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, and motivations for various actors to distort or hide inconvenient evidence have died down.
I will be conferring with the community extensivly before resolving this market, to ensure I haven't missed anything and aren't being overconfident in one direction or another.
(For comparison, the level of evidence in favor of anthropogenic climate change would be sufficient, despite the existance 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 loans you your mana back after a few months, so this doesn't negativly 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.
This market is skewed because if it did come from a lab then there probably exists evidence to prove that, but if it didn't come from a lab then evidence to prove that to 98% confidence seems unlikely to exist, so in that world there's a higher chance the market stays open indefinitely.
@ahalekelly If it comes from nature, I would think we'd be able to find bats containing various prior versions of it, so its evolutionary history could be constructed - but we haven't found them.
@ahalekelly Disagree. It's mostly skewed because of the resolver. This market is an attempt to predict @IsaacKing's opinion on covid more than anything else. I personally think there is 98+% of a lab origin and would have resolved this market already.
@SG Yet you've barely bet anything on YES. You don't trust me to resolve this accurately once more evidence is out?
Is there a more objective set of criteria that you would bet on? Maybe what Wikipedia says in 2040, or something like that?
@IsaacKing I am too lazy to put in the work to evaluate your approach to examining the evidence. This is a complex, highly politicized issue so deferring to the typical authorities is unusually problematic. Your attempt at operationalizing this question seems pretty good, all things considered.
@SG Also, just for the lols: /SG/did-covid19-come-from-a-laboratory-fc7b3ea8cf47
@SG Would you bet in a market that resolves to the beliefs of an aligned superintelligence, conditional on us ever getting one?
@IsaacKing I would trust its true belief, but not necessarily its stated one...
Good points. Here's another market that should fix most of these concerns?
25% chance natural origin.
60% accidental lab leak.
15% intentional lab leak.
It's always interesting looking at the "market depth" graphs to see the story behind the current percentage.
The fact that this market updated by 10 percentage points based on a Twitter thread that contains no new information implies that this market is not properly taking into account all public information.
@IsaacKing Speaking as one of the two people who bet it up at that point, I was not aware of almost any of the public info prior. Could be though that other people just know even more, and so know that there is good counter-evidence. (That they have bet it almost all the way back down again suggests they think this.)
@IsaacKing schelling point? Or was it shelling point? Yeah, people believe others think a certain way even if they don't. High anti China sentiment, high propensity for people to buy the truth they want to see into existence because it's ideologues vs people who really don't care and see it as 50/50. Basically it's a bunch of 50/50 people vs a bunch of 99% ideologues who don't care about the real truth, average that out you get 75%.
@PatrickDelaney Just pointing out that the efficient market hypothesis is false, at least for this market. :)
@PatrickDelaney If only the ideologues say it's a lab leak, how do you explain polls showing that most Democrats think it's a lab leak?
@Akzzz123 because not all ideologies are binary split down party lines. Rather every individual has a vector of beliefs and positions they hold based upon personal experience, risk assessment, tolerance for uncertainty, etc. Those vectors that we all hold can cluster us all into groups, the Rep vs Dem thing is a spectrum fallacy based upon historical precedent in how the US is set up. So you likely have a ton of people who have a low psycological tolerance for uncertainty on this issue, who, "need," it to be resolved (either yes or no direction) now so they can feel safe and warm, when the dark, horrific very possible scenario is the data was just too obscured for us to know and until we get that data we won't know. Covid was really horrible for a lot of people, it's a sensitive point in folks lives, they just want to feel, "normal," again but civilization is a thin layer of ice covering an ocean of chaos, misery, brutality.
I don't think there's any evidence to suggest most in the NO camp are 50:50. Here's a two month old comment.
"I reckon we'll never have conclusive evidence but all speculation of YES is doubtful at best, and most experts agree that it did NOT come from a lab, so yes betters are retarded ON GOD."
The largest NO better has been on the 100:0 zoonosis camp.
@Akzzz123 yeah if that's the case then my assumption may be wrong and that individual has no clue what they are talking about. Typically the more forceful language, the less evidence an author has. I didn't see that one.
@JamesGrugett Makes no mention of the food market, and then "fact 9" is just "if you don't do what I say, you must have something to hide", the favorite assumption of cops the world over. I remain skeptical.
@JamesGrugett @ForrestTaylor this has been the most credible case for lab leak, and throw in the speed from initial transmission to human and near instantaneous community spread, which is 24 months of something like that faster than should be possible.
@PatrickDelaney It's amazing how the government can fit such a complex issue into basically one wide margin page.
@BTE not really too complex, you have Fox Mulder working at the FBI who wants to believe, and people love the X-Files, that's what gets us to the close to 70% market price when a more reasonable price is likely around 55%.
Biohacking, scientists play
In top-secret labs, all tucked away
But what they've wrought, we cannot say
Gene splicing games, and we all pay
@Mason Post one more poem on this market and I'm blocking this account for spam.
@IsaacKing 😂 poem spam... Robert Frost would be proud of you Isaac.
Scientists in white coats,
Claim the wet market's totes.
But conspiracy floats,
Bioweapon was the goal of these notes.
In lab coats they toil,
A virus they did boil,
Released to the world,
Are their hands unsoiled?
In a lab dish, a virus was grown
Now the world's reaping what was sown
Conspiracy theories may abound
But the truth, in time, will be found
As expected, the actual report is a dud.
https://zenodo.org/record/7754299#.ZBjzoKQXY0E
On a related note, the list of authors virtually overlaps with the previous flawed analysis - Worobey et al (2022), Pekar et al (2022), Holmes et al (2021), Andersen et al (2020).
@Akzzz123 There seems to be a lack of data defensibility, which the authors are disclosing. It's not published yet, so not even worth discussing yet.
