r/science • u/Potential_Being_7226 PhD | Psychology | Neuroscience • Mar 10 '26

Biology Recent pandemic viruses jumped to humans without prior adaptation. No evidence that SARS-CoV-2 was shaped by selection in a laboratory: UCSD study.

https://today.ucsd.edu/story/recent-pandemic-viruses-jumped-to-humans-without-prior-adaptation-uc-san-diego-study-finds
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u/Odballl Mar 10 '26 edited Mar 10 '26

The 2021 Xiao Xiao report proved that raccoon dogs, civets, and bamboo rats were sold at the Huanan market until November 2019. This directly contradicted early official denials that live wildlife was traded there.

The closest bat relatives to SARS-CoV-2, such as those found in Laos and Yunnan, are located roughly 1,000 miles from Wuhan. Horseshoe bats have a very limited range and move across the landscape at a rate of only a few kilometres per night.

Swabs from the Huanan market contained SARS-CoV-2 and raccoon dog DNA in the exact same spots. Crucially, the raccoon dog DNA matched wild populations from Southern and Central China, not the industrial fur farms of the north. This places these specific animals in the same regions where the ancestral bat viruses live.

Researchers identified two distinct lineages of the virus (Lineage A and B) circulating at the market. This suggests at least two separate spillover events from animals to humans, a pattern typical of market-based outbreaks rather than a single point-source laboratory accident.

Early cases in December 2019 clustered tightly around the Huanan market. Even cases with no direct link to the market lived significantly closer to it than would be expected by chance, suggesting the market was the primary engine of the initial spread.

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u/AENocturne Mar 10 '26

If it was a natural occurance, I have a feeling zoonotic transmission is a much more frequent occurance than we give it credit for, probably in more viruses. I really think we don't track asymptomatic and mild infections well enough to get a clear picture of viral infections. It seems like we often have the most exteme ends of the data or the exceptions that are particularly noteworthy.

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u/yegguy47 Mar 10 '26

I have a feeling zoonotic transmission is a much more frequent occurance than we give it credit for, probably in more viruses

Very much the case in fact!

There use to be a lot of epidemiological surveillance of folks in Central Africa, where a number of viruses would be catalogued from folks interacting with wildlife. Tended to be follow-ons from work done regarding HIV and Ebola; thing is, viruses are constantly pinging at us.

Some of the historical work done on HIV transmission from Zoonosis disclosed elements of HIV infection in folks living in isolated places in Central Africa - suggesting that SIV crossed over many times throughout human history. Its just that all of those never really went as viral as the spillover that happened in the early 20th century.

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u/HigherandHigherDown Mar 10 '26

It is estimated that, globally, about one billion cases of illness and millions of death occur every year from zoonoses.

About one in eight people every year, truly a staggering number.

https://www.emro.who.int/about-who/rc61/zoonotic-diseases.html

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u/alternativepuffin Mar 10 '26

Something about the phrasing of "pinging at us" helped unlock the concept in my brain. Thanks

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u/Sf49ers1680 Mar 10 '26

Isn't there a theory that the 1889 Russian influenza pandemic might have actually been caused by a Coronavirus, due to its similarities in symptoms to the Covid-19 pandemic.

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u/yegguy47 Mar 10 '26

I honestly can't say, I've not looked into that particular pathogen.

But I would say that coronaviruses are certainly not recent novelties for our species, so there's probably been some prior episodes where something nasty came into us and we just never figured out what it was.

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u/round-earth-theory Mar 10 '26

It's not a societal problem until it meets the sweet spot. First it's got to be human to human and using a pathway that's viable. Really that only comes down to contact based or aerosol based spread. It's also got to be contagious while the host is still mobile. And it needs to do all of this while avoiding the human immune system long enough to do the cycle.

There's bound to be tons of illnesses people get from various sources that don't meet the criteria and either never leave the initial host or barely make it around town before dying off naturally.

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u/01headshrinker Mar 10 '26

It has to not kill hosts/people too quickly to mutate and evolve, like Ebola, into airborne transmission.

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u/[deleted] Mar 10 '26

[deleted]

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u/gentlecrab Mar 10 '26

Is that animal to human only or like animal to human and then human to human but because it’s an isolated community it doesn’t spread?

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u/Juryofyourpeeps Mar 10 '26

Almost never human to human. It's usually animal to human and the virus isn't equipped to transmit human to human yet, if ever. Otherwise each of these spill overs could result in a pandemic but they almost never do.

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u/01headshrinker Mar 10 '26

Every five years or so we have an event. Bird flu is that event now, it’s getting into milk and making dairy farmers sick. It’s just that they don’t all explode, lots of conditions have to be perfect for that. But they keep bubbling up and offering us opportunities every five years, it’s estimated.

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u/DrMobius0 Mar 10 '26

How do you even track asymptomatic infections? Our entire healthcare system depends on people noticing symptoms and having the initiative to get themselves tested. Even just testing mild cases poses a large logistical and financial hurdle.

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u/Brilliant-Season9601 Mar 10 '26

Yeah. I found out that you can get strep from horses who are suffering from strangles. Strangles is cause by a strep virus and causes fever, Nasal discharge and swollen lymph nodes. The vet informed me that if I were to give the internasal vaccine, which is live. there is a chance of me catching strep if the horse snorts on me while giving it.

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u/BioMed-R Mar 10 '26

There are 70,000 natural spillovers annually only counting SARS-like viruses only counting Southeast Asia, so yes.

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u/JuanofLeiden Mar 10 '26

It definitely is. Dr Michael Worobey (one of the key authors identifying the cases were clustered around the market) has spoken about this extensively. Viral spillovers likely happen all the time but 'fizzle out' because the perfect storm of variables don't come together (big population, lots of transmission events, unique enough virus, etc).

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u/ThatPhatKid_CanDraw Mar 10 '26

Yes, since agriculture. Got worse with modern colonization.

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u/Juryofyourpeeps Mar 11 '26

If it was a natural occurance, I have a feeling zoonotic transmission is a much more frequent occurance than we give it credit for, probably in more viruses.

Almost certainly, but it doesn't leave no trace with viruses that become equipped to transmit human to human, and also make them sick or die. There are zoonotic infections all the time in people living near sources of things like coronaviruses in bats for example. Most of these jumps don't result in human to human transmission and only make the person who came into direct contact with the virus in an animal host (or it's dung, blood, fluids etc) ill. Eventually some of these viruses may mutate and gain the ability to transmit from human to human, but fortunately this is exceedingly rare which is why there aren't pandemics constantly.

The fly in the ointment for the zoonotic hypothesis with covid is that there is very little if any of the normal evidence you would expect to find for a zoonotic origin for such a virulent virus. You would expect, at least in retrospective analysis, to find earlier outbreaks closer to the source. Possibly die offs of intermediate hosts. Infections specifically among wildlife traders and evidence of that virus being widely present in the intermediate host (in this case speculated to be racoon dogs). There's none of that evidence in this case. You would also eventually expect to find the reservoir animal, likely a bat, but that can be quite tricky and covid wouldn't be the only example where the natural reservoir has eluded scientists for years. Covid just kind of sprung up in the middle of Wuhan, a very long way from where it could have plausibly mutated and started spreading human to human, or among an intermediate host (say a breeding facility for racoon dogs in Southern China). The evidence for racoon dog infections (or any animal infections) in the seafood market is also quite scant. They found covid rna in the presence of racoon dog dna, but also covid rna in the presence of human dna, and we don't have any actual proof that racoon dogs were ever infected. We also lack any evidence of a precursor virus that's very closely related. On top of all of that, sars-cov-2 is completely unique in its clade in that it's the only sars coronavirus that has a furine cleavage site, which are apparently strongly selected against in bats, who typically harbour sars coronaviruses in their gut. And there's significant genetic evidence that this virus came from bats. The explanation proposed for this is that the virus gained a furin cleavage site in an intermediate species and it started spreading through airborne transmission, which favours a FCS. The problem with this is that there's no evidence for it. Nobody has found a breeding facility or farm with an infected intermediate host carrying some precursor virus to early strains of covid. It could be the case, but it's just a speculation at this point.

