Did COVID-19 come from a laboratory?
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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.

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@George Again with something that isn't evidence supporting that SARS-CoV-2 is a lab leak. It's almost as if you lack any evidence of this.

Is the point that it says "WIV" ? What are these people at WIV who aren't Zhengli Shi guilty of, exactly? As far as I can tell, the only fault is lacking a time machine to be able to find a better match in a sequence published in 2024.

And to the extent it suggests a "lab leak," which is not certain at all, it's the expected type of "lab leak" of an attenuated strain commonly used in labs and to produce vaccines.

@IsaacKing Has your opinion changed after many, many months of attempts to offer evidence in this discussion in favor of lab leak section being nothing but irrelevant conspiracy theories? If I’ve missed something that’s an exception please let me know.

If you missed it below, I recently learned from Dali Yang’s book (and verified in other source) that Zhongnan hospital got the alert to look for suspicious pneumonia cases. They found two. Not only looking for market-linked patients. Both patients happened to be linked to Huanan market. Zhongnan hospital is something like 1 km from WIV and a dozen km (and one river) from Huanan market.

I also recently learned that a fairly large sample of Zhongnan hospital patients were tested to determine if their sample was lineage A or lineage B. 91% were lineage B. Just like the earliest sequencing focused on Huanan market patients.

Every time I learn about new data the Huanan market bias looks more and more like a bias towards the correctly identified epicenter of the pandemic.

How is anyone citing Yuri after his laughable excel table contribution to the Rootclaim debate?

bought Ṁ1,000 NO from 52% to 51%

What’s a rant from an incredibly unhinged and unethical psychiatrist or something supposed to prove?

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22571733

Galileo's Middle Finger: Heretics, Activists, and the Search for Justice in Science

Alice Domurat Dreger

How the science sausage is made. 👍👍

https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB61/

U.S. INTELLIGENCE ON THE DEADLIEST MODERN OUTBREAK
National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 61
Edited by Robert A. Wampler and Thomas S. Blanton
November 15, 2001

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/risa.14291.

Use of a risk assessment tool to determine the origin of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2

This paper would be fraud if the methods weren’t written for everyone to read. Instead it’s just really discrediting for every single person involved with it. Including the funder.

“The earliest confirmed case of HIV is from 1959 at one of the vaccination sites.” Is just wow, damn. I believe it

bought Ṁ550 NO

Grab some cheap shares:

Big arbitrage opportunity between these two:

Put 40 to close

It's better than arbitrage! The "lab" scenario is inclusive both of "laboratory" and of the infinite multiplicity of Mr-Peabody-but-evil type time travel scenarios. Maybe an intelligent Labrador watched the Alfred Nobel dynamite episode, learned the wrong lesson, and opted for interdimensional bioterrorism. It's irresponsible not to leave all options on the table and prematurely rule out any scenario.

Moore, J. (2004). The Puzzling Origins of AIDS: Although no one explanation has been universally accepted, four rival theories provide some important lesson. American Scientist, 92(6), 540–547. http://www.jstor.org/stable/27858482

Battling Theories

Arguments over rival theories of the

origin of AIDS have raged viciously at

times?far beyond the norms of most

scientific debates. Indeed, both sides

in the OPV controversy have in the re

cent scientific literature gone so far as

to accuse their opponents of lying and

manipulating evidence. I only became

aware of the explosive nature of the

debate after my students and I unwit

tingly wandered into this minefield.

Some of the participants in this con

troversy appear unwilling even to en

tertain the possibility of being wrong.

Given the precarious status of each of

the current theories, it seems more rea

sonable to try to keep an open mind

until better evidence emerges and, in

the meantime, to consider the litera

ture on each of these origin stories as

representing a highly refined simula

tion scenario. Insofar as there is any

material benefit to come from under

standing the origin of HIV in terms of

cautionary tales, each model can and

should be considered plausible?and

worrisome. After all, unsterile needles

do transmit diseases, contaminated po

lio vaccine did spread a simian virus

(one called SV40) to millions of

doctors do sometimes conduct risky re

search, colonial policies did have major

health consequences, and contact with

wild animals can introduce pathogens

into humans.

An obvious general lesson can be

drawn from all four theories: For some

very puzzling reason, the origin of HIV

was not fundamentally natural, given

that humans apparently failed to ac

quire an immunodeficiency virus from

simians during thousands of years of

exposure. Instead, the emergence of

HIV involved social change in one form

or another: the abuses carried out at the

hand of an invading foreign power;

abrupt urbanization overwhelming the

ability of medical and political authori

ties to manage the process; the undersu

pervised transfer of medical technology

and half-measures in development pro

grams; doctors taking liberties in dis

tributing medicines without adequate

precautions. It is worth noting that three

of the four theories postulate an origin

for AIDS that involves the inadvertent

results of medical efforts, with what

were then state-of-the-art health pro

grams and technologies carrying with

them unforeseen dangers.

Whether understanding the origin of

HIV and AIDS is useful for evaluating

risks associated with present-day con

cerns (say, the consumption of wildlife

that might be the natural reservoir for

emerging diseases like SARS, or evalu

ating the likelihood that the transplan

tation of animal organs into people will

unleash a dangerous new virus) is a

matter of opinion. My own view is that

a firmer grasp of what happened in the

past?and what might easily have hap

pened had circumstances been slightly

different?helps society to understand

these dangers and to minimize the risk

of sparking the next global scourge.

David B. Resnik: "[T]he idea that a biosafety lapse at the WIV—or some other laboratory for that matter—could have caused the COVID-19 pandemic is a very real possibility that has significant bioethical and public policy implications."

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40592-024-00204-3

Citing Harrison & Sachs with their incredibly specific theory of a conspiracy between EcoHealth Alliance, the University of North Carolina, and the Wuhan Institute of Virology as supporting evidence and then throwing out "or some other laboratory for that matter" makes it very clear this is much more an "idea" than a "very real possibility" in Resnik's mind. If he had any evidence, he wouldn't be citing an inane conspiracy theory that didn't square with what he wanted to say.

Isn't that statement most fairly read as "Events like the COVID-19 pandemic can very plausibly be caused by lab leaks, so we should be cautious and consider the ethics of that kind of work"

I think this is a fair and uncontroversial take, just not one that has much bearing on the specifics of if the COVID-19 pandemic itself came from a lab leak.

@draaglom No. It’s not “fair and uncontroversial” to posit something that did not happen as a plausible cause of something else because you can’t make the argument without misrepresenting the evidence.

You know what’s a threat to biosecurity? Letting people who use lazy rhetoric like be stakeholders in biosecurity discussions. It’s staggering how people pretend this is so important to them yet, for example, promote and pay for this sort of thing: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38488186/

It's a fair and uncontroversial position because lab leaks in general are well documented and do occur on a basically annual basis.

It can simultaneously be true that:

  • lab leaks are possible/frequent and we should be cautious about them

  • COVID-19 did not in fact come from a lab leak

This isn't evidence that SARS-CoV-2 started as a lab leak. Citing fictional historical events to justify current policy preferences rather than dealing with reality is weird, but obviously effective on this topic.

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