What you are referring to as, "flawed analysis," is this: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abp8715
...which, again, very respectfully, I need to be careful here because there were some sensitivities in the past when I contradict you...you are baselessly claiming (which is becoming less surprising over time honestly, since you continually do this), that it's flawed. This is from Science, which has an impact factor of 63.
To show that it is flawed you would have to point to other published papers that show why it's flawed ... which might exist! I don't know! That's what this is all about, sharing information. You realize why random comments online saying something is flawed do not support that something is flawed, right? Again...we are not twitter, yelling things out into the wild helps no one...we are trying to resolve a bet, which means go toward the ground truth of something.
Again, trying to be respectful here, not sure how I can be more respectful in the point I'm trying to make. Please help me out here...?
@PatrickDelaney I have answered this in a previous comment but here's the relevant part of that comment (Links point to sources).
"I cannot say the same for the scientists with COI's though, who have repeatedly authored some shockingly poor scientific articles designed to promote a narrative. These papers are more pseudoscientific opinion pieces than rigorous scientific papers yet get amplified by the "reputed" sources and "science journalists" without any close scrutiny of their methods.
Quoting Gilles Demaneuf (an independent analyst who you had linked earlier): "90+ p-values in a Worobey paper based on very partial data (155 Dec cases out of proven ~250+) and some improver spatial statistics is not science."
Vanity Fair article: Simon Wain-Hobson has his own hypothesis for what is taking place: The group of scientists pushing the claim of natural origin, he says, “want to show that virology is not responsible [for causing the pandemic]. That is their agenda.”
Simon Wain-Hobson is Professor of molecular retrovirology at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, Director of the French National HPV Reference Laboratory."
@IsaacKing Reeks of natural origin propaganda.
No raw data, preprint shared, conveniently only the authors get this data before it is taken down within a week, timing is suspicious too given the recent DoE assessment, Select Committee hearings.
From the same set of authors of 3 previously failed papers arguing for natural origin - Worobey, Andersen, Holmes.
GISAID does not host raw reads - only viral genome assemblies.
Article only surveys the scientists who have been pro-natural origin since day one.
Environment samples in an animal market are bound to contain Animal DNA
DNA can last for thousands of years in the environment
Exact same playbook as the previous Worobey, Pekar, Andersen papers, headlines and PR over actual substance.
@Akzzz123 Possibly it could be propaganda, or just click farming for advertising revenue and traffic on a developing story. The likelihood of it being pure propaganda is probably pretty low being that it's covered by many reputable news organizations:
NYT: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/16/science/covid-wuhan-market-raccoon-dogs-lab-leak.html
But that being said, since it's not a peer reviewed study at this point, we should probably just reject it as unknown at this point.
Some of your other points:
timing is suspicious too given the recent DoE assessment, Select Committee hearings.
No, not suspicious, we expect new information to come out, potentially in support of or against a lab leak theory. That's the entire purpose. As another YES better had commented here: https://manifold.markets/IsaacKing/did-covid19-come-from-a-laboratory#IKCTwddNKmKIuJNsiexr ... part of the whole reason of pushing hard on the lab leak theory has been for, "meta game theory reasons," to gain more scrutiny on the topic. If that's the case then turning around and just saying, "NO," to any information that does not support the case is in really bad faith and just comes off as...I'm sorry to say, conspiratorial thinking.
From the same set of authors of 3 previously failed papers arguing for natural origin - Worobey, Andersen, Holmes.
OK, a, "failed paper," is like...the objective in science. Hypothesis, analysis, testing. If your experiment failed, great...publish it. That's not like saying, "they are a failure at being scientists." Science is a lot of work.
Exact same playbook as the previous Worobey, Pekar, Andersen papers, headlines and PR over actual substance.
What are you talking about? What playbook? Please see my comment below. https://manifold.markets/IsaacKing/did-covid19-come-from-a-laboratory#M7kMLDJyNshplE1gSHua
DNA can last for thousands of years in the environment
Umm...source? Under what conditions? Are these wet markets under those thousand year conditions?
Please entertain the thought that COVID did indeed come from the wet market / farmer's market, and not a lab leak. What are the ramifications of that? They are still selling bats, raccoon dogs, and all sorts of wildlife in these markets in China. If we find that this came from a wet market, or if there is overwhelming evidence that's where it came from...there needs to be massive international pressure on China to clamp down on this activity. You are very quick to call this thing you disagree with, "propaganda," ... well, yeah, propaganda cuts both ways - see my discussion here https://manifold.markets/IsaacKing/did-covid19-come-from-a-laboratory#Y0yDGfKrM0ptNc5AGRPm.
@PatrickDelaney Has any of these "reputable" news sources even covered the DEFUSE proposal?
Yet an unpublished article gets the headline "The Strongest Evidence Yet That an Animal Started the Pandemic" and doesn't even bother to interview one person who is skeptical of natural origin. It only interviews natural origin proponents who have previously authored flawed studies arguing for natural origin whose conclusions neither the WHO nor the Lancet bought.
It is obvious that this is a propaganda piece to anyone who is aware of the evidence and the conflicts of interest which I have highlighted before.
@Akzzz123 I don't think it's propaganda, I just think it's media bias, which is based upon cost. I don't think media contacts are going to interview reputable (non-conspiratorial) lab leak proponents, bioethicists, biosecurity advocates, three-letter agency folks simply because they want to publish the story ASAP. There will be alternate articles that will come up in the next week interviewing those parties...just watch.
I am not familiar with the DEFUSE proposal I think and am going to have to read up on that.
