To prevent the next pandemic, we must find the source of covid-19. China’s stonewalling is unacceptable.
Recently, a group of scientists led by Zhiqiang Wu published the preliminary results of a study in which they cast a very wide net looking for the pandemic virus — or a progenitor closely related to it — among bats in China. They examined 703 sampling sites in urban, rural and wild areas across China where bats are suspected or confirmed to carry sarbecoviruses. Swabs from 13,064 bats were examined. They found plenty of samples related to the first SARS virus from 2002-2004. But “we did not find any” viruses related to SARS-CoV-2 in the samples, they said, indicating the pandemic virus “might not actively circulate among bats in China.” Similarly, in the joint China-World Health Organization report issued in March, it was reported that, in “sampling and testing of 38,515 livestock and poultry samples and 41,696 wild animal samples from 31 provinces in China from 2018 to 2020, “no positive samples were found” for SARS-CoV-2 antibodies or nucleic acid tests.
