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So I just said on a press call: I think the most productive thing we can do is remove a dichotomy where it was either this one specific market or lab-based. It came from animals, somewhere, and we probably WON'T ever know date/time, and probably WILL know species in months-years https://twitter.com/JedMSP/status/1265706030798786562
I don't think we're in too deep to set the complete evidence-based narrative straight: it's almost 100% certainly a bat "origin" virus evolutionarily. It may have jumped directly, through a wild animal (not necessarily pangolin), or a domestic animal (though probably not pig)
We don't think that happened in Huanan market. We don't have any animal infection data to make us think that. We do think that was a big location early in the outbreak. We do think human-wildlife contact fits that storyline. It wasn't necessarily legal or illegal wildlife trade.
The difficulty in knowing date/time speaks to why wildlife trade based solutions are an ineffective (and potentially entirely irrelevant) solution, and why pandemic preparedness must not get caught up in conservation discourse. Health security is about public and global health.
But the certainty we have it came from animals speaks to the value of viral sampling, ecology, and One Health approaches. And the work we do in the next few months will hopefully give us a 100% solid picture of how the virus made the jump. https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.22.111344v1
And if I sound frustrated, it's because we could've worked together across disciplines to keep this narrative straight since January, when we already had the key evidence the market might be involved in transmission but not primary spillover. https://twitter.com/cmyeaton/status/1220026222475743234
Even if the announcement by China today represents another data point in the rising political conflict between the U.S. and China about accountability for the virus's origins, it still presents us an opportunity to course correct science-policy-public communication.
Doing so will require us to identify, correct, and actively dis-assemble this specific narrative structure about why It's Still Actually About Wildlife Trade/Markets, Really, If You Think About It: https://twitter.com/wormmaps/status/1265396385265967104
