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Science

Scientists Again Link Covid Pandemic Origin to Wuhan Market Animals (msn.com) 103

Posted by EditorDavid from the following-the-science dept.
The Washington Post reports: An international team of scientists published a peer-reviewed paper Thursday saying genetic evidence indicates the coronavirus pandemic most likely originated with a natural spillover from an animal or animals sold in a market in Wuhan, China, where many of the first human cases of covid-19 were identified. The paper, which appears in the journal Cell, does not claim to prove conclusively that the pandemic began in the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, and it is unlikely to end the acrimonious and politicized debate over the coronavirus's origin... "The results we see are consistent with infected animals, but we cannot prove that they were," said Florence Débarre, an evolutionary biologist at the French National Center for Scientific Research and a co-author of the new paper...

Many of the 23 authors of the paper are known to have long supported a market origin for the virus. In an informal report in March 2023, they presented a central feature of the genetic data — the confirmation that animals potentially capable of triggering a pandemic were in the market... The new paper in Cell is longer, more comprehensive, probes a broader range of questions, and includes more data from the market and early-patient cases than the international team's informal 2023 report, Débarre said. Both the earlier and the new reports document that traces of the virus were found clustered in a section of the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market where genetic traces of animals were also found. Several of those species — raccoon dogs, rabbits and dogs — are known to be susceptible to infection with SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes covid. Raccoon dogs have also been shown experimentally to be capable of transmitting the virus. A significant element of the new paper is an analysis of when the pandemic began. Scientists can study mutations of the coronavirus, which evolves at a relatively steady rate, to estimate when the millions of genomes deposited in databases had the most recent common ancestor. That genetic evidence points to mid-November 2019 as the most likely time the virus spilled into humans and began spreading, and there could have been two or more spillover events, the researchers said.

"The timing of the origin of the market outbreak is genetically indistinguishable from the timing of the origin of the pandemic as a whole," the report states. There are many independent lines of evidence pointing to the market as the epicenter of the pandemic, said Kristian Andersen, an infectious-disease researcher at Scripps Research in La Jolla, Calif., and a co-author of the report in Cell. No previous virus spillover has been so well-documented, he said. "Of any previous outbreak, pandemic, you name it, we don't have this level of granularity," he said. "We can narrow it down to a single market, and narrow it down to a section in that market, and maybe even narrow it down to a single stall in that market. That is mind-boggling...." The genetic evidence, the new report contends, supports the hypothesis that SARS-CoV-2 emerged in the same way that SARS-CoV-1 — which sickened people in 2002-2003 but was extinguished before it could cause a full-blown pandemic — is widely believed to have started, from animals sold in a market.

The authors contend the world needs to take more aggressive action to shut down the illegal trade in wildlife to lower the risk of another catastrophic pandemic... There is no evidence that the virus, or its progenitor, was inside a laboratory before the outbreak.... "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."
One co-author posted a summary on X.com "If you don't want to read the papers."
  • "Early cases centered around the market (not a lab)"
  • "Environmental swabs that tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 clustered in the corner of the market where animals were sold."
  • "There were 2 lineages of SARS2 that spilled over separately at Huanan."

Scientists Again Link Covid Pandemic Origin to Wuhan Market Animals More | Reply

Scientists Again Link Covid Pandemic Origin to Wuhan Market Animals

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  • Let's see what the experts have to say about this.

    • This is gonna be good!

    • Re:Grabs my Frosty (Score:5, Funny)

      by Savage-Rabbit ( 308260 ) on Saturday September 21, 2024 @04:11PM (#64806053)

      Let's see what the experts have to say about this.

      Lemme guess: something, something, ... CCP lab, ..., something, something, ... victimise Trump ..., something, something, ... Deep State ..., something, something, ... horse dewormer ..., something, something, ... DEMONcrats ..., something, something, ... Lizard people ..., something, something, ... eating cats and dogs ..., something, something, ... Killary Clinton ...

      • Let's see what the experts have to say about this.

        Lemme guess: something, something, ... CCP lab, ..., something, something, ... victimise Trump ..., something, something, ... Deep State ..., something, something, ... horse dewormer ..., something, something, ... DEMONcrats ..., something, something, ... Lizard people ..., something, something, ... eating cats and dogs ..., something, something, ... Killary Clinton ...