As far as Conflict of Interest goes...I have brought this up here recently, perhaps you didn't see it...but we don't get to just choose what Conflict of Interest means, it doesn't mean, "I personally suspicious of that person, therefore there is a Conflict of Interest." A conflict of interest must have a legal (or professional) standing, which means there has to be a jurisdiction. I'm not aware of any professional bodies that regulate conflict of interests in this field so if you can point me to that and where those cases are being arbitrated, I'm happy to concede to that, but as far as legal conflicts of interest go - those are being litigated, the legal cases are being tracked by the Organic Consumer's Association in my wonderful home state of Minnesota. I would point out that the Organic Consumer's Association is in itself a highly biased, propaganda outlet that thinks we need to guard the world against GMOs and genetic engineering of all types.
So basically when you say, "conflict of interest," what it really is...is...pending conflict of interest.
https://manifold.markets/IsaacKing/did-covid19-come-from-a-laboratory#Y0yDGfKrM0ptNc5AGRPm
Just like how this Raccoon Dog study needs to be thrown out until it gets peer reviewed and published, the Conflict of Interest talk needs to get thrown out until it gets established in a court of law (in a reliable jurisdiction, obviously, can't be China).
@PatrickDelaney The fact that you are unaware of the DEFUSE proposal (despite being engaged in Covid origins debate) shows that you too are a victim of the asymmetric information flow of evidence supporting the two camps. Thank you for making my point! You are free to call it whatever you want but the results of such journalistic malpractice are the same as what you would expect from a propaganda campaign.
COI's should be mentioned for both sides. It is good that you mentioned USRTK's COI above although I have yet to see it impact the accuracy of their reporting. Can you point to evidence where USRTK deliberately mislead in their reporting?
I cannot say the same for the scientists with COI's though, who have repeatedly authored some shockingly poor scientific articles designed to promote a narrative. These papers are more pseudoscientific opinion pieces than rigorous scientific papers yet get amplified by the "reputed" sources and "science journalists" without any close scrutiny of their methods.
Quoting Gilles Demaneuf (an independent analyst who you had linked earlier): "90+ p-values in a Worobey paper based on very partial data (155 Dec cases out of proven ~250+) and some improver spatial statistics is not science."
Vanity Fair article: Simon Wain-Hobson has his own hypothesis for what is taking place: The group of scientists pushing the claim of natural origin, he says, “want to show that virology is not responsible [for causing the pandemic]. That is their agenda.”
Simon Wain-Hobson is Professor of molecular retrovirology at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, Director of the French National HPV Reference Laboratory.
@Akzzz123 I'm doing fine, not a victim, it's a hobby not a job so if I missed something it's my own fault though thanks for your concern.
For those who still can't see why the natural origin hypothesis is purely a manufactured consensus, here are the thoughts of some of the big boys in the biodefense virology research complex saying that the kind of experiments being done in the Wuhan Institute of Virology should NOT be made more cumbersome.
These are then the same people who are later involved in the peer review process.
@Akzzz123 How is this related to whether the lab leak theory is true? This person appears to just be saying that they find certain types of lab research to be useful.
@IsaacKing The certain types of research being the ones that very likely created this pandemic aka gain of function research of concern.
It is important to evaluate the conflicts of interest of those making the zoonosis argument who are mostly from the biodefense research complex right now. This is something that has happened in the past when the Tobacco industry-funded scientists published peer-reviewed studies to show smoking and cancer are unrelated.
@Akzzz123 All right, two positives and a negative.
I really do believe that we should be concerned about biosecurity, for sure. I think the source that this seems to come from (at least that url linked from the twitter account), https://biosafetynow.org/ seems legit.
Thanks for posting a link to what you're talking about.
That being said...can you please be more specific? This is a lot of hand-waving. "These are a some of the same people involved in the peer review process." OK...so? What peer review process? Of which papers? Who else was involved in the peer review process?
I respect your efforts at trying to figure this out and I respect you.
Inventing Conflicts of Interest: A History of Tobacco Industry Tactics
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3490543/
Dr. Roger Brent (Brent Lab, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center): "if you canvassed any other sub-specialties of biologists who are not emotionally and professionally invested invested in issues surrounding research on viral pathogens, I suspect you would get a very different 'wide scientific consensus'."
As of Friday last week:
The House has unanimously passed a bill to require the Director of National Intelligence to declassify information regarding the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic.
https://www.npr.org/2023/03/10/1162612886/covid-origins-bill
I've modified the description slightly to try to reassure people this market will be resolved correctly. Specifically, I added:
and it doesn't seem likely that any further relevant evidence will be forthcoming any time soon.
and
This will likely not occur until many years after Covid is no longer a subject of active political contention, and motivations for various actors to distort or hide inconvenient evidence have died down.
I see this as a clarification rather than a change, but let me know if you have any objections.
David Friedman does a quick bayesian analysis on the lab leak hypothesis.
This analysis doesn't really work, because there are a lot of other factors!
If we look at emerging diseases, whatever over the severity, even just over the past decade, a whole lot more of them are of natural origin than of lab leaks. If we consider that in isolation, our posterior would be like .95 / .5 natural / lab
Just the existence of this makes a '1:50' update incredibly suspect
... also, there are a fuckton of BSL-2 and BSL-3 labs worldwide. We can't condition our BSL labs on 'works with sars', but not condition our wet markets on 'usually have coronaviruses', because both BSL labs and wet markets have all kinds of viruses. What percent of wet markets sell bats?
to elaborate: if one feature makes you do a 50x update in one direction .... aren't there probably other features that'll also update you 50x in some or another direction? Which in turn makes any 'confidence' that a '99:1' gives ... not confidenet
i just read this https://www.rootclaim.com/analysis/What-is-the-source-of-COVID-19-SARS-CoV-2
... wow, 'shut up and multiply' "reasoning" sucks. I could probably make a list of 20 'x2' updates, 10 in either direction, of similar quality to some of the ones in there. And probably another 5 in either direction that would've appeared convincing a year ago, but then were disproven by future studies.
