Did Covid really originate in Wuhan’s seafood market?

There is new evidence pointing to the origin of Covid being in the seafood market in Wuhan. That, at least, is the substance of a breathless piece published in the Atlantic. Specifically, Katherine Wu, the journalist who wrote the piece, had evidence suggesting that ‘raccoon dogs being illegally sold at the venue could have been carrying and possibly shedding the virus at the end of 2019’. Notice: ‘could have’, that old fallback of hype and spin.

Wu went on to claim that ‘it’s some of the strongest support yet, experts told me, that the pandemic began when SARS-CoV-2 hopped from animals into humans, rather than in an accident among scientists experimenting with viruses’.

The claim is sadly what we ‘experts’ on this topic call a ‘grotesque exaggeration’. First, it’s not new: we reported that raccoon dogs were on sale in that market in our book Viral, which came out in 2021.