[metalspot]

> nearly impossible to disprove

lab leak is dead simple to disprove. all you have to do is find an animal that you can infect with covid and will spread it and you have your proof. many people have been spending a lot of money for years trying to do this and the longer they continue to fail the higher the probability of lab leak becomes.

[ceejayoz]

> all you have to do is find an animal that you can infect with covid and will spread it

https://news.osu.edu/covid-19-virus-is-evolving-rapidly-in-w...

"Scientists collected 1,522 nasal swabs from free-ranging deer in 83 of the state’s 88 counties between November 2021 and March 2022. More than 10% of the samples were positive for the SARS-CoV-2 virus, and at least one positive case was found in 59% of the counties in which testing took place. Genomic analysis showed that at least 30 infections in deer had been introduced by humans – a figure that surprised the research team."

“And the evidence is growing that humans can get it from deer – which isn’t radically surprising. It’s probably not a one-way pipeline.”

Still, this doesn't disprove a lab leak; it proves something other than a lab leak is plausible.

[metalspot]

> something other than a lab leak is plausible

of course it is plausible. a priori there is no reason why lab leak is more likely than natural origin. it just comes down to the evidence of what actually happened.

what you need to show natural origin is transmission in an animal population with an animal that can be linked to the outbreak location. that hasnt been found after 3 years of tremendous effort.

everyone associated with the wiv has millions of lives and trillions of dollars in damages on their heads if it was a lab leak so these people are definitely highly motivated to prove a natural origin. it has been 3+ years and nothing has been found. the more time that passes the less likely it becomes.

[jacquesm]

A priori the evidence is squarely in the 'zoonosis' favor, because that's how viruses spread before we ever had labs and there are thousands of examples for such spreading and very scant evidence for lab leaks.

But: this doesn't prove or disprove either and just like in the discussion about that superconductor, there is absolutely no need to commit to either hypothesis even if there is a historical pile of evidence, because that's not proof that this case is the same.

So I would advice anybody that really wants to jump to a conclusion to do so with the historical data in mind and for everybody else to just wait until there is conclusive evidence with the caution that such evidence may never be found. Ironically, the Chinese moved with such speed against the market that they may very well have destroyed the evidence that would have proven that they weren't directly involved. At the same time there is some support for the theory that the market itself wasn't the place where 'patient zero' got infected, and that still doesn't prove or disprove a lab leak.

People love to have someone or something to blame when there is a big problem, and with natural disasters we sometimes are in fact able to show how humans are a direct or proximate cause. But biology is super messy and even if there is a human cause at work here we may never know it, likewise we may never know for sure that it was a zoonosis.

If I had to bet I would bet zoonosis because the stats are in favor. But I don't have to bet so I'll just wait. I do hope that anybody that favors one theory over another will come forward to admit that they were wrong to jump to conclusions if there ever is a resolution, and that they will learn something from that. But they won't be much more or less wrong than those that backed the other side. Finally: there are some viruses that are known to have jumped from the animal kingdom to people many times in the past and in spite of hunting them for decades we still haven't found the reservoir. It could happen again tomorrow and there might be a breakthrough, but so far there is nothing. So absence of evidence doesn't prove a thing.

[metalspot]

> nybody that favors one theory over another will come forward to admit that they were wrong to jump to conclusions

a probability statement is not wrong just because the less probable thing turns out to happen. lab leak of a non-natural virus that was created through purposeful gain-of-function using transmission is currently the most likely scenario based on all available evidence. even if natural origin is proven, my probability statement will still be correct. i dont discount the probability of natural origin. it is just very unlikely now.

[baja_blast]

But humans infected the white tailed deer, and guess what when humans passed on SARS2 to different species it did not suddenly stop circulating within humans which seems to have been the case with SARS2. For SARS2 we have a single spillover event hundreds of miles away from the nearest SARS reservoir and then some how the strain that was circulating in whatever intermediate host it may have come from simply vanished! Despite being so extremely infectious SARS2's spillover seems to be a case of an immaculate infection!

But like virgin births, I find immaculate infections to be implausible.

[ceejayoz]

> But humans infected the white tailed deer

Thus providing clear evidence this virus jumps fairly readily between mammals. (Especially when you count that it has also been found to have jumped to quite a few other animals; cats, dogs, hippos, anteaters, manatees; it's clearly not picky. https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/daily-life-coping/...)

> guess what when humans passed on SARS2 to different species it did not suddenly stop circulating within humans which seems to have been the case with SARS2

I assure you that SARS2 is still circulating within humans, lol.

> For SARS2 we have a single spillover event hundreds of miles away from the nearest SARS reservoir

Not being the same disease, this isn't all that surprising.

> some how the strain that was circulating in whatever intermediate host it may have come from simply vanished

"Hard to find" is not the same as "vanished".

We've never conclusively found the reservoir for Ebola, either. Not for lack of trying.

[baja_blast]

>"Hard to find" is not the same as "vanished".

Which is strange for a virus as you stated. "found to have jumped to quite a few other animals; cats, dogs, hippos, anteaters, manatees; it's clearly not picky". So why is it so hard to find the virus that spilled over into humans, this virus would have been better adapted towards their own species and would have not been replaced by the human variants. We find SARS circulating in animals all the time, but they all descend from the human variant.

It is the Immaculate Infection!

[dang]

It looks like you've been posting about this single flamewar topic and almost nothing else for years now. That's not ok - we don't allow single purpose accounts on HN, and ban them when they show up, because pre-existing agendas aren't compatible with the curiosity we're trying to optimize for.

I'm not going to ban you right now because if I scroll back far enough, your account used to be more in keeping with the intended spirit of the site. But please go back to that so we won't have to.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[ceejayoz]

Or, more mundanely, whatever mutation allowed it to be not-very-picky might be recent. The Black Death likely came about when Yersinia pestis went aerosolized, for example, despite the bacteria probably being around at least back to Roman times.

[elicash]

I think you misunderstood my comment. In that scenario, it still wouldn't rule out the possibility of a lab leak, since like I said they still could have been studying that natural origin inside of a lab.

[metalspot]

> still wouldn't rule out the possibility of a lab leak

but finding an animal that can spread covid with a plausible story for how it cross over to humans in wuhan is a threshold that has not been crossed yet. if anyone could meet that threshold test it would be treated as proof of natural origin.

but supposing that it was a natural virus that came from an animal in the lab at wuhan then it would be very easy for people with access to that information to identify the natural source, and since that has not happened, it means the virus is either from a natural source that was not in the lab, or it was created in the lab.

the longer time that passes without finding a natural source outside the lab the more likely it is that it was created in the lab.

[jacquesm]

> the longer time that passes without finding a natural source outside the lab the more likely it is that it was created in the lab.

This is not correct. It may well be that the evidence existed but was lost.

The idea that biology will just sit around and wait until we catch up with it is fundamentally mistaken. Some things happen just once and that's that. Some things happen all the time and you can observe them as they happen. Some things leave ample evidence. Biology is not a static system, it isn't a computer program and it isn't a piece of hardware. Your 'bug' may simply not be reproducible even if it in fact did occur just once.

[metalspot]

> the evidence existed but was lost

if the virus crossed over from animals to humans then it must be able to cross back over. viruses evolve quickly, but animals don't, and we have plenty of samples of the original virus. all you have to do is find the right species and infect them with a sample of the virus and show that they can spread it to prove natural origin.

the only scenario where your theory could be true is if the origin species suddenly went extinct after starting the pandemic, which is very improbable.