A food blogger from Thailand may face jail time after footage uploaded to her YouTube channel showed her tucking into some bat soup, local media outlets reported.
In her 1-minute-40-second clip, speaking in a local dialect, the woman purportedly raved over how delicious bats are, comparing them to "eating rat meat." She was also seen holding up a whole bat in front of the camera and allegedly saying, “it has teeth.”
The video zoomed in on the vlogger also proceeding to crunch on the bones of the bat, which she dipped in a spicy sauce called Nim Jam, saying “the bones are so soft.”
Outraged viewers wasted no time in flooding the comments section with criticism. Alarmed at the possible implications, people wrote that, "If you're going to die, die alone. No one will blame you. But you'll be damned if you start a pandemic."
Some netizens decried the vlogger's "attention-seeking" video, while one was quoted as commenting:
“You put yourself at risk. If you get sick don’t bother burdening doctors and nurses.”
A professor at the Faculty of Medicine at Chulalongkorn University, Teerawat Hemajuta, was cited as warning against handling or eating even cooked bats, pointing out that the animal's organs, blood, and even fur can contain severe pathogens that can make a person very ill.
The issue of bats and their links to COVID-19's origin has been steeped in controversy since the outset of the pandemic. While the World Health Organization (WHO) believes the COVID-19 virus evolved in bats before being passed to humans, and former US President Donald Trump eagerly pointed the finger of blame at China.
Despite lack of concrete evidence, Trump claimed the virus could have been created at the Wuhan biolaboratory. Democrat Joe Biden, who succeeded the Republican POTUS, echoed the same rhetoric. For their part, Chinese media and the Chinese People's Liberation Army (PLA) questioned Washington's handling of the pandemic and its non-transparent biolab activities. In spring 2021, the WHO issued a full report on the origins of the coronavirus, stating that a leak from the laboratory was unlikely. Throughout the scientific community, neither a COVID-19 "patient zero" nor a "guilty bat" has been traced.