So far, there have only been anecdotes about the cruel conditions in the animal markets in Wuhan before the outbreak of the pandemic.

Now a study shows that illegal wildlife trade was ubiquitous there.

Internationally protected species such as Siberian weasels have been openly offered, scientists from China, Canada and Great Britain write in the paper that appeared in the journal Nature this week.

Friederike Böge

Political correspondent for China, North Korea and Mongolia.

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    Almost a third of the mammals studied would have suffered wounds from gunshots or traps, suggesting that they were poached.

    The hygienic conditions were also such that they at least made it appear possible to skip the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

    "Almost all animals were sold alive, in stacked cages and in poor condition," the paper says.

    "Most of the stores offered slaughter services that were carried out on site."

    No pangolins and bats

    The study not only raises the question of whether illegal wildlife trade played a role in the outbreak of the corona pandemic. On some points it also contradicts the results of the World Health Organization (WHO) mission in Wuhan. In their final report, citing Chinese sources, it says: "No illegal trade in wild animals has been found." It also states that no confirmed reports have been found that live mammals were sold on the market in 2019. In addition, the WHO report lacks the information from the Nature study that raccoon dogs and minks were also traded in Wuhan. We know from them that they can serve as a reservoir for SARS-CoV-2.

    The scientists came to their results through a routine examination.

    One of the authors examined the 17 market stalls that traded in wild animals in Wuhan every month for two years.

    Of course, the scientist from China West Normal University in Nanchong didn't know anything about SARS-CoV-2 at that time.

    He was searching for the origin of a tick-borne SFTS virus and didn't finish his research until the Huanan market was closed and wildlife trade was banned due to the corona outbreak.

    What he found in the market stalls will still be relevant to the question of the origin of the coronavirus.

    Among other things, the researchers emphasize that, according to their findings, no pangolins or bats were sold in Wuhan.

    Laboratory orthosis is again given attention

    But why have the scientists only published their results now, more than a year and a half after the outbreak? The reason is apparently the fear of scientists about a politicization of the knowledge. Co-author Chris Newman from the University of Oxford told FAZ that the manuscript had already been submitted to Conservation Letters magazine in April 2020, where it had been peer-reviewed twice by October 2020. “In the end, they decided that they felt it was inappropriate to get involved in the controversy over the origin of Covid-19.” Co-author Christina Büsching thinks this is “outrageous”. For the question of the origin of the virus, it is important to know that animals were slaughtered on the spot. There were then further delays in the journal Nature,"Ironically, it took some time to find reviewers because of Covid's disruption to academic operations," Newman said.

    The study recalls that there remain numerous unanswered questions about the wildlife trade in China and its possible role in causing the pandemic. Many experts wonder why the Chinese authorities have not yet submitted a systematic study of the supply chains of Wuhan wildlife traders. Nor has fur farms been investigated in southern China, which experts consider as a possible place for a leap from a bat to a transitional host.

    The German virologist Christian Drosten pointed out in the Swiss online magazine Republik that “no studies” have been published to date that investigate the question of whether breeding stocks of raccoon dogs or minks carry the SARS-CoV-2 virus. You just have to "go there" and make cuts, said Drosten. Even when millions of minks were killed in Denmark last year, there was no public comment in China.

    In addition to the wildlife trade as a possible trigger of the pandemic, the other hypothesis of a possible laboratory accident has recently received a lot of attention, although there are no fundamental new findings on it. One reason for this is that the Wuhan Institute of Virology's credibility has recently suffered. Among other things, it became known through a dissertation that the institute had also carried out experiments on highly contagious viruses in laboratories with a low security level two. It was also announced that the institute was actively working with the RaTG13 virus, the genome of which is 96 percent identical to SARS-CoV-2.

    So far, experts had assumed that the virus had been stored intact in the freezer. The virus came from a copper mine in southern China's Yunnan Province, where six workers who were supposed to clean bat droppings from the mine fell ill in 2012. Three of them died. The head of research at the Wuhan Institute, Shi Zhengli, said they died of a fungal disease. But a study by a medical doctoral student on the workers has raised doubts. In 2013, she wrote that the men were infected with a "SARS-like" virus. The American government adviser Anthony Fauci has meanwhile asked China to publish more information about the sick miners.