A recently published paper about the possible zoonotic origin of SARS-CoV-2 has been given undiscerning coverage in the mainstream media, but 23 scientists have called for “an investigation of the paper for possible retraction”.

The scientists say the paper, published in Cell on September 19 and entitled ‘Genetic tracing of market wildlife and viruses at the epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic’, “has unsound premises, has unsound conclusions, and may be a product of scientific misconduct”.

They write in a letter to the editors of Cell: “We urge Cell to issue an Expression of Editorial Concern for this paper and to initiate an investigation of this paper for possible retraction.”

The paper published in Cell has 23 authors. Twenty-two of them published a preprint on bioRxiv on September 14 last year with the same title and the same conclusions.

The two papers contain the findings of an analysis of environmental qPCR and sequencing data collected in the Huanan market in early 2020.

The papers revive the debunked theory that racoon dogs being sold in the Huanan market in Wuhan could have spread Covid-19 to humans.

“We demonstrate that market-linked severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) genetic diversity is consistent with market emergence and find increased SARS-CoV-2 positivity near and within a wildlife stall,” Crits-Christoph et al. state.

“We identify wildlife DNA in all SARS-CoV-2-positive samples from this stall, including species such as civets, bamboo rats, and raccoon dogs, previously identified as possible intermediate hosts … This analysis provides the genetic basis for a shortlist of potential intermediate hosts of SARS-CoV-2 to prioritize for serological and viral sampling.”

Those calling for the Cell paper’s retraction say it proves nothing at all about the origin of SARS-CoV-2.

It is the mainstream media and those scientists who have been avidly pushing the hypothesis that the virus had a zoonotic origin (that it spread naturally, either directly from an animal to humans or via an intermediate host) who have been vaunting Crits-Christoph et al.’s findings and claim that their paper is evidence of zoonosis.

Professor Emeritus at the University of Oslo Stig S. Freeland says the article in Cell does not provide a definitive answer as regards the possibility of a lab origin.

He told the Norwegian newspaper VG that the headline in Britain’s Daily Mail (pictured below) was “journalistic hype”.

Strategic adviser on biotech Sigrid Bratlie from Norway tweeted: “The claims that the new Cell paper strongly supports a spillover at Huanan market are highly exaggerated, and appear to be another attempt to shut down the lab leak discussion.”

Bratlie, who has a PhD in molecular biology, told VG that there were several factors that pointed to a lab leak of SARS-CoV-2 in Wuhan.

She says the study carried out by Crits-Christoph et al. actually shows that samples taken at the Huanan market in January 2020 contain traces of genetic material from both animals and humans.

“No host animal, i.e., an animal that would have infected a human with SARS-CoV-2 has been found,” she said. “The market cannot be ruled out as an origin, but, in this study, very firm conclusions are drawn on very thin data.”

Bratlie said the study by Crits-Christoph et al. did not move the matter of the possible origin of SARS-Cov_2 on at all, “apart from showing that there are some researchers who have a great interest in rejecting the lab leak theory”.

Referring to a misleading National Public Radio (NPR) headline about the Cell paper, evolutionary biologist David Bahry tweeted on September 20: “… The paper isn’t ‘new’ or ‘controversial’; it’s a year old in preprint form, and was debunked as soon as it came out …”

Bahry added: “It isn’t pretty strong evidence. It’s just the latest in a long line of bad papers by a group of partisans. Here, they even include a misleading figure that was already pointed out as misleading a year ago when the paper was a preprint.”

The paper still contained misleading heatmaps, whose fallacy was pointed out a year ago, Bahry said.

The 23 scientists who are calling for the Cell paper to be retracted point out that phylogenomic evidence, epidemiological evidence, and documentary evidence all indicate that SARS-CoV-2 entered humans in July–November 2019.

“As such, conclusions based on data for the Huanan Seafood Market on or after mid-to-late December 2019 as in Crits-Christoph et al. 2024 cannot, even in principle, shed light on spillover into humans that occurred one to five months earlier, in July– November, 2019,” they write.

They add: “Crits-Christoph et al. 2024 is premised on Worobey et al., 2022, and Pekar et al. 2022, both of which are unsound and are the subject of a formal request for editorial action and possible retraction for scientific unsoundness and possible scientific misconduct.”

