Are Raccoon Dogs the New Pangolin? with Steve Massey

On March 17th, 2023, the news cycle was dominated by the announcement of an “international team of virologists and evolutionary biologists”  that claimed to have analyzed data from China that showed raccoon dogs at the Wuhan Seafood Market were linked to the origin of COVID-19. Unfortunately, the scientists were unable to provide the data they had analyzed for independent examination.

Baffling to many was that the data used to implicate raccoon dogs as the reservoir animal for SARS-2, was the same data that had previously been analyzed in a preprint last year. Using the same data, the authors of the preprint concluded that the Wuhan Seafood market was a super spreader location not the location of the origin of COVID-19...

The evolutionary virologists implicating the raccoon dog were the usual suspects. A cabal of virologists that Jonathan Latham refers to as “Fauci’s COVID-19 Origins SWAT Team...” A small group of virologists who’ve tried to maintain the false narrative that science shows that COVID-19 was the result of natural spillover and attacking those providing evidence that suggests COVID-19 originated from a lab. Some of these evolutionary biologists are the same ones that told us three years ago that a virus 99% similar to SARS-CoV-2 had been isolated from pangolins and that pangolins could be the missing link in the natural spillover to humans... They were wrong.

Now, they’re telling us it’s a raccoon dog.

Today, I interview Steven Massey to discuss the claim by “The Usual Suspects” that “the data shows” the racoon dog is the new pangolin. Dr. Massey is a researcher in bioinformatics, metagenomics and genomics, complexity and molecular evolution.