        In future news, Trump goes off prompter at a rally and says this exact thing -- including all the "something, something" ...

      • You forgot "something, something, ... Fauci"!

      • "they're eating the DOGS. they're eating the CATS. they're eating .... your pets!"

        I'm sorry, world. lets hope we get beyond this stage of our country's adolescence.

        btw, dont let the cat out of the bag. safer to leave them in. if you know what I mean.

    • Hold on let me tweet Joe Rogan.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by mspohr ( 589790 )

      Do you mean the expert scientists who wrote this paper or the basement dwellers up to their necks in conspiracy theories?

    • Re:Grabs my Frosty (Score:4, Interesting)

      by phantomfive ( 622387 ) on Saturday September 21, 2024 @06:48PM (#64806367) Journal
      The only reason there's any controversy at all is because of the secrecy from the Chinese researchers. They could end the controversy immediately by releasing their data. (To be fair, there's unneeded secrecy on the part of American researchers as well).

    • Don't listen to the experts, with their education, and data, and fact-based conclusions. The pundits on TV, Cable Channels, and Social Media Influencers are the ones who know everything. They said it was a lab leak! How could they all be wrong?

  • What I really get a kick of, though, are the commenters on slashdot and elsewhere saying "CCP virus" etc. in support of lab leak, but also denying that the US had any part in the research. It's a weird take that kind of glows since right wingers who care about covid's baclground would be familiar with the NSAID part of the story.

  • I don't care how thoroughly you search under the street light if you only search under the streetlight.

    The notion of falsifiability in science is both obvious and subtle. Obvious in that, of course, there's no sense in believing something that you can't tell is right or wrong. Subtle in that actually telling whether something is right or wrong can be devilishly tricky.

    Let's draw a very simple analogy. Let's say I give you gizmo with a single light on it that turns on when there's a MumbleGrumble in the vici

    • Hey guys... did RightwingNutjob get killed and replaced by a ChatGPT script? Can someone go and check if he's okay...

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by dfghjk ( 711126 )

      I like how you reject any notion of scientific process in favor of reinventing the world.

      I'd like to know, first, what a MumbleGrumble is. We should not have to discover that, and given that information we may know a great deal about your detector without any of your nonsense.

      "Maybe. But if all you do is that, you have fooled yourself into thinking you know something. Maybe the peak light on place is where the MumbleGrumble is, or maybe the light goes on where there are MumbleGrumbles but something else se

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by HiThere ( 15173 )

        That's an unfair criticism. He's using "MumbleGrumble" as a type specifier, not as an instance. And in the model he's presenting, the "MumbleGrumble" could be responding to, e.g. either magnetic fields or vibration. Say that it was supposed to detect magnetic fields, but could also respond to vibration and you have a reasonable objection.
        I don't believe the objection is valid, as I think the model is a poor analogy, but if you accept the model then his objection is valid.

    • Re:Apply the same level of scrutiny to the lab (Score:5, Insightful)

      by starworks5 ( 139327 ) on Saturday September 21, 2024 @04:12PM (#64806059) Homepage

      There is no such thing as falsifiability with history, there is no way to prove scientifically that Jesus was born, and therein lies the problem. Even if we take as granted that the covid pandemic was tied to Wuhan market, it is fundamentally impossible to prove how the animals in the market got sick, they could have acquired the virus from one of the lab workers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, even if we accept everything that the authors say is true.

      I would also like to mention, that every major world power has a bioweapons program, including the United States. Chinese generals have also purportedly wanted to develop ethnic bioweapons, and the Covid hysteria by Government Officials was an attempt to not look weak, i.e. to portray that we are not vulnerable to a bioweapons attack.

      • Indeed, from what we've seen and the way the lab was working, there are two possibilities which would implicate both the lab and the market.

        1. The virus appeared in the market and the lab was working furiously to try to understand what was happening. In their haste, they released the virus further.

