Beatle Paul McCartney said on Tuesday that eating bats, which many scientists believe is the how the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 was transmitted to humans, is “medieval.”

McCartney, 77, called into Howard Stern’s Sirius-XM radio to give an update on his life amid the coronavirus pandemic. Stern brought up China’s wet markets, which sell freshly slaughtered animals, including exotic ones like turtles, snakes, bats, civits and pangolins. McCartney, a vegetarian and animal rights activist, blasted the markets.

“I really hope that this will mean the Chinese government says, ‘OK, guys, we have really got to get super hygienic around here.’ Let’s face it, it is a little bit medieval eating bats,” he said.

McCartney said to Stern that celebrities should call for China to shut down the markets.

“It is a very good idea,” he said. “They don’t need all the people dying. And what’s it for? All these medieval practices. They just need to clean up their act. This may lead to it. If this doesn’t, I don’t know what will.”

McCartney said China is irresponsible for keeping the markets open: “They might as well be letting off atomic bombs, because it’s affecting the whole world. Whoever is responsible for this is at war with the world and itself.”

The singer said change may be hard but the practice of eating such animals is outdated.

“They did slavery forever, too, but you have to change things at some point,” McCartney said.

SARS, a far more deadly disease than the current coronavirus, also emerged from a wet market in China. Luckily, that virus is far less communicable than SARS-CoV-2 and killed fewer than 800 people worldwide. The current coronavirus, which causes COVID-19, has killed more than 120,000 people worldwdide, according to the Johns Hopkins Center for Systems Science and Engineering.

Scientists say SARS-CoV-2 mostly resembles related viruses found in bats and pangolin. But China is still allowing markets to sell all sorts of wild animals — including bats.

The Daily Mail wrote last week that “the markets have gone back to operating in exactly the same way as they did before coronavirus despite the outbreaks links to bats.” The first coronavirus cases were traced to a market in Wuhan, China, in December, but the outbreak was kept silent by officials for weeks and whistleblowers were arrested.

“Some guy in China started all of this, and it most likely came from a wet market,” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) said last week. “Just remember what I said. Some guy in China started this and we’ve got to stop this stuff in China.”

“What I would tell President Trump is to call up President Xi and say, ‘Listen, you just reopened the wet market in Wuhan where we believe all this came from. Crackdown on bringing exotic and other wild animals into these wet markets where they contaminate the food supply and human beings.”

In his interview with Stern, McCartney, who is hunkered down in England, said the mood of England and America reminded him of the countries after World War II. “A lot of people are pulling together, and it is a great thing,” he said. “It is inspiring.”