Since the coronavirus pandemic began, the question has been, “Where does COVID-19 come from?”
According to a report by NPR, a member of the World Health Organization’s investigation team says the most likely source of the COVID-19 pandemic is ‘game farms in southern China’.
Peter Daszak, a disease ecologist from the EcoHealth Alliance and a member of the WTO delegation who traveled to China earlier this year, told NPR that during the trip new evidence was found by the WTO team that traders at the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan has supplied animals from these game farms.
Daszak told NPR that when the Chinese government closed these game farms in February 2020, the reaction was a strong signal that the Chinese government believed the farms were the most likely route for a coronavirus in bats in southern China. was to reach people in Wuhan. ”
According to the report, the game farms are part of a project that the Chinese government has been promoting for 20 years.
Daszak said, “They take exotic animals, such as rivets, porcupines, pangolins, raccoon dogs and bamboo rats, and they breed them in captivity,” NPR said. He added that the project was a way to ‘relieve rural population from poverty’.
In the next two weeks, the WHO is expected to disclose the team’s investigative findings. However, Daszak gave NPR a ‘highlight’ of what the team determined.
The game farms were very successful.
As for the game farm project, Daszak told NPR: “It was very successful.” He added: “In 2016, they employed 14 million people on game farms, and it was a $ 70 billion industry.”
However, Daszak noted that the Chinese government made a complete turnaround on the farms on February 24, 2020 – exactly at the time when the outbreak in Wuhan was declining.
“What China did then was very important,” Daszak said. “They issued a statement that they would stop farming game for food,” and they closed the farms.
“They sent the farmers instructions on how to safely dispose of the animals – to bury, kill or burn them – in a way that does not spread disease,” he added.
Why would the government do that?
Daszak believes the government acted because these farms could be the point where the coronavirus ‘moves from one bat to another animal and then to humans’. Daszak said: ‘I do think that SARS-CoV-2 first encountered people in southern China. It looks like that, “the newspaper said.
There are good arguments behind Daszak’s belief. First, in or around the southern province of Yunnan, there are many farms. This is also where ‘virologists have found a bat virus that is 96% genetically similar to SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes the disease COVID-19.’ Second, farms breed on animals such as cats and pangolins, which are known to contain coronaviruses, the report said.
Finally, Daszak told NPR that during the WTO mission to China, new evidence was found by the team indicating that ‘these farms supplied the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan, where an early outbreak of COVID-19 took place has.’ After the market was linked to ‘what was then a mysterious pneumonia-like disease’, the market closed overnight on 31 December 2019.
NPR quoted another member of the WHO investigation team, Linfa Wang, a virologist studying bat viruses at Duke-NUS Medical School in Singapore, who said: “There was definitely a massive transfer in that market.” After the outbreak in the Huanan market, Wang noted that “Chinese scientists went there and searched for the virus.”
“In the live animals section, they had a lot of positive samples,” Wang told NPR. “They even have two samples from which they can isolate live virus.”
It is therefore the conviction of Daszak and other WHO team members that ‘the game farms are a perfect tube between a coronavirus-infected bat in Yunnan (or neighboring Myanmar) and a Wuhan animal market’, NPR reported.
“China is shutting down the road for a reason,” Daszak said.
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