6 ms·
Is there a way to disprove the lab leak hypothesis?
by karpierz 5y ago
Is there a way to disprove the lab leak hypothesis?
- Sunspark 5y agoDisprove it? No. We do innocent until proven guilty in our jurisprudence.
- colordrops 5y agoThis isn't a US legal case; it's a scientific inquiry. Either lab leak or zoonosis is plausible, so you can't say one isn't the default until the other is proven. You don't flip a coin and say "heads until proven tails".
- nahnahno 5y agoThis seems like the misuse of impressive sounding words. The hypothesis has nothing to do with US law. It’s a question of whether there is sufficient empirical evidence in support of the prevailing hypothesis, that the virus originated from a market in Wuhan.
- Sunspark 5y agoNo, there isn't especially after 2 years. This does not however mean that in the absence of wet market evidence that the only possible answer is lab leak.
- xqcgrek2 5y agoYes - an animal host or reservoir is found. It's unusual after 2 years none has been found.
- sudosysgen 5y agoThere are many animal hosts or reservoirs. The issue is that it's not obvious wether they got it from or gave it to humans. You really need the most direct ancestor virus.
- johncena33 5y agoAFAIK the known animal reservoirs got it from humans. Do you know any animal reservoir that we still don't know how the animals have got it?
- sudosysgen 5y agoWe don't, and that's the issue, we can't know unless we find an ancestor virus. It's also very possible if could have wiped out the original virus in all original reservoirs. It's very difficult to do this now and for endemic viruses in general, and it took a very very long time to do for SARS where this wasn't a problem.
- neom 5y agoI thought they thought it might be pangolins? https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32380510/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32380510/
- sudosysgen 5y agoYeah, that's a theory, but I don't think it's settled yet
- lamontcg 5y agoThat is a very old article in pandemic research time. Pagolins aren't thought to be the likely intermediate animal any more.
- awb 5y agoA quick reminder of what scientists said in early 2020: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/28/how-did-the-coronavirus-start-where-did-it-come-from-how-did-it-spread-humans-was-it-really-bats-pangolins-wuhan-animal-market https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/28/how-did-the-co... > “we really don’t know” how accurate the origin story is, she says: “There’s some sort of connection [to the Wuhan market] and there were people exposed to the market that were infected.” > Baker says what is “very likely” is that the virus originated in a bat. “It’s a likely scenario but we will never know. The market was cleaned up quite quickly. We can only speculate.” > “These wet markets have been identified as an issue because you do have species interacting,” she says. “It’s an opportunity to highlight the dangers of them and an opportunity to clamp down on them.” > Turner adds: “We’ve found the ancestors of the virus, but having broader knowledge of the coronavirus in other species might give us a hint about the evolution of this thing and how it jumped.” There has been other wet market origin stories as well, so I think absent other evidence it seemed like the Occam’s razor answer.
- dopa42365 5y agoTurned out that it's basically impossible to test just us 7.something billion humans. No one is out there testing a billion bats (or many more billions of mice and what not). Animal patient 0 is probably dead already anyway? Good luck with that search.
- philjohn 5y agoWe still aren't 100% sure about Ebola's reservoir, so that isn't necessarily a smoking gun.
- tim333 5y agoEbola didn't break out in a modern city of 10m + people.
- lamontcg 5y agoThe progenitor of the SARS-1 outbreak in 2003 wasn't found until a decade later in 2013. There's a lot of research which is getting closer: https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-871965/v1 https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-871965/v1 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-21240-1 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-21240-1 https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fmicb.2020.584717/full https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fmicb.2020.5847... https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.01.26.428212v1 https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.01.26.428212v1 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1873506120304165 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S187350612... https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-885194/v1 https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-885194/v1 https://www.adn.com/nation-world/2021/10/11/in-search-for-covid-origins-chinas-hubei-caves-and-wildlife-farms-draw-new-scrutiny/ https://www.adn.com/nation-world/2021/10/11/in-search-for-co...
- tim333 5y agoThe immediate source - palm civets at a local market was found almost as soon as they looked, about four months after the outbreak. Tracing back where they got it from took longer.
- lamontcg 5y agoAfter the discovery of WIV1 in bats it was found that it efficiently infected human airway epithelial cells, and since the palm civets were never linked to any outbreaks it is possible that the virus had directly hopped to humans from bats and that the palm civets were unnecessary as an intermediate species. It was also later found that it infects racoon dogs, ferret badgers and domestic cats. There was never any conclusive proof that raccoon dogs were responsible/required and that now looks unnecessary, which is a good example of how over a decade later what we think we know can change.
