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Coronavirus pandemic: All stories
ChinaScience

Chinese scientist hits back at Wuhan market coronavirus origin paper

  • Liang Wannian takes aim at suggestions of strong evidence linking the market with early community transmission
  • Evolutionary biologist says reports point to a vendor at the food centre as the earliest known case

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The coronavirus’s links to the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market have been fiercely contested. Photo: AFP
Linda Lew
A Chinese health expert has hit back at a Canadian researcher’s claims of strong evidence that Covid-19 originated from a wholesale food market in central China, saying the suggestions do not stand up to scrutiny.
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Liang Wannian, the head of a Chinese government expert panel, said on Saturday that it was unscientific to conclude that some early cases of people living close to the market was proof that it was the origin of the community transmission.

“We think that Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market may not be the origin of Covid-19. This is a result … fully recognised by the WHO expert team after analysing the epidemiological records of patients,” said Liang, who was part of the WHO-China joint investigation team on Covid-19’s origins.
A team of 34 experts from China and 10 other countries conducted an on-the-ground investigation into the origins of Covid-19 in January and February.

The resulting report did not offer a conclusion. Instead, it listed four scenarios in which the virus could have been introduced to the human population, including from bats via an intermediary animal, a route that was considered the most likely.

05:08

Nature or lab leak? Why tracing the origin of Covid-19 matters

Nature or lab leak? Why tracing the origin of Covid-19 matters

In a paper published in the peer-reviewed journal Science in November, evolutionary biologist Michael Worobey, from the University of Arizona, said he examined early cases flagged by hospitals and reported in medical journals, as well as in media reports.

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