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.
1,000https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1897462773875138899.html
SARS-CoV-2 ANIMAL ORIGIN: The evidence?
What strikes me about the animal market spillover (zoonosis) theory is how hard it is to get a straight answer out of those claiming it’s settled science … when it isn’t.
https://x.com/gourlaysyd/status/1897462773875138899?s=61&t=Haq8F5rHkNHGokTmpYVUsQ
Proponents of “zoonosis” say there was a “spillover” at Huanan Seafood Market in Wuhan, China selling (among other things) wild animals i.e. transmission of an animal coronavirus to humans in late 2019.
Why? Because most of the early cases in 2020 had links to that market.
@George LOL it's another one of those people who things humans are the one and only species capable of transmission without S:D614G. The Netherlands mink outbreak was a boring early lineage B strain until it adapted further in mink. The Bronx zoo lion infections reported early in the pandemic were infected by and transmitted a more interesting lineage B that doesn't have S:D614G. Probably there are other examples, and of course there are certainly countless undetected examples because people had other shit to worry about in early 2020. After that, lineages derived from B.1 dominated most of the word and thus most spread in non-human animals as well.
@zcoli I love how these lab leak stories mutate.
At first it was "there's a mahjong room kind of near the raccoon dog shop, maybe that's relevant somehow?".
But now this guy has it as "maximum detection is in toilets and mahjong room, not the animal stalls"
Nope! The highest number of positive samples was taken from the raccoon dog shop, and there were zero positive samples in the mahjong room. It's still just something kind of nearby.
@PeterMillerc030 well, one positive sample in the way to the mahjong room… next to an almost untested animal shop.
@zcoli @PeterMillerc030 is there somewhere I can read about the methodology for location sampling in the market?
@bens I'd start here. Raw data is in the excel file (Supplementary Table 1)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06043-2
I wrote some code to map it in other ways, can share results if you're interested, but I assume you just want to look at the original data.
@PeterMillerc030 I guess a few questions I have for you:
-My recollection of the early days of the pandemic were that only about half to 2/3rds of the earliest (recorded) cases were tied to the Huanan market, and it was considered likely that it had been spreading in the population for a few weeks before then, correct?
-From what I can understand of the sampling methodology, it doesn't appear that a statistically significant difference of the animal vs environmental samples turned up positive. If a SINGLE EXTRA environmental sample had been positive, the rate of environmental samples being positive would have actually been HIGHER than the rate of animal samples. What are your takeaways from the data in this paper?
-I guess it's hard for me to conclude much from the Huanan Market studies without active and passive controls. Is there good research that answer questions like: What percent of samples in, say, a shopping mall in Wuhan during the same time period, or a market not implicated in the initial outbreak event, would have turned up positive with similar sampling methodologies?
-How do you account for the spotlight effect? Like, the reason that the natural release theory has indexed so heavily on the Huanan Market is because of the availability of data there. One might imagine a different world where, say, 5 markets were tested and no difference was found between them, in which case one might conclude that the virus was already spreading in Wuhan at that time, say.
-How do you account for the 1/3 to 1/2 of cases in Wuhan that were not tied to the Huanan market? Did they acquire it from others who had been to the Huanan Market (and presumably gotten the virus from raccoon dogs or something)?
-If the disease is transmissible from raccoon dogs to humans, it's also transmissible the other way around. If there were, say, several dozen COVID-positive people in the market at the time, that could have led to outbreaks among the captive animals in that market, no?
All the people obsessed with this theory basically have full reign of the government and the agencies now to investigate it all they want. But that doesn't sell. Conspiracies and fear mongering is where the money is at, isn't it? So shut the fuck up and do something about it. If China is to blame for all of this then retaliate. Could have done that in 2020 but here we are, another opportunity. Nut up or shut the fuck up. We're entering a time now where a lot of people are just done with this nonsense. We've listened to crazy people and are where we are today because of it. Time to stop nodding your head at work and at family gatherings to keep peace and just start telling people to get their shit together or shut the fuck up.
@Predictor Nah, people will fall over themselves the next N times the same pair of people at Wall Street Journal have another vague report promising lab leak evidence and delivering nothing.
@bens It's trivial to find recent examples of culturing animal viruses with human cells that poses more of a risk than a coronavirus predicted to bind human receptors e.g. viruses already thought or known to be associate with human illness and viruses serial passaged to observe adaptation.
The most trivial example are viruses that make animals sick. Is it better to find out if they likely pose a risk to humans by seeing if it's possible to culture them at BSL-2 on human cells or is it better to find out when you sequence a sample from a sick human and observe homology with the thing you couldn't afford to study before because of expenses of BSL-3?
It's not an easy question to answer; treating it like an existential threat with infinite cost vs no benefit is how you conclude "these people are insane" but that's not actually the case.
What level of biosafety is called for for particular experiments is an important thing to debate, but Baric and Lipkin are totally exploiting mad scