including a possible lab leak. here s abc s stephanie ramos. reporter: tonight, new evidence that covid-19 may have originated from natural animal to human transmission after new analysis suggests a link from the virus to raccoon dogs that at china s wuhan market. this is another brick in a huge wall of evidence pointing to this market as the epicenter a and to wildlife as the source of this pandemic. reporter: the findings first reported by the atlantic after researcher michael worobey and a group of scientists from around the world analyzed new data uploaded just days ago into a global database by researchers at china s cdc. that data including swab samples taken in and around wuhan back in january of 2020. we found some pretty interesting things, including raccoon dog and other mammal dna in samples that have sars-cov-2.
reporter: the preliminary findings and data not yet published or peer reviewed. tonight, the w.h.o. and experts say the findings are strong evidence but do not prove conclusively raccoon dogs transmitted the virus to humans or had covid-19 themselves. this data does not provide a definitive answer to the question of how the pandemic began. reporter: the news coming amid fierce debate over where the virus came from. the department of energy now joining the fbi saying with low confidence they suspect the pandemic most likely started with a lab leak in china. whit, this is raising questions again about transparency. when it comes to the origin of covid. chinese researchers reportedly uploaded that data and then for some reason took it down after that international team was able to analyze it. the w.h.o. is now calling for china to release any and all information relating to covid-19
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this is like a scientific drama. so these samples taken in march of 2020 that are intermittently made available for researchers to look at. they said yeah, we ve looked at these samples, and there s no evidence of anything other than there was covid there like there was in a lot of places in wuhan. just the past week, the samples show up on a server again. you have these researchers to see if there is any new data, and so they downloaded it. what they found was this in samples that had previously been positive for covid-19, they saw that there was the presence of this animal dna in those samples, as well. that animal, as you pointed out, the raccoon dog. a type of animal that is known to be able to carry coronaviruses and possibly transmit them. so that s what we know now, there was animal covid dna intermixed within the wuhan