COVID wet market nature origin theory gets a boost: The genetic trail of coronavirus origins

Jonathan Pekar, an evolutionary virologist at the University of Edinburgh and an author of the new study, said that the histories of the two coronaviruses followed parallel paths. “In my mind, they are extraordinarily similar,” he said.

In both cases, Dr. Pekar and his colleagues argue, a coronavirus jumped from bats to other wild mammals in southwestern China. In a short period of time, wildlife traders took the infected animals hundreds of miles to city markets, and the virus wreaked havoc in humans.

…

Related on the SLP

Viewpoint: RFK, Jr.’s ‘useful idiots’: His 6-point plan that undermines U.S. health policy rolls along Did COVID-19 escape from a lab?

Viewpoint: Dubious environmental fears: Why the AI buildout is critical to America’s ecological future

Vitamin D, omega-3 fish oil and glucosamine supplements could cause brain damage 

Child-monitoring apps: When the cure is worse than the harm—and how the technology could be tweaked

The study lands at a fraught political moment. Last month the White House created a web page called “Lab Leak: The True Origin of Covid 19,” asserting that the pandemic had been caused not by a market spillover but by an accident in a lab in Wuhan, China.

This is an excerpt. Read the original post here