Scientists have been looking for the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic since the virus first emerged, but that search has been complicated by factors including the massive surge of human infections in the pandemic’s first two years and an increasingly bitter political dispute. WATCH: Lawmakers question intelligence officials about origins of COVID-19 He was not connected to the new analysis. “The market environmental sampling data published by China CDC is by far the strongest evidence to support animal origins,” Yip told the AP in an email. Centers for Disease Control office in China, said that even though the new findings weren’t definitive, they were significant. Ray Yip, an epidemiologist and founding member of the U.S. “If you were to go and do environmental sampling in the aftermath of a zoonotic spillover event … this is basically exactly what you would expect to find.” “There’s a good chance that the animals that deposited that DNA also deposited the virus,” said Stephen Goldstein, a virologist at the University of Utah who was involved in analyzing the data. Their analysis was first reported in The Atlantic. Genetic sequencing data showed that some of the samples, which were known to be positive for the coronavirus, also contained genetic material from raccoon dogs, indicating the animals may have been infected by the virus, according to the scientists. Tedros said the genetic sequences were uploaded to the world’s biggest public virus database in late January by scientists at the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention the data have since been removed from the database.Ī French biologist spotted the information by chance while scouring the database and shared it with a group of scientists based outside China and looking into the origins of the coronavirus. The samples were collected from surfaces at the Huanan seafood market in Wuhan after the first human cases of COVID-19 were found in late 2019. He also criticized China for not sharing the genetic information earlier, adding that “this data could have and should have been shared three years ago.” “These data do not provide a definitive answer to how the pandemic began, but every piece of data is important to moving us closer to that answer,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus at a Friday press briefing. intelligence info about origins of COVID-19 READ MORE: House votes unanimously to declassify U.S. How the coronavirus first started sickening people remains uncertain. Other experts have not yet verified their analysis, which also has not appeared so far in a peer-reviewed journal. International scientists who examined previously unavailable genetic data from samples collected at a market close to where the first human cases of COVID-19 were detected in China said they found suggestions the pandemic originated from animals, not a lab.
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