This market resolves once we have a definitive answer to this question. (i.e. "I've looked at all notable evidence presented by both sides and have upwards of 98% confidence that a certain conclusion is correct, and it doesn't seem likely that any further relevant evidence will be forthcoming any time soon.")
This will likely not occur until many years after Covid is no longer a subject of active political contention, motivations for various actors to distort or hide inconvenient evidence have died down, and a scientific consensus has emerged on the subject. For exactly when it will resolve, see /IsaacKing/when-will-the-covid-lab-leak-market
I will be conferring with the community extensively before resolving this market, to ensure I haven't missed anything and aren't being overconfident in one direction or another. As some additional assurance, see /IsaacKing/will-my-resolution-of-the-covid19-l
(For comparison, the level of evidence in favor of anthropogenic climate change would be sufficient, despite the existence of a few doubts here and there.)
If we never reach a point where I can safely be that confident either way, it'll remain open indefinitely. (And Manifold lends you your mana back after a few months, so this doesn't negatively impact you.)
"Come from a laboratory" includes both an accidental lab leak and an intentional release. It also counts if COVID was found in the wild, taken to a lab for study, and then escaped from that lab without any modification. It just needs to have actually been "in the lab" in a meaningful way. A lab worker who was out collecting samples and got contaminated in the wild doesn't count, but it does count if they got contaminated later from a sample that was supposed to be safely contained.
In the event of multiple progenitors, this market resolves YES only if the lab leak was plausibly responsible for the worldwide pandemic. It won't count if the pandemic primarily came from natural sources and then there was also a lab leak that only infected a few people.
I won't bet in this market.
1,000
3.00I may well eat my hat on this, but I feel like even if concrete evidence emerges that COVID-19 was, at some stage of development, developed in a laboratory (the most likely piece of evidence we'll get with sufficient certainty in my view), some of the zoonosis folks in here will still try to say it doesn't qualify because it might've emerged independently of that lab leak event, or that it passed to an animal first and it developed from there, or it would've emerged naturally anyway.
I mean, for example, if the scientists at Wuhan captured a coronavirus and all they did was add a furin cleavage site and then release it, I feel like a lot of people in here would try and say the virus itself is natural and the alteration they made to it doesn't matter.
@LukeShadwell nah if an ancestor of SARS2 was ever in a lab anywhere in any way before November 2019 I’d say it’s certainly a lab leak.
The only reason I say November is because there’s a chance a natural outbreak would have a patient sample in a clinical lab and no one noticed in late November and perhaps someone could find it.
@zcoli Appreciate it, very reasonable. And if no evidence ever comes to light to such an effect then I will continue to concede that there’s not enough evidence that it is a lab leak (currently).
Something like an ancestor being found in large animal populations in china, where it’s clear that was before mid 2019 ish, would probably be enough for me to swing to the zoonosis side.
https://pca.st/episode/8e59f321-d674-4049-8871-37835025cf18
https://youtu.be/5d-eqdRSx7Y?si=B5lIKHNAlXeS1EFX
Manifold Podcast Steve Hsu always conducts great interviews with interesting guests.
Jim Haslam author COVID-19 mystery solved.
@George Fascinating that Steve Hsu has only had 2 covid origins guests on and they both blame America, not China, for a lab leak. Maybe there's some kind of bias in how Steve thinks about China?
(Before Jim Haslam, Steve had Jeffrey Sachs on. Jeffrey Sachs is so pro-China that even DRASTIC questions his motives:
Alright freaks, get ready for some mArKeT mAniPUlaTiOn next winter (joking, for contest purposes, of course):
https://www.metaculus.com/questions/31275/substantial-change-in-covid-origin-market-in-2025/
French newspaper article on COVID-19 origins. Features comments from Florence Débarre, Patrick Berche, Marc Eloit and Renaud Piarroux and Etienne Decroly.
@zcoli given the editorial bias against upsetting China [see Richard A Muller's comments] or the virology field generally that isn't going to happen.
