The World’s Most Powerful Authoritarian Government Just Can’t Find an Infected Pangolin, Huh?

Back on July 2020, Wuhan Institute of Virology scientist Shi Zhengli, famously nicknamed “Bat Woman” for the focus of her research, offered written answers to submitted questions from Science magazine.

Here are her comments about the possible origin of the virus.

 There are two possibilities for the cross-species transmission from the natural host to humans. One is that the virus was transmitted directly from a bat to a human, while the other is that the virus spread to humans via one or more intermediate hosts. For SARS-CoV-2, though the first possibility cannot be ruled out, its likelihood is very low. I tend to support the second scenario.

When and where the earliest cross-species transmission of SARS-CoV-2 occurred from the intermediate host to humans has not been scientifically uncovered yet. We know from historical experience like HIV that the places where big emerging diseases first break out usually are not their place of origin (where the spillover originally happened). Tracing the origin of a virus is a very challenging scientific task. As for the origin and transmission routes of SARS-CoV-2, it needs a pioneering vision, and the collective efforts of scientists all around the world, and it needs time as well.

We have done bat virus surveillance in Hubei Province for many years, but have not found that bats in Wuhan or even the wider Hubei Province carry any coronaviruses that are closely related to SARS-CoV-2. I don’t think the spillover from bats to humans occurred in Wuhan or in Hubei Province. I guess you are referring to the bat cave in Tongguan town in Mojiang county of Yunnan Province. To date, none of nearby residents is infected with coronaviruses. Thus the claim that the so-called “patient zero” was living near the mining area and then went to Wuhan is false.

Shi Zhengli is extremely skeptical that a person near the cave in Yunnan Province caught the virus directly from a bat, and according to Chinese health officials, the first COVID-19 patient in Yunnan Province was diagnosed on January 21, 2020 –– well after the outbreak had started in Wuhan. Shi affirms other research contending that bats in Wuhan or even the wider Hubei Province do not carry coronaviruses that are closely related to SARS-CoV-2. That leaves some intermediary species, like a pangolin. The problem is, no one has found the intermediary species — and not only has no one found an intermediate species infected with COVID-19, no one has been able to determine with absolute certainty which species is the intermediate one.

In fact, Shi declares in her written answers:

Under the deployment of the Hubei Provincial Government, our team and researchers from Huazhong Agricultural University collected samples of farmed animals and livestock from farms around Wuhan and in other places in Hubei Province. We did not detect any SARSCoV-2 nucleic acids in these samples.

This was back in July. Nearly a year later, Liang Wannian, the Chinese head of the joint Chinese–WHO effort, recently stated that Chinese authorities “tested 50,000 animal specimens, including 1,100 bats in Hubei province, where Wuhan is located. But no luck: a matching virus still hasn’t been found.”

If this is a virus that evolved in the systems of pangolins or small mammals, why hasn’t anyone found any pangolins or small mammals infected with it, after nearly a year and a half of looking?

A little later in the Q and A, Shi writes:

Q: Is it possible that someone associated with the institute became infected in some other way, for instance while collecting, sampling, or handling bats?

A: Such a possibility did not exist. Recently we tested the sera from all staff and students in the lab and nobody is infected by either bat SARSr-CoV or SARS-CoV-2. To date, there is “zero infection” of all staff and students in our institute.

The contention of Shi Zhengli is that there is no evidence of an infection of a human in Yunnan Province (which is true), there is no evidence pointing to bat that is native to Wuhan or wider Hubei Province (which is true), and there is no evidence of  an accidental infection in the Wuhan labs (which is highly debatable), which means this must be a spillover from some non-bat animal somewhere… a scenario for which there is not yet any evidence.

The Chinese government spent $378 billion on research and development last year, catching up fast with the United States. The U.S. National Science Foundation says that preliminary data suggests China may now be spending more than the U.S. on research and development. China just landed and deployed a rover on Mars, they’re the first country to land a probe on the far side of the moon, they’re building their own space station, their own separate satellite navigation system, they’re building secret nuclear reactors that generate more weapons-grade plutonium, they just broke the record for manned exploration of the Mariana Trench at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean, and they claim they’ve developed a new way to build the most advanced quantum computers on earth.

And this same government, with all of its awesome resources, unsurpassed manpower, and unlimited authoritarian powers… can’t find a single infected pangolin or other small mammal?

This leaves a few possible scenarios.

1. Infected pangolins or other small mammals are really, really, really rare. This is odd, considering how contagious the virus is.
2. The Chinese government doesn’t want to find a pangolin, or has found one and covered it up, because it doesn’t want to admit that the pandemic started from a wet market or other interaction between Chinese people and an infected animal.
3. Infected pangolins or other small mammals don’t exist, because this pandemic started with the infection of a lab worker in Wuhan.