DOES anyone really know the origin of the coronavirus? President Trump would have us believe it was made in a Chinese laboratory. 

More serious commentators believe that it started among the curious — and mostly illegal — wild animals offered for sale in the Huanan market in Wuhan. We know the virus lives in several species of bat in a single cave in southern China.

The bats themselves cannot pass the virus to humans. For that it needs an intermediate species, probably a mammal. 

Humans catch the disease from contact with that intermediate animal either alive or dead and for sale in markets like the one in Wuhan. 

Once the virus had found a human host, the vast amount of international travel by airline or even cruise ship soon ensured the distribution of the virus to every corner of the globe. 

The poor old persecuted pangolin — a scaly mammal that looks like an anteater — was just one of the exotic animals on sale in the Wuhan market and it soon appeared on the list of suspects. 

Other suspects are various species of civet cats. One, the Asian palm civet, is best known for producing expensive luxury coffee by being fed coffee beans and once they have passed through the civet, extracting the coffee from its droppings.   

After the corona outbreak, China moved quickly to toughen its laws to make eating wild animals illegal. 

A strict ban on the consumption and farming of wild animals is being rolled out across China, but of course it was already illegal to catch or eat these exotic creatures but sadly that law had never really been enforced and had never stopped them being eaten.  

Back in March of 2017, in a Morning Star feature on animals in danger of extinction, I wrote about one my favourite creatures — the pangolin. 

I explained that although pangolins are not at all well-known, they are one of the most threatened and trafficked animals on Earth.

Just eight species of pangolin survive, four in Asia, four in Africa. They are the only mammals with scales rather than fur. 

They eat only ants or termites, catching them with one of the longest tongues in the animal kingdom. Those tongues are as long as the animal’s body. 

Some amazing film has just been shot in the wilds of Uganda. It features the six-foot giant ground pangolin — the world’s largest species. 

The footage shows adult animals carrying babies on their backs and even climbing trees to reach arboreal ants’ nests.  

When rolled in a ball for protection even a full grown African lion cannot get through their armoured scales and as a result they have no real predators except for humans. 

They are hunted for food, for medicines and folk remedies and to satisfy a huge illegal international trade in their scales, skins and meat.

The animals are in high demand for Chinese traditional, but totally unscientific, medicine in southern China and Vietnam because their scales are believed to have medicinal properties. 

Some claim — without any scientific evidence — that the scales can cure cancer and many other diseases. 

In fact their scales are made of keratin — the same thing that our finger and toenails are made of. 

Toenail clippings should have the same healing properties as pangolin scales.

Pangolin meat is also considered a delicacy and a status symbol. Some 100,000 a year are estimated to be trafficked to China and Vietnam, amounting to over one million over the past decade. Pangolins are the most trafficked mammal in the world.

Just how threatened is the pangolin? Over the last 10 years more than a million pangolins have been captured and killed. That is 20 per cent of all illegal wildlife trading. 

In January 2019, nine tons of pangolin scales — thought to have come from some 14,000 animals — were seized in a single shipment in Hong Kong. 

The next month, 33 tons of pangolin meat were discovered in Malaysia, and in April, 14 tons of scales in Singapore.

It wasn’t until 2017 that a ban on the international commercial trade of all eight species of pangolins came into effect under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES).  

Last year a Chinese conservation organisation declared the Chinese pangolin extinct in the wild in China while over the past 20 years, the population of Malayan pangolins has dropped by 80 per cent and those of Filipino and Indian pangolins by half.

Because there is tremendous demand for pangolins the price of live animals has increased from about £5 per kilo in the 1990s to around £450 today. 

Vietnam even has expensive restaurants that specialise in pangolin dishes.

In late February, the Chinese People’s Congress slapped a temporary ban on all farming and consumption of “terrestrial wildlife of important ecological, scientific and social value.” This has now been signed into law. 

In March China’s People’s Congress passed a new law making the selling and eating wild animals illegal. 

President Xi Jinping, speaking about the public health risks of eating wildlife, told the Congress: “We can’t be indifferent any more.” 

President Xi knows it won’t be easy. The Chinese diet has always included all kinds of wild animals, including rats, snakes, bats and many other unlikely living things including pangolins. 

He also knows that Chinese traditional medicine uses animal parts such as the penis of tigers and deer; snake oil and rhinoceros horn. Some are used to try to cure diseases but most are used as kinds of organic Viagra.

Pangolin scales have now been removed from an official June 2020 listing of ingredients approved for use in traditional Chinese medicine in a move lauded by animal protection groups.

It is hoped that this new law and stricter implementation of previous controls on wildlife markets will start to change long-held ideas about what makes good, healthy food. 

The long-term worldwide effects of the pandemic must shape Chinese public opinion on conservation too.

The coronavirus has tended to occupy headlines, so it isn’t clear if the reduced reports of pangolin trafficking are real.  

Since the virus hit in December, almost 20,000 wildlife farms across seven Chinese provinces have been shut down or put under quarantine. These include breeders specialising in peacocks, foxes, deer and turtles. 

However, unscrupulous traffickers are now claiming they are breeding pangolins for scientific research.

Will the new laws, and a major TV documentary and the new film footage from Uganda — catching up with the Morning Star — change public opinion in time to save the wonderful but endangered, ancient scaly anteater? 

I hope it will, but only if Trump doesn’t point his accusing, finger not just at what he is struggling to get us all to call the “China virus” but also at the poor old persecuted pangolin.