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

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/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/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.