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
3.00
@George Conspiracy theories centering on Bethesda, MD are a good way to burn your best evidence of an eerie coincidence in Wuhan.
@benshindel He apparently didn't know that the time to avoid this circus was 20/Jan/2021 and not 20/Jan/2025... should've declassified absolutely everything possible and been as clear as possible that there was no smoking gun to be found anywhere else. Could've DEFUSED a lot of this nonsense 4 years ago by taking the question seriously in a public way even if that turned out to be a little embarrassing for analysts doing what Trump asked them to do in 2020.
Natural viruses have a normal statistical distribution. Covid does not have normal distribution. All of the virus versions were deadly. Not distributed statistically. Once one strain went, it would be replaced with another also deadly strain.
U.S. government agencies, including the Department of Energy and FBI, have assessed with low to moderate confidence that a laboratory origin is plausible.
Early SARS-CoV-2 genomes showed limited genetic diversity, which some argue is more consistent with a lab leak than natural zoonosis.
The genetic structure of SARS‐CoV‐2 does not rule out a laboratory origin
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7744920/
The receptor binding domain (RBD) of SARS-CoV-2 appears highly optimized for binding to human ACE2 receptors. While this could arise naturally, some suggest it may indicate laboratory adaptation.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7982270/
Furin Cleavage Site (FCS): Several discussions highlight the FCS in SARS-CoV-2, particularly the PRRA sequence, which is not commonly found in related coronaviruses. Posts on X and some research papers argue that this site, which increases the virus's infectivity, could be the result of genetic engineering. The presence of this site, especially its exact amino acid sequence matching human proteins like ENaC (Epithelial Sodium Channel), has been cited as evidence suggesting artificial manipulation.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3281273/
https://x.com/R_H_Ebright/status/1630764833887903744
SARS-CoV-2 is the only one of more than 200 known SARS-like coronaviruses that contains an FCS. This is a feature that does not rule out a natural origin, but that is more easily explained by a lab origin. Especially since insertion of FCS had been explicitly proposed in 2018.
https://oversight.house.gov/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/Year-5-EHAv.pdf
In 2017-2018, WIV (Wuhan Virus Institute) constructed a novel chimeric SARS-like coronavirus that was able to infect and replicate in human airway cells and that had 10,000x enhanced viral.
Codon Usage: There's mention of the codon usage in the FCS being unusual for bat coronaviruses, suggesting it might have been inserted artificially. The specific codon optimization for human cells could indicate lab manipulation.
Gp-120 Sequences: Some claims on social media point to Gp-120 sequences in SARS-CoV-2 as absolute proof of its man-made origin, suggesting that these sequences are akin to those found in HIV, which could imply a form of genetic engineering growth and 4x enhanced lethality in mice engineered to display human receptors on cells.
Papers discussing the use of AI in analyzing SARS-CoV-2's genome for origin tracing sometimes inadvertently support the artificial origin debate by noting the uniqueness of some genetic features not typically seen in natural evolution
@brianwang Huh?
One thing you are right about is linking Prof. Richard Ebright to the theory that SARS-CoV-2 is engineered from HIV.
He has been promoting a movie based on this premise: https://www.the-gallop.com/from-fauci-to-fiction-doc-promises-covid-origins-delivers-hiv-lies/
@EthanBrooks The direct bat-to-human scenario shares a problem with the lab leak scenario. It doesn't explain Huanan market.
Folks also talk about how far away the bats are, but no one knows how the SARS/SARS2-like viruses got into a cave in Xiaogan (just outside of Wuhan) either... https://academic.oup.com/ve/article/8/1/veac046/6601809
@zcoli I was curious specifically about the virology as opposed to the plausibility of any given scenario. Is there a reason that an intermediate animal would increase the probability of the mutations that enabled COVID-19 to infect the respiratory system of humans? This was partly in reference to @PeterMillerc030's assertion:
> Direct bat to human is unlikely. No evidence of bats for sale at Huanan market. Not many bats in Wuhan.
@EthanBrooks I don't think we know enough about transmission between bats to answer the question of whether adaptation for respiratory transmission could've happened to some extent in some bat species. Probably there are a number of imperfect experimental approaches in different cell culture systems that would be very interesting to test all of the non-synonymous mutations separating SARS-CoV-2 from its inferred ancestral genome in bats.
@George Since you're citing her as an authority, what does Susan Weiss think after 5 years of evidence?
I 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.
@LukeShadwell Worth looking at this when it comes to what's already been sampled in nature: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10369958/
Importantly, what's left to be explained is not only the furin cleavage site. There are other differences between "RecCA" (the common ancestor of SARS-CoV-2 and viruses sampled in bats and pangolin) that zero people would've thought to engineer in 2019.
Also importantly, the sequence around the furin cleavage site insert has only been sampled in animal viruses a handful of times. Very low N to expect to find the rare thing that was either subject to positive selection in an intermediate host or was acquired during transmission in an intermediate host that happened to fit the Goldilocks criteria for being a vector for both bat- and human-infecting SARS-like viruses.
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:
@PeterMillerc030 I assumed you were making good faith arguments on here, unlike a certain commentator. I was wrong.
@George What's bad faith about that?
There are dozens of different lab leak theories that are all mutually exclusive. Like, Ron Unz thinks covid is an American bioweapon launched against China. Li Meng Yan thinks it was a Chinese bioweapon. Many other people think it was not a bioweapon, but a leaked lab project.
Jim Haslam thinks it's an American lab project carried out in Wuhan, by one western scientist, and the Chinese scientists at the WIV don't know about it. Haslam spends most of his time on Twitter arguing against other pro-lab leak accounts, telling them that their lab leak theories don't make sense.
Jeffrey Sachs is more vague about what his theory is, but he mostly emphasizes that covid was made with "US biotechnology", and he puts more blame on UNC and Fauci than on China. I think he's even veered into some more specific ideas like "covid was designed in a lab in Montana". Sachs is also a pro-China shill, as Billy's thread documents: he's pro-China and anti-US in almost every political issue and shows up on Chinese media.
If you don't understand the distinctions between what all these people are selling, then you're a badly educated mark for these conspiracy theories.
As for Steve, I don't know. I've met him once, he seemed like a good guy. It was pre-pandemic, so we mostly just talked about IQ research. I follow him on Twitter and have listened to his podcast a few times. His politics are kind of hard to parse, but he frequently talks about US and Chinese competition, is very positive on China overtaking the US lead, and he's become sort of pro-MAGA I think mostly based on criticizing the US position in Ukraine.
Anyways, he could host anyone on this issue. He could host scientists who believe in zoonosis. He could host mainstream lab leakers like Ridley and Chan who blame the WIV. Instead, he hosted 2 people that blame US scientists, one of whom is clearly a pro-China shill.
What drove that choice? Political bias? Desire to host obscure opinions? Those guests sought him out? Something else? I'd assume that Steve is smart enough to know the difference between all these theories.