Coronavirus Originated in Wuhan Market –
Members of the Wuhan Hygiene Emergency Response Team leaving the closed Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market on Jan. 11, 2020: Noel Celis/Agence France-Presse
The Big Picture –
By Glynn Wilson –
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Sometimes you might see news outlets playing catchup with each other on an important story by citing another news outfit. We all feel a responsibility to provide our unique collection of readers, our audience, with certain information.
Even The New York Times and The Washington Post do this often, sometimes even citing each other.
Back 17 years ago, before bloggers were summarizing the news and linking to newspaper stories, wire services like Reuters and television news stations were already doing the same thing by summarizing and repeating news from reporters on the ground on the broadcast airwaves and on cable TV.
“Sometimes you eat the bear, and sometimes the bear eats you.”
The big, name brand online news outlets tend to get most of the anonymous leaks these days, so they break most of the big stories. But every once in a while, possessing unique insights, a smaller circulation news organization might get ahead of the curve and make a key break in a story and report it first. News readers may not notice, especially when a story hits on all news channels at virtually the same time.
One example in history comes immediately to mind. It was a weekly newspaper in Beruit, Lebanon that broke the first story in 1987 on the arms-for-hostages deal that came to be known as the Iran–Contra affair, a political scandal in the United States that occurred during the second term of the Reagan administration. Senior administration officials secretly facilitated the sale of arms to the Khomeini government of the Islamic Republic of Iran, which was the subject of an arms embargo. The administration hoped to use the proceeds of the arms sale to fund the Contras in Nicaragua. Under the Boland Amendment, further funding of the Contras by the government had been prohibited by Congress.
Coronavirus Origin?
Who broke the definitive story on the origin of the coronavirus that caused Covid-19 and how it jumped from animals to humans? You might be surprised to know that it was the New American Journal.
This past year, on August 23, 2021, all the big news outlets in the United States and around the world were running story after story speculating that the coronavirus could have emerged from a lab leak in Wuhan, China. That was giving ammunition to Donald Trump and his conservative followers to blame China in a conspiracy theory.
The New American Journal produced a story showing definitively that it was far more likely that the virus that caused a global pandemic emerged and spread from on outhouse in a meat market in Wuhan, based on a study that was briefly mentioned by a reporter for Bloomberg News, and an early story in The Wall Street Journal about the suspected first case.
It took a few more months, but this year, in February, The New York Times finally put the story together and reported what we had indicated last August.
“Scientists released a pair of extensive studies over the weekend that point to a large food and live animal market in Wuhan, China, as the origin of the coronavirus pandemic,” the Times just reported. “Analyzing a wide range of data, including virus genes, maps of market stalls and the social media activity of early Covid-19 patients across Wuhan, the scientists concluded that the coronavirus was very likely present in live mammals sold at the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in late 2019 and suggested that the virus spilled over into people working or shopping there…” (and using the bathroom there, as we reported).
NYT: New Research Points to Wuhan Market as Pandemic Origin
“When you look at all of the evidence together, it’s an extraordinarily clear picture that the pandemic started at the Huanan market,” said Michael Worobey, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Arizona and a co-author of both new studies.
Several independent scientists said that the studies, which have not yet been published in a scientific journal, presented a compelling and rigorous new analysis of available data.
“It’s very convincing,” said Dr. Thea Fischer, an epidemiologist at the University of Copenhagen, who was not involved in the new studies. The question of whether the virus spilled over from animals “has now been settled with a very high degree of evidence, and thus confidence.”
The new papers did not identify a single animal at the market that had the exact strain of SARS-CoV-2 that led to Covid-19, or spell out exactly how the disease spread the virus from animal RNA to human RNA.
But in our story, we reported this based on another unpublished and even suppressed study:
“Disease detectives arriving from Beijing on the first day of 2020 ordered environmental samples to be collected from drains and other surfaces at the market. Some 585 specimens were tested, of which 33 turned out to be positive for SARS-CoV-2. All but two of the positive specimens came from a cavernous and poorly-ventilated section of the market’s western wing, where many shops sold animals.”
The Conclusion?
“So now we know all the species sold in the market that could have had strains of the coronavirus, strains which were found on the pipes in the market, and we know that they all became mixed up (their RNA with human RNA) in the outhouses, where the woman first breathed in the disease that passes in respiratory droplets. It has also been confirmed in sewer systems all over the world.
“So it seems logical and inevitable that the mutation becoming SARS-CoV-2 developed there in that outhouse in Wuhan, and other variants … are not only being spread in the air but also from sewage.”
In a separate study published recently online, cited by the Times, scientists at the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention analyzed genetic traces of the earliest environmental samples collected at the market, in January 2020 (as we first reported).
As the Times now reports, by the time Chinese researchers arrived to collect these samples, police had shut down and disinfected the market because a number of people linked to it had become sick with what would later be recognized as Covid. No live market animals were left.
As we also reported last August, the researchers swabbed walls, floors and other surfaces inside the market, as well as meat still in freezers and refrigerators. They also caught mice and stray cats and dogs around the market to test them, while also testing the contents of the sewers outside. The researchers then analyzed the samples for genetic traces of coronaviruses that may have been shed by people or animals.
Although the Chinese researchers conducted their study over two years ago, it was not until Friday’s report that they publicly shared their results. They reported that the Huanan market samples included two evolutionary branches of the virus, known as lineages A and B, both of which had been circulating in early Covid cases in China.
“These findings came as a surprise,” the Times reports. “In the early days of the pandemic in China, the only Covid cases linked to the market appeared to be Lineage B. And because Lineage B seemed to have evolved after Lineage A, some researchers suggested that the virus arrived at the market only after spreading around Wuhan.”
But that logic is upended by the new Chinese study, they say, which finds both lineages in market samples. The findings are consistent with the scenario that Dr. Worobey and his colleagues put forward, in which at least two spillover events occurred at the market.
“The beauty of it is how simply it all adds up now,” said Jeremy Kamil, a virologist at Louisiana State University Health Shreveport, who was not involved in the new studies.
Although the Huanan market was an early object of suspicion, by the spring of 2020 senior members of the Trump administration were promoting the idea that the new coronavirus had escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a coronavirus laboratory located eight miles away on the other side of the Yangtze River.
There’s no direct evidence that the new coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, was present at the lab before the pandemic. Researchers there have denied claims of a lab leak.
But the Chinese government has come under fire for not being forthcoming about the early days of the pandemic.
The report from the Chinese C.D.C. about the Huanan market’s samples, for example, had remained hidden. Starting in June 2020, two newspapers, The South China Morning Post and The Epoch Times, reported on what they claimed were leaked copies of the report.
But those reports were ignored at the time by everyone else.
Read the full New York Times story here.
New Research Points to Wuhan Market as Pandemic Origin
National Public Radio also recently moved a story about this on its website.
Striking new evidence points to Wuhan seafood market as the pandemic’s origin point
But remember, we had it right here first.
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