Geneticist debunks China's frozen food theory on Covid origin

Covid found in frozen food 'simply cannot produce human infection because they are not active viruses'

By Keoni Everington
2021/02/11 18:05

TAIPEI (Taiwan News) — A geneticist investigating the origins of the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic has debunked China's claims that the outbreak may have started with frozen food.

After carrying out an investigation into the origins of the COVID-19 outbreak in Wuhan over the course of a month, two weeks of which was spent in quarantine, the World Health Organization (WHO) echoed findings by China's National Health Commission. The only definitive conclusion of the study was that the virus' origin remains unknown and more research is needed.

The WHO posited that there are four possible explanations for the start of the pandemic: a direct jump from animal to human, introduction through an intermediate host, transmission through frozen food, and a lab-related accident. Although high-risk gain of function experiments with bat coronavirus chimeras were being carried out on humanized mice at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) in 2019, the possibility of a lab leak was listed as "extremely unlikely" and will not be subject to further study.

Full article:
https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/4125464