New COVID-19 origins paper from controversial scientists: What to know

A research report published Thursday from controversial scientists claims to present new evidence that SARS-CoV-2 , also known as the coronavirus, may have come from the Huanan Seafood Market in Wuhan, China , in late 2019.

The study, published in the journal Cell by key players in the debate over the origins of COVID-19, comes from a new analysis of hundreds of swabs from the market, originally collected by Chinese scientists in January 2020.

The scientists argue that the new analysis pinpoints, down to the individual market stall, that coronavirus-susceptible animals, SARS-CoV-2, and humans were all commingling in the Huanan Market in what eventually became the first days of the global pandemic.

Most of the paper’s authors have been vocal supporters of the market theory of the virus's origin from the beginning. Many of them have also been publicly critical of the possibility that the virus originated from an accident at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and have sparked controversy for their role in the debate.

Here is everything to know about the new research.

The new study does not definitively prove that there were infected animals at the market or that infected animals first spread the virus to humans.

Rather, the tested samples document that SARS-CoV-2 RNA was found intermingled with DNA and RNA samples from a host of exotic animals, including masked palm civets, Himalayan marmots, Malayan porcupines, and raccoon dogs.

These clusters, which the authors call “hot spots,” were strewn across the market but were particularly located in the southwest corner, where wild animals were known to be sold.

The Chinese government made the market data available in 2022, fully allowing scientists to conduct an in-depth study of the market-origin hypothesis.

The results point to either an animal-based origin from the Huanan Market or that humans already infected with the virus came in contact with animals that could have easily contracted the infection themselves.

“It doesn't 100% prove that those animals had SARS-CoV-2, but it shows that you can just say goodbye to the idea that these [coronavirus-susceptible] animals weren't even there at the time the pandemic started,” Michael Worobey, head of the Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Department at the University of Arizona and study co-author, told NPR.

Twenty-three research scientists contributed to the study published in Cell, but the involvement of a handful of these scientists in some of the most controversial aspects of the origins debate could raise skepticism about the new study.

Kristian Andersen of Scripps Research, Robert Garry of Tulane University, Edward Holmes of the University of Sydney, and Andrew Rambaut of the University of Edinburgh were subjects of the House Republican investigation into the origins of COVID-19.

Andersen, Garry, Holmes, and Rambaut, along with their colleague Ian Lipkin, wrote the paper “The proximal origins of SARS-CoV-2” published in Nature Medicine in March 2020, which argued at the time that they did “not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible.”

But public records requests, along with the congressional investigation into COVID-19's origins, revealed that the authors of the “proximal origins” paper were highly skeptical of an animal origin within weeks of the paper's publication.

Evidence unearthed by the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic indicates that Andersen spoke with National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony Fauci on Jan. 31, 2020, to express concerns that the virus was possibly engineered.

But the next day, the authors of the soon-to-be “proximal origins” paper held a conference call with Fauci, National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins, and Jeremy Farrar, one of the world’s largest funders of scientific research.

It was only after the Feb. 1, 2020, phone call that Andersen and his colleagues on the “proximal origins” project began to change their minds to publicly tout the animal origin hypothesis and downplay concerns of a lab leak.

But Andersen, as late as April 2020, still questioned the possibility of a lab leak and genetic engineering of the virus behind closed doors with his colleagues, according to instant message communications unearthed by Congress.

Even in April 2020, Andersen worried specifically about research on SARS-like viruses conducted at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in laboratories with low biosafety levels, calling it “definitely concerning work.”

Both Andersen and Garry testified before the House Oversight Committee in July 2023, denying that they were asked by NIH leaders to cover up evidence of a lab leak of the virus or they took bribes to do so. The Washington Examiner reported last year that Andersen and Garry together received a total of $25.2 million in research grants from the NIH between 2020 and 2022.

Skeptics of the new research purporting the market origin hypothesis are quick to note that the data collected by the Chinese scientists from the market were specifically collected from the western half of the venue, where live animals were regularly sold.

In that way, Chinese researchers were preferential when collecting data and did not necessarily collect a representative sample.

Jamie Metzl , a scientific historian and author of books on genetics and technology, is one of the most outspoken critics of the market-origin hypothesis and a leading advocate for improving biosafety standards in the fallout of the pandemic.

Metzl said the data Andersen and his colleagues were working for the new study were inherently biased.

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“It's circular logic to say, well, we have more positive samples concentrated on the western side of the market when, according to the Chinese sources, that was where they were doing most of their sampling,” Metzl told NPR.

The other critique of the new study is that it does not support a hypothesis that one particular mammal species could have been the intermediate host that could have acted as a transition animal to begin human infections with the virus, which most likely originally came from bats.