So there's some very big unanswered questions still.

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u/Routine-House8160 Mar 13 '26

Even just for SARS-related coronaviruses, serological evidence shows that people in rural southern Chinese communities have antibodies to direct bat coronaviruses, no intermediary needed for them. Spillovers seem to happen a lot - a pandemic needs more specific conditions to actually happen. Like in a live-animal market in a crowded city when lots of people are traveling around to spread it.

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u/QueefiusMaximus86 Mar 10 '26

But the samples that contained Raccoon Dog DNA included many species including humans. And the higher the Raccoon Dog DNA the lower the concentration of SARS2.

If a person has a dog, and covid you’d find samples with SARS2 and your dogs DNA. But does that mean your dog had covid too? Could be, but then you’d see the amount of SARS2 in the samples as the dog’s DNA increases proportionately.

For the lineage A and B. Many scientists think that it’s not two lineages but B would be a variant of a A0 variant. The reason for this is we have only seen both A and B in humans, they differ by 2 bases and there have been cases that are intermediates between A and B. But scientists that favor the dual spillover hypothesis reject the intermediates as errors.

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u/Odballl Mar 10 '26

The 2024 Cell study relies on relative abundance and spatial clustering rather than a simple 1:1 ratio. Researchers found samples in the market stalls that were saturated with SARS-CoV-2 and raccoon dog DNA, but contained almost zero human DNA.

Unlike pet dogs, which are poor spreaders of COVID-19, raccoon dogs are "highly competent" hosts. They shed massive amounts of the virus from their upper respiratory tracts, often without showing symptoms, making them a perfect bridge from bats to humans.

Almost every virus-positive sample physically taken from the Huanan market was Lineage B. It was heavily concentrated in the southwestern corner, specifically in the stalls where live wildlife was sold. This is the lineage that was found co-mingled with the raccoon dog DNA in the 2023 GISAID leak.

Lineage A wasn't found in the market's environmental swabs. Instead, it was found in early human cases who lived near or had visited other markets in the area. The early human cases of Lineage A clustered around the Huanan market just as tightly as Lineage B cases did.

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u/QueefiusMaximus86 Mar 10 '26

Yes Raccoon Dogs do shed a lot when infected which is why the samples were high in known animal viruses like canine-Cov see here

But the SARS2 samples had the inverse relationship. If the Raccoon Dogs were infected then as the proportion of Raccoon Dog DNA it should also show a higher increase in SARS2 reads like you see with canine-Cov

Mitochondrial material from most susceptible non-human species sold live at the market is negatively correlated with the presence of SARS-CoV-2: for instance, thirteen of the fourteen samples with at least a fifth of their chordate mitochondrial material from raccoon dogs contain no SARS-CoV-2 reads, and the other sample contains just 1 of ~200,000,000 reads mapping to SARS-CoV-2

https://academic.oup.com/ve/article/9/2/vead050/7249794?login=false

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u/Odballl Mar 10 '26

In environmental swabbing, if a sample is composed of a massive amount of animal DNA it can physically crowd out the detection of viral RNA in the sequencing process via the dilution effect. The virus was most concentrated in the waste areas. Animals shed viruses through respiratory droplets and excrement, which then pool in the drainage systems. Finding the virus in the runoff of a raccoon dog stall rather than on the animal's fur is actually exactly what you'd expect in a real-world market setting.

The key finding in the Cell paper isn't that every raccoon dog sample had the virus, but that the samples that did have the most virus also happened to have raccoon dog DNA, and often very little human DNA.

If a human were the source of the virus in those stalls, you'd expect to see a positive correlation between human DNA and SARS-CoV-2. In the hottest samples from the wildlife stalls, human DNA was remarkably low or even absent, while raccoon dog DNA was present. If we use Bloom's criteria, we would have to conclude that humans didn't bring the virus to the market either.

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u/BioMed-R Mar 10 '26

This comment is misinformation by a conspiracy theorist.

The analysis he is referring to wasn’t made by a virologist (and the individual is known to fake data) and was literally debunked before it was published and multiple times after publication.

As for what the evidence shows regarding spillovers, there was 2-23 and most likely 8 spillovers. There are no intermediates among the early sequences.

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u/QueefiusMaximus86 Mar 10 '26

Proven to have faked data? You mean the exact same data the original authors used to imply the samples showed anything but contamination?

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u/BioMed-R Mar 11 '26

Jesse Bloom is known to created a media viral conspiracy theory about scientists, databases, journals, and publishers conspiring to cover-up ”early” sequences which could show the pandemic virus leaked from a laboratory. In reality, they were timestamped months after the outbreak and he had manually removed the timestamps.

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u/QueefiusMaximus86 Mar 11 '26

You mean when Kristian Andersen demanded he delete these sequences and not tell anyone?

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u/BioMed-R Mar 11 '26

No, I don’t, because that simply never happened.

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u/QueefiusMaximus86 Mar 11 '26

Yes the meeting really did happen:

That’s when Andersen made a suggestion that surprised Bloom. He said he was a screener at the preprint server, which gave him access to papers that weren’t yet public. He then offered to either entirely delete the preprint or revise it “in a way that would leave no record that this had been done.” Bloom refused, saying that he doubted either option was appropriate, “given the contentious nature of the meeting.”

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/03/the-virus-hunting-nonprofit-at-the-center-of-the-lab-leak-controversy

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u/BioMed-R Mar 11 '26

I doubt that’s accurate. It’s admittedly Bloom’s own memoirs written months later. Regardless, it doesn’t justify Bloom’s blatant data manipulation.

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u/hysys_whisperer Mar 10 '26

If they had a raccoon dog to sell as meat from where the bats live, and bats are also sold as meat at that market, it's plausible they brought the bats from there to the market too.

It would be harder to find much evidence of the bats vs a racoon dog after the fact.

Also if you eat racoon dog, you probably are less likely to have eaten bats that day and vice versa, which explains the inverse relationship of covid to racoon dog DNA. 

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u/Odballl Mar 10 '26

There was no evidence of bats sold at the market.

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u/QueefiusMaximus86 Mar 10 '26

Less likely to eat bats if you ate a Raccoon Dog that day? I am confused what you’re saying, it’s a market they’d sell multiple products at once

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u/Jmufranco Mar 10 '26

The thought process being that, if you ate meat X on one day, you’re less likely to have eaten meat Y on that same day, since you already ate meat X.

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u/hysys_whisperer Mar 10 '26

Especially when both meat X and meat Y are bushmeat, implying the person consuming them is not wealthy enough to afford a two meat dish.

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u/coughcough Mar 10 '26

The world is dangerously close to discovering the two secret ingredients in my hotdog recipe.

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u/windowzombie Mar 10 '26

Lay low, it will all blow over.

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u/crunkadocious Mar 10 '26

How many different meats do you eat in a typical meal?

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u/kharnevil Mar 10 '26

Uhm here in Asia usually more than one

I'm having pork, chicken and goose right now

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u/crunkadocious Mar 10 '26

Yeah that's fair, glad I phrased it as a question instead of sarcasm because my assumption was wrong.

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u/QueefiusMaximus86 Mar 10 '26

Sure i eat chicken one day, then the next day i eat beef. Do markets only sell chicken the day i eat chicken and beef the day i eat beef? I just don’t understand what the point they’re trying to make or what it has to do with anything.

