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Comment by nradov | Hacker News Reader

If 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

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Couldn’t someone just inject the original virus into a nearby animal population and say ‘look what we found!’ ?

I'm not a biologist but I believe it should be repeatable, i.e. the animal should be able to pass it on in lab.

Non-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.

Also 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.

No. 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.

If you are inclined to think the CCP knows / is covering up a lab leak; you are also inclined to think that they'd release fake disclosure data to cover it up.

I prefer an independent third party audit.

Faking data is much harder: it’s easy to forget to remove something, change numbers so they don’t match other numbers, or make up numbers which have the statistical signal of manufactured data. Even being a great power does not prevent these kind of mistakes, because of the skill level censors would need in multiple scientific fields to make a good forgery. People get away with it in minor papers in the social sciences all the time, but with a million eyes on the data sets in this case, someone’s gonna see it.

They wouldn't have to actually fake scientific data - they'd just release everything else they were working on, omit the problematic files, and go "see? we showed you everything - there's nothing to see here!".

Time tables, budgets, staffing docs, those are readily forgeable. Any leftover discrepancies can be chocked up to clerical error. This is doubly so if the problematic research was classified or compartmentalized - files pertaining to those programs are often designed to be easily expunged.

Ultimately, China could release as many files as people ask, and never be able to settle the debate. You can't prove/disprove the existence of files they claim do not exist.

Our best bet would be whistleblowers - ideally multiple trusted and independent ones - who can testify to a hidden program. However, we can't use the lack of whistleblowers to prove the lack of a program, which is where we're stuck today.

Well, who says they haven't tried to do that. The 2013 Mojiang mining incident was claimed to be a fungal infection, while it was later proven it was a viral infection.

The Mojiang mine viral outbreak actually occurred in 2012.

https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/...

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