Should We Blame the Bats?

The pictures have spread much faster than the coronavirus itself: images of bats on skewers, bats in stews, bats being consumed by voracious diners. So are bats to blame for COVID-19? No one knows.  

As the CDC explains it: coronaviruses are a large family of viruses that are common in people and many different species of animals, including camels, cattle, cats, and bats, and all three recent coronavirus epidemics (SARS, MERS and now COVID-19) have their origins in bats. What the CDC doesn’t say is how the transmission occurred in the first place. While there are lots of scientists digging deep to figure that one out, there are also lots of social scientists pointing out that COVID-19 and xenophobia are travelling hand-in-hand. NPR has a great piece on this, as does Fast Company. But if you want to know more about bats in particular, read this one:

As news of the Wuhan virus spread online, one video became emblematic of its claimed origin: It showed a young Chinese woman, supposedly in Wuhan, biting into a virtually whole bat as she held the creature up with chopsticks. Media outlets from the Daily Mail to RT promoted the video, as did a number of prominent extremist bloggers such as Paul Joseph Watson. Thousands of Twitter users blamed supposedly “dirty” Chinese eating habits—in particular the consumption of wildlife—for the outbreak, said to have begun at a so-called wet market that…READ MORE