2024-09-19 15:00:15
Huanan Market in Wuhan, China, closed due to its link to the first cases of Covid-19, in January 2020. YUAN ZHENG / FEATURECHINA / MAXPPP
At the end of 2019, the Huanan market in Wuhan (China) was home to neither bats nor pangolins. But a host of animals of all kinds, some of which – such as the raccoon dog and the palm civet – were likely to carry and transmit SARS-CoV-2, the virus responsible for the Covid-19 pandemic. This is confirmed by an analysis of genetic data carried out by an international team under the direction of Florence Débarre, from the Institute of Ecology and Environmental Sciences (CNRS-Sorbonne University-UPEC-IRD-Inrae), and published on Thursday, September 19 in the American magazine Cell.
The French researcher had spotted, in March 2023, part of the data in question, put online on the Gisaid database by a Chinese team, which had taken environmental samples from the Wuhan market at the beginning of 2020, just after it closed. The sudden publicity surrounding this data had led the Chinese researchers to put it online in full, and to hastily publish an initial analysis in the journal NatureThey confirmed the presence of raccoon dogs and other animals sold illegally, and samples positive for SARS-CoV-2.
In fact, as early as January 2020, George Gao, the respected head of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), had declared on the basis of these initial analyses that he suspected that the epidemic was linked to the trade in wild animals in this market.
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In June 2021, a study conducted before the pandemic to study tick circulation, published in Scientific Reportsconfirmed the illegal presence of raccoon dogs at the end of 2019. But in the meantime, the Chinese authorities, indicted by Donald Trump, then president of the United States, had pushed another hypothesis, that of an importation of the virus through frozen meat.
Is this why George Gao has been more cautious in his subsequent publications? The analysis presented by his team in Nature in 2023 mentioned a possible bias in the collection of samples, and noted that the presence of the virus and genetic traces of these animals did not prove that they had been infected with SARS-CoV-2. If this were the case, it remained possible that they had been contaminated by sick humans, and not the other way around, they insisted, believing that the market could have been only an amplifier of the spread of the virus, and not the point of origin of the pandemic.
“Evidence is mounting”
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