In each instance of potential deer-to-human disease transfer, the nucleotide sequences of the SARS-CoV-2 strains found in sick humans was 99.93 percent or more identical to strains found in tested whitetail deer. But the evidence doesn’t stop there; the makeup of these viral strains didn’t show up in any public database of recorded strains sourced from humans. In other words, whitetail deer (and one random lion from a zoo in North Carolina) provided the closest match to the strain these individuals were infected with.
What complicates these results is the fact that, when researchers contacted some of these people, they didn’t report having any close contact to deer or to the zoo where the lion resided in the prior month. It would be one thing if they were all avid deer hunters who just came off a successful 2021 season. But they weren’t.
This opens up a host of questions. How did Covid-19 jump from deer to humans if those humans weren’t in close contact with deer? Did whitetail deer transmit Covid-19 to the family dog, who then passed it on to these people? The mystery of whitetail deer-to-human transmission of Covid-19 remains.
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While the unedited, non-peer-reviewed nature of the study raised eyebrows when Canadian researchers first published it in February 2022, it was later accepted and published nine months later by Nature Microbiology, a research journal that boasts a “rigorous peer-review process.”