For @Zackkenyon and others frustrated by skepticism that this market will ever resolve, here's a market that resolves at regular intervals and addresses exactly the same question. Except the opinion of one person is substituted by the editorial judgement of many people.

Why does anyone think that there is such a thing as molecular evidence that covid is not a lab leak? Any wild virus can be harvested, stored, and passaged in a lab. No facts about the genetic makeup of the virus itself can possibly rule out a lab leak, and this is the only kind of evidence that "experts" have been able to produce. Every possible story about how the virus got to WIV, benign, malicious, unlikely, likely, is compatible with the hypothesis that the lab itself was the epicenter of the outbreak. WIV studies bat coronaviruses, every bat coronavirus is likely to end up at WIV.

@Zackkenyon on a Bayesian basis this is in fact evidence, in that it substantially reduces the likelihood of some specific lab leak hypotheses (e.g. that COVID was RaTG13 subject to GoF).

It's true that this by itself does not "rule out" a lab leak.

However, two things are wrong with this framing implicitly:

1. A neutral position is not that we have to "rule out" a lab leak (in the sense that it is presumed true unless ruled out). We should instead simply evaluate the strength of each hypothesis.

2. Molecular genetic evidence is not, in fact, the only evidence in play. Feel free to consult the rest of the many comments below for other kinds of evidence that have been shared.

@Zackkenyon

Best molecular evidence in favor of origins in the Wuhan wildlife trade: All of the genetic diversity of SARS-CoV-2 is found in the biggest wildlife in town and nowhere else on 1-January-2020 (although it was likely present by that point in some Wuhan hospitals). Within that market, those samples were found close to where wildlife was sold. Within locations selling wildlife, there was both SARS-CoV-2 RNA and DNA of animals that can be infected by and transmit SARS-CoV-2.

Best molecular evidence of origins elsewhere: none.

The "lab leak" community spent years demanding, and then getting, molecular evidence to help rule out "lab leak" scenarios, e.g.:

• Proof the spike receptor binding domain wasn't synthetic (BANAL-52 proved this)

• Proof 8 WIV samples didn't contain the SARS-CoV-2 precursor (RaTG15 sequence published as well as raw data)

• Retrospective testing of blood bank samples to prove SARS-CoV-2 wasn't widespread in Wuhan in late December when the first cases were identified (done, published, and ignored)

The lab definitely isn't the epicenter of the outbreak so I don't know what you're going on about there.

All that's left that's claimed as molecular evidence of SARS-CoV-2 being synthetic is 12 nucleotides (the FCS). It's the smallest god of the gaps in the history of intelligent design. Famous lab leak theorists Zeynep Tufekci, Alina Chan, and Matt Ridley have all said either that FCS is either evidence in favor of SARS-CoV-2 having a natural origin, or that it wouldn't make any difference to lab leak likelihood if exactly the same sequence were found in nature.

The fact that no one can "rule out a lab leak" is because no one remotely credible will state the "lab leak" in the form of a falsifiable hypothesis. They've been burned too often by doing that and being disproven by betting against natural selection and they've learn to be strategically vague to avoid more embarrassment.

@draaglom All but one specific lab leak scenario getting ruled out is a prediction of the lab leak hypothesis. This is not discriminating evidence.

@Zackkenyon I feel that you have not engaged with the substance of my reply. Happy to discuss further when you do.

@draaglom I engaged with the first thing you said, from which all other things follow, which is that you can apply bayes theorem to evidence about a specific instance of the lab leak hypothesis to update your probability of the lab leak hypothesis. This is not true.

Suppose I hold four cards and I say "I have four of a kind". To test this hypothesis, you draw a card from the remaining cards. It's a 3, so you correctly deduce that I do not possess 4 threes. You have gained exactly zero information about whether or not I have any four of a kind.

@Zackkenyon folks sharing your lab leak amnesia should go back and read what folks wrote in 2020-2021.

There were some falsifiable lab leak theories — and they were falsified.

There was a falsifiable wildlife origin theory. It fell out of favor for a while in 2020 and came roaring back between the beginning of 2021 through the beginning of 2023 thanks to molecular and epidemiological evidence piling up in its favor.

@zcoli

I do not need to predict the specific path that lightning will take in order to correctly deduce that a tropical storm will generate lightning. And none of your "molecular evidence" means anything for the lab leak hypothesis for the reason presented in my original comment.

@Zackkenyon The easy way to respond is simply with a falsifiable lab leak theory. Ideally one that was popular from the beginning and not one that was fabricated sometime more recently in response to the other theories being falsified.

Otherwise it’s just an unfalsifiable conspiracy theory.

Zoonotic origin theories could’ve been falsified by data that’s been published since 2020… yet the data collected in China and elsewhere just monotonically increases support for zoonotic origin. Nothing at all supporting the initial concern that originating in Wuhan was something other than a coincidence.

And it’s not nearly as eerie a coincidence as you appear to think. It’s trivial to think of coincidences that would make for theories as or more compelling covering 10x the population of Wuhan. Add in every city where WIV collaborated with the provincial CDC—after all, Wuhan CDC is also invoked by lab leak theorists—and it starts to get really absurd.