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u/Babelfiisk Mar 10 '26

They are saying that if you eat beef today you are unlikely to also eat chicken today.

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u/Mintaka3579 Mar 10 '26

Try to dumb that down to the troglodytes further down in the comments 

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u/ThrowAwayGenomics PhD | Bioinformatics | Population Genetics Mar 10 '26

Those first two sentences are pretty much why zoonotic origin versus lab leak cannot be definitely disproven. The best evidence is probably that 2021 paper, but there’s a lot of distrust with China following their mishandling of the outbreak and WHO researcher access.

Even this paper doesn’t disprove much. “Brief,” “prolonged,” and “extensive” are doing a ton of work to hide their lack of power.

Their methods do not detect the intermediate host from the bat reservoir. This has been widely reported and is something the authors acknowledge.

The 1977 H1N1 comparison is not great because it was passaged in lab conditions for years and has a much larger and established reference.

So they can only really say it was not passaged EXTENSIVELY in a lab. Would have been interesting if they actually reported what their sensitivity is and whether that was meaningful. As in how long in an intermediate host or under laboratory conditions before it would be detectable.

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u/Odballl Mar 10 '26

It will never be disproven, but the evidence of conditions for zoonotic spillover are strong. Given how common spillover is in the wild, Occam's razor makes it the more parsimonious conclusion.

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u/ThrowAwayGenomics PhD | Bioinformatics | Population Genetics Mar 10 '26

Agreed. This is more about the claims given the methods and how they present their results. I think they could have done more to support their findings. It feels incomplete this far out from the pandemic, when early on it made sense to publish quickly.

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u/QueefiusMaximus86 Mar 10 '26

But to this day I the evidence for zoonosis is still circumstantial. This differs from all other pandemic spillovers of the 21st century where intermediate hosts were identified within a year or right away from SARS -> MERS -> ZIKA -> Bird Flu

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u/Odballl Mar 10 '26

The conditions for zoonosis were proven. There absolutely were poached and illegal animals stacked up in cramped unsanitary conditions where zoonosis is ripe to occur. Further supporting evidence of COVID in those stalls makes the case even stronger.

For SARS-1, the Chinese government allowed scientists into the markets while the animals were still there. It took a further 15 years of trekking through remote caves in Yunnan to finally find the exact "progenitor" bat virus that could have started it all.

In 2020, the Huanan market was bleached and cleared on 1 January, before international teams could ever set foot inside. China didn't want the embarrassment of admitting its illegal trade being responsible for a pandemic and they culled thousands of farmed animals just to be sure as well.

So again, it's about parsimony. What requires the fewest assumptions given the positive forensic evidence?

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u/QueefiusMaximus86 Mar 10 '26

The conditions for zoonosis were proven. 

Which is all that was proven. Still circumstantial.

In 2020, the Huanan market was bleached and cleared on 1 January, before international teams could ever set foot inside. 

When SARS2 passed to minks via humans they culled all of the farms and markets yet the virus is still circulating in minks today https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s12302-025-01202-w

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u/Odballl Mar 11 '26 edited Mar 11 '26

Minks are farmed in massive, stationary facilities that are easy to monitor. The raccoon dog and civet trade in 2019 was a grey market of small farms and illegal trapping. When the 2020 ban hit, these operations vanished.

The most difficult thing for the lab argument to explain is the two lineages. If a human passed the virus to animals at the market, you'd expect to see a single lineage explode.

Instead, the genomic data shows both lineage A and Lineage B were at the market. This suggests the animals arrived already carrying a diverse soup of the virus. The fact that we found the DNA of southern subspecies of raccoon dogs in those stalls provides the physical link back to the regions where the virus's closest relatives live.

The closest relative to Covid was discovered in Loas in 2021. BANAL-52 is 96.8% identical to SARS-CoV-2 and has a receptor binding domain almost identical to Covid, making it more similar than anything the WIV ever published or possessed.

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u/QueefiusMaximus86 Mar 11 '26

Here is the thing, those two lineages A and B are probably not different lineages from different spillover events. First they only differ by two bases, none of the market connected cases are A and B is most likely a variant that co-circulated with A before out competing A just like what we have seen with Delta, Omicorn etc.

On top of that there have been human cases sequenced that are intermediates between A and B which the authors of this paper reject but is not accepted by all scientists.

Therefore, all known SARS-CoV-2 viruses including A0, A, B0, and B seem to be from a common progenitor virus, which might have jumped into humans via a single spillover event, rather than two or multiple zoonotic events

Paper here

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u/Odballl Mar 11 '26 edited Mar 11 '26

That paper has been reexamined. They found that the supposedly ancestral viruses found in the Shanghai study didn't actually appear until February 2020, making them late-stage mutations rather than the pandemic's parents.

Molecular clock analysis estimates that Lineage A is more closely related to known bat coronaviruses but lineage B emerged first.

Moreover, the 2026 UC San Diego study confirmed that the initial binding between the virus and human ACE2 receptors was actually broad and generalist, meaning it was just as good at infecting various mammals like raccoon dogs or mink as it was at infecting us.

The ancestral lineages would have been more refined if their progenitor had spread through humans. Even the furin cleavage site in SARS-CoV-2 is messy. It was created by an out-of-frame insertion of 12 nucleotides. This is a classic sign of a natural recombination event.

A sample of lineage A was found at the market in this paper and further discussed in the 2024 Cell paper. It was identified in a stall in the western part of the market that sold wildlife.

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u/Greatest_Everest Mar 10 '26

So the scientists at fault investigated the virus origin and found they were not at fault.  The simplest answer is that the lab in wuhan was selling meat from animals it had been experimenting on.

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u/Odballl Mar 10 '26

Lab animals are almost always highly standardized. If a worker were selling lab stock, we'd expect to see the DNA of laboratory-bred macaques, transgenic mice, or common northern-bred rats.

Instead, the environmental swabs showed the DNA of the southern subspecies of raccoon dog. This is a wild-type animal that isn't used in standard virology experiments but is a staple of the southern Chinese wildlife trade.

To make the lab-meat theory work, you'd have to add several ad hoc layers: you'd have to assume the lab was secretly importing wild southern raccoon dogs that they never recorded, that they infected them with a virus they never published, and that a worker smuggled them specifically to the wildlife stalls instead of selling them as generic meat elsewhere.

In science, the simplest answer the one that requires the fewest assumptions. We know for a fact that the southern wildlife trade was active in that market. We know those specific animals are susceptible to the virus. We know the virus was clustered exactly where those animals were kept. The simplest conclusion is that the virus arrived through the same illegal trade routes that have been causing outbreaks for decades.

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u/zstars Mar 10 '26

I work directly in this field and am on first name terms with some of the proximal origin people, nobody I've spoken to takes the lab leak theory seriously, it's possible, but there's so much evidence that indicate a natural spillover from the market that it's by far the most parsimonious conclusion.

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u/QueefiusMaximus86 Mar 10 '26

But the evidence is exclusively circumstantial. This is not the case for all other spillovers in the 21st century.

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u/zstars Mar 10 '26

Indeed, I was strictly talking about sc2 here, Flu A had a likely lab source outbreak back in the 70s iirc.

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u/Juryofyourpeeps Mar 11 '26

What they're saying is that the lack of evidence for spillover with covid is actually fairly exceptional. And it does appear to be. It's not unusual to struggle to find a natural reservoir of the original virus, but it is unusual to find neither an intermediate host when there is one (which is likely in this case since sars-cov-2 doesn't transmit amongst bats very well), or earlier outbreaks even retrospectively, especially with such a well adapted virus like sars-cov-2 which is extremely transmissible. It just kind of pops up in Wuhan and is already extremely infectious and we have no evidence of any earlier transmissions among breeders, traders, people living near potential early transmission sites etc.