(to be clear, my "opinion on the issue" is "i dont know and i dont think the evidence points either way", so sort of 50/50)
@NickAllen I had no idea who he is, had to look this up: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_D._Friedman
Ok cool, a super accomplished guy, great parental pedigree coming from Milton Freedman and what not. I have no ancestors that approach any where that level of accomplishment, good for him.
That being said: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C24&q=David+D.+Friedman&btnG=
OK, so he's an economist. So laudably, in his analysis he says:
In order to base an opinion on the origin of Covid on the second set of claims I would have to know quite a lot about the detailed evidence on what happened in China — how many people had, or may have had, Covid how early and where — and about virology. I do not know those things. Neither, I suspect, does anyone in Congress or any of the reporters writing news stories on the topic. All of us are dependent for our opinions on those claims on second hand information, arguments and conclusions provided to us by the small number of people who have the relevant expert information or transmitted from experts to us via the media.
So he's basically saying that we have to rely on second hand information.
He then goes on to say:
There was no mention of the fact that Peter Daszak, one of the authors [of the lancet], was the head of a nonprofit that had funded bat virus research at the Wuhan Institute with money from the National Institutes of Health.
So this is injecting a political interpretation of what, "competing interests," mean in this context, isn't he? E.g. isn't he actually begging the question right after he said above we shouldn't beg the question? I understand that some out there see Peter Daszak's involvement in EcoHealth Alliance as a Conflict of Interest - but it really legally established as having been a conflict of interest? Have there been lawsuits about this? Or perhaps more fairly asked, can there be a lawsuit in this situation?
I just don't even want to entertain people's arguments if they start off by asserting something that's not true, even as a, "teaser," regardless of whatever their pedigree may be. I feel like that gets into Matt Ridley territory where you have these extremely smart people who are taking us all for a ride for some undisclosed reason of their own.
Fauci discussing how a lab leak could be considered a natural occurrence.
@NickAllen Note that he says (summarized), "if a lab worker got infected in the environment, and then came back into the lab, and further infected others, that could be a definition a lab leak."
So he's not saying that, "is" a lab leak, but, "if that is your definition, then it is a lab leak."
However, if you read the market criteria very carefully, @IsaacKing for the purpose of resolving this market specifically said:
A lab worker who was out collecting samples and got contaminated in the wild doesn't count
So...even though Fauci said that could hypothetically fit the definition of a lab leak, the market maker has already said it would specifically not fit the definition for this market.
I'm posting this here because I think this guy seems to be a fairly independent, though non-expert researcher who has a lot of the same interests in this question as many of us do, but he seems to have done a fantastic job of going much deeper into some of the questions we have discussed on this forum. He seems to be highly skeptical of any, "no lab leak," claims and definitely believes that it's something that should be discussed, yet as far as I can tell he's not jumping in and saying, "hey this actually happened," and makes a point to make sure people don't misconstrue his writing as conclusive.
As far as I can tell, his research team seems to be calling for more information so that the origins of COVID19 can be solved, as opposed to some of the other sources on here that I've listed, which are somewhat suspect in that they may be aligned toward some other goal rather than figuring out what the truth is.
I want to come back and revisit this, but I thought this is something that any YES betters might be interested in reading as it likely puts them on a more solid foundation for their case, and for any NO betters, it may help us think a bit more deeply about some really solid arguments for a lab leak are, and not the more conspiratorial joke arguments. Please correct me if I'm wrong in this interpretation or if I have missed something that blatantly shows that this guy is indeed a crank.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organic_Consumers_Association#cite_note-mcgill-6
The Organic Consumers Association, based in Finland, Minnesota, a town in the middle of nowhere is basically funding purpose built research and propaganda under the theory that there's a global conspiracy they need to fight.
Reaction to any real or perceived global conspiracy becomes an over-reaction at some point when you basically start an anti-vax campaign in a neighborhood that leads to people getting measles. https://www.health.state.mn.us/diseases/reportable/dcn/sum17/measles.html
Many words have been written here compiling circumstantial evidence and are drawn from either ongoing FOI lawsuits which the Organic Consumers Association tracks via this organization that they fund here: https://usrtk.org/covid-19-origins/foi-litigation-on-origins-of-sars-cov-2-gain-of-function-2/
Other evidence on the, "Pro Leak" side has come from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matt_Ridley who seems to have had many laudable scientific accomplishments, but based upon reviews, his more recent book "Viral" (linked in Wikipedia) seems to be much more politically motivated rather than focusing on whether there was an actual lab leak - e.g. it's being touted as highly sophisticated conjecture.
Complicating my above thoughts are of course:
If any of the FOI Lawsuits being tracked by the Organic Consumer's Association actually do reveal evidence of a lab leak within the discovery process...great! It's better that we know.
Matt Ridley, definitely knows his stuff with regards to genetics more than I do, so while he may be pulling a fast one, I have no way of knowing other than the assurances of other experts.
TD;LR from what I can tell (please correct me if I'm wrong), the source of almost anything on the YES side (other than from intelligence agencies) ultimately trails back to those two main sources, both sources are suspect, so we should be highly suspicious of these pro-lab leak talking points, they just don't come from neutral sources.
Of course this above also must come with the huge caveat that, if US or Western intelligence agencies tell us with a high degree of certainty that there was a lab leak, we should probably listen to them. Also this is an evolving issue, more evidence could be presented in those above court cases which change anything at any moment.
The corollary to the lawsuit argument is of course though, if these lawsuits increasingly get thrown out or go nowhere, then any lab leak theory should be increasingly dubious as time goes on.
Question for those who believe Zoonotic origin funding was politically motivated because of a desire to maliciously collaborate with China...if virologists are so politically motivated how can we know that there aren't now virologists going after funding making statements that go too far in the direction of overestimating the likelihood of a lab leak, so we can get funding? We all know China and US tensions are at an all time high. If the narrative that we are supposed to believe is based upon virologists being overly eager to go after funding, how does that line of reasoning not apply in both pro-lab leak and anti-lab leak directions given the nature of China and US tensions?
