NPR: 2022 Data Points To Raccoon Dogs As COVID Source

National Public Radio (NPR) says that a substantial body of evidence back in 2022 pointed to raccoon dogs as a likely starting point for the spread of SARS-CoV-2, Michaeleen Doucleff and Jason Beaubien reported.

Photo Insert: Five positive COVID results were traced to an animal cage containing raccoon dogs and red foxes in just one stall.

Two extensive, peer-reviewed papers in Science were published in July 2022 and offered the strongest evidence that the COVID-19 pandemic originated in a market in Wuhan, China.

They concluded the coronavirus most likely jumped from a caged wild animal into people at the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, where a huge COVID-19 outbreak began in December 2019.

Evolutionary biologist Michael Worobey helped lead two of the studies and has been at the forefront of the search for the origins of the pandemic. He has spent his career tracking down the origins of pandemics, including the origin of HIV and the 1918 flu.

Worobey is a research professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Arizona. Back in May 2021, Worobey signed a letter calling for an investigation into the lab-leak theory.

But then, through his own investigation, he quickly found data supporting an animal origin. He traced the five positive COVID results to an animal cage containing raccoon dogs and red foxes in just one stall.

Cases of COVID infection were also traced to the same stall, precluding any suggestion that the pandemic was introduced to China from abroad. These pieces of evidence kill Chinese claims that foreigners created COVID.

Deleting the same data from the Chinese database would not erase the fact that the infections came from Wuhan.

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