Peer-Reviewed Study Rejects Pangolins as Intermediate Species for COVID-19

A major suspect on the theory of the origin of the "wet market" coronavirus has just received a pass, after a peer-reviewed study discovered that the new coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, could not have passed from pangolins to humans.

As an examination, SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19 in humans, is 96% identical a strain of coronavirus found in bats known as RaTG13, which was incidentally collected in a cave in Yunnan, China, by scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

As such, RaTG13 cannot infect humans, but SARS-CoV-2 has a "receptor binding motif" (RBM) which is identical to a pangolin coronavirus strain

This theory has just been refuted by a team of researchers from Guangdong, China.

Via PLOS:

The 2019 epidemic of a new corona virus disease (COVID-19) in the city of Wuhan, China, has resulted in more than 1.7 million laboratory-confirmed cases worldwide. Recent studies have shown that SARS-CoV-2 probably originated from bats, but its intermediate hosts are still largely unknown.. In this studio, we have assembled the complete genome of a coronavirus identified in 3 sick Malaysian pangolins. Molecular and phylogenetic analyzes have shown that this pangolin coronavirus (pangolin-CoV-2020) is genetically linked to SARS-CoV-2, as well as to a group of bat coronaviruses. but they are not compatible with SARS-CoV-2 directly from pangolin-CoV-2020.

Which leaves us with the following main theories about the origins of SARS-CoV-2:

1. A bat coronavirus with a pangolin-like RBM never seen before came from a wet market that sold neither bats nor pangolins, and now some other the species is the middleman unless a pangolin with SARS-CoV-2 is finally found.
2. It was designed in Fort Detrick, USAMRIID of Maryland and released by the United States Army during a clandestine mission last October during a sporting event in Wuhan, China (a theory promoted by the CPC).
3. Scientists working with the bat coronavirus in the exact city it came from made headlines in 2015 for modify bat coronavirus specifically to infect humans (and were internationally reprimanded for this) – either created SARS-CoV-2 by splicing pangolin receptors into RaTG13, or captured in the wild, and an employee was accidentally infected