@PatrickDelaney yes, taking account of bias in both directions is important. It's admissable as a reason to look further into people's impartiality. Not an open and closed book, but an indication to look deeper.
@StrayClimb Some of your YES colleagues whose names I won't mention are writing and presenting such bias arguments in extremely convinced manners, saying things like, ">95% confident," and, "this is a red flag for X," among other inflamatory arguments I won't mention, rather than what you are saying, which is, "Not an open and closed book, but an indication to look deeper." What do you think this says about these types of comments and how much it appears to disagree with the level of certainty you are proposing in this above comment? Do you feel at all uncomfortable with these comments?
@PatrickDelaney I'm afraid I'm also 90%+ non-zoonotic. I am sorry they are coming off as too strident for you. I usually try to step back and evaluate whether people would change their minds if presented evidence. i.e. is it conceivable that evidence could convince someone? And if not, there's really no point in discussing things w/them. For me, if WIV released the database, and we found animal hosts, etc. I would be forced to change my view, and I hope (and believe) that I would.
I think the thing that really intensified the resistance to zoonotic is that many official people involved didn't seem to admit that it was a legitimate debate. i.e. rather than addressing the questions (why Wuhan? why did they take the db offline?) they just tried to shut down debate using authority. In arguments that's sort of a meta-level trigger - for game theoretic reasons, after someone does that, one strategy is to completely oppose them (to influence future debate styles by going extreme against those who don't debate "fairly") and that's what's happening here. I hold a similar view.
@StrayClimb I'm sorry I'm not familiar with, "meta-level / game theoretic," reasons to believe that something is true or not. It sounds like what you are saying is something along the lines of, "the reaction of authorities early in the pandemic (presumably the Lancet letter?) was highly unwarranted given their level of evidence at the time, so therefore we should take an aggressive accountability approach to ensure they adhere to scientific principles and don't put out that type of letter again." Is that correct? If so it just sounds like you are asking for the same thing that I am...basically, scientific accountability. Am I off track here? Hope I'm not sounding like I'm putting words in your mouth, if so I apologize, just trying to paraphrase to understand.
@PatrickDelaney Yes, that's how it would work out here. More generally, when someone acts unfairly in an argument (by hiding information, using motivated arguments, and exerting authority), I also want to signal that anyone using that style will run into extra resistance, so I go a lot farther than normal in opposing them than otherwise. That's the game theory - when someone breaks "the rules of discussion" you have to punish them more so others know not to do that. Just my POV of course :)
That said, I am still a NO here for profit reasons, not just to make the point. The origin of my suspicion was discoveries about them attempting to craft a clear & simple message and tamp down legitimate dissent, silence critics (MDs & others) in media. Those doubts got stronger when I read about it now, and I find some kind of lab connection more likely than zoonotic+Wuhan origin+DB hidden+furin
"i.e. rather than addressing the questions (why Wuhan? why did they take the db offline?) they just tried to shut down debate using authority."
IDK if that ever really happened, though? Are there really any scientists who ever said something like: "The possibility of lab origins should be censored, completely ignored, and never discussed in any context" ?
Genuine question. for what it's worth as you consider a response though, do make sure the quote actually intends one of those statements, instead of something actually tangential.
Anyways, folks have talked about those two questions to death, so honestly, they get a little tired of it.... but I'll give it a quick go
"Why wuhan" -> epidemics require populated cities to take off in, Wuhan is one of the largest cities in China, it is closer to the bat resevoir than Beijing or Shanghai or Hong Kong, and is probably one of a handful of major cities in the region? It also has a less regulated and more activate wildlife trade than Beijing / Shanghai or the other cities to the east/north. SARS of course started in Guangzhou/Shenzen, which are further south, but still pretty dang far from where the closest bat relatives of each virus have been found near Yunnan. As folks have pointed out, SARS was found in some animals on farms near Wuhan as well, so we might have narrowly avoided an outbreak in Wuhan at that time, as well.
"why did they take the db offline?"
-> This question presupposes a lot of things and has also been discussed to death. The "database" was really just a spreadsheet hosted on a website for a couple of months, sort of a little new student project that never really took off, and wasn't really accessed by anyone outside their lab, if at all. It was actually taken down after the pandemic had already started: https://twitter.com/flodebarre/status/1577401140345507859.
Further, we now know most if not all of the viral sequences that would have been in the lab. For example, this paper from the WIV was first submitted in early October 2019 - before the earliest estimates of when the pandemic began. It contains a large analysis of all of their coronavirus sequences. If SARS-CoV-2 had been in that dataset, the reviewers/editor would have seen it upon submission. But it wasn't.
Second, other sequences from the WIV, submitted to the databases in mid 2018, well before the start of the pandemic, were made public in July 2022, as explained in this thread:
https://twitter.com/edwardcholmes/status/1632652392650117120
Again, if SARS-CoV-2 had been in those sequences, we would have seen it there, but we didn't.
So the question "Why did they take the DB offline?" is basically flawed at the core. It embellishes the nature of the "database", the nature of it being "offline", and obscures the fact that there was probably if not almost certainly nothing in it that is now already public.
Oops, forgot the link to Latinne et al. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-17687-3 for the second question there.
@alexcc Your arguments here make a lot of assumptions. I'm on mobile and very busy today so let me just address one for now.
Are there really any scientists who ever said something like: "The possibility of lab origins should be censored, completely ignored, and never discussed in any context" ?
This was the exact point of the
Lancet letter from Feb 2020 (https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(20)30418-9):
"The rapid, open, and transparent sharing of data on this outbreak is now being threatened by rumours and misinformation around its origins. We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin."
