Welcome to Public Health On Call, a podcast from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

I'm Joshua Sharfstein, Vice Dean for Public Health Practice and Community Engagement,

and a former health commissioner here in Baltimore.

Our goal is to bring evidence and experience to illuminate critical public health issues.

If you have questions or ideas for us, please send an email to public health question at jhh.edu.

That's public health question at jhu.edu for future podcast episodes.

Hi, I'm Lindsay Smith-Rogers, producer of public health on call, and today I talk with Gigi

Groundball about a new report confirming the origin of SARS-CoV-2 as a spillover event from a seafood market

in Wuhan.

We talk about why it took so long to pinpoint the emergence, what we now know about where the virus came from, and why it's important for preventing future pandemics.

Let's listen.

Gigi Grongval, thank you so much for joining us again on public health on call.

Today, we are going to talk about a recent report that confirmed that a seafood wholesale market in

Wuhan was the early epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic. So let's start off with, first of all,

why was the origin of SARS-CoV-2 in question in the first place? Yeah, so there have been,

there's been a lot of evidence up to this point that the market was the epicenter of SARS-CoV-2, but this recent couple of papers that were published in Science Magazine really are the death-mill for any alternative theories.

And the reason why people thought that it wasn't the animal market in Wuhan was because

they're right next door in that same city is a laboratory that studies the Virology Institute

where people, scientists were studying coronirology Institute where people,

scientists were studying coronaviruses.

So people thought, well, maybe it came from a lab.

But the evidence definitely shows that the market was the culprit just like in SARS in 2003, where it was the live animal market that led to the

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