Fauci: It's mind-boggling that China's wet markets are still operating during coronavirus pandemic

The Hill ^ | April 3 2020 | Joseph Guzman

[Svartalfiar]

“[They] should shut down those things right away,” Fauci told 'Fox & Friends" Friday. “It just boggles my mind that when we have so many diseases that emanate out of that unusual human-animal interface that we don’t just shut it down.”

Assuming this quote is exactly correct, how does Fauci think "we" are going to shut them down? I certainly do not include China's government in very many "we"s or "us"s.

And even then, how would he expect them to shut them down? The wet markets are basically just like our farmer's markets, only they also offer live animals freshly butchered. It really wouldn't be a big problem, but Chinese ideas of sanitation and cleanliness are almost non-existent, with animals packed close together, crapping on each other, peeing on each other, etc etc. The butchering and packing aren't much cleaner either.

I don't know how much China has somewhat more legit butcher shops or meat counters at the grocery store, but the wet markets are definitely very popular/crowded, and not going to be an easy thing to just get rid of.

[Svartalfiar]

If Fauci were precise he would demand that China shut down exotic animal sales at their wet markets. Bats, pangolin, monkey meat, civit cats and so on. Who in their right mind would want to eat pangolin? A kind of ant-eater?

And just how do you define "exotic"? Sure, we eat a lot of pork, beef, and chicken. To many from the Western world, goat/duck/mutton would be exotic, yet they don't have much disease potential. What about crickets/grasshoppers? In many poor countries, those are one of the big food groups, yet here we only see people eat them on Fear Factor or Survivorman. What about bison, ostrich, horse, goose, venison, alligator, elk, turtle, snake, camel, kangaroo, iguana, rat, llama, and so on? That's not even touching all the weird-ass crap the Japanese pull out of the ocean!

The big issue with banning "exotic" meat is that exotic entirely depends on where you're at. Stuff that's quite common in one place may be unheard of in another. (Frenchies eating snails?) And the Chinese (along with Africans) tend to be the worst (or you could say the best) at eating anything they can catch. And that's why you see a lot of diseases coming out of places like China or Africa - they're going into deep jungle or strange areas humans haven't had much contact with, and then eating things humans haven't really been exposed to much before. And that's where a lot of these new diseases come from.

Of course, it seems the most likely origin of this particular virus was from one of the Chinese labs, but there's still a lot of other stuff coming out of there, historically and in the future. Poor starving people are going to eat whatever they can, whether the government tells them they can't or not.