so very definitive; hence the waldo's citation request... surely... member kimmy won't vacillate on her certainty - factual certainty, no less! Let's see now:
from your own linked article: "Prof Andrew Cunningham of Zoological Society of London (ZSL) said it was important not to jump to conclusions from the paper. "The source of the detected coronavirus really is unknown - it might have been a natural pangolin virus or have jumped from another species between capture and death.""
at this point your linked article's paper reference is one that has not yet been published - to allow it to enter into the peer-response cycle; a pre-release unedited manuscript has been offered by the Journal Nature. That being said, the paper/lead author state: "This outbreak has been tentatively associated with a seafood market in Wuhan, China, where the sale of wild animals may be the source of zoonotic infection2. Although bats are likely reservoir hosts for SARS-CoV-2, the identity of any intermediate host that might have facilitated transfer to humans is unknown."
member kimmy, so... definitive to support your, uhhh... factual certainty!
If I acknowledge that it is not yet an established fact that the COVID-19 animal-to-human transfer resulted from China's animal trafficking trade, will you acknowledge that it's by far the most likely probability?
The experts have been looking closely at the Wuhan live animal market, and for good reason. Animal trafficking creates ideal conditions for animal to human transfer. It's how the 2003 SARS outbreak originated (trafficked civets-- that WAS conclusively proven), and if it didn't cause the current outbreak, it'll cause a different outbreak in the future. Animal trafficking is a clear and ongoing threat to human health. It took 4 years to conclusively prove that the 2003 SARS epidemic was linked to animal trafficking. It's unreasonable to suggest that we shouldn't worry about animal trafficking until such time as we know for certain that it's linked to COVID-19.
People are not wrong in pointing out that there could be some other explanation. It's not impossible that some chance encounter with a wild animal was where humans first contacted the virus... it's just extremely improbable. Maybe some hapless farmer was minding his own business and he just got jumped by some pangolins. Maybe it was the Teenage Mutant Ninja Pangolins. Who knows. We can't conclusively say that didn't happen. But given the odds of that vs the odds that one of the tens of thousands of trafficked pangolins spread the virus to thousands of other trafficked pangolins, which then spread the virus to some of the thousands of humans who they came into proximity with, either at the market or during the trafficking process... you'd have to be an idiot to put your money on the wildlife scenario.
I'm also confused as to why you're lawyering on behalf of animal trafficking and the "traditional Chinese medicine" trade that is the major driver of animal trafficking in China. They're scum. They're vermin. They don't need lawyering, they need a good hard kick in the nuts.
TCM practitioners and associated animal trafficking are guilty of:
-peddling quack medicine
-driving some animals to the brink of extinction
-disgusting acts of sadism and cruelty
-unleashing SARS, 2003 version
-most likely unleashing SARS the 2020 version
And they'll most certainly unleash some future plague, unless they're stomped out.
Why would you want to take up for people like that?
-k