As reported a few days ago, and before that in a “special report,” Emmanuel Makandiwa, known simply as “Prophet Makandiwa,” is founder of a large Pentecostal mega-church called United Family International Church in Zimbabwe.
Way back, on November 20, 2016, Makandiwa told tens of thousands at the City Sports Centre in Harare: “I saw diseases that are coming, many diseases — know that we are praying about it — and another disease more deadly, and I saw it coming from the sea. If they investigate, they will find that it comes from the ocean, more deadly than HIV and cancer. Very fast, very aggressive. How does it come from the sea? Is it a creature in the ocean, I don’t know. Is it from food from the sea? It will originate from under the waters, from the ocean.”
While scientists by and large believe the novel coronavirus originated in bats, the first famous hotspot was the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan. It has been closed permanently.
Now, a second seafood-meat-produce market — this one far larger, employing ten thousand in Beijing — has been closed after fifty-three people tested positive for the virus in the city, renewing fears that China’s grip on the pandemic is not yet secure.
Let’s delve a bit deeper into this breaking story.
When we do, we see in news reports that the market “supplies 90 percent of Beijing’s fruits and vegetables, according to the state media.
“The virus was reportedly detected on cutting boards for imported salmon there” [our italics], says The New York Times, which has dozens of reporters around the world tracking it.
Does that mean the coronavirus, scourge of the decade, originated with salmon? It could have gotten onto cutting boards any number of ways. And as far as scientists can tell, fish can not contract the virus; they don’t have the cellular receptors onto which the virus that causes covid-19 latches.
But research is nascent as yet, and nothing is etched into stone (or cutting boards, for that matter).
[Later this week: What did Maria Esperanza say that may relate to current times?]