        2. The virus leaked from the lab. In order to cover it up, the virus was introduced into the market.

        I guess there's a third possibility of two simultaneous leaks as well although that seems to be a bit fa

      • Or they could have been infected by the CIA in an effort to start a pandemic in China as an act of biological warfare. You can choose any cause that appeals to you and make the case for it to the satisfaction of people who share your beliefs. If you are Chinese its those venal Americans. If you are American its those venal Chinese. And god forbid you suggest there is any moral equivalency that would make both equally unlikely.

        Anyone remember the Anthrax scare after 911? The origins of the weaponized anthra

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by rta ( 559125 )

      pretty much and even an AP article , for once, contextualizes this study quite well:

      Woolhouse said the new study, while significant, left some critical issues unanswered.

      “There is no question COVID was circulating at that market, which was full of animals,” he said. “The question that still remains is how it got there in the first place.”

      https://apnews.com/article/cov... [apnews.com]

      And contrary to some of the ppists in this thread there's no claims in the paper (afaict) that the virus was changed in sone meaningful way by these animals or that they were particularly involved in it's spread. It's still the case that these animals were present in those stalls and that covid was also present and the animals likely had active infections while there.

      in addition, it's s

  • Sure they do (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Let's keep this narrative going. Heaven forefend we should admit an obvious truth: it got loose from the virology lab next door.

    • The report doesn't say anything directly about whether or not the virus originated in a lab. It only traces it back to some animals in a nearby wet market. Nobody said how the animals got infected in the first place.

      We do know that multiple strains of Covid-19 have been observed jumping from humans to animals.

      • Re:Sure they do (Score:5, Insightful)

        by hey! ( 33014 ) on Saturday September 21, 2024 @07:49PM (#64806477) Homepage Journal

        I worked in zoonotic disease surveillance for many years, although I was out of the business when SARS-COV-2 emerged.

        The conspiracy theories about SARS-COV-2 being cooked up in a lab are popular because they're simple, satisfying, and plausible sounding until you really start looking into them. Zoonotic diseases, on the other hand, nearly always sound implausible. The life cycle of the pathogen is often confusingly convoluted, and the path to human spillover involves a sequence of extremely unlikely events and require the interaction of things people never anticipated were related.

        And yet novel zoonoses emerge on a regular basis, even though each emergence is implausibly unlikely. It's because these may be tail events, but the number of *trials* is huge: basically every time a human comes in contact with a potentially infected animal there is a very remote chance of a zoonosis emerging.

        It's like God is the dungeon master and humanity is a player making a saving through on a d-one-million once every minute or so. We roll one-million about once every year or two, and a new zoonotic disease emerges. Every emergence a black swan event, and with black swan events people never have difficulty cooking up explanations that sound more plausible than what actually happened.

        Truth really is stranger than fiction in these cases.

    • Let's keep this narrative going. Heaven forefend we should admit an obvious truth: it got loose from the virology lab next door.

      Yeah obviously. It's either that or it happened the same way as last time.

  • Sure, it'd be nice to nail down details of the previous scary time for everybody, but what about catching the next one earlier? Or stopping anything else scary before it can impact us all?

    I don't trust other people to do what is best for everyone else (isolate and report problems). Especially when their own lives are impacted. And I don't think our society helps them be good people either (with universal healthcare, or general paid vacation/sick time access).

    How do we minimally bother people, but still n

    • > what about catching the next one earlier? Or stopping anything else scary before it can impact us all?

      If the epicenter is China... good luck. They're far more interested in cover-ups than prevention.

      Even authoritarian regimes have limits to their power, and apparently locking the sick in their apartments during an outbreak is one thing, but taking away their wet markets and other unsafe food habits is another.

      • [China] They're far more interested in cover-ups than prevention.

        This is just an anecdote, but I flew out of Wuhan airport mid-November 2019. There were uniformed people at security checkpoints, taking everybody's temperature before letting them get to the airplanes. During the same trip I had flown to and from other cities in China, and this was the only airport where temperature was checked. I didn't pay much attention at the time, thinking it's just some local bureaucratic idiocy; I only connected this event to the COVID epidemic a couple of months later, when the new

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by rgmoore ( 133276 )

      Sure, it'd be nice to nail down details of the previous scary time for everybody, but what about catching the next one earlier?