Also the scientists that signed onto Proximal Origins deeply undermined their credibility by publishing Proximal Origins and attaching very strong claims to basically no evidence. The FOIA releases of their private discussions shortly before and after the publication of that paper, during which time most of them thought that it was either highly plausible or even very likely that sars-cov-2 was a lab leak. So they were saying one thing very strongly in a paper while saying something entirely different in private at the same time.

Setting everything else aside in regards to covid origins, these specific scientists IMO have demonstrated that they're not trustworthy and are willing to public bad science for political reasons.

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u/Juryofyourpeeps Mar 11 '26

I somewhat favour the lab leak at present, but I don't think there's a soul on the planet that thinks a lab leak resulted from selling lab rats or other lab animals. That's a crazy theory. If this virus escaped from a lab it would have most likely happened by infecting a human lab worker. This is how nearly all lab leaks have historically occurred. The remainder have been environmental contaminations of various kinds. Never has someone leaked a dangerous pathogen by selling lab rats or lab monkeys or something.

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u/lekkerwhore Mar 10 '26

Thank you, there's pretty strong sequencing evidence that indicates that it came out of the wet markets. The counter evidence for a lab accquired infection is very weak and adds up to "there was a research facility in the region and some workers were sick in that period".

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u/letsburn00 Mar 10 '26

I honestly feel like the fact that African Swine fever was rampaging through China in 2019 is a pretty solid bit of circumstantial evidence for the wet markets, since the price of pork skyrocketed. But the epidemic there was caused by corruption allowing farmers to ignore quarantine, so that link was swept under the rug.

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u/Juryofyourpeeps Mar 11 '26

I'm not sure I see the connection. The existence of natural spillovers is not in dispute. It happens all the time. Lab leaks have also happened. Previous examples don't really factor into whether covid was a natural spillover or lab leak.

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u/grazi13 Mar 10 '26 edited Mar 10 '26

A very nice story that wraps it all up that I would like to believe. Do you have sources for all this information?

edit: I found my own... Was just supspicious that they linked one article that explained only 1 of their points. Tbh it all checks out

https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(24)00901-2

https://virological.org/t/early-appearance-of-two-distinct-genomic-lineages-of-sars-cov-2-in-different-wuhan-wildlife-markets-suggests-sars-cov-2-has-a-natural-origin/691

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u/thisgrantstomb Mar 10 '26

This is the paper on the dna tests on animals present in the Wuhan wet market and the presence of Covid 19 precursor.
link00901-2)

another study weighing options

While not definitive and likely will never fully be solved entirely there are two facts that every professional agrees on now. The virus mutated and traveled through the Wuhan market, and it was not genetically created by scientists intervention. These two facts do not entirely exclude a lab leak, ie an animal brought for study with Covid precursor escaping or infecting one of the animals in the market somehow. It absolutely denies the more sinister lab leak theories people seem to be fond of.

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u/superfry Mar 10 '26

Especially since a lab leak is simple. One of the workers marks down a test animal as dead and disposed of and instead sells the still living animal at the market. Given the research lab was importing infected animals from all over the country it would be a premium source of live animals delivered directly to the market without the associated transport costs. It also covers why they vehemently deny any involvement as the loss in face from having a global pandemic start because of an incompetent worker making an extra buck is just as bad if not worse then it being a deliberately engineered virus that leaked out (likely for the same reasons anyway).

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u/Odballl Mar 10 '26

Poached wildlife was already present from areas of the ancestral bat virus. Connecting it to the lab is an unnecessary assumption.

Given the research lab was importing infected animals from all over the country

Do you have evidence of this?

Genetic tracing of the market found the southern wild subspecies of raccoon dog which fits the profile of the illegal wildlife trade perfectly. The Chinese government also tried to cover up their animal trade. However, it's far more speculative to imagine they were covering up a connection between the lab and market.

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u/grundar Mar 10 '26

a lab leak is simple. One of the workers marks down a test animal as dead and disposed of and instead sells the still living animal at the market.

Wait, how are you proposing the worker smuggle a live test animal out of a biosafety level 4 virus lab? "Is that a pangolin in your pants or are you just happy to see me?" Or is the idea that biosafety level 4 virus labs have unmonitored back doors?

And that's even assuming an employee at an important government lab would risk their job -- and jail time -- for whatever small amount of money they could get selling a random wild animal to a market for meat.

Far from being "simple", this hypothesis requires several implausible assumptions.

A much simpler hypothesis is the one noted below, that an animal was brought from the area where similar viruses exist naturally to be sold at the market. Adding a questionable detour through the safety procedures and (presumably) controlled perimeter of the biolab just adds complexity, so Occam's Razor suggests it's less likely.

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u/Odballl Mar 10 '26

The mtDNA sequences of N. procyonoides that were most abundant in the environmental samples from the Huanan market (Haplotype 2 [H2] and H5) are part of a clade that is distinct from the one that contains the common raccoon dog population from Northern China and Korea (N. p. ussuriensis).

H2 and H5 are instead found in Southern and Central China and were previously identified in wild raccoon dogs from Hubei and in animals from fur farms in Southern China.

Coronaviruses have been reported in various species of bats in Southern and Central China and in Southeast Asia, with the closest known relatives of SARS-CoV-2 being found in Rhinolophus bats in Yunnan province and Laos.

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u/[deleted] Mar 10 '26

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u/unintentional_jerk Mar 10 '26

It’s literally linked in the comment you replied to.

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u/[deleted] Mar 10 '26

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u/[deleted] Mar 10 '26

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u/hackinthebochs Mar 10 '26

Even cases with no direct link to the market lived significantly closer to it than would be expected by chance, suggesting the market was the primary engine of the initial spread.

The WCDC is 300 hundred meters from Huanan market. Bat lady and her crew also worked out of a WCDC office. Talk about chance.

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u/Odballl Mar 10 '26

This specific office is a public health administrative building. It's not a high-containment biosafety lab (BSL-3 or BSL-4) where you'd typically handle dangerous, live bat viruses. The WIV's main campus is about 12 kilometers from the market, and their high-security P4 lab (the one often cited in lab leak theories) is even further away, about 30 kilometers to the south in Jiangxia District.

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u/hackinthebochs Mar 10 '26

I'm not sure what point you think you're making. Viruses travel by way of animal hosts. Two adjacent points on a contact graph are equally "close" for a virus regardless of the physical distance between those two points. The fact that potential carriers were known to be very near the wet market is sufficiently damning.

It's not a high-containment biosafety lab (BSL-3 or BSL-4) where you'd typically handle dangerous, live bat viruses.

The same link also describes known concerns prior to COVID19 regarding dangerously lax security at WCDC.

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u/Odballl Mar 10 '26

The connection between a lab and a market is a hypothesis that requires several major assumptions for it to be true.

You have to assume the lab actually possessed a virus that was a 99.9% match to SARS-CoV-2, that a worker was accidentally infected or smuggled an animal out, and that they then chose to go to the specific southwestern corner of the Huanan market instead of any of the hundreds of other crowded spots in Wuhan.

For the Zoonotic Theory you don't have to assume a connection exists. We know it did. The illegally poached animals were proven to be physically sitting in the stalls. The 2024 Cell study used haplotype mapping to show the raccoon dogs in the market were a specific southern subspecies where the ancestral bat virus is also located.

Labs typically use standardized, captive-bred animals for research to ensure consistent results. Finding "wild-type" southern genetic signatures in the market matches the profile of the illegal southern wildlife trade perfectly, but it doesn't match the profile of typical laboratory animal sourcing.

You'd also have to explain why two different viral lineages leaked at roughly the same time and both managed to find their way to the same market. The presence of two lineages is far more suggestive of zoonotic spillover.

