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Chris Newman, a wildlife biologist at the University of Oxford and co-author of one of the studies, said his Chinese colleagues saw a number of wild mammals for sale in the Huanan market in late 2019. Any of them could have been responsible. For the pandemic, Dr. said Holmes.

“You can’t prove raccoon dogs yet, but they’re definitely a suspect,” he said.

Some critics, Dr. They questioned how certain Holmes and his colleagues could be that the culprit was a Huanan animal. Although many of the earliest cases of Covid are market-related, it is possible that other cases of pneumonia have not yet been recognized as early cases of Covid.

“We still know very little about the initial cases – and there are probably other cases we don’t know about – to draw final conclusions,” said Filippa Lentzos, a biosecurity expert at King’s College London. “I am open to both natural spread and research-related origins.”

Another problem: If the infected animals did indeed start the pandemic, they will never be found. When researchers from the Chinese CDC came to the market in January 2020 to investigate, all the animals were gone.

However, Dr. Holmes argues that there is ample evidence that animal markets could spark another pandemic. Last monthhe and his Chinese colleagues published a study of 18 animal species that are often sold in markets and obtained them in the wild or on breeding farms.

Dr. “They were definitely full of viruses,” Holmes said.

More than 100 viruses have emerged that infect vertebrates, including a number of potential human pathogens. And some of these viruses had recently crossed the species barrier – bird flu infecting badgers, canine coronaviruses infecting raccoon dogs. Some of the animals were also infected with human viruses.

The simplest way to reduce the likelihood of future pandemics, Dr. Holmes arguedis to do studies like this at the interface between humans and wildlife. His experience of discovering new viruses convinced him that it didn’t make sense to try to catalog every potential threat in wildlife.

Dr. “You can never take a sample of every virus out there and figure out which of them could infect humans,” Holmes said. “I don’t think it’s viable.”