      These are not opposing goals. If you want to stop the next pandemic, it helps to understand how previous pandemics spread. The most recent pandemic is possibly the best place to start, because it happened under conditions most similar to those in effect today. Those who refuse to study history are doomed to repeat it, and that applies just as much to the history of this pandemic

  • And how much is he paying to promote conspiracy theories aligned with his interests?

  • An exotic animal bazaar with zero hygiene control; a bioweapons lab in an authoritarian state with zero accountability; in the same area, possibly one supplying the other with regular cross-contamination. There's no way anyone is going to untangle that.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by HiThere ( 15173 )

      That depends on whether you are trying to calculate "most probable", or looking for certainty. You sure won't find certainty, and estimating probabilities is quite difficult. (And I favor a theory different from either of the two dominant theories.)

      But you can always estimate probabilities. The problem is calculating your error bars (degrees of certainty).

  • They can say it originated at the market, but it seems to me that whoever captured and transported the animal would probably have been infected even earlier. Although the marketplace may have exposed more people.

    • Re:The animals came from somewhere (Score:5, Insightful)

      by hey! ( 33014 ) on Saturday September 21, 2024 @05:29PM (#64806215) Homepage Journal

      Well, maybe. We can't rule that out, nor can we rule out a lot of other things.

      The question being addressed here is, I think, what is the link between the place where we know the virus must have originated and the first identified outbreak at a wet market 1500 kilometers from the nearest bat cave? It's not unreasonable to focus on the bush meat trade, since that's what the market specialized in. Whether the pathogen actually arrived at that market in an animal or a person like a truck driver is a question we'll never be able to answer, and is not really consequential. If you want to stop this from happening again, you need to eliminate the bush meat trade, or you have to regulate it.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by HiThere ( 15173 )

        Actually, that one's very consequential, and I strongly favor the truck driver or merchant. The reason is that it was already adapted to transmit between humans in a relatively inconspicuous manner, and many of the infections weren't noticed by the people carrying them. To me this strongly points to an endemic disease with an animal host. The only plausible alternative seems (to me) to be a lab creation intentionally designed for human transmission. And that the US would pay China to create such a thing

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Lehk228 ( 705449 )
      something like half of cases had no symptoms, so patient 0 may have never even known he or she was infected.
  • Of course, the first _reported_ cases came from a high-traffic area.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by cirby ( 2599 )

      They are sorta skipping the "some idiot lab assistant let himself get exposed, started feeling a little ill, and spread it to a number of people, one of which went to the market" theory.

      Heck, if it was someone in their early 20s, they might have been contagious without feeling too bad.

      All this study does is nail down one of the early vector locations, not establish the actual origin.

  • The article is pretty clear that the animals in question are also easily infected by coronavirus. That animals at the market are infected early on, just like humans at the market are infected early on, does not mean the nearby lab doing coronavirus gain of function research on animals is not involved. A leak from the lab, human or animal, may have gone to the market and infected both animals and people.

    An initial cluster shows where patient zero (human or animal) first came into contact with a large popu

  • Ha I had it in October 2019 (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Tiberius2019 ( 6367696 ) on Saturday September 21, 2024 @05:07PM (#64806189)
    If they think it was spread from Nov 2019 in Wuhan, they should probably have checked the flights from SFO to Seattle in October when I first got it. I can still remember not being able to stop coughing unless I had a cough drop in my mouth and I was burning up on that flight. I know it was the same covid-19 because I have gotten that same virus and it temporarily damages my kidneys each time. I get magnesium and calcium reabsorption issues each time that drop my energy levels significantly, call it long haul covid or the reason why so many people died one or two months after recovery from hospitalizations, I know I beat it because I was lucky enough to learn how to counter some early low magnesium symptoms. So, yeah, no Wuhan believer here. My dad even had the same symptoms that same month and went on get kidney stage for 4 disease after it took out his kidneys, again this was October 2019 before any Wuhan outbreak occurred.

    • I know it was the same covid-19 because I have gotten that same virus and it temporarily damages my kidneys each time.

      That's meaningless unless you can rule out other viruses don't present the same symptoms. If you get influenza, or rhinovirus, does it temporarily damage your kidneys? Be scientific about it.

