Since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, the question has been, “Where did COVID-19 come from?”
According to an NPR report, a member of the World Health Organization investigative team says the most likely source of the COVID-19 pandemic is “wildlife farms in southern China”.
Peter Daszak, a disease ecologist at the EcoHealth Alliance, and a member of the WHO delegation who traveled to China earlier this year, told NPR that during that trip, new evidence was found by the WHO team, who sells at the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan he was receiving animals from these wildlife farms.
Daszak told NPR that when the Chinese government closed these wildlife farms in February 2020, the “response was a strong sign that the Chinese government thought these farms were the most likely route for a coronavirus in bats in southern China. reach humans in Wuhan. “
The report states that wildlife farms are part of a project that the Chinese government has been promoting for 20 years.
Daszak said: “They take exotic animals, such as civets, hedgehogs, pangolins, raccoon dogs and bamboo mice, and raise them in captivity,” quoted the NPR. He added that the project was a means of “alleviating the poverty of rural populations”,
In the next two weeks, WHO is expected to reveal the results of the team’s investigation. However, Daszak provided NPR with a “highlight” of what the team determined.
The wildlife farms have been very successful.
Regarding the wildlife farm project, Daszak told NPR: “It was very successful.” He added: “In 2016, they had 14 million people employed on wildlife farms, and it was a $ 70 billion industry.”
However, Daszak noted that on February 24, 2020, the Chinese government made a complete reversal of the farms – just at the time when the Wuhan outbreak was subsiding.
“What China did then was very important,” said Daszak. “They made a statement saying they would stop growing wild animals for food,” and closed the farms.
“They sent instructions to farmers on how to safely dispose of animals – bury, kill or burn them – in a way that would not spread disease,” he added.
Why would the government do that?
Daszak thinks the government acted because these farms could be the point at which the coronavirus would “move from a bat to another animal and then to people”. Daszak said: “I really think SARS-CoV-2 hit people for the first time in southern China. It looks like this ”, quoted the media.
There is good reasoning behind Daszak’s belief. First, it is in or around Yunnan province that many farms are located. It is also where “virologists have found a bat virus that is 96% genetically similar to SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes COVID-19 disease”. Second, farms raise animals such as civet cats and pangolins, which are known to carry coronaviruses, the report said.
Finally, Daszak told NPR that during the WHO mission to China, new evidence was found by the team indicating that “these farms were supplying sellers at the Huanan Wholesale Seafood Market in Wuhan, where an early COVID-19 outbreak occurred. ” After being linked to cases of “what was then described as a mysterious pneumonia-like illness”, the market was closed overnight on December 31, 2019.
The NPR cited another member of the WHO investigative team, Linfa Wang, a virologist who studies bat viruses at Duke-NUS Medical School in Singapore, who said: “There was massive transmission going on in that market, for sure.” After the outbreak in the Huanan market, Wang noted that “Chinese scientists went there and looked for the virus”.
“In the live animals section, they had a lot of positive samples,” Wang told NPR. “They still have two samples from which they can isolate live viruses.”
And so, it is the belief of Daszak and other members of the WHO team, that “wildlife farms have provided a perfect channel between a coronavirus-infected bat in Yunnan (or neighboring Myanmar) and an animal market in Wuhan,” reported the NPR.
“China closes this path for a reason,” said Daszak.
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