Harbaugh's latest inspirational tweet

The article's data is not powerful enough to make their conclusion persuasive. Let's apply the story of the two Texas nurses from last fall. These two ladies contracted the virus, but their hospital doesn't know how or when it happened and neither does the CDC. Despite a plethora of safety measures, all of which serve as contact barriers between healthcare workers and the patient, the health care workers still got sick. 

 

What do the hospital and CDC think? Well they educatedly guess that a mistake was made and two nurses touched one or more fomites. I'd call that a rightful assumption. It's steeped in decades of research and is consistent with both the kinetics of transmission and the number of victims in every outbreak to date.

The logical structure of the 1995 paper I described (and the most frequently [perhaps only] cited "report" of aerosolized Ebola) would change that narrative and conclude (this quote is adapted from that paper): "The most likely route of infection of the [nurses] was aerosol, oral, or conjunctival exposure to virus-laden droplets secreted or excreted from the [Liberian victim]." Because that's how they interpreted what happened to their non-contact monkeys.

That kind of thinking is mottled with holes.

I'm not trying to say that virologists are incapable of discovering entirely new modes of viral transmission. Of course they can. But if we apply the prevailing logic to their experiments, we get this: Someone messed up, and the uninfected monkeys were accidentally infected by physical means...just as happened with these nurses. 

That is more probable and just as easily explains their finding. So long as "oops we made a mistake" remains plausible, the burden of proof for this 1995 Lancet article remains very great. And still unmet. 

Unsurprisingly, their findings have not been corroborated or caught fire in the many years since that publication. They wanted to establish an entirely new mechanism of action. But "Caged monkey over here caught what the caged monkeys over there had, so...duh" is not enough to establish that the Zaire strain of ebola can aerosolize.

They need a direct test. For instance, collecting air and PCRing it for Ebola-specific signatures.