      • Yeah, even I kept discounting that it was Covid-19 causing the problem behind the kidneys too until I went on the Long Haul forums and the first thing they suggested that worked for them also worked to restore my kidneys ability to reabsorb magnesium and calcium. Two weeks on an antihistamine.

        My dad was in Colorado and I was in California, we both complained how the virus hit us the same week and impacted our energy levels more than normal for months afterwards. I know the virus was already spread out ac

  • I mean, unless they somehow discovered incontrovertible evidence that it was a Chinese government operation to deliberately start a pandemic, or something else equally outlandish, does it really matter anymore where the gods-be-damned virus came from? It's not even a pandemic anymore, it's endemic, we're stuck with it, probably for as long as our species exists.
    Managing outbreaks of it, and continual development of a better vaccine against it should be the primary focus, that and dispelling all the disinfo

    • I mean, unless they somehow discovered incontrovertible evidence that it was a Chinese government operation to deliberately start a pandemic,

      Ironically the work in the lab (creating coronaviruses) was funded by the American government. That part's not even controversial.

      • I mean, unless they somehow discovered incontrovertible evidence that it was a Chinese government operation to deliberately start a pandemic,

        Ironically the work in the lab (creating coronaviruses) was funded by the American government. That part's not even controversial.

        Hey Cletus, you misspelled 'Murican' and 'gubbermint'.

  • First: the CCP lies all the time, they have lied about this many times. The US government and the media lie too.

    Second: From the time you contact the virus, until the time you show symptoms, is what? 3 or 4 days? So cited where the virus showed up does not mean much. Frankly, it seems a little desperate.

    I don't know what happened, but this story proves nothing.

  • "Bat-origin RaTG13 is currently the most phylogenetically related virus."
    https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/p... [nih.gov]

    How does a bat corona virus end up in civets and racoon dogs in a wet market with supposedly no bats?

    • Because civets and racoon dogs tend to live near bats. It might be that the virus jumps to them fairly regularly but doesn't normally continue to spread to people. Or it might not be.

  • Does it matter ? (Score:3)

    by nehumanuscrede ( 624750 ) on Saturday September 21, 2024 @09:24PM (#64806647)

    At this point you either:

    1) Believe the narrative that this came out of some wet market in China.

    or

    2) Believe the narrative that this was created in a Chinese Lab and, due to either incompetence or malicious intent, was released into the wild.

    There is a no amount of evidence that will sway either side from what they believe.
    Those battle lines are firmly drawn and there is absolutely nothing that will erase them at this point.

    Just let it go.

    Hell, I've added Covid to the list of topics to never discuss alongside religion and politics.

    People are just way, Way, WAY too passionate about the topic and nothing positive ever comes from discussions about them.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      All that matters is how we deal with the next one. Unfortunately we fucked that up already by being obsessed with assigning blame. Wherever the next one starts, that country will try to cover it up and hope it spreads somewhere else so they can avoid being blamed as the origin, or getting it named after them.

      They probably won't be sharing critical early data with the WHO either, for fear of that blowing back on them.

      The WHO itself was badly weakened by all the politics played over COVID, and by the US tempo

  • I don't understand the false binary here.

    The VERY FIRST story I heard about the origin from a friend from southern China was that it was probably a lab tech or maintenance person, tasked with "disposing" of a batch of lab animals.
    Seeing a side-opportunity to make some $, he sells them to a friend that works the wet market. They may have even all been rated as healthy failed test animals or something so it wasn't even deliberate or (in his view) dangerous.

    I have to say, it still rings credible to me. I *do

    • Your hypothesis is very nice in that it would explain all of the data. If I had mod points they would be yours.
  • To me the interesting question is not if COVID was a lab-escape, but if the safety procedures at infectious disease labs are sufficient to insure that their can't be an escape in the future. Covid did the damage of a thermonuclear bomb in a major city - so labs working with dangerous infectious disease should have nuclear-materials lab like precautions, and I very strongly suspect that they don't.

  • Green-brown steaming puddle of material such as emanates from the south end of a north facing fertile male bovine.

    {+_+}

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