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‘Lost’ Wuhan Study Suggests COVID-19 Came From Wild Animals, Not Lab

“They did not think it would have widespread appeal,” said one of the paper’s co-authors of attempts to get the data published.

A Chinese virologist’s research that got buried among mountains of other submissions for a year and a half includes “meticulously collected data and photographic evidence” that supports the belief that COVID-19 emerged from infected wild animals sold at Wuhan wet markets rather than having come from a lab leak, Bloomberg reports. After sitting unpublished as the debate over the origins of COVID became increasingly contentious, the study, by Xiao Xiao, a virologist affiliated with Hubei University and the government-funded Key Laboratory of Southwest China Wildlife Resources Conservation, was finally released in June. “We’d imagined that the journal we sent it to would say, ‘Fantastic! Of course we want these data out as quickly as we can. The World Health Organization would be absolutely thrilled to receive this information,’” British ecologist and co-author Chris Newman said of one unnamed publication. “They did not think it would have widespread appeal.” In February 2020, Chinese health authorities prohibited scientists working on COVID research from sharing their findings publicly, and China’s government insisted it be the one to release all data in a single “coordinated deployment.”