A team of scientists say it is "beyond reasonable doubt" the Covid pandemic started with infected animals.

A team of scientists say it is “beyond reasonable doubt” the Covid pandemic started with infected animals sold at a market, rather than a laboratory leak.

They were analysing hundreds of samples collected from Wuhan, China, in January 2020.

The results identify a shortlist of animals – including racoon dogs, civets and bamboo rats – as potential sources of the pandemic.

Despite even highlighting one market stall as a hotspot of both animals and coronavirus, the study cannot provide definitive proof.

The samples were collected by Chinese officials in the early stages of Covid and are one of the most scientifically valuable sources of information on the origins of the pandemic.

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Their analysis was published last year and the raw data made available to other scientists. Now a team in the US and France says they have performed even more advanced genetic analyses to peer deeper into Covid’s early days.

    • @WanderingVentra@lemm.ee
      3•2 months ago

      Conspiracy theorists have still been spreading the lab leak theory without proof for awhile now because China is the current scary boogeyman. I get that there was lab there studying these diseases, but guessing isn’t how science works, and the wet markets have been known to be a possible source of diseases for a long time now by scientists. I remember warnings about this scenario coming up awhile ago.

      Lot of diseases come from China probably for similar reasons: it’s crowded and close contacts with lots of animals. No one thought the 1956 flu could be a lab leak, or SARS, or H7N9, etc. People just have conspiracy theories about this one because it turned into the biggest pandemic of them all, which is just the roll of the dice of all the diseases coming out of there.