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Newly-revealed coronavirus data has reignited a debate over the virus's origins:
Data collected in 2020—and kept from public view since then—potentially adds weight to the animal theory. It highlights a potential suspect: the raccoon dog. But exactly how much weight it adds depends on who you ask. New analyses of the data have only reignited the debate, and stirred up some serious drama.
The current ruckus starts with a study shared by Chinese scientists back in February 2022. In a preprint (a scientific paper that has not yet been peer-reviewed or published in a journal), George Gao of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CCDC) and his colleagues described how they collected and analyzed 1,380 samples from the Huanan Seafood Market.
These samples were collected between January and March 2020, just after the market was closed. At the time, the team wrote that they only found coronavirus in samples alongside genetic material from people.
There were a lot of animals on sale at this market, which sold more than just seafood. The Gao paper features a long list, including chickens, ducks, geese, pheasants, doves, deer, badgers, rabbits, bamboo rats, porcupines, hedgehogs, crocodiles, snakes, and salamanders. And that list is not exhaustive—there are reports of other animals being traded there, including raccoon dogs. We'll come back to them later.
But Gao and his colleagues reported that they didn't find the coronavirus in any of the 18 species of animal they looked at. They suggested that it was humans who most likely brought the virus to the market, which ended up being the first known epicenter of the outbreak.
But....
Fast-forward to March 2023. On March 4, Florence Débarre, an evolutionary biologist at Sorbonne University in Paris, spotted some data that had been uploaded to GISAID, a website that allows researchers to share genetic data to help them study and track viruses that cause infectious diseases. The data appeared to have been uploaded in June 2022. It seemed to have been collected by Gao and his colleagues for their February 2022 study, although it had not been included in the actual paper.
[...] "This finding was a really big deal, not because it proves the presence of an infected animal (it doesn't). But it does put animals—raccoon dogs and other susceptible species—into the exact location at the market with the virus. And not with humans," Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at the University of Saskatchewan in Canada and a coauthor of the report, tweeted on March 21.
[...] There's more drama to this story. Débarre and her colleagues say they told Gao's team their findings on March 10. The next day, Gao's team's data disappeared from GISAID, and Débarre's team took their findings to the World Health Organization. The WHO convened two meetings to discuss both teams' results with the Scientific Advisory Group for the Origins of Novel Pathogens (SAGO).
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Immerman on Monday March 27 2023, @07:54PM (1 child)
Agreed.
From a pandemic response perspective knowing where it originated is moderately useful - with enough details it could help pin down specific details that could be changed to reduce future risks.
But short of discovering it was intentionally engineered and released, the details are irrelevant to everyday people.
Seems like the wet market and the lab are the two leading possibilities, since they're obvious danger spots. But who cares?
If we find out it came from the lab, does that make semi-tropical wet markets a good idea?
Of course not.
If we find out it's the wet market, does that mean doing gain-of-function research in inadequately secured* labs is a good idea? (*pretty sure I've heard of at least one unrelated leak of something less dangerous from the lab in question)
Of course not.
Both are ongoing pandemic risks, and pinning the blame on one, or even on something else entirely, makes no difference to the risks they pose.
If we want to ask questions, I'd much rather we focus on the important questions - namely: what went wrong AFTER we realized there was a problem, that made the problem much worse. So that we can try to fix that before the next pandemic (because there will *always* be a next pandemic)
- China clearly went into information blackout mode about the virus shortly after they realized there was a problem. Why, exactly? And what can we do to encourage them to be more open next time?
- Some politicians, especially in the US, ignored the risks, and/or played into conspiracy theories, making the response far more protracted and less effective than it had to be. Why? And what can we do to reduce it next time?
-etc.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday March 29 2023, @11:14AM
Because one purpose of finding out is to prevent it from happening again.
What do you base that assertion on? Wet markets are a source of nutrition. You'll need a replacement. And how important it is to replace them will depend in large part on how dangerous they actually are. Merely asserting that they are "of course" a bad idea doesn't make it so.