[ericlathrop]

A bat conservationist thinks bats are blamed for viruses because they're sampled more often than other mammals:

"Since 2005, when coronaviruses in horseshoe bats were first hypothesized to be the ancestors of the coronavirus that caused SARS, bats have received far more scrutiny than any other group of animals. For example, in the study on which the scariest headlines were based, researchers sampled nearly twice as many bats as rodents, shrews, and nonhuman primates combined and didn’t even include carnivores or ungulates."

https://issues.org/a-viral-witch-hunt-bats/

[DiogenesKynikos]

On the positive side, the focus on bats has led to a lot of research into their genomics. For example:

* "Comparative Analysis of Bat Genomes Provides Insight into the Evolution of Flight and Immunity": https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1230835

Bats are believed to be the reservoir species for a number of nasty viruses, though. As the abstract of the above paper says, bats are the "reservoir hosts for some of the world's most highly pathogenic viruses, including Nipah, Hendra, Ebola, and severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS)."

I haven't heard any virologists who study bats call for the eradication of bats. In fact, the Ecohealth Alliance, which coordinates a lot of the fieldwork to gather data on viruses in bat populations, says that conservation measures would help reduce the risk of spillover.