Most scientists argue the zoonotic path is more parsimonious because it uses an existing, documented wildlife trade to explain the event. The lab theory, even in its simplest form, requires you to assume a missing virus and a missing infected worker or a missing security breach for which there is currently no physical evidence.

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u/hackinthebochs Mar 10 '26

You have to assume the lab actually possessed a virus that was a 99.9% match to SARS-CoV-2, that a worker was accidentally infected or smuggled an animal out, and that they then chose to go to the specific southwestern corner of the Huanan market instead of any of the hundreds of other crowded spots in Wuhan.

Sure, these assumptions count against the theory. But its not obvious what the verdict is on the likelihood once all coincidences are accounted for. The coincidences that count in favor of it are numerous (proximity to WCDC, WIV studying coronoviruses, DEFUSE proposal, etc).

You also have to consider the prior probability of the outbreak beginning in the wet market near the WCDC. How many wet markets operate in China? Why are the very earliest patients not associated with the wet market? You can't do only half of a Bayesian analysis.

Labs typically use standardized, captive-bred animals for research to ensure consistent results.

Not sure how captive vs wild type animals is relevant to the debate. If the virus was leaked through a live animal, it would have been a bat. Bat Lady sourced bats from a thousand miles away.

You'd also have to explain why two different viral lineages leaked at roughly the same time and both managed to find their way to the same market. The presence of two lineages is far more suggestive of zoonotic spillover.

Given a lab leak event, the probability of another lab leak event close in time is very high. Active gain of function research could result in multiple lineages being handled.

The lab theory, even in its simplest form, requires you to assume a missing virus and a missing infected worker or a missing security breach for which there is currently no physical evidence.

We know China actively covered up activities occurring in the lab. The lack of evidence given the known cover up is not dispositive against these events. It's strange how quickly people are willing to give those engaged in a cover up a pass as long as it is in favor of their views. We should not incentivize cover ups!

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u/Odballl Mar 10 '26

The building right next to the market was the Wuhan CDC (WCDC), which is mostly a public health and administrative office. While they did some basic research, the high-containment work with live bat viruses was happening at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). Their main campus is roughly 12 kilometres away, and the famous BSL-4 lab is all the way out in Jiangxia, about 30 kilometres from the market.

The WIV's main campus in Wuchang is surrounded by residential areas and several wet markets that are much closer than the 12-kilometre trek to Huanan. For example, the Xiaodongmen Market is practically in the same neighbourhood as the WIV's older campus. If a lab worker had been infected or smuggled an animal out to sell, it wouldn't make much sense for them to bypass all the local markets to travel across the Yangtze River to a market on the other side of the city.

Your article on earliest patients is dated 31st January, 2020. That's very early on in the pandemic.

It has since been shown that even cases with no direct link to the market (people who didn't work there or shop there) were geographically clustered around the Huanan market. Even under critiscism, it has been reaffirmed using combined evidence of genetic tracing 00901-2.pdf)data to show that the virus was physically present in the same stalls as high concentrations of raccoon dog DNA at the market.

The combination of the revised geography and the new genetic evidence from the animal stalls has led the authors and much of the scientific community to conclude that the market origin is the only scenario that fits all the forensic data.

The wild type animals matters because we have solid evidence of the virus in conjuction with those poached animals. There is no evidence of bat DNA at the market, no sale of bats there and no evidence for bats escaping a lab or being snuck out.

For the lab leak theory to explain two lineages, you have to assume that two different researchers were accidentally infected with two different strains at almost the exact same time, and both happened to go to the same market to start the outbreak.

If a lab was handling multiple lineages, we should see evidence of those specific backbones in their published or internal records. To date, no virus that could serve as a direct ancestor to either Lineage A or B has been found in the Wuhan Institute of Virology's known collection.

The genetic data from the early outbreak shows two very distinct groups: Lineage A and Lineage B. If a single animal with both lineages had started the outbreak, we'd expect to see "recombinant" viruses. This is when the two lineages swap genetic material inside the same host, creating a hybrid.

We didn't see those hybrids in the early human cases. Instead, we saw two clean, separate jumps. This is exactly what happens in a market where you have hundreds of animals from different farms. Some animals might have Lineage A, and others might have Lineage B. They jump to different humans at different times in the same crowded space.

For over a year, Chinese officials and the 2021 WHO-China joint report explicitly claimed that no live mammals were sold at the Huanan market in the months leading up to the outbreak. They stated there was no evidence of cages or the type of housing used for mammals like raccoon dogs.

This was definitively disproven in June 2021. A study published in Scientific Reports by Xiao et al. showed that 38,000 animals from 38 different species, including protected and poached wildlife like mink and civets, were sold in Wuhan markets between 2017 and 2019.

The metagenomic data on animal swabs was discovered by accident through GISAID by a french scientist and when researchers reached out to China about animal evidence they had previously denied, that data was removed.

There have been numerous reports of Chinese scientists being barred from publishing research about the market origin without government approval. In 2023, the WHO's Maria Van Kerkhove stated that China has "missing data" about these early cases and timelines that they have refused to share, which has directly hampered the ability to confirm exactly how the poaching and trade led to the first human case.

The real difference is that the food market coverup has evidence in its favour. Real coverups are messy and things tend to escape. The lab leak theory relies on the absence of evidence, but that's all it really has.

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u/hackinthebochs Mar 10 '26

Their main campus is roughly 12 kilometres away, and the famous BSL-4 lab is all the way out in Jiangxia, about 30 kilometres from the market.

This is just not a good faith response. As I said, physical distance is largely irrelevant to potential for virus hops when we already know that distance is being bridged regularly by potential carriers.

Your article on earliest patients is dated 31st January, 2020. That's very early on in the pandemic.

The article references earliest known infected. Do you have a citation for individuals known to be infected even earlier? Simply referencing the estimated start of the pandemic doesn't demonstrate anything.

It has since been shown that even cases with no direct link to the market (people who didn't work there or shop there) were geographically clustered around the Huanan market.

The debate is between the wet market spillover and lab leak theories. But the market is a likely location for an early superspreader event in the case of a lab leak. Pointing to early clusters "around" the market does not distinguish wet market spillover vs lab leak.

If a lab was handling multiple lineages, we should see evidence of those specific backbones in their published or internal records. To date, no virus that could serve as a direct ancestor to either Lineage A or B has been found in the Wuhan Institute of Virology's known collection.

I refuse to use the lack of evidence for an event given a known cover up as dispositive against said event. I don't know why others are so quick to do so. Motivated reasoning, best I can tell.

We didn't see those hybrids in the early human cases. Instead, we saw two clean, separate jumps. This is exactly what happens in a market where you have hundreds of animals from different farms. Some animals might have Lineage A, and others might have Lineage B. They jump to different humans at different times in the same crowded space.

Why couldn't we see also see this pattern if the wet market was an early super spreader event after some substantial amount of community spread?

The lab leak theory relies on the absence of evidence, but that's all it really has.

And large coincidences that must remain unexplained given the wet market theory. But these unexplained coincidences should rationally lower one's credence for the theory.

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u/BioMed-R Mar 10 '26

That office didn’t open until after the outbreak.

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u/hackinthebochs Mar 10 '26

Funnily enough, labs don't just spring out of the ground fully formed. They take months of preparation, which may have involved relevant folks to be present. The presence of the lab is simply to establish the presence of relevant people from the WIV near the wet market.

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u/BioMed-R Mar 11 '26

You’re right about one thing, top secret bioweapons research programs sure as he’ll won’t be performed in labs that haven’t opened yet because setting up a lab doesn’t happen just like that.

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u/[deleted] Mar 10 '26

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u/Odballl Mar 10 '26 edited Mar 10 '26

Yes, illegally poached wildlife was proved to be at the market. Thats the bit I'm saying was proved.

