‘When a bat is stressed, by being hunted or having its habitat damaged by deforestation, its immune system is challenged and finds it harder to cope …’
(Michael Barnes, Liberty Headlines) A new CNN report says humans, not bats, are to blame for the coronavirus pandemic that’s infecting hundreds of thousands of people around the world and devastating the American economy.
Why? Because humans have destroyed bat habitats.
“When a bat is stressed, by being hunted or having its habitat damaged by deforestation, its immune system is challenged and finds it harder to cope with pathogens it otherwise took in its stride,” the cable news network said Friday, adding that the coronavirus requires “a complete rethink of how we treat the planet.”
It’s been widely speculated that patrons of an unsanitary, outdoor “wet market” in Wuhan, China, first contracted the disease from eating horseshoe bats, among other live animals like rats, dogs and pangolins.
While scientists remain unsure of the exact origins of the Wuhan coronavirus, similar viruses to the current super-virus, known as COVID-19, have been found in Chinese horseshoe bats.
But rather than attribute blame to bats—or the Chinese Communist Party for failing to contain the disease and then lying about it until it was too late—a pair of CNN reporters interviewed several scientists who conveniently echoed CNN’s political bias concerning environmentalism and climate change.
“Human activities are causing this,” asserted Andrew Cunningham, professor of wildlife epidemiology at the Zoological Society of London.
Kate Jones, chair of ecology and biodiversity at University College London, agreed with Cunningham. She claimed that the “zoonotic spillover” of the disease from bats to people is because people are “destroying their habitats into landscapes that are more human-dominated.”
The solution, they say, is two-fold: stop blaming bats and look to bats for how they deal with viruses; essentially making the disease-carrying animals both the victim and the hero of the Wuhan coronavirus.
“The ultimate lesson is that damage to the planet can also damage people more quickly and severely than the generational, gradual shifts of climate change,” CNN concluded.