This letter purports to be about open info sharing, but it preempts any sincere attempts to bring up valid concerns by grouping them with conspiracy theories. (Which is not to mention the small conspiracy to draft this letter by people whose funding would be stopped if Covid turned out to be a lab escape.)
@alexcc "It was actually taken down after the pandemic had already started:"
False.
There are two different measurements.
1. status monitoring tool
2. traffic stats tool
Status monitoring shows the status till Feb 2020.
However, the db page was not accessible externally since Sep 2019 as seen from the traffic stats tool.
"and obscures the fact that there was probably if not almost certainly nothing in it that is now already public"
False, again.
WIV had sequenced around 180 sarscov by 2018 (DEFUSE proposal). Yet they have published only a few of those till date.
"This was the exact point of the Lancet letter from Feb 2020 (https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(20)30418-9):
"The rapid, open, and transparent sharing of data on this outbreak is now being threatened by rumours and misinformation around its origins. We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin.""
Yes, the infamous letter... But even here, read the sentence you've quoted again. It never makes a call for media censorship. It does not state all non-natural possibilities should never be discussed. It simply "condemns conspiracy theories" of non-natural origins. Consider this also in the context of Feb 2020 publication date: at this time the most popular ideas in this category were extremely outlandish, and included the debunked "HIV inserts" preprint and various talk of bioweapons.
You may think I'm splitting hairs, and that the letter must surely imply that all of the above is true, and of course I do understand that egos are, er, sensitive on this issue and people may take it a particular way. But you must admit you are reading into it, and could be completely wrong about what each individual author intended.
My point in this is I do think it is important to note that the idea that most scientists or virologists are out there demanding censorship or "shutdown" of all alternative theories has little basis in fact, as it is just not true.
"(Which is not to mention the small conspiracy to draft this letter by people whose funding would be stopped if Covid turned out to be a lab escape.)"
Whose funding on the Lancet letter do you think would be "stopped" beyond perhaps Peter Daszak's Ecohealth Alliance? I personally think one of the funniest notions out there is the idea that virology funding in the west (especially USA) would be reduced or restricted if it turns out China engineered a virus that completely devastated our societies. On the contrary, there'd be an unrestricted bioweapon gap! US government and millitary would increase virology funding 10 times over to respond to China's capacity here.
"Status monitoring shows the status till Feb 2020.
However, the db page was not accessible externally since Sep 2019 as seen from the traffic stats tool."
Not sure of the details, that may be possible. Regardless the Sep 2019 date is months before every scientific estimation gentic tMRCA estimate of when the virus first spilled over. So what do you think happened, here exactly? WIV thought "Hey guys, one of us might actually get infected by this new virus that one grad student is engineering in a couple months, let's shut down the spreadsheet the other grad student is working on now just in case?"
When you actually walk through the logic of this stuff, it never makes an ounce of sense...
Congressional investigators accusing Fauci of directing the conclusions of the early paper saying C19 didn't come from a lab.
Additionally, two of the authors went on to receive millions in NIH funding immediately after authoring the paper.
Not sure how this is still trading so low, but I guess I'll keep taking fake money. Are there any "zoonotic origins" papers left which aren't known to be goalseeked by the people running WIV from the US?
Just to break down the farce:
Proximal origin authors to press: We changed our minds because of the pangolin cov sequences
Proximal origin authors to Nature reviewers: "the newly available pangolin sequences do not elucidate the origin of SARS-CoV-2 or refute a lab origin"
The same authors then go on the write two articles in Scimag - Pekar et al and Worobey et al which are routinely touted as the "strongest" evidence showing a natural origin. I don't know how much more evidence people need to realize that these papers arguing for natural origins are political pieces disguised as scientific papers. Would be interesting to see if people who believe natural origin hypothesis will update their beliefs based on the new evidence that is coming in.
Posting this because few people are aware of some conversations these virologists had in private.
Robert Garry (Tulane University School of Medicine): "I really can’t think of a plausible natural scenario where you get from the bat virus or one very similar to it to nCoV where you insert exactly 4 amino acids 12 nucleotide that all have to be added at the exact same time to gain this function – that and you don’t change any other amino acid in S2? I just can’t figure out how this gets accomplished in nature"
Mike Farzan (Scripps Research Institute): "bothered by the furin site...hard time explaining that as an event outside the lab (though, there are possible ways in nature, but highly unlikely)"
Andrew Rambaut (University of Edinburgh): "From a (natural) evolutionary point of view the only thing here that strikes me as unusual is the furin cleavage site... I think the only people with sufficient information or access to samples to address it would be the teams working in Wuhan"
Kristian Andersen (Scripps Research Institute): “You have to look very closely at the genome to see features that are potentially engineered… I should mention that after discussions earlier today, Eddie, Bob, Mike, and myself all find the genome to be inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory,”
Ian Lipkin (Columbia University): "It does not eliminate the possibility of inadvertent release following adaptation through selection in culture at the institute in Wuhan. Given the scale of bat CoV research pursued there and the site of emergence of the first human cases we have a nightmare of circumstantial evidence to assess."
Ed Holmes (University of Sydney): "He (Andersen) said 'there’s this furin cleavage site between the S1 and S2 junctions, There are two restriction sites, BamHI, around it. And that section, between the restriction sites, looks like it has reduced variation.' Bloody hell this is bad"
Shan-Lu Liu (Ohio State University): "rumor says that furin site may be engineered. Importantly, the virus RNA sequence around the furin site (288 nt), before and after, has 6.6 % differences, but with no amino acid changes at all."
Susan Weiss (University of Pennsylvania): "I find it hard to imagine how that sequence got into the spike of a lineage b betacoronavirus- not seen in SARS or any of the bat viruses ... frightening to think it may have been engineered"
Yet some of these same virologists are the strongest proponents of natural origin now and routinely claim that the lab leak theory is dead. I do not deny that scientists cannot change their minds if new data comes up, but in this case, there has been no data remotely good enough to justify such a drastic change.
