“The data have neither been removed nor deleted since they were added. In accordance with the usual practice of publication, and by agreement with the journal and GISAID, the data are released simultaneously with formal publication, but the link to access the data for journal review has always existed,” the scientists wrote.
However, they stressed that all these data only showed that the market acted as “an early amplifier during the pandemic due to the high number of consumers every day, resulting in many of the initially identified infection clusters”.
“The origin of the virus involving animal-to-human transmission cannot be determined based on current data,” they wrote.
The researchers said that hypotheses and conclusions presented in the report released by the WHO in March 2021 are both scientific and objective.
They added that tracing the origins of the virus is a scientific issue that requires scientific evidence and logical inference. Determining the origins of the novel coronavirus may still be a long way off.