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
3.00We are waiting for peer review, but initial sequences from Wuhan lab samples are not especially closely related to SARS-COV-2.
On September 30, 2024, Jay Bhattacharya (Trump's NIH appointee) posted on Facebook that "dangerous gain-of-function research [] likely caused the pandemic" and commented that "This piece by Matt Ridley lays out the evidence."
I haven't read Matt Ridley's linked post There is now very little doubt that Covid leaked from a lab, and haven't looked into any evidence about the lab leak question since Scott Alexander's post Practically-A-Book Review: Rootclaim $100,000 Lab Leak Debate in April 2024. I recall watching the first ~2-3 hours of the Rootclaim debate videos then and updating my uncertain view to <20% Lab Leak (maybe ~5% lab leak, or ~1-20% lab leak; specifics don't matter to my current question), which I understood to be the approximate probability that Scott and most readers updated to after reading his post or watching the Rootclaim debate (if I'm wrong about that; please correct me).
Before I read Matt Ridley's long article or otherwise look into the lab leak question again, can someone who (like me) read Scott's post or watched the Rootclaim debate and updated on that evidence to ~1-20% lab leak, and who unlike me has been following the lab origin question, please update me on whether new evidence or analysis has come to light since April 2024 that should update me significantly upwards from the conclusion reached following the Rootclaim debate?
Thanks very much in advance!
There are a couple things here that were added since the preprint (which had already been published in April 2024): https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(24)00901-2
Including:
One additional sample with some evidence of lineage A in Huanan market in a different location (only 2 duplicate reads; not strong evidence but there are very few reads anywhere outside of the few high coverage environmental genomes and patient sequences).
A Huanan linked patient is annotated in Fig 1 that was not annotated before (lineage B; HB-01/2020). This was someone who couldn’t get any hospital to see him until he went to his hometown outside of Wuhan and became the first case there.
Not annotated (from same paper as above) is that of the earliest lineage A cases “lived about 2 km from Huanan market.”
This paper contains a few interesting patient sequences that aren’t discussed in the paper — https://academic.oup.com/ve/article/10/1/veae020/7619252
Particularly, one demonstrating likely spread from Huanan market. There’s some other evidence for that lineage spreading from the market, but this sample made it more likely.
All of this is more evidence against Huanan market centrality being some artifact of biased ascertainment.
There’s also been a lot of evidence ruling out various conspiracy theories about cover ups by scientists outside of Wuhan, but if you were at 5-20% lab leak beforehand you rightly don’t care about the mad scientist smokescreen so that’s not evidence that matters.
@WilliamKiely New evidence has emerged that infected animals were present at the Hunan market: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-03968-0
@WilliamGunn This is the sort of thing (pretty vague report on content of a conference talk and colleagues' comments on it) where it's hard to interpret as evidence. Can't tell from this report what was measured or what was compared. It's a very difficult analysis. Distinguishing between reads where mRNA or DNA was the template is just the beginning. Then you've got to deal with all sorts of variability between sampling locations and so on. I have no idea how distinct a signature there is for immune activation for SARS2 vs other infections.
Signatures of sick humans might be nearly as interesting interesting as sick animals in the data. It's unfortunate that for 1/January there isn't sequencing data for swabs that were PCR-negative for SARS2.
I have a question for non-scientists in this thread. The article says, "its cells make copies of genes that produce proteins" and "increased gene copying" rather than "transcription of mRNA from DNA" and "increased transcription." Which would be more clear for you? It's very awkward to me since "gene copying" has a very different meaning in other contexts.
@WilliamGunn the difficulty is that other animal coronaviruses were also present. In fact, Jesse Bloom found there were associations between viral and animal genetic material for some animal coronaviruses but not SARS-COV-2. https://academic.oup.com/ve/article/10/1/vead089/7504441
Steve Massey observes that sample Q61, which had the highest % raccoon dog sequences, showed the presence of raccoon dog amdovirus, and canine parvovirus and canine kobuvirus (with the potential to infect raccoon dogs).
These were present at much higher abundance that the single SARS2 read present in the sample. Therefore, it would be erroneous to attribute raccoon dog immune activation to SARS2.
https://x.com/stevenemassey/status/1864348559178391594?t=t7iv3ixfVzEBUzeK54YNHw&s=19
@MikePa67d I see it’s another “all viruses are equal” argument. Go read papers on canine coronavirus infection of dogs, raccoon dogs, and red foxes.
“By nearly all measures of science”
So the best case for a lab leak after a year plus of investigation is this weird rhetoric and a couple coverup conspiracy theories that take place in the United States?