Robert Garry, Kristian Andersen, Ed Holmes, Andrew Rambaut are all coauthors in Worobey et al and Pekar et al which most zoonosis proponents cite as strong evidence for a natural origin.
@Akzzz123 I'm surprised at how poor the quality of argument above is. Taking past quotes from people who currently strongly disagree with you on the answer to this topic is obviously an uncharitable exercise, and has an obvious logical flaw.
"Someone used to agree with me, but now they do not" is actually not the strong piece of evidence you think it is. Rather, this is easily explained by experts changing their minds in the face of new evidence. Most of the quotes that you reference above were made mere days to weeks after COVID-19 was first reported, and the scientists quoted had very little time to start to evaluate the evidence. Ergo, the quotes above contain a few obvious inaccuracies:
"Importantly, the virus RNA sequence around the furin site (288 nt), before and after, has 6.6 % differences, but with no amino acid changes at all"
This is incorrect.
"There are two restriction sites, BamHI, around it. And that section, between the restriction sites, looks like it has reduced variation"
This is also incorrect.
The scientists had very little data at the time, and almost no time to evaluate it. You've quoted their initial private first glances and speculations as evidence, when they all later realized these initial mistakes.
Your entire interpretation only makes context in the sense of top international evolutionary biologists and virologists being part of a conspiracy/cabal to hide the truth. It is quite a coincidence that the world's single most accomplished evolutionary virologists (Holmes and Worobey) happened to be in on this conspiracy!
This is far more easily explained by scientists acquiring more evidence and changing their minds: indeed, as they have explained publicly many times. Your interpretation is uncharitable and, like all conspiracy theories, entirely unfalsifiable. It brings no value at all to the debate.
Those virologists have said in public repeatedly that they changed their minds because of pangolin cov data.
Yet the email by Kristian Andersen told the reviewer at Nature "the newly available pangolin sequences do not elucidate the origin of SARS-CoV-2 or refute a lab origin".
There's also a clear motivation for Fauci, Collins to do this because they have been vocal proponents of GoF research and directed taxpayers' money to fund risky GoF experiments with no oversight at the Wuhan lab. Obviously, they have a significant interest in covering up the lab leak debate.
Further evidence:
Robert Redfield, head of CDC and himself a virologist was never included in the "scientific" discussions. No wonder because he believes that a lab leak is the more likely scenario and even told Fauci to vigorously investigate both lab and natural origin before the discussions began.
Collins' email show he clearly expressed an interest in suppressing lab leak debate using the Proximal Origin paper.
Fauci on April 17, 2020 referred to Proximal Origin as some independent study he had no relation with. "There was a study recently...where a group of highly qualified evolutionary virologists looked at the sequences...totally consistent with a jump of a species from an animal to a human...I don’t have the authors right now..". Nope, he was setting the narrative and we bought it.
As the heads of funding agencies, Fauci, Collins' involvement in PO should have been made clear from the start but they did not.
Fauci, Collins were also not upfront that they had ties with WIV and Fauci's statement to Congress that the work done at WIV was not GoF is a demonstrable lie.
Andersen received one of the highest grants in Aug 2020. Any court would reasonably interpret this as quid pro quo.
You're professionally vested in this debate and you have co-authored hopelessly flawed studies with Andersen et al. Thus, your interpretation of the evidence is highly unreliable.
I am sure the ongoing investigation will further open this can of worms.
"You're professionally vested in this debate and you have co-authored hopelessly flawed studies with Andersen et al. Thus, your interpretation of the evidence is highly unreliable."
Haha, even worse than that, I am predicting NO in this market! Oh wait, and you're predicting YES! Wait a minute, we all have a vested bias here!
At some point, you may notice that your definition of "professionally vested" includes just almost everyone with relevant expertise....
"Andersen received one of the highest grants in Aug 2020. Any court would reasonably interpret this as quid pro quo."
Do you know how NIH funding grants are assigned? Anthony Fauci does not personally review or approve grants. He's not even involved with that at all. There are dedicated study sections of scientists who do that job. Also, the grant you're quoting was reviewed before the pandemic, grants are reviewed and scored long before they begin. The conspiracy (I know folks can be touchy about this word, but we must admit, this particular case is the dictionary definition) that you're suggesting does not work on multiple levels.
"Fauci, Collins were also not upfront that they had ties with WIV and Fauci's statement to Congress that the work done at WIV was not GoF is a demonstrable lie."
It was not, because the NIH has a very specific and well-defined definition for GoF work that this work did not fall under. Please find that definition here: https://www.nih.gov/news-events/research-involving-potential-pandemic-pathogens
You can disagree with that definition, and argue it should be changed to encompass more kinds of experiments such as those reported at WIV, but you have to admit he didn't lie.
"As the heads of funding agencies, Fauci, Collins' involvement in PO should have been made clear from the start but they did not."
Why? PO authors cite their funding sources. There is no scientific code of ethics that you must include the name of someone in acknowledgements who suggested changing a word or two, in fact this would be quite unusual and strange. Their contributions did not meet the criteria defined for authorship by Nature series of journals, and inclusion in the acknowledgements section at the discretion of authors.
"Collins' email show he clearly expressed an interest in suppressing lab leak debate using the Proximal Origin paper."
Haha, can we just remind folks what they actually said in their private emails? I'll quote Anthony Fauci:
>"I told him that as soon as possible he and Eddie Holmes should get a group of evolutionary biologists together to examine carefully the data to determine if his concerns are validated. He should do this very quickly and if everyone agrees with this concern, they should report it to the appropriate authorities. I would imagine that in the USA this would be the FBI and in the UK it would be MI5. It would be important to quickly get confirmation of the cause of his concern by experts in the field of coronaviruses and evolutionary biology. In the meantime, I will alert my US Government official colleagues of my conversation with you and Kristian and determine what further investigation they recommend."
