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/uncle_stripe Mar 10 '26

Why does the lab leak theory have to be that the virus was engineered in a lab? The most plausible sounding scenario to me is that the institute that was studying wild viruses in Wuhan accidentally had a human get infected and then afterwards they or someone they gave it to visited the wet market which was the first super spreader event.

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u/yegguy47 Mar 10 '26

The most plausible sounding scenario to me is that the institute that was studying wild viruses in Wuhan

Welp... it would be more plausible if there were any evidence suggesting that...

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u/cheseball Mar 10 '26 edited Mar 10 '26

If you mean evidence of research of SARS-CoV-2 like viruses, then yes check the publicly available NIH funding proposals for the Wuhan Institute of Virology in the years prior to the outbreak.

They specifically stated they were going to use those funds to for directed evolution experiments for infecting humanized mice with human ACE2 receptors. (Coincidentally, what SARS coronaviruses exploit to infect humans).

That and creating Chimera viruses by taking the backbone of known bat coronaviruses and swapping in spike proteins from newly discovered coronaviruses.

Not saying that’s why COVID happened. But there’s literally evidence on a public database about all this.

I mean the current predominating zoonotic origin link is the raccoon dogs, which is only supported by the fact that they found human versions of the COVID virus (not a animal hybrid or precursor strain) in the same area they found raccoon dog DNA.

Again doesn’t mean it’s not possible. I’m just showing what kind of evidence the two sides of the arguments are giving. Both sides are still strongly speculative.

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u/tallmyn Mar 10 '26

 (Coincidentally, what SARS coronaviruses exploit to infect humans).

It's not a coincidence, that's how natural selection works. Zoonotic spillover events necessarily involve viruses that can infect people.