Ever since the coronavirus pandemic began, the question has been, “Where did COVID-19 originate?”
According to a report by NPR, a member of the World Health Organization investigative team says the most likely source of the COVID-19 pandemic are “wildlife farms in southern China.”
Peter Daszak, a disease ecologist with EcoHealth Alliance, and a member of the WHO delegation that traveled to China earlier this year, told NPR that during that trip, new evidence was found by the WHO team, that vendors at the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan were being supplied with animals from these wildlife farms.
Daszak told NPR that when the Chinese government shut down those wildlife farms in February 2020, the “response was a strong signal that the Chinese government thought those farms were the most probable pathway for a coronavirus in bats in southern China to reach humans in Wuhan.”
The report said the wildlife farms were part of a project the Chinese government has been promoting for 20 years.
Daszak said: “They take exotic animals, like civets, porcupines, pangolins, raccoon dogs and bamboo rats, and they breed them in captivity,” NPR cited. He added that the project was a means to “alleviate rural populations out of poverty,”
In the next two weeks, the WHO is expected to reveal the team’s investigative findings. However, Daszak provided NPR with a “highlight” of what the team determined.
The wildlife farms were very successful.
With regards to the wildlife farm project, Daszak told NPR, “It was very successful.” He added, “In 2016, they had 14 million people employed in wildlife farms, and it was a $70 billion industry.”
However, Daszak noted that on Feb. 24, 2020 the Chinese government made a complete reversal about the farms - right at the time the Wuhan outbreak was winding down.
“What China did then was very important,” Daszak said. “They put out a declaration saying that they were going to stop the farming of wildlife for food,” and they shut down the farms.
“They sent out instructions to the farmers about how to safely dispose of the animals — to bury, kill or burn them — in a way that didn’t spread disease,” he added.
Why would the government do this?
Daszak thinks the government acted because these farms could be the point where the coronavirus moved “from a bat into another animal and then into people.” Daszak said, “I do think that SARS-CoV-2 first got into people in South China. It’s looking that way,” the news outlet cited.
There’s good reasoning behind Daszak’s belief. First off, in or around the southern province of Yunnan is where many farms are located. It’s also where “virologists found a bat virus that’s genetically 96% similar to SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes the disease COVID-19.” Second, the farms breed animals such as civet cats and pangolins, which are known to carry coronaviruses, the report said.
Finally, Daszak told NPR that during the WHO’s mission to China new evidence was found by the team indicating that “these farms were supplying vendors at the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan, where an early outbreak of COVID-19 occurred.” After being linked to cases of “what was then described as a mysterious pneumonia-like illness,” the market was shut down overnight on Dec. 31, 2019.
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 at that market for sure.” Following the outbreak at the Huanan market, Wang noted that “Chinese scientists went there and looked for the virus.”
“In the live animal section, they had many positive samples,” Wang told NPR. “They even have two samples from which they could isolate live virus.”
And so, it’s the belief of Daszak and other WHO team members, that “the wildlife farms provided a perfect conduit between a coronavirus-infected bat in Yunnan (or neighboring Myanmar) and a Wuhan animal market,” NPR reported.
“China closes that pathway down for a reason,” Daszak said.
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