“In collaboration with local activists, our investigative team returned to where scientists believe COVID-19 began: China’s wet markets.

Our team determined that it was important to monitor the situation within the country’s wet markets to find out if anything had really changed, as many media outlets repeatedly announced. We had an obligation to the more than half a million people who had already signed our petition to end these markets—places where humans come into contact with wild and farmed animals, creating breeding grounds for emerging zoonotic diseases. We had to return to these live animal markets to report the truth.

This is not the first time our investigators have infiltrated these markets where living and dead, wild and domestic animals are sold for consumption. Between 2014 and 2019, we captured shocking images of wet markets in China, Vietnam, and India, which documented extreme neglect and cruelty in these places.

The footage we were able to capture when we returned to China reveals that the threat to public health and safety is ongoing. Despite the pandemic that has changed our lives, these places (where COVID-19 is thought to have originated) are still open to the public, drawing massive crowds of people, and worse, continuing to trade and brutally kill animals of all kinds.”