TWiV 876: Spillover market with Michael Worobey

March 17, 2022

Michael Worobey joins TWiV to explain evidence that SARS-CoV-2 emerged via the wildlife trade and that the Huanan market was the unambiguous epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Hosts: Vincent Racaniello, Rich Condit, Kathy Spindler, and Brianne Barker

Guest: Michael Worobey

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Download TWiV 876 (128 MB .mp3, 107 min)
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Weekly Picks 1:26:55

BrianneKartchner Caverns (info from Wikipedia here)
Kathy Laminar flow and turbulent flow
RichWikipedia
Vincent The Human Lake by Carl Zimmer

Listener Picks

BradNASASpaceflight

Intro music is by Ronald Jenkees

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7 comments on “TWiV 876: Spillover market with Michael Worobey

  1. Andrew Stoll Mar 17, 2022

    The only real evidence I can see is the steadfast refusal of cooperation from the Chinese authorities, the creation and spread of false evidence and rumours, the distruction of evidence from the early days of the outbreak, the deaths and disappearances of people connected to the origins of Covid 19 – and so on and so forth!
    What does all that say to you?
    Two things:
    Cover-up!
    Or being extremely naive to believe otherwise..

    • Sue Street Mar 19, 2022

      The whole thing says that no-one wanted to be the official upon whose desk the lack of enforcement around the markets landed. All you needed is a few folks with a bit of power trying to duck the problem for the problem to completely blow out. The US had similar problems, where the orange mandarin stocked the response with spineless muppets.

  2. Keith Robinson Mar 18, 2022

    The podcast that listener Brad is looking for is “Debunk the Funk.”

  3. Sue Street Mar 19, 2022

    And another absolute banger of a show, at least for us non-biologist listeners

  4. Steven Quay Mar 22, 2022

    Thank you for this presentation. I was surprised by the claim that the tMRCA of SARS-CoV-2 was Dec 10, 2019, the day when the earliest market case has been documented. A collection of 10 separate studies have dates ranging from mid-Oct to Mid-Nov. The earliest date I have seen is actually from an 83,688 genome study and reports a tMRCA of Aug 16, 2019 with a 20 day 95% CI:

    Xia X. Dating the Common Ancestor from an NCBI Tree of 83688 High-Quality and Full-Length SARS-CoV-2 Genomes. Viruses. 2021 Sep 8;13(9):1790. doi: 10.3390/v13091790. PMID: 34578371; PMCID: PMC8472983.

    If the first market case is weeks or months after ‘Patient Zero’ how can the market data inform the origin?