The scientists also say in their letter to the Cell editors: “Compelling evidence has been presented that four of the authors of Crits-Christoph et al. 2024 (Kristian Andersen, Robert Garry, Edward Holmes, and Andrew Rambaut), including one of the corresponding authors (Kristian Andersen), committed scientific misconduct, publishing conclusions they knew to be invalid, on a previous paper on the same subject.”

They are referring to the paper entitled ‘The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2’, published in Nature Medicine on March 17, 2020, which dismisses the lab-origin hypothesis. There have also been calls for that paper’s retraction.

They note that private email and Slack communications by Andersen, Garry, Holmes, and Rambaut – made public through a congressional inquiry – establish that the four scientists knew that the premises and conclusions of the Proximal Origin paper were invalid at the time the paper was drafted, at the time the paper was submitted for publication, and even at the time the paper was published.

“When a paper – such as Crits-Christoph et al. 2024 – has unsound premises and conclusions and has authors who committed scientific misconduct on a previous unsound paper on the same subject and may have committed scientific misconduct on subsequent unsound papers on the same subject, there is clear basis to infer the paper may be a product of scientific misconduct,” the scientists write.

Kristian Andersen is quoted by NPR as saying Crits-Christoph et al.’s findings don’t prove by any means that there were infected animals at the Huanan market.

Bryce Nickels and Richard Ebright from the NGO Biosafety Now have highlighted Andersen’s tactic for getting the Crits-Christoph et al. paper into Cell by reaching out to the deputy editor, Sri Devi Narasimhan. Narasimhan has now deleted her X account.

Ebright tweeted: “The paper is a house of cards erected on a foundation of misconduct.”

The advocates of a zoonotic origin of SARS-CoV-2 been not only been promoting the Crits-Christoph et al. paper, they are also blocking challenges to the conclusion that the paper is proof that the virus did not come from a laboratory.

A commentator who tweets under the name ‘Libertarian Virologist’ was blocked by Scripps Research (the research institute where Kristian Andersen is a professor) after responding to their tweet promoting the Cell paper.

“Evidently they think it is totally inappropriate to ask any probing questions about papers they wish to promote,” he said.

Scripps Research tweeted: “Genetic evidence from the Huanan Seafood Market strengthens the #COVID19 animal origin hypothesis. Scripps Research, @CNRS and @uarizona identified raccoon dogs and civet cats in stalls with positive samples of #SARSCoV2.”

‘Libertarian Virologist’ responded: “No evidence of an infected raccoon dog and a negative correlation between raccoon dog DNA and SARS2 RNA. Paper finds raccoon dog genomes most resemble wild raccoon dogs in Hubei, which have never been found to be positive for SARS2.”

One of the signatories of the letter to the Cell editors, Stuart Newman, tweeted: “Hi @scrippsresearch, I am a developmental and evolutionary biologist with the same concerns as Libertarian_Virologist (@ban_epp_gofroc). Out of professional courtesy, I would be grateful if you addressed these points instead of blocking me. Cordially, Stuart A. Newman, Ph.D.”

Many of the articles published about the Crits-Christoph et al. paper are awash with inaccuracies.

In an article published by CNN Brenda Goodman wrongly states the following: “Raccoon dogs have also been shown to transmit the infection, making them a strong candidate to be the animals that first passed the virus to humans.”

Seemingly unaware of the controversies surrounding many of the authors of the Crits-Christoph et al. paper, Robert Edwards from Flinders University in Adelaide, Australia, is quoted in the New Scientist as saying a “dream team of evolutionary biologists” conducted the Crits-Christoph et al. study.

“There is little doubt about the origins of SARS-CoV-2 coming from the wet market now,” Edwards is quoted as saying in the article headlined ‘Evidence points to Wuhan market as source of Covid-19 outbreak’.

One of the Crits-Christoph et al. papers’ authors, Michael Worobey, hit the headlines in February 2022 when two papers he co-authored were published as preprints (‘The Huanan market was the epicenter of SARS-CoV-2 emergence’ and ‘SARS-CoV-2 emergence very likely resulted from at least two zoonotic events’, both published on February 26).

The New York Time hailed the two studies as a “significant salvo” in the debate about the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Worobey, who heads the department of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Arizona in the US and is a leading proponent of the zoonosis hypothesis, was quoted by the New York Times as saying: “When you look at all of the evidence together, it’s an extraordinarily clear picture that the pandemic started at the Huanan market.”