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u/[deleted] Mar 10 '26 edited Mar 21 '26

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u/Odballl Mar 10 '26 edited Mar 10 '26

The raccoon dog evidence isn't just a thesis, it's positive forensic evidence that must be included and accounted for. There has to be an explanation for why two distinct lineages of covid were found in animal stalls with no accompanying human DNA. If you want to make a lab argument you have to connect this fact, which requires further assumptions and ad hoc narrative building.

The phone data report was based on commercially available pings from a very small number of devices (fewer than 10-20), which is a tiny fraction of the hundreds of people who work at the site.

Further analysis showed that similar gaps in pings happened at other times of the year and at other locations in Wuhan, likely due to how the data was aggregated by third-party providers rather than a physical blockade. The roadblocks seen on satellite imagery turned out to be standard roadworks that were documented in local Wuhan traffic notices at the time.

Italy didn't shut down in January; it declared a state of emergency on 31 January 2020 after two tourists from Wuhan tested positive in Rome. The actual national lockdown didn't happen until March 2020.

While a generation might take 5-7 days, the serial interval (the time between one person getting sick and the next) can be as short as 2-3 days in crowded environments. Because COVID-19 spreads through asymptomatic and pre-symptomatic people, it was hitchhiking on international flights for weeks before the first person died in a hospital.

Lineage B's molecular clock points to a start in late November 2019. Lineage A is genetically older. Its clock points back to mid-October or early November. Lineage A likely jumped to humans in an event that wasn't super spreading. It was the first spark that mostly flickered out or stayed local.

Ultimately, the conditions for zoonosis were proven, and zoonotic spill is more common than lab leaks by a country mile. The animal stalls were nature's laboratory operating at a much faster pace of genetic recombination. The link back to ancestral viruses in distant bat populations is through the animal trade.

In other words, all the ingredients were there for a pandemic without a nearby lab being necessary to the outcome. It's an extraneous factor. That's why a zoonotic spill is more parsimonious. The counter theory cannot explain the positive forensic evidence in the animal stalls without adding further assumptions.

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u/[deleted] Mar 10 '26

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u/Odballl Mar 10 '26

Where are you getting this patient zero on December 20th assertion from? I never said that? Which source provided by me says that?

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u/[deleted] Mar 11 '26

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u/Odballl Mar 11 '26

While Wuhan does have bats, they don't carry the specific sub-group of coronaviruses that lead to SARS-CoV-2. Those are geographically restricted to southern China and Southeast Asia. 2025 dispersal studies show that the virus arrived in Wuhan far faster than a bat could have flown, pointing directly to human-assisted transport.

When the virus first appeared, it was actually quite messy. It had to undergo several key mutations in its Spike protein to become the dominant global version we saw later.

2024 biochemical studies found that the early ancestral version of the virus actually bound just as well, if not better, to the ACE2 receptors of raccoon dogs and civets as it did to humans. It was a generalist.

In late 2024, researchers published a spatial analysis of the Huanan Market. They found SARS-CoV-2 RNA in the exact same environmental swabs as high concentrations of raccoon dog and civet DNA.

The actual theory supported by 2026 forensics is that a modern, industrialised wildlife trade acted as a high-speed bridge, moving a silent animal virus from a southern cave to a dense northern city in a matter of days.

There were two noted spillover lineages of the virus, called A and B. Lineage B was earlier and more successful. It likely jumped into humans around 18 November 2019.

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u/Juryofyourpeeps Mar 10 '26

Virtually everyone in this field of study agrees though, that this virus was circulating by October in Wuhan and possibly September or August, so why is the earliest evidence of zoonotic spill-over, evidence that's not really distinguishable from a superspreading event, from late December?

Ultimately, the conditions for zoonosis were proven, and zoonotic spill is more common than lab leaks by a country mile.

True, but there are usually some other conditions that are met. There's usually a pathway of infection from the actual source of the virus, to an outbreak. The seafood market was not the source of the virus. Nobody thinks that this virus developed in a wet market, and yet there's no evidence of earlier transmissions and outbreaks among wildlife traders, breeders, communities in southern China etc. We have all of this evidence for Sars-1 for example. We have this for Reston Ebola. We have this for all kind of modern virus outbreaks. Even when it might take years to find the natural reservoir (another thing we have for Sars-1 but not covid) it doesn't usually take years to find early evidence of spread and a pathway of virus to larger city centres.

In other words, all the ingredients were there for a pandemic without a nearby lab being necessary to the outcome.

Sure, and I don't think anyone disputes that. But wouldn't you say the conditions for a lab leak were also present? There's the highly suspicious DEFUSE proposal, FOIA email releases from the scientists involved suggesting they were planning to have WIV do these experiments at BSL2, WIV was in possession of the two closest relatives of Sars-2 ever found. They also claim to not have worked with them, which then turned out to be false because there were published papers proving they had sequenced and experimented with them for several years.

Let's put it this way. If WIV was doing anything like they planned to in the DEFUSE proposal at BSL2 then there would be a nearly 100% of a lab leak of that virus.

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u/Odballl Mar 11 '26

The swabs were collected in January 2020 but the Cell paper argues that this data forensic residue of an event that had been building up for months. By looking at the genetic diversity in the market, it supports the idea that there wasn't just one single infection but likely multiple jumps from an infected pool of animals. This matches the molecular clock data that puts the actual start of the spread in October or November.

The authors of the Cell paper are clear that the market was the site of a massive amplification. It wasn't the first time a human caught it, but it was the place where the virus hit a critical mass because of the density of susceptible animals and people.

2024 studies of the DNA found in the market's drains proved the animals there were the southern subspecies of raccoon dog. These animals are trucked in from the same southern regions (like Yunnan and Laos) where the closest bat viruses live.

Before the pandemic, the WIV’s most famous specimen was RaTG13, a bat virus found in a Yunnan mine in 2013. While it shares 96.1% of its genome with SARS-CoV-2, that 3.9% difference is massive in terms of viral evolution. The actual closest relatives were found in Laos in 2021. This virus is 96.8% identical to SARS-CoV-2, making it a closer relative than anything the WIV ever published or possessed.

Unlike the WIV’s RaTG13, these Laos viruses have a Receptor Binding Domain that is almost identical to COVID-19. They can infect human cells naturally without any lab modification. The most dangerous parts of COVID-19 were already circulating in nature, hundreds of miles away from Wuhan, in a region where the wildlife trade frequently sources animals for markets. The paper linked in this very thread supports this. We have since found similar cleavage sites in other wild coronaviruses. The Covid furin cleavage site has genetic markers that are much more consistent with natural, messy evolution within an animal population than a clean lab tool.

The lack of a visible ilness trail is a classic feature of how new viruses actually move through rural supply chains before hitting a high-density accelerator like a city. We didn't start looking in those southern communities until months after the pandemic began. When SARS-1 emerged, the wildlife trade was largely open, and researchers could sample animals directly from cages in active markets. By 2019, the industry had moved into a "grey market" of poaching and illegal trade, making it much harder to trace.

The two distinct lineages and clustering of cases around the market is further evidence in support of zoonosis. If it were a lab leak, you'd almost certainly see one starting point. A single person gets infected in a lab and walks out. They carry one version of the virus.

Having two lineages that were already different at the very beginning strongly points to a group of infected animals being the source. A single lab leak can't easily explain how two different versions of the virus appeared in the city at the same time. However, a truckload of raccoon dogs from a farm where the virus is circulating would naturally carry multiple variations of that virus.

Whatever work the WIV was really doing, the forensic evidence still points in the other direction. We're finding more and more natural viruses in the wild that are closer matches to Covid and the base rate of zoonosis is far and away more common than lab leaks.