To clarify your position, the above sounds like a conspiracy to you?
I believe a "low confidence" intelligence assessment equates to <5%.
As someone who has been commenting on the NO side, but doesn't really have much of expertise in this area (genomics, lab management, biology), I want to be the first to link to today's Fox News headline from Christopher Wray, director of the FBI who has stated the following, to help contextualize what he's saying:
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/fbi-director-says-covid-pandemic-most-likely-originated-chinese-lab
"The FBI has for quite some time now assessed that the origins of the pandemic are most likely a potential lab incident in Wuhan," Wray told Fox News in an interview that aired Tuesday. "Here you are talking about a potential leak from a Chinese government-controlled lab."
"I will just make the observation that the Chinese government, it seems to me, has been doing its best to try to thwart and obfuscate the work here, the work that we're doing, the work that our U.S. government and close foreign partners are doing. And that's unfortunate for everybody," he added.
Wray said the FBI has specialists who focus on "the dangers of biological threats, which include things like novel viruses like COVID, and the concerns that they [are] in the wrong hands [of] some bad guys, a hostile nation state, a terrorist, a criminal."
He also said that the Chinese government has been trying to block investigative work into the origins of the coronavirus.
To me it seems like he's trying to put pressure on China to allow more investigations into what happened which is a good thing, as the area should be studied, but it doesn't sound like there was new information that the FBI came out with just now, or that the FBI somehow changed their position on the topic. Am I missing anything? Correct interpretation here from anyone advocating on the YES side?
@PatrickDelaney Note that Intelligence people are not that naive, and can be expected to spend much more time collecting and checking information from many more sources. They sure got it right for Sverdlovsk when another batch of naive scientists was again blaming it on some animal meat sales.
@PatrickDelaney Regardless of the true origin, the CCP is not wrong to worry about managing liability cause it's not unthinkable they could be found liable for negligenceand lose big money in a US court which we would just collect through land seizures. That's a bit hyperbolic but you can see how they would get quickly paranoid regardless of whether it was a lab leak or just mismanaged quarantine or under reporting of cases (something you and I are painfully well aware of) or whatever.
@Akzzz123 Part of the problem with intelligence agencies is there is no transparency for the most part, so we just kind of, "have to trust them." The assumption being that they have some kind of source of information, e.g. intercepted communications, which are not public, which point toward a lab leak. That being said, I believe (again, not an expert in intelligence either), that all intelligence agencies share a high degree of info with each other, and it's very curious that they are not in agreement. If all of the intelligence agencies presented a high level of confidence, I would think it's very justifiable to concede this market quite to, "YES, lab leak." If it came down to US intelligence agencies vs. Chinese intelligence agencies, then most people in the Western World at least, are going to go with US Intelligence agencies. That being said, as of now the FBI seems to have the highest degree of confidence, followed by the DOE, with other intelligence agencies saying either, "null set," or, "no." Am I correct on that statement? Has anything else changed?
By the way, I am still parsing through your other below comments and links, that will take a while, busy at work. This market doesn't resolve until 2040 so I think we have a long time to discuss this.
@BTE I have no clue what any liability under any US court would hypothetically be or who the lawsuit and defendants would involve, I am not an expert in this. I just see China as a black box with unpredictable outputs, but for the most part we know that there is a history of inaccurate reporting, health coverups, etc., so a lab leak hypothesis is not unreasonable, but at the same time, the over-riding problem is virology and immunology research overall. How do things get managed and improved? How do we prepare vaccinations for inevitable future epidemics and diseases? This is also tangential, perhaps worthy of other markets, but there seem to be A) High lab security-minded folks, who fear humanity genetically engineering a virus which potentially wipes us out again a-la COVID19. B) High nature-origin concerned folks who fear a virus coming out of nature that has been germinating for decades, also potentially wiping us out again a-la COVID19. I must confess I'm much more on the B) side but I fault no one at all for being on the A) side and I'm glad that there are people arguing for both sides - because it doesn't seem like there are super clear answers. It belongs in the realm of public debate - but, we can't let people just outright fabricate evidence and enter that into the debate either.
@PatrickDelaney If I had to speculate, my guess would be the reason for disagreement is not scientific but political (based on whether they were proponents of funding and continuing GoF research). I say that because there was a similar divide within the US Department of State - https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/06/the-lab-leak-theory-inside-the-fight-to-uncover-covid-19s-origins
@Akzzz123 I'm not against speculation and thank you for disclosing that your statement is indeed a speculation. I think this is the purpose of prediction markets, speculate, aggregate information, discuss, etc., be open to changing one's mind over time. Thanks, I will read that.
Strong no, purely because Spanish flu, SARS, MERS, ebola, black death, H5n1 ect didn't come from a laboratory either.
@CromlynGames That was true before gain of function experiments were a thing. Here is what reputed scientists, not fringe conspiracy theorists, said before the coronavirus pandemic.
Carl Bergstrom (2017): "Of course, the problem is that if something goes wrong and the virus escapes, it could start a pandemic and kill millions."
Marc Lipsitch (2018): "Another accident like that—if it involved a virus that was both newly created and highly contagious—has the potential to jeopardize millions of people."
Simon Wain-Hobson (2015): "If the virus escaped, nobody could predict the trajectory"
The risks of experiments that were being carried out in unsafe conditions at the Wuhan Institute of Virology were well known. The only reason this is a controversial issue is because the US Government (NIH under the leadership of Anthony Fauci) lifted the moratorium in 2017 AND funded the lab that is suspected of leaking the virus.
https://twitter.com/VigilantFox/status/1630675980636286977?s=20
I think the answer in the real world is 'no', but this will probably resolve to yes given human biases.