“Why did the outbreak start in the large city of Kunming rather than in a village next to a bat cave?” is one of many memes you’d hear on alternative timelines with alternative and equivalent lab leak theories.

The entire lab leak theory is that Covid was leaked from a laboratory. We don't now how the Pyramids were built, but it's not an unfalsifiable conspiracy theory to say that the Egyptians built them.

@Zackkenyon The Pyramids of Giza are a good example! The 2020-21 lab leak theories morphing into today's more ambiguous versions are a bit like John Taylor's theory that the biblical Noah started the project. This language of his about other theories is pretty familiar!

And, of course, there's evidence found within the Pyramids and far away from the Pyramids that supported the theory Taylor denigrated and did not support his theory in any way. Folks who want to believe said all that data must be fake or badly misinterpreted. They don't provide any theory of their own that explains the available data.

Sound familiar?

@zcoli

Also, if you think the lab leak theory is unfalsifiable, then what are you doing betting on it being falsified (which is what this market is)?

@zcoli We can say the pyramids were built by the egyptians very confidently, despite not knowing how. When you respond by arguing instead about how it's not clear what the pyramids were for, I agree that this is a perfect analogy for how this conversation is going. How is that related at all to who built them?

This claim, that the Egyptians built the pyramids, is plenty specific and falsifiable, despite not containing any reference to how they were made, or why. And because we know who built them, we expect those questions to have answers, but my inability to produce them is not evidence that they don't exist.

All that *this* market is about, and in fact the entirety of the content of the lab leak hypothesis, is that Covid came from WIV. Molecular evidence cannot tell you anything about this hypothesis,. That doesn't mean it's unfalsifiable, it means you're looking in the wrong place for evidence.

@Zackkenyon Suppose that there are features of SARS-CoV-2 that suggest that it is not a typical bat virus.

The most well known one of these features is the furin cleavage site, which is a feature that is found in some natural bat viruses, but has not been found in the hundreds of other most closely related bat viruses (sarbecoviruses).

3 possible explanations for this might be:

1. A sarbecovirus can't possibly evolve a furin cleavage site in nature, therefore SARS2 was engineered in a lab (this is Rootclaim's position).

2. A sarbecovirus can evolve this feature naturally, but it's most likely to happen in some intermediate animal, other than a bat (I think this is probably the most common view held among virologists).

3. This feature can evolve naturally in bat sarbecoviruses, but it's very rare and you'd have to sample thousands or even millions of viruses to find it, which is why it hasn't been seen in any sampled viruses (Virologists Eloit and Temmam wrote a paper implying this was true).

If #2 is true, then that's bad for the lab leak theory, because they had no known sampling program looking for these viruses in animals other than bats.

If #3 is true, then that's worse for the lab leak theory, because the WIV did not sample thousands or millions of sarbecoviruses, they sampled ~200 of them, over the course of 14 years, with many of those coming from a single cave. In general, the diversity of viruses found in nature will be much higher than the small subset that the lab has collected or looked at.

Beyond the furin cleavage site, there might be other clues that SARS2 did not come directly from a bat. Marc Johnson wrote a paper on other mutations that look like the virus is adapted for respiratory transmission (which would happen in another animals) as opposed to intestinal (which is how these viruses transmit among bats):
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1872953895280169172.html

If his analysis is correct, then that's more proof that SARS2 spent time in some intermediate host, between bats and humans.

As others have noted, it is not possible to disprove the lab leak theory, because there is no one lab leak theory, just an ever changing set of hypotheses that mutate when new data arrives. At first, it was a leak of a bat virus. Then we got some evidence from pangolins, so the theory changed to involve a bat/pangolin chimera. Then we got some evidence from Laos that disproved that theory, so the pangolin part got dropped from the lab leak theory.

If you could 100% prove that the virus had spent time evolving in raccoon dogs, for instance, a new lab leak theory could just say that the WIV had gone out sampling raccoon dogs, or else they had some in the lab and infected those with viruses in a way that caused that evolution of the virus.

Similarly, if you did go out and find a rare bat sarbecovirus with a furin cleavage site, or even with the exact same FCS as SARS2 has, then a new lab leak theory could just pretend that the WIV had also gone out and found exactly that same virus in 2019.

There will always be room for people to make up ever more contrived lab leak theories to try to fit new data, but none of these theories will be even remotely possible. Studying the genome of the virus is a good way to rule out the likely theories, and to show that the only ones that remain are highly improbable.

@PeterMillerc030

>As others have noted, it is not possible to disprove the lab leak theory, because there is no one lab leak theory

There is exactly one lab leak theory, that Covid escaped from a lab, specifically the WIV. If you think that this is impossible to disprove, you should definitely sell your stake in the NO position. You are, according to your own reasoning, betting against an unfalsifiable proposition.