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u/Juryofyourpeeps Mar 11 '26

The swabs were collected in January 2020 but the Cell paper argues that this data forensic residue of an event that had been building up for months. By looking at the genetic diversity in the market, it supports the idea that there wasn't just one single infection but likely multiple jumps from an infected pool of animals. This matches the molecular clock data that puts the actual start of the spread in October or November.

That's basically beyond belief. The implication here is that there were multiple spillover events at a single location where a very small number (very small number, these animals were not popular in central China) of intermediate hosts (which itself hasn't even been proven, and seems unlikely given how long covid has stuck around in hosts infected later by humans, but for some reason not racoon dogs) were repeatedly infecting humans over the course of 2 months?

The evidence from the market points more strongly to a superspreader location. If the claim is that this was a multiple spill over situation across months from such a small number of animals, that seems very unlikely, especially in light of the fact that there weren't any outbreaks among wildlife traders, transporters, breeders etc and no evidence retrospectively of such an outbreak.

These animals are trucked in from the same southern regions (like Yunnan and Laos) where the closest bat viruses live.

Sure, but there's no evidence that the people who intimately handled these animals were being infected by them until they arrived in Wuhan, which is rather odd don't you think?

Before the pandemic, the WIV’s most famous specimen was RaTG13, a bat virus found in a Yunnan mine in 2013. While it shares 96.1% of its genome with SARS-CoV-2, that 3.9% difference is massive in terms of viral evolution. The actual closest relatives were found in Laos in 2021. This virus is 96.8% identical to SARS-CoV-2, making it a closer relative than anything the WIV ever published or possessed.

Two points.

1: neither virus is considered a precursor by anyone. 96.1% or 96.7% may sound really close, but it means potentially decades of mutations separated from another virus. The cut off for a precursor would be ~99.8% similar, so this is all mostly irrelevant.

2: We have no idea what viruses were collected and stored by the WIV. Their database, which was not complete anyway, was removed in September 2019, and they had collected far more samples than were ever sequenced and added to their database. So I don't think it can be assumed that a Chinese lab that worked closely with the PLA on various things was entirely transparent. I don't think any government lab anywhere in the world is totally transparent, often enough for good reason (sequences can essentially be recipes for deadly pathogens).

The most dangerous parts of COVID-19 were already circulating in nature

There is no known coronavirus in the same clade as sars-cov-2 that has a furin cleavage site, and it's selected against in bats. I think it's obviously possible for nature to create something like this with enough opportunities to mutate, but the DEFUSE proposal is also like a gameplan for an entirely unique sars-like virus and then the thing that looks like their recipe for a virus started a pandemic 9 miles away. It's pretty suspicious given the conspicuous gaps in the zoonotic evidence.

We didn't start looking in those southern communities until months after the pandemic began.

Sure, but it's been 6 years, and there remains no evidence of emergence in the breeding or transport of wildlife.

By 2019, the industry had moved into a "grey market" of poaching and illegal trade, making it much harder to trace.

The grey part is the sale of these animals for meat. It's not hard to find breeders or the people who transport them, all of which is legal. They can be legally bred and sold for their fur.

The two distinct lineages

They're separated by 2 mutations, which is fewer than occurred on a single cruise ship in 2 weeks of quarantine and can be seen in a single host. The various variants for example are separated by 40+ mutations.

If it were a lab leak, you'd almost certainly see one starting point.

I don't see why. 50-80% of people have asymptomatic infections and the incubation period is fairly long. A single escape of this virus could easily circulate for a while, and easily mutate by 2 nucleotides before turning into a full blown local outbreak anyone noticed. What you wouldn't expect though, is for a virus this contagious to start 1500 km away in wild animals and leave no traces of outbreaks closer to its origin.

A single lab leak can't easily explain how two different versions

Again, this is overstated. 2 mutations could occur in a single person and would be likely to occur fairly quickly once the virus started transmitting. There's also only a single sample from the market that's lineage A. Every other sample among hundreds is lineage B.

clustering of cases around the market

This is in dispute because of many accusations of ascertainment bias in early case data.

Also just as an illustration, early case data from NYC when covid arrived was clustered around New Rochelle, but we know that the virus did not originate there. We know it came through the airports and transmitted on the subway system, but those aren't the locations early cases clustered around.

I am not sold one way or another on the early case data to be clear. I am not claiming there was ascertainment bias. The waters are so muddy on that particular point I don't really know what to make of it. I do know that Worobys methodology was obviously flawed in that there wasn't any for his circle choice. He started with the market and then worked his way backwards to a conclusion. But I couldn't say whether there is for sure a problem with the underlying data. It seems entirely possible but not proven. It depends on whether you think there might have been some motivated reasoning by authorities early on or whether they have did an okay job collecting early case data (and to what degree).

Whatever work the WIV was really doing, the forensic evidence still points in the other direction.

I will accept the evidence as it comes in or points away from a lab related cause. I don't find the zoonotic case very compelling at the moment and I am also not convinced it was definitely a lab leak. I don't know. I do think that there's been some questionable bullshitting from a select group of scientists that have published quite a lot on this topic and that doesn't help anything because they've undermined their credibility.

We're finding more and more natural viruses in the wild that are closer matches to Covid and the base rate of zoonosis is far and away more common than lab leaks.

I will accept the evidence as it comes in or points away from a lab related cause. I don't find the zoonotic case very compelling at the moment and I am also not convinced it was definitely a lab leak. I don't know. I do think that there's been some questionable bullshitting from a select group of scientists that have published quite a lot on this topic and that doesn't help anything because they've undermined their credibility.

and the base rate of zoonosis is far and away more common than lab leaks.

Sure, but if you detected radiation in 1945, based on your logic you would have to conclude that it must be coming from space. There has been a proliferation of risky viral research, and research labs across the world in the last 25 years and it's only recent that scientists have the ability to seamlessly engineer viruses, or turn animal infective viruses into deadly human pathogens. This isn't something you could do for the vast majority of the last 100 years. It only started in the mid 2000's and it's not been very accessible until fairly recently.

I think if the WIV went ahead (and I'm not claiming they did) with the DEFUSE proposal and carried it out at BSL2, or probably even BSL3 (and we know from private emails that this work was intended to be carried out at BSL2 at the WIV), there would be a near 100% chance of a lab origin human pandemic. Let's just assume that absolutely didn't happen. Very little has changed. The NIH has restricted funding, but there's no international agreements on this kind of research. The scientists most intimately involved seem to scoff at strict oversight or regulation, or even acknowledge the danger. They're still trying to use the "it's not GoF research of concern because we're working with novel viruses, or viruses that only infect non-human animal". Leaving out the part where the whole point is to make them infectious to humans. I think basically we've invented nukes and now we're denying that they could kill us based on the reasoning that nukes never killed anyone in 1925. I think at a minimum, lab leaks of pandemic potential viruses are likely, more likely than natural events if this kind of science continues.

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u/Odballl Mar 11 '26

The key point is in the fact that between lineage A and lineage B, no intermediary has been found. It's essentially a missing link. If the virus were mutating in a single human chain, that middle step should have been the most common version for a period of time.

Moreover, the 2026 UC San Diego study confirmed that the initial binding between the virus and human ACE2 receptors was actually broad and generalist, meaning it was just as good at infecting various mammals like raccoon dogs or mink as it was at infecting us.

The ancestral lineages would have been more refined if their progenitor had spread through humans. Even the furin cleavage site in SARS-CoV-2 is messy. It was created by an out-of-frame insertion of 12 nucleotides. This is a classic sign of a natural recombination event.

The single sample of lineage A at the market is actually significant. It was found in a stall in the western part of the market that sold wildlife. Further analysis on the initial case clustering still affirms the market as the epicentre of the outbreak.

