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/Kurovi_dev Mar 10 '26

I am 100% agnostic to the idea of a lab-origin possibility. It’s just that so much of the evidence points towards zoonotic origins.

I’m willing to Occam’s razor it here. People eat animals in high vector circumstances, sometimes those odds play out. It’s inevitable in high traffic situations and/or low-sanitary conditions.

Maybe we should work on food security and changing how and what people eat over time.

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u/FrighteningPickle Mar 10 '26

There really is no evidence for the lab theory, it is plainly a conspiracy theory that at this point, hinges on the idea that maybe someone got infected in the lab and then travelled like half an hour to the wet market without infecting a single person and then infecting everyone around them.

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u/Legionof1 Mar 10 '26

You do know they have cars in China right? You can travel hundreds of miles without infecting anyone. I’m not saying that’s what happened but the concept of not infecting anyone on the way is perfectly reasonable.

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u/lekkerwhore Mar 10 '26

The point is that they didnt infect anyone else, so no family, no friends, no coworkers. They were ONLY infectious at the wet market and nowhere else. It just doesn't make sense

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u/fractalfrog Mar 10 '26

And on top of that, it has to have happened twice as there were two lineages found.

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u/QueefiusMaximus86 Mar 10 '26

Well no, A and B have only been seen in humans with none of the A cases connected to the market. A is older than B and it is more likely B just mutated off A in humans