A bipartisan group of lawmakers called upon the world’s leading health groups to push for a global ban on live wildlife markets, also known as “wet markets,” believed to be the source of many deadly infectious diseases, including COVID-19.
Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Democratic Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey, both members of the Foreign Relations Committee, along with Rep. Mike Quigley of Illinois, of the House Intelligence Committee, and Rep. Michael McCaul of Texas, the ranking member on the Foreign Affairs Committee, were joined by 60 senators and congressmen in sending a letter Wednesday to a trio of international organizations.
“In order to help prevent the next pandemic, we write today to urge your organizations to take aggressive action toward a global shut down of live wildlife markets and a ban on the international trade of live wildlife that is not intended for conservation purposes,” the lawmakers urged. “Live wildlife markets, known as ‘wet’ markets, were linked to the 2003 SARS outbreak and are believed to be the source of the current COVID-19. As this pandemic continues to threaten the lives of millions, pushes healthcare systems to the breaking point, and devastates economies around the world, it is imperative that we all take action as a global community to protect public health.”
The lawmakers addressed their concerns to the World Health Organization, currently under fire for its response to the COVID-19 outbreak and its seeming coziness with China, as well as the Paris-based World Organization for Animal Health and the Rome-based Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.
The WHO concluded the COVID-19 virus first appeared in the city of Wuhan, the capital of Hubei province in China, and an investigative report in February found “early cases identified in Wuhan are believed to have acquired infection from a zoonotic source” in the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market.
“Scientists studying zoonotic diseases — diseases that jump between animals and humans — have pointed to the close proximity of shoppers, vendors, and both live and dead animals at wildlife markets in countries around the world as prime transmission locations for these pathogens,” the lawmakers said Wednesday, adding, “The viruses can subsequently spread or ‘spill over’ into humans through handling and consumption of wildlife, potentially starting highly contagious outbreaks of new and deadly diseases for which we have no natural immunity — as we are currently seeing with COVID-19 and have seen with SARS, Ebola, monkeypox and Lassa fever in the recent past.”
Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas and Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, among others, have speculated the novel coronavirus may have originated from an accidental lab escape from China’s biosafety level 4 superlaboratory, which researches human infectious diseases just a few miles from the Huanan market.
President Trump said Tuesday the seemingly “China-centric” WHO “blew it” on responding to the coronavirus outbreak, prompting a response from WHO Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus on Wednesday.
“Please don’t politicize this virus,” Tedros said. “If you don’t want many more body bags, then you refrain from politicizing it.”
Tedros has praised China’s response repeatedly, including after a meeting with President Xi Jinping in Beijing in January.
U.S. officials and lawmakers have repeatedly raised questions about whether WHO was being unduly influenced by China. Taiwan has claimed it warned the WHO about the contagious threat posed by the coronavirus back in December, but its warnings went unheeded. WHO senior adviser Bruce Aylward, who has lavished praise on China’s response, got the WHO into a storm of bad publicity recently when he refused to answer questions about Taiwan.
There is well-documented evidence that China tried to cover up the existence and spread of the coronavirus, muzzled whistleblowers, misled the WHO, and attempted to block outside health experts. At least one study indicated that if the Chinese government had acted more quickly, the coronavirus’s global spread would have been greatly reduced.
The U.S. intelligence community suspects that China has consistently lied about the outbreak.
Reports show Chinese doctors knew around late December and early January that human-to-human transmission of the coronavirus was almost certainly occurring, and the Chinese government silenced medical professionals who attempted to go public. Yet the WHO tweeted on Jan. 14 that “preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission.”
As of Wednesday night, there were more than 1.5 million confirmed coronavirus cases around the world and more than 88,000 deaths tied to the infection, according to the Johns Hopkins University tracker. In the United States, there were more than 430,000 cases, which have resulted in more than 14,700 deaths.