An outbreak could’ve happened just about anywhere in the world and there’d be an equivalent six degrees of Kevin Bacon case to make for someone who (1) participated in research nearby in the USA and (2) though “lab leak” was BS. If that’s the bulk of the case for “lab leak” it’s meaningless.
And this is coming from the committee with the power to ask anyone in USA anything and almost always get answers. IDK what they’re going on about at the end about “FOIA Lady” — is she the one that will finally reveal the truth or something?
@George This committee investigated for almost two years and spent thousands of hours on the topic getting more access than any committee before.
The result when they didn’t hear what they wanted to hear: throw all that out, reference what some random people said in the news in October and November 2024, and spend the vast majority of time time on the subject on an implausible cover up theory instead.
The select subcommittee on the pandemic — a group with the power and mandate to know pretty much what anyone in the USA knows about pandemic origins — is out with their final report. My quick reading of their logic in finding lab leak most likely:
Robert Redfield things so; logic unimportant
Nicolas Wade thinks so; based on logic that disallows viruses from evolving novel function ever
Alina Chan published an opinion article recently (it repeats her 5 points — which aren’t accurate — at length).
Other people were recently lab leak curious; no info given on what evidence they brought to the table
Anyone banking on secret knowledge within the US government supporting lab leak and being too difficult to share for some reason… looking less likely than ever today.
More or less, the rest of the origins section is all about how the Proximal Origins article is a big coverup. The alternative hypothesis that a few guys got excited about some bad ideas, were bluntly told they were bad ideas by peers, and came to agree within a day or two… that’s not discussed.
Latest breaking news supporting lab leak: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14113769/Covid-obviously-Chinese-lab-leak-covered-Beijing-British-expert-says.html
TL;DR Someone who made an irrelevant app and who has no new evidence or analysis said on a podcast that he thinks it’s likely a lab leak because USA and China are both covering up what happened.
Something like that — hard to figure out what the article actually says. This didn’t stop the story from being promoted as new supporting evidence by the lab leak social media crowd who insists that they are certain of lab leak origins and have found too many smoking guns to count. If I had smoking gun evidence, I probably would care what someone’s gut feeling was on a podcast.
@George This wouldn’t explain the lack of anyone here making a rational argument for lab leak unless China is paying everyone. You need to think bigger.
The origin of Covid-19, part 1: Evidence for and against an origin at the wet market
@MikePa67d let's see what we have here... skimming through for a few seconds:
I also want to point out they do this funny reporting of relative risk p-value in their paper. And to get a better p-value you need to sample more. If you sample more, you get better p-values. So it's a little bit misleading.
One of sillier complaints about that manuscript. What's a "better" p-value? The most highly sampled regions within the market are not the highest positivity even though sampling for many of them was posited on suspected cases nearby (e.g. the southeast corner of the west half to he market). No one's confused about the low sampling density in the east half of the market being a bit underpowered to detect significant enrichment of positive samples.
Again I'll point out: the hottest areas are not actually where you have the animal stalls.
At this point, the narrator is highlighting an area with an animal stall that might not have been sampled.
Let's skim a bit more:
Lipkin changed his story once he was asked about it in by the House subcommittee:
Oh look, it's SARS2 in Brazil in November. This is clearly a contamination artifact because the sequencing is published: it has mutations that definitely didn't occur until 2020.
The person who made this video is clearly informed enough to not make these mistakes, so I guess they aren't mistakes.
@Rwin If you think that publication of proof of a lab leak is a sure thing, put your fake money where your mouth is.
For what it's worth, I wouldn't put the odds of this (a paper in one of these journals that's peer reviewed and concludes lab leak more likely than not) happening too low myself, even though I think a lab leak of any kind is an extremely unlikely origin and a lab leak origin where there was genetic manipulation or selection by passage of an isolated virus is essentially impossible. These journals all publish papers that don't pan out now and then.
@Rwin This is the truth. We just need to FOIA a few more documents. Surely the proof of this Chinese conspiracy is hidden in some American scientists' emails.
@PeterMillerc030 Exactly! Bobby Kennedy is going to expose the Chinese government any day now. It probably is just a matter of hours. One more McChicken and the Wuhan Flu conspircacy will be confirmed.
@Rwin RFK knows that the plandemic came from the US government itself:
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/rfk-jr-kennedy-covid-pandemic-planned-b2650127.html
That's why we need to hold the people who were in charge in 2019 and 2020 accountable, by re-electing the people who were in charge in 2019 and 2020.