- tripletao 5y agoI believe that: 1. The closest known animal viruses to human SARS-1 were found in civet cats in 2003, within about a year of the first discovery of the virus in humans. 2. No animal viruses closer to SARS-1 have since been discovered. Dr. Shi discovered various viruses in bats that we believe are ancestral to SARS-1, including WIV-1 in 2013. This is significant because we believe SARS-1 evolved primarily in bats, but those viruses have lower genetic identity with SARS-1 than does the virus found in the civets. If you disagree, please link a paper. Based on the above, I don't understand why you'd think 2013 is the important date. Within about a year of the emergence of both of the previous two novel coronaviruses in humans (SARS-1 and MERS), a near-identical virus was discovered in animals (civets and camels). This is suggestive but not conclusive evidence that those animals first infected humans, and strong evidence that those viruses existed in nature--somewhere, even if not exclusively in those animals--before they emerged in humans. For SARS-CoV-2, no such evidence has yet been found. This doesn't prove that SARS-CoV-2 is of unnatural origin, and I assume you'll mention the uncertainty in Ebola's zoonotic hosts shortly; but I don't see how anyone could treat that as irrelevant, except out of willful blindness.
- 737min 5y agoYes, clear animal reservoirs, viral lineage, old samples from human or animal infections with precursor variants. No position on the question, just answering your question about proof.
- johncena33 5y agoThat would only disprove the genetic manipulation part, but not necessarily lab leak. A WIV lab staff can easily contract virus from a bat inside the lab. This essentially what happened in Taiwan, where a lab staff got infected with COVID from a mouse [1]. To disprove lab leak you also have to show either 1. WIV or any other labs in Wuhan didn't have any virus samples that can be an ancestor of SARS-CoV2 2. we can establish a very clear and well understood route how the ancestor of SARS-CoV2 arrived at Wuhan from Yunan province, where the horseshoe bats live, including how it became so good at infecting humans in a very short period of time. [1] https://fortune.com/2021/12/10/taiwan-investigates-covid-lab-leak-scientist-tests-positive-bite-infected-mouse/ https://fortune.com/2021/12/10/taiwan-investigates-covid-lab...
- tim333 5y agoWith SARS original they found the source as infected animals at a local food market. Something like that would pretty much disprove a lab leak as the source as it did that time.
- nradov 5y agoIf a virus essentially identical to the original wild type SARS-CoV-2 is found in a wild animal population that would be fairly strong evidence against the lab leak hypothesis, although not an absolute disproof. Researchers have looked and not found such, so it remains an open question. So far the closest we've come is a bat virus in Laos but it has some significant genetic differences. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02596-2 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02596-2
- johncena33 5y agoAlso Ecohealth Alliance and WIV collected viruses in Laos. So in terms of natural origin vs. lab leak the viruses found in Laos don't increase probability on either side.
- mensetmanusman 5y agoCouldn’t someone just inject the original virus into a nearby animal population and say ‘look what we found!’ ?
- selcuka 5y agoI'm not a biologist but I believe it should be repeatable, i.e. the animal should be able to pass it on in lab.
- tripletao 5y agoNon-human animal-to-animal transmission has been observed, like on Danish mink farms. But you can sequence the virus from many human and non-human infections and build a phylogenetic tree from the sequences, knowing that each variant should have all the mutations of its ancestor plus maybe some new ones. In such a tree, the proximal zoonotic host should have infections with no human-infection ancestor. This was observed for the original SARS (palm civets) and MERS (camels), each within about a year. For SARS-CoV-2, we're still waiting.
- systemvoltage 5y agoNo. The only way to disprove lab leak theory is for the CCP to disclose the WIV databases and records of what they were studying. Otherwise, just because it was found in some animal doesn’t quite disprove it. WIV was actively collecting virus samples from mammals for research funded by the US tax payer money through Eco Health Alliance.
- iabacu 5y agoAn animal sample from the wet market that was shut down. (I spooned they were all bagged). If they were all destroyed, then go get a sample from their natural reservoir (wherever those animals came from)
- Sunspark 5y agoLet me respond to this question with another question. Can you disprove the existence of space aliens? No, you cannot, because they are statistically possible. Are they plausible? That isn't what is being asked here, the plausibility, just whether something is possible.
- analog31 5y agoTo whose satisfaction? Scientifically? It seems possible if the evidence still exists or could be found, based on a few of the other comments here. Politically? The faction that will never be satisfied, parted company with the scientific community, before the pandemic was even on the horizon. As a scientist, I would have been OK with learning about the hypothesis from a credible source and letting it play out. I would have been OK with letting the public know about it. However, realistically, good faith investigation of the hypothesis would have been utterly drowned out by hysterically amplified versions of the same hypothesis that were already in circulation.