@MikePa67d Can you give a ballpark on how many people are in on the conspiracy here exactly? Richard Muller has zero expertise in this and simply endorses whatever nutty stuff Steven Quay tells him—and doesn't retract his endorsement when he learns that Steven Quay is wrong.
I told Muller about a couple of Quay's errors and Muller responded: "Dr. Quayle [sic] makes many good points, and some that are debatable." Yet that debate never plays out in public. Are the editors and virologists censoring Muller from criticizing his friend publicly as well?
@zcoli I'm referring to Muller's comment that when he tried to discuss the topic of COVID-19 origins with virology colleagues they declined. Eventually, one told them that there was no way they could be seen to be discussing the lab origin scenario as that would end their work with colleagues in China. So there are strong incentives to avoid the topic and for major academic publications to avoid papers arguing for lab origin.
@MikePa67d LOL Nature published a BS superconductivity paper and had it retracted by the same guy that’d done exactly the same thing before. No damage to Nature at all. If there was a defensible academic paper to be written concluding lab leaks, Nature would gladly publish it. And they’d publish the angry responses and profit off the controversy once again. You think scientists in China are gonna collectively quit Nature Publishing Group over one paper or something?
@zcoli I'm going on Muller's experience and also the response to the initial draft of Proximal Origin which Nature rejected as too open to lab origin.
@MikePa67d The paper illicitly pushed by Fauci and Farrar was too pro lab leak for Nature? I thought virologists were all too biased and covering up the truth to save their field’s research funding or something…
@zcoli I take it you haven't read any of their correspondence? They acknowledge that any suggestion it arose from an accident would cause a "sh!t show". Still, their initial draft was far less definitive that it could be ruled out. Nature didn't accept that. Andersen actually complained about how it not only wasn't a conspiracy but a likely scenario. In any case, you should read it.
@zcoli he didn't. They made the conclusions more definitive and got it published in Nature Med. A month later though he was still saying they couldn't rule out culture, that the furin cleavage site may have been added and pointing out how creating a reverse genetics system wasn't hard (while simultaneously saying they had ruled out engineering in his Scripps press release - one of the reasons he's faced a degree of opprobrium because he clearly believed otherwise).
@MikePa67d You’ve invented a new logical fallacy of appealing to the authority of what authorities might’ve thought 5 years ago but either no longer believe or have decided to lie about.
@George Why doesn't Richard Ebright include Ebola lab leak and HIV inserts in SARS-CoV-2 in his list? He's featured in a movie including those details and he advertised the movie the day it was released. Odd.
There's a new documentary being promoted by Tucker Carlson featuring a bunch of lab leak proponents, several of whom have been cited as experts in this thread.
The errors in the movie are quite a bit more severe than anything people complain about in Proximal Origins and the scientists involved in the movie appear to know as much, since none of them seem interested in discussing what the movie is actually about: a theory that SARS-CoV-2 was engineered from HIV (and a Moderna sequence read backwards).
One of the genomes most closely related to SARS-CoV-2 was sampled in pangolins in the wildlife trafficking network. It's one of the very few genomes that are identical to SARS-CoV-2 in the vicinity of the "FCS". It sickened those pangolins and was never found anywhere else before or after after again. According to Chan's logic, it was also a lab leak (just one that happened to infect some unlucky pangolins instead of some unlucky people).
The idea that a pandemic spillover will necessarily leave a trail of evidence in near-identical genomes in infected animals is just counterfactual. Just like for SARS2, there's "no reported sign of intense transmission of the virus in animals prior to the detected outbreak" of SARS in 2002. Or of H1N1 in 2009. Or of Ebola prior to its various human outbreaks.
Chan is referencing a Slack conversation here and she's intelligent enough to know that she's misrepresenting the point, which is that the people talking didn't suspect that the FCS literally emerged and was selected in this market because the number and density of animals there is fairly low. Probably all the people in that conversation would say the same thing today.
@George I guess it's also worth repeating that, no, the DEFUSE proposal did not say that they'd put random cleavage sites no one has ever seen into SARS-like viruses no one has ever seen and then see what happens. Combining two unknowns and seeing what happens is the sort of experiment people don't generally do because it's so hard to interpret the results.