“It speaks volumes that this weak and missing data is considered the strongest evidence for a market origin,” molecular biologist Alina Chan of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard told Yahoo News.
A new report suggesting that the coronavirus may have originated in raccoon dogs has energized scientists who have long argued that the pandemic began at a wildlife market in Wuhan, where the pathogen jumped from animals to humans.
Security personnel gather near the entrance of the Wuhan Institute of Virology during a visit by the World Health Organization in 2021. “Now we have definite proof that animals were there that could carry coronaviruses at the time of the outbreak," said Peter Daszak, president of EcoHealth Alliance, a New York-based nonprofit that supported controversial virus research in Wuhan before the 2019 outbreak.
Andersen, Worobey and Holmes have not made their work available to the public. None of them responded to Yahoo News requests for comment.According to the Atlantic, the trio studied genetic material collected from market stalls by Chinese investigators in February 2020, weeks before the World Health Organization declared a pandemic.
To make matters more complicated, the data in question disappeared from the GISAID database after it was accessed by Andersen and his colleagues. WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom GhebreyesusBeijing has been highly reluctant to do so, denying altogether that the virus originated in China, whether in a market or a lab.
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