The papers co-authored by Worobey did not, however, identify an animal at the Huanan seafood market that spread SARS-CoV-2 to humans.

The preprints later passed peer review and a new paper, ‘The Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan was the early epicenter of the Covid-19 pandemic’ was published in Science on July 26, 2022.

In this paper Worobey et al. refer to 155 cases of Covid-19 for which they said they were able to “reliably extract” the latitude and longitude coordinates from the report of the ‘Joint WHO-China Study’ of the possible origins of SARS-CoV-2  that took place from January 14 to February 10, 2021.

The WHO-China report was published on March 30, 2021, and stated that, at that time, “no firm conclusion” about the role of the Huanan market in the origin of the outbreak could be drawn.

The findings of Worobey et al. are challenged in a paper published in August 2024, and in its analysis by two German researchers.

In their paper published in the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Dietrich Stoyan from the Institute of Stochastics in Freiberg, Germany, and Sung Nok Chiu from the Department of Mathematics at the Hong Kong Baptist University say statistics do not prove that the Huanan seafood wholesale market was the early epicentre of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Stoyan and Chiu said they had come to a clear conclusion: that the analysis in the paper by Worobey et al. that was published in Science did not give “an acceptable argument for the centrality of the market in the 155 December cases”.

The DRASTIC group of independent investigators and scientists had already challenged Worobey’s claims in a report they published in October 2022.

“We find that the arguments by Worobey et al. that SARS-CoV-2 emerged from the Huanan seafood market via zoonosis and the hypothesis that at least two separate zoonotic jumps from wild animals occurred at the HSM are not supported by data,” the independent investigators state in their report.

Zhang et al. state: “We find that the datasets and analyses put forward in support of zoonosis are biased, and lack sufficient verifiable data to support this hypothesis.”

They point to three studies: one by researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and Huazhong Agricultural University (HZAU), one by Wu et al., and a more extensive study by Gao et al. All the studies concluded that the Huanan seafood market was likely to be a superspreader location and not the source of SARS-CoV-2.

“Consequently, we conclude the most likely scenario is that an infected person brought the virus to the HSM, sparking a superspreader event.”

Raccoon dogs

In March 2023, an article by Katherine Wu was published in The Atlantic in which she made the claim – repeated in numerous other media outlets – that raccoon dogs being illegally sold at the Huanan market in Wuhan “could have been carrying and possibly shedding” SARS-CoV-2 at the end of 2019.

Wu said “experts” had told her that analysis of genetic sequences collected from the market was “some of the strongest support yet” that the Covid-19 pandemic began “when SARS-CoV-2 hopped from animals into humans, rather than in an accident among scientists experimenting with viruses”.

The co-author of the book ‘VIRAL: The Search for the Origin of Covid-19′, Matt Ridley, wrote in an article published in The Spectator on March 18, 2023: “The claim is sadly what we ‘experts’ on this topic call a ‘grotesque exaggeration’.”

Ridley points out in an article published in The Telegraph on September 21 that there is no new evidence that Covid-19 originated with a raccoon dog in a market in Wuhan.

“The public relations blitz that surrounded the publication this week of a paper in Cell from a team whose previous papers have been debunked caught some headlines, as it was designed to do,” Ridley writes.

“The market theory is still implausible, as George Gao, the man who led the investigation of that market, Ralph Baric, the world’s leading coronavirologist, and many others insist.”

Ridley adds: “The new paper’s reasoning demands that a single infected raccoon dog somehow souped up a bat virus enough to spark a global human pandemic without sparking even a single other case among, er, raccoon dogs – and then vanished into thin air.

“Bizarrely, the one new piece of data in the new paper points away from the market: the geographic origin of the mammals. The raccoon dogs came from central China, near Wuhan, where close relatives of the pandemic virus have never been found.”

A member of DRASTIC who uses the X/Twitter handle @Daoyu15 points out that no raccoon dogs have been found to be infected with SARS-CoV-2 in nature anywhere in the world.

He adds: “No porcupines have been found infected in nature or in the lab anywhere in the world, even in otherwise heavily infected zoos. No genus of the claimed ‘susceptible species in the market’ are found infected in nature anywhere in the world. No bamboo rats have been found infected in nature or in the lab anywhere in the world, even in locations where the closest bat ancestors of SARS-CoV-2 are found. No civets have been found infected in nature by SARS-CoV-2 anywhere in the world.”

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