Did monkeypox come from a lab?

1kṀ2616

2028

12%

chance

ALL

Claims beginning to circulate (just search twitter etc) e.g: https://thenationalpulse.com/2022/05/22/wuhan-assembled-monkeypox-strains/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kD5x-xwGxTQ https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/jan/22/monkeys-escape-after-truck-carrying-100-animals-to-a-laboratory-crashes-in-us?CMP=share_btn_tw Resolves to my post hoc PROB (hopefully after smart sci folk have done the thorough analysis)

Science

Monkeypox

Get

1,000

to start trading!

People are also trading

Did HIV come from a laboratory?

8% chance

Did/will H5N1 come from a laboratory?

15% chance

Was the 2021 Ebola outbreak caused by a lab leak?

14% chance

Did Lyme disease come from a lab?

7% chance

Will the next pandemic originate in a laboratory?

Sort by:

The evidence is that there were a huge number of mutations, matching those produced by one human enzyme.

No evidence of unnatural codons or splicing (which Covid was loaded with…); someone would have likely found the “smoking gun” of any genome manipulation by now

Hard to imagine a positive resolution, as it’s compatible with an unmonitored outbreak or passage in lab cells.

To the extent future pathogens have pure “passage/long-term infection” signatures, probabilities almost entirely depend on your priors about how many people are playing with these things in labs and rates of intentional or unintentional lab escape.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-022-01907-y

I'd have bet a lot more, but the market resolves in several years, and the question is ambiguous. It needs resolution criteria. Monkeypox has been around since the 70s - the chances a lab knew enough to modify it and was doing so are pretty low. If the question said, "Did the strain of monkeypox infecting the US resident diagnosed on 18 May come from a lab?" I'd be less confident.