Back in early 2020, while we were all wiping down groceries and hearing tales of people hoarding toilet paper, one truth became clear: this was all happening because someone had eaten bat soup in Wuhan, China, and it had spread a contagious virus that would end us all.

“China is to blame,” Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, had said. “Because the culture where people eat bats and snakes and dogs and things like that.”

Bat soup became the face of a global catastrophe. Five years later, the idea of bat soup still persists, despite more science, more evidence, and definitely more perspective. The story has all the ingredients the internet clings to: exoticism, fear, and a whole lot of finger-pointing.

“Are you saying it’s heresy? Slander? No one actually consumed a bat?”

Well…

Bat Soup’s Origin

The story of bat soup began, as most things do, on Twitter. A tweet showing a Chinese woman holding up a bat went instantly viral, with tens of thousands of people chastising her until it only grew more and more.

The issue was, this Chinese woman was Wang Mengyun, a travel food influencer. The same kind of influencer that we have in bulk on the Western internet, where they travel to foreign countries and eat things like scorpions, tarantulas… alligators.

The clip came from a video Wang Mengyun made… in 2016, when she was visiting Palau, a small island country in Oceania. Bat soup is considered a delicacy there, made by breeding fruit bats, and is not commonly eaten in China.

Then What is COVID-19’s Origin?

There’s been a lot of finger-pointing and theories about COVID’s origin, ranging from wet markets to lab leaks, most scientists now agree on one thing: the pandemic began long before a single cough in Wuhan.

Surprise, bats actually are connected to COVID! That’s what helped the bat soup rumor spread so far. Horseshoe bats in particular are what’s theorized to be the culprit, since they’re natural reservoirs for a wide variety of coronaviruses. The closest known viral relatives to SARS-CoV-2 were found in bat droppings collected in Laos and China. One of those, RaTG13, shares an evolutionary path with SARS-CoV-2 that diverged about 50 years ago.

So how did a virus living in a bat’s gut end up sweeping through every corner of the planet?

Well, as cities and farmland carve deeper into wildlife habitats, the buffer between humans and animals grows thinner. Bats, displaced from their natural roosts, move closer to humans. Meanwhile, the global trade in live wildlife brings stressed and sick animals into densely packed markets, creating ideal conditions for a virus to jump species.

In the wild, they’d never be this close, but at markets, the walls between species and viruses break down. The Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan became the focal point of this risk. A 2024 study found genetic traces of potential intermediate hosts like raccoon dogs in the same area where SARS-CoV-2 was first detected. These animals likely originated in southern China; not far from where bat viruses closely related to SARS-CoV-2 were discovered.

Zoonotic spillover, or when a virus jumps from animals to humans, isn’t a rare occurrence. Humans already carry antibodies to a range of bat-borne coronaviruses, so encounters with these viruses happen way more often than we realize. What made this one different was the chain of circumstances that allowed it to take hold and spread.

One possibility is direct transmission from bats. Another, seen as more likely, involves an intermediate host. When viruses infect animals genetically closer to humans, they can adapt more easily to human cells. That’s one reason why raccoon dogs and civets are of particular interest — both were implicated in the earlier SARS outbreak and both were present at the Wuhan market.

Bats have always carried viruses. The difference now is that we keep getting closer.

TL;DR:
COVID-19 likely emerged from a chain of spillovers that began in bats and moved through one or more intermediate hosts in wildlife markets. Bat soup has nothing to do with it.