pus and corruption and its ‘experts’ because…?
Kristian Andersen: where have I seen that name before? Oh yes, Dr Campbell’s latest video at 7.37.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TYiy2pclRxQ
No relation to Hans Christian Andersen.
Whitty and Vallance would be the Brothers Grimm.
Who funded the research – was it the WHO by any chance?
Isn’t the whole point of being a theoritician that anything is possible, even 3+ years after the event?
Andersen co-wrote the lab-leak debunking article in Nature Medicine in early 2020 (“The Proximal Origin of Sars-Cov-2″) following secretive teleconferences with Fauci, Farrar and other. He also wrote an email to German participant Christian Drosten, which admitted that “our main work over the last couple of weeks has been focused on trying to disprove any type of lab theory.” He needs to keep that storyline going to rescue his reputation and the jobs of all the Strangelovian labgeeks who are the real origin of the pandemic.