The latest reports say we are still not sure. Eric
New Data Links Pandemic’s Origins to Raccoon Dogs at Wuhan Market
Genetic samples from the market were recently uploaded to an international
database and then removed after scientists asked China about them.
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[Members of the Wuhan Hygiene Emergency Response Team leaving the closed Huanan
Seafood Wholesale Market on Jan. 11, 2020.]
Members of the Wuhan Hygiene Emergency Response Team leaving the closed Huanan
Seafood Wholesale Market on Jan. 11, 2020.Credit...Noel Celis/Agence
France-Presse — Getty Images
[Members of the Wuhan Hygiene Emergency Response Team leaving the closed Huanan
Seafood Wholesale Market on Jan. 11, 2020.]
[Benjamin Mueller]<https://www.nytimes.com/by/benjamin-mueller>
By Benjamin Mueller<https://www.nytimes.com/by/benjamin-mueller>
March 16, 2023
5 MIN READ
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An international team of virus experts said on Thursday that they had found
genetic data from a market in Wuhan, China, linking the coronavirus with
raccoon dogs for sale there, adding evidence to the case that the worst
pandemic in a century could have been ignited by an infected animal that was
being dealt through the illegal wildlife trade.
The genetic data was drawn from swabs taken from in and around the Huanan
Seafood Wholesale Market starting in January 2020, shortly after the Chinese
authorities had shut down the market because of suspicions that it was linked
to the outbreak of a new virus. By then, the animals had been cleared out, but
researchers swabbed walls, floors, metal cages and carts often used for
transporting animal cages.
In samples that came back positive for the coronavirus, the international
research team found genetic material belonging to animals, including large
amounts that were a match for the raccoon dog, three scientists involved in the
analysis said.
The jumbling together of genetic material from the virus and the animal does
not prove that a raccoon dog itself was infected. And even if a raccoon dog had
been infected, it would not be clear that the animal had spread the virus to
people. Another animal could have passed the virus to people, or someone
infected with the virus could have spread the virus to a raccoon dog.
But the analysis did establish that raccoon dogs — fluffy animals that are
related to foxes and are known to be able to transmit the coronavirus —
deposited genetic signatures in the same place where genetic material from the
virus was left, the three scientists said. That evidence, they said, was
consistent with a scenario in which the virus had spilled into humans from a
wild animal.
Image
[A young raccoon dog at the Chapultepec Zoo in Mexico City in 2015.]
A young raccoon dog at the Chapultepec Zoo in Mexico City in
2015.Credit...Alfredo Estrella/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
[A young raccoon dog at the Chapultepec Zoo in Mexico City in 2015.]
A report with the full details of the international research team’s findings
has not yet been published. Their analysis was first reported by The
Atlantic<https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2023/03/covid-origins-research-raccoon-dogs-wuhan-market-lab-leak/673390/>.
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But the genetic data from the market offers some of the most tangible evidence
yet of how the virus could have spilled into people from wild animals outside a
lab. It also suggests that Chinese scientists have given an incomplete account
of evidence that could fill in details about how the virus was spreading at the
Huanan market.
Jeremy Kamil, a virologist at Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center
Shreveport who was not involved in the study, said the findings showed that
“the samples from the market that had early Covid lineages in them were
contaminated with DNA reads of wild animals.”
Dr. Kamil said that fell short of conclusive evidence that an infected animal
had set off the pandemic. But, he said, “it really puts the spotlight on the
illegal animal trade in an intimate way.”
Chinese scientists had released a
study<https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-1370392/v1> looking at the same
market samples in February 2022. That study had reported that samples were
positive for the coronavirus but suggested that the virus had come from
infected people who were shopping or working in the market, rather than from
animals being sold there.
At some point, those same researchers, including some affiliated with the
Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, posted the raw data from
swabs around the market to GISAID, an international repository of genetic
sequences of viruses. (Attempts to reach the Chinese scientists by phone on
Thursday were not successful.)
On March 4, Florence Débarre, an evolutionary biologist at the French National
Center for Scientific Research, happened to be searching that database for
information related to the Huanan market when, she said in an interview, she
noticed more sequences than usual popping up. Confused at first about whether
they contained new data, Dr. Débarre put them aside, only to log in again last
week and discover that they held a trove of raw data.
Virus experts had been awaiting that raw sequence data from the market since
they learned of its existence in the Chinese report from February 2022. Dr.
Débarre said she had alerted other scientists, including the leaders of a team
that had published a set of studies last year pointing to the market as the
origin.
An international team — which included Michael Worobey, an evolutionary
biologist at the University of Arizona; Kristian Andersen, a virologist at the
Scripps Research Institute in California; and Edward Holmes, a biologist at the
University of Sydney — started mining the new genetic data last week.
One sample in particular caught their attention. It had been taken from a cart
linked to a specific stall at the Huanan market that Dr. Holmes had visited in
2014<https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/21/health/covid-lab-leak-eddie-holmes.html?action=click&module=RelatedLinks&pgtype=Article>,
scientists involved in the analysis said. That stall, Dr. Holmes found,
contained caged raccoon dogs on top of a separate cage holding birds, exactly
the sort of environment conducive to the transmission of new viruses.
The swab taken from a cart there in early 2020, the research team found,
contained genetic material from the virus and a raccoon dog.
“We were able to figure out relatively quickly that at least in one of these
samples, there was a lot of raccoon dog nucleic acid, along with virus nucleic
acid,” said Stephen Goldstein, a virologist at the University of Utah who
worked on the new analysis. (Nucleic acids are the chemical building blocks
that carry genetic information.)
After the international team stumbled upon the new data, they reached out to
the Chinese researchers who had uploaded the files with an offer to
collaborate, hewing to rules of the online repository, scientists involved with
the new analysis said. After that, the sequences disappeared from GISAID.
It is not clear who removed them or why they were taken down.
Dr. Débarre said the research team was seeking more data, including some from
market samples that were never made public. “What’s important is there’s still
more data,” she said.
Scientists involved with the analysis said that some of the samples had also
contained genetic material from other animals and from humans. Angela
Rasmussen, a virologist at the Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization at
the University of Saskatchewan in Canada, who worked on the analysis, said that
the human genetic material was to be expected given that people were shopping
and working there and that human Covid cases had been linked to the market.
Dr. Goldstein, too, cautioned that “we don’t have an infected animal, and we
can’t prove definitively there was an infected animal at that stall.” Genetic
material from the virus is stable enough, he said, that it is not clear when
exactly it was deposited at the market. He said that the team was still
analyzing the data and that it had not intended for its analysis to become
public before it had released a report.
“But,” he said, “given that the animals that were present in the market were
not sampled at the time, this is as good as we can hope to get.”
Benjamin Mueller is a health and science reporter. Previously, he covered the
coronavirus pandemic as a correspondent in London and the police in New York.
@benjmueller<https://twitter.com/benjmueller>
