Lab leak or wet markets? The question remains
We have been told that the devastating Covid-19 virus probably escaped from Wuhan virus laboratories. Or maybe not. It may have come from markets that trade in live wild animals? What are we to do about it?
The Covid-19 pandemic, which struck in 2020, is estimated to have caused between ten and twenty million deaths world-wide — either directly from the infection, or indirectly due to healthcare system overload.
The economic impact was severe and far-reaching: Global GDP contracted by 3.5%, there were massive job losses — between April and June 2020 it is estimated that an equivalent of 400 million full-time jobs were lost worldwide, and income fell by 10%. The long-term economic cost to the global economy is estimated at $82 trillion over five years.
But how did the Covid-19 pandemic start? Scientific assessment is leaning towards a lab leak theory, but a natural origin is also plausible. Five years after the outbreak, no definitive conclusion has been reached.
The Lab Leak theory
There is this laboratory in Wuhan, China, where they were conducting “gain-of-function research” on viruses. That means genetically altering an organism to enhance its biological functions. The research is intended to better predict the course infectious diseases will take, should they emerge. The scientists want to anticipate amino acid changes in advance, in order to develop vaccines and therapeutics for them. But there are risk-benefit concerns: what if there is an accidental release of an enhanced pathogen into the population, or in fact an intentional release into the population?
Coronaviruses were being studied in the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a stone’s throw away from where the first Covid-19 infections were registered. From there the disease spread around the globe. It seems quite likely that the Chinese regime, one of the most devious and secretive in the world, might be trying to shirk responsibility and cover up the facts of the pandemic’s origin.
Wet markets
But Wuhan also has a gigantic wet market, a place where vendors sell fresh meat, usually by slaughtering animals for food: monkeys, raccoons, foxes, meerkats, civets, porcupines, turtles, rats, mice, snakes, pangolins (the most heavily trafficked mammal in the world) and dozens of other wild species. And bats, bats, bats. I have described them in section 5 of my May 2020 article on the emergence of Covid-19.
Studies provide evidence that SARS-CoV-2 (which causes Covid-19) may not have resulted from a lab leak, but originated in the Wuhan Huanan Seafood and Meat Market. That would mean that the virus emerged from wild wet market animals, rather than escaping from a Chinese lab. The evidence points right to this particular market in the middle of Wuhan.
In a study by University of Arizona evolutionary biologist Michael Worobey and his colleagues used mapping tools to estimate the locations of more than 150 of the earliest reported COVID-19 cases from December 2019. It turned out the highest density of cases centered on the Wuhan market. This is an indication that the virus had started by spreading in people who worked at the market, but then begun to spread into the local community. In fact two lineages, both originating in the wet markets in Wuhan, likely spilled from animals into people two separate times.
So what to do about wet markets?
If you want to read some (pretty drastic) details on the operation of wet markets, read my article Covid-19 — what needs to be done immediately! It is so obvious. And costs just 100 billion dollars.
Clearly, if we wish to avoid global disruptions on the scale we are currently seeing, we need to close down wet markets that trade in wild animals, all over the world. China, which has the greatest number (followed by Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, Vietnam, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, Uganda, Brazil, Colombia, Mexico), tried forbidding them. The Chinese ban on wet markets lasted just two months, after which they were allowed to reopen again, “under strict health conditions.” Why? Because “wet markets are an important source of affordable food and livelihood for millions of people.” It should be noted that wildlife meat is mainly provided to the wealthy. The lower-income population seeks more common forms of meat — chicken, beef, mutton, pork — or fish, for nourishment.
The 100-billion-dollar solution
What I have been proposing is that we spend one hundred billion dollars on closing down wet markets that allow wildlife trade, in order to prevent one pandemic after another from arising. Sounds like a crazy idea, a massively exaggerated sum, brought up purely for effect? Well, SARS CoV-2 infected almost 800 million people worldwide, and killed ten to twenty million. And it has caused unfathomable economic damage.
What I am asking for is a paltry sum: it is less than one percent of what the world spends on “defence”, 1/8th of what the US spends per year! Combating the economic damage caused by Covid-19 cost the world at least eighty trillion dollars. We are asking less than one half of one percent to prevent this from happening regularly.
This is how we must proceed. There are tens of thousands of wet markets world-wide. They need to be all shut down, or rigorously monitored, every one of them, without exception. The ones that are simple meat markets we can keep, but need to police them meticulously. It is the ones that deal in exotic live animals that need to go.
But: there is a vast number of people whose livelihoods depend on such markets. The hundred billion dollars would be used to give vendors an alternate supply of protein to sell. Build clean modern chicken, pig, cattle or goat farms, where the people can work under hygienic conditions — and in fact earn more than they did trapping exotic animals and bringing them alive to market. And it would be very much less dangerous — we have hundreds of years of experience in health control for traditional animal husbandry (chickens, cattle, sheep). Somehow we must convince people that delicious bat soup or gorilla paw stew are things of the past. And that eating exotic animals has absolutely no medicinal value.
There is one more thing we need to do to successfully close down all wet markets that allow trade with exotic wildlife: make it hideously illegal. Make countries and governments directly responsible for the implementation of the ban, and threaten them with the stiffest of penalties if any exotic animal or otherwise uncontrolled market is discovered. Use economic sanctions and travel restrictions, make it extraordinarily painful for any country to continue endangering the rest of the world.
Define the wet market as biological warfare which must be forbidden. And that will, incidentally, do wonders for wildlife on planet Earth.