You should really consider the pyramid analogy above, as it's a quite good summary of your argument (if I do say so myself). If the Egyptians built the pyramids, then there certainly exists an explanation for how they were built and what they were for, but so far those explanation have largely eluded us. Our evidence for the hypotheses that we have come up with so far are surprisingly weak. It turns out to be quite hard to discover exactly what happened when the ravages of time destroy most of your evidence, but we can certainly formulate coarser propositions about what happened and we can evaluate those propositions without ever needing to solve the mystery of exactly how they came to be.

One example of such a hypothesis is that, regardless of how the pyramids were built, they were definitely built by Egyptians. Humans specifically. Do you think that not being able to describe exactly how the pyramids were built by humans means that actually they must have been built by aliens? When various hypotheses about how the pyramids were constructed are debunked, egyptologists race to come up with new theories to fit the new evidence. Should we, as a result, label the "Human Construction" hypothesis an unfalsifiable conspiracy theory?

@Zackkenyon LOL, nice try, but no one even agrees on which lab the virus leaked from:

The FBI thinks it's WIV, the DoE thinks it's the Wuhan CDC. Matt Ridley has switched between blaming those 2 labs, at different times. Jim Haslam thinks the virus was made by an Australian scientist, over at the BSL-4 lab. Other people think it was made by Chinese scientists over at the BSL-2/3 lab. More obscure theories have blamed places like Wuhan university or the Wuhan institute of biological products or Huazhong agricultural university. In China, millions of people think the virus was made at Ft Detrick. There's one guy on Twitter who's convinced that Covid started with an exploding lab in Russia, and he'll bet you $10,000 that you can't prove him wrong.

You could have a 100% verifiable, perfect alibi for every Chinese scientist at the WIV and it wouldn't matter, because lab leak theorists could just shift to a different lab, a secret military project, whatever.

In this market, we're betting on whether Isaac will eventually hit 98% confidence in one side or another. We're not betting as to whether conspiracy theorists will stop making conspiracy theories. They obviously will not.

@Zackkenyon You might want to read the post you're responding to again if you think I wasn't talking about who built the Pyramids!

And, of course there is molecular evidence against "WIV" starting the pandemic. Namely, none of the sequences from WIV, including many that became public by accident, have any plausible connection to SARS-CoV-2 origins. These include sequences demanded by people to disprove WIV lab leak theories!

@PeterMillerc030

You could have a 100% verifiable, perfect alibi for every Chinese scientist at the WIV and it wouldn't matter, because lab leak theorists could just shift to a different lab, a secret military project, whatever.

and/or lab leak theorists would just demand you prove that the independent verification of that data isn't also faked by the global conspiracy to suppress the truth about origins.

@Zackkenyon

Do you think that not being able to describe exactly how the pyramids were built by humans means that actually they must have been built by aliens?

The aliens theory is relatively new. The main alternative theory was humans other than Egyptians because it was considered too awesome an accomplishment for someone to build a monument and then have the civilization capable of accomplishing it not continue to do more of the same. Then folks translated inscriptions inside chambers that had been sealed since it was constructed—initially published without recognizing its significance—confirming that the relatively boring explanation from thousands of years earlier was the correct one.

19th century cranks continued to say it couldn't have been Egyptians without coming up with a plausible explanation for this data. So did 20th century cranks who swapped Noah for aliens. Popular opinion diverged with opinion of experts because people want to believe.

@Zackkenyon The evidence is genetic, epidemiological and circumstantial. This allows for the possibility that the virus was not engineered but the natural one was in the WIV collection. As Peter said, it’s more likely that the virus spent some time in an animal. There is zero evidence of early spread around the WIV and plenty for the market being the epicenter. Lab leak cannot be completely disproved is not the way science works. Nobody can disprove that the yeti exists either. We just haven’t found any evidence indicating that it does..

please keep voting no im enjoying the discounts

wow price is free falling. There must've been new evidence released

@BrendanFinan In a way, there has been.

Marty Makary is FDA Commissioner. Shouldn't he be an insider at least when it comes to the outlines of what the lab leak case is for the intel community at the moment?

Instead, he's going around on podcasts recently and saying his smoking gun evidence is that there was a patent application for a COVID-19 vaccine filed by someone in China in February 2020. There were many patent applications for COVID-19 vaccines filed all around the world in February 2020 and even January 2020. See the figure from WIPO here.

So, more evidence if anyone needed any that the only evidence that likely remains secret in the USA is evidence of some half-baked lab leak theories flying around 2020-2021.

With the caveat that I haven't watched it all yet, this is a pretty accessible overview focusing on the quality of the underlying arguments for lab leak that have come and gone over the years: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ra0WKNhQZ0U

I'd make some different editorial choices in terms of what content to focus on if telling a similar story. Specifically, I'd discuss the influential scientists and members of the media who have essentially repeated, since roughly spring 2021, that it's impossible to conclude anything at all. Folks whose contributions as a rule consist of inaccurately describing the available data as being totally uninformative, and who never update their beliefs when specific data they requested is published and doesn't point to lab leak.

I spotted a couple errors; I'm sure the subjects of the video will latch on to one or two of them to undermine the whole thing for people who want to believe, confident that audiences at X and so on won't watch for themselves and fact check to see if it basically checks out.