Chinese researchers have published an eagerly awaited analysis of swabs collected at the wet market in Wuhan that has long been linked to the start of the pandemic — as well as the underlying data.
The latest report lends weight to one of the two competing theories about how the COVID-19 pandemic’s origins. Debate has raged over whether the pandemic had a natural origin, with a virus passing from animals to humans, or arose from a lab leak at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
The findings support the natural-origin hypothesis, says a researcher who was not involved in either study and wishes to remain anonymous owing to the controversy surrounding COVID-origins work. The presence of many wild-animal species means that a viral spillover that resulted in the COVID-19 pandemic could have occurred, says the scientist. Some of those species, such as raccoon dogs, have the potential to transmit SARS-CoV-2 infections, the source adds.
The strange results could be from laboratory contamination, or improper processing of the data that failed to weed out spurious species identifications, says Hughes. “We must be exceedingly careful with interpreting or putting too much faith in the paper.”
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