Don’t Fall for the Chinese Wet Market Theory for Covid

No, Covid didn’t originate from a raccoon dog in Wuhan, says Matt Ridley in the Telegraph. Don’t be fooled by the latest PR buzz surrounding a debunked team’s paper in the scientific journal Cell. Here’s an excerpt:

The new study says there were mammals on sale in the market. We knew that: it was in our book published three years ago. It says there was SARS-CoV-2 in the market; yup, in our book. It says there were two strains in the market, A and B. Well, every human infection in the market was the B strain; the only sign of the older A strain was on a single glove, possibly contaminated in a lab. It says both animals and viruses were concentrated in the south-west corner of the market. Yes, that’s because, the Chinese scientists say, they focused their search on the stalls that had been selling mammals!

None of this is new. What the new paper does not say, because it cannot, is that there was an infected mammal in the market; or a market vendor infected by a mammal. These are the bare minimum clues that in every other zoonotic outbreak scientists have demanded to see. Other viruses that do infect raccoon dogs are in close association with raccoon dog DNA in that market, whereas SARS-CoV-2 is less associated with raccoon dogs in the market samples even than fish.

The new paper’s reasoning demands that a single infected raccoon dog somehow souped up a bat virus enough to spark a global human pandemic without sparking even a single other case among, er, raccoon dogs – and then vanished into thin air. …

There are thousands of markets selling raccoon dogs all over China and South East Asia. Yet by spectacular bad luck, the virus turned up only in the one city in the whole of Asia that has a laboratory focused on collecting, studying, growing and genetically manipulating SARS-like viruses and infecting humanised mice with them: Wuhan.

Worth reading in full.