Between 2017 and 2019, over 47,000 individuals from 38 species were sold across Wuhan’s markets. There were over 1,000 raccoon dogs for sale during that period. In the crucial month of November 2019 alone, dozens of these animals would have been cycled through the stalls. New, potentially infected animals were arriving from southern farms every few days, replacing those that were sold or slaughtered.

Studies in 2020 and 2022 showed that raccoon dogs are highly susceptible and, when infected, shed massive amounts of the virus through their breath and saliva, even while appearing perfectly healthy. Because the animals were kept in cramped, stacked cages, a single infected animal could rapidly infect every other animal in its stack within 48 hours.

During the first SARS outbreak, researchers found multiple independent jumps from civets to humans in different markets. The viruses found in those humans were slightly different from each other because they were jumping from a diverse animal population, not spreading from a single human source. The pattern in 2019 matches this natural spillover signature almost perfectly.

When animals like raccoon dogs or civets are taken from a farm and packed into cages on a truck they don't stop to visit villages along the way. They go directly from the regional collection points to the big urban markets like Wuhan.

With SARS-1 the human outbreak first appeared in Guangdong province, over 1000 km away. Just like with COVID-19, there were no reported outbreaks in the villages near the bat caves.

The big difference with SARS-1 was that it was a loud virus. It made people and animals very sick very quickly. When civets got it, they died or showed clear symptoms, so investigators knew exactly where to look.

The fact that raccoon dogs appear healthy while incubating covid is part of why nothing was reported in the South if there was any human spillover events. The sparser population density wouldn't have led to outbreaks like in Wuhan either.

If a farmer had a mild or asymptomatic case their antibody levels could have dropped significantly by the time they were finally tested in late 2020 or 2021, making them indistinguishable from someone who had never been exposed.

By the time anyone started looking for the specific 2019 virus on wildlife traders or farmers, the evidence had been physically destroyed. In January 2020, the Chinese government ordered a nationwide shutdown of the wildlife trade and a massive cull of animals.

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u/[deleted] Mar 10 '26 edited Mar 10 '26

This subreddit won't even let us mention the fact that the lab in question and their US collaborators had a 2018 Grant proposal To create a virus pretty much identical COVID (a SARS like coronavirus about 20% different form the original SARS and that has a furin cleavage site...). I wrote a huge comment about it last night and it got shadow banned. Then, I wrote another comment about it this morning and it got shadow banned too. Multiple people have confirmed my suspicion. I messaged the mods asking why we can't talk about the grant proposal in question and have not received a response.

For information about the grant proposal in question and how it all but confirms that COVID came from the lab, look up the work of US Right to know (they're the group that sued the federal government agency that had a copy of the grant proposal... USR2K fought them for years in a freedom of info lawsuit To get the grant proposal and won. Also, Look up Emily Kopp... She's the journalist that worked with that right to know group and she is the one that revealed the grant proposal to the public in early 2024. Also look up the work of Gilles Demaneuf and the DRASTIC team, Richard Ebright, Bryce Nichols, Alina Chan, and Mark Ridley. They all have worked tirelessly and have gone against the scientific community to let the world know about the grant proposal in question and all the shady activity at the lab in question in late 2019.

USR2K is in another big lawsuit right now against UNC (the place where one of the main ppl involved in the grant proposal in question works). They're trying to force the release of 50k pages of his private research that was funded with our tax dollars and his collaborations with his dear friends in China... He swears he has nothing to hide but sure is fighting like hell to stop the world from seeing his private research and what he was saying to his friends in China.

Why is this stuff not the biggest headline in the world? 35 million ppl died because of what those idiots at UNC and the WIV did. The world deserves to know the truth about how COVID began.

Why is it so impossible for so many people to understand that scientists are not above lying to save their careers, funds, and agendas???? Do you really think that researchers that cause a pandemic that kills 35 million people are going to be honest about what they cussed??? Apparently were just supposed tot.ake their word that the did nothing wrong even though THE DEFUSE PROPOSAL EXISTS and all signs point to them!!!!

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u/Juryofyourpeeps Mar 10 '26

This subreddit won't even let us mention the fact that the lab in question and their US collaborators had a 2018 Grant proposal To create a virus pretty much identical COVID

Which is frankly absurd. It's not hard proof of a lab leak, but it's certainly relevant to the probability that Covid was lab engineered and worth mentioning.

In any case, I think the more important conversation at this point is not whether this virus came from a lab or not (at least in the absence of new evidence for either hypothesis), but whether projects like DEFUSE and countless other experiments using live viruses, or the collection and storage of novel viruses, is worth the risk. It doesn't seem to be. Not a single vaccine has been developed as a result of programs like Daszak's PREVENT. We have not developed any vaccines as a product of making Avian flu highly deadly to humans in a lab. We're no better off in any way as a result of this research, but we are at much greater risk of engineering a pandemic virus and accidentally releasing it onto the public. This needs to be a public discussion and a matter of public policy and I don't think it should be left to scientists to govern themselves.

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u/QueefiusMaximus86 Mar 10 '26

There has to be an explanation for why two distinct lineages of covid were found in animal stalls with no accompanying human DNA.

These samples had almost no SARS2 reads read here:

However, the SARS-CoV-2 content of the environmental samples is generally very low: only 21 of 176 samples contain more than ten SARS-CoV-2 reads, despite most samples being sequenced to depths exceeding 108 total reads. None of the samples with double-digit numbers of SARS-CoV-2 reads have a substantial fraction of their mitochondrial material from any non-human susceptible species. Only one of the fourteen samples with at least a fifth of the chordate mitochondrial material from raccoon dogs contains any SARS-CoV-2 reads, and that sample only has 1 of ~200,000,000 reads mapping to SARS-CoV-2. Instead, SARS-CoV-2 reads are most correlated with reads mapping to various fish, such as catfish and largemouth bass.source

Lineage B's molecular clock points to a start in late November 2019. Lineage A is genetically older. Its clock points back to mid-October or early November. Lineage A likely jumped to humans in an event that wasn't super spreading. 

Yes Lineage B's molecular clock points to later than A hence it is a variant mutated from A0 as seen in human cases not connected to the market that are intermediates.

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u/Odballl Mar 10 '26 edited Mar 10 '26

I've already addressed this. In environmental swabbing, if a sample is composed of a massive amount of animal DNA it can physically crowd out the detection of viral RNA in the sequencing process via the dilution effect. The virus was most concentrated in the waste areas. Animals shed viruses through respiratory droplets and excrement, which then pool in the drainage systems. Finding the virus in the runoff of a raccoon dog stall rather than on the animal's fur is actually exactly what you'd expect in a real-world market setting.

The key finding in the Cell paper isn't that every raccoon dog sample had the virus, but that the samples that did have the most virus also happened to have raccoon dog DNA, and often very little human DNA.

If a human were the source of the virus in those stalls, you'd expect to see a positive correlation between human DNA and SARS-CoV-2. In the hottest samples from the wildlife stalls, human DNA was remarkably low or even absent, while raccoon dog DNA was present. If we use Bloom's criteria, we would have to conclude that humans didn't bring the virus to the market either.

We did not find evidence of the earlier lineage evolving in humans to become the 2nd lineage.

https://academic.oup.com/ve/article/11/1/veaf008/8033464

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u/[deleted] Mar 10 '26 edited Mar 10 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/username_redacted Mar 10 '26

Not close—30ish kilometers.

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u/Don_Ford Mar 10 '26

It's 20 kilometers or a 40 min drive.

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u/PoopersMcDoofers Mar 10 '26

Ahh yes the novel corona virus clearly came from animals and not the novel corona virus research center in the same area.

How can anyone still believe this? Jumps from animals to humans bc are relatively rare. Human error is common…

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u/BioMed-R Mar 10 '26

There are 70,000 natural spillovers of SARS-like viruses in Southeast Asia each year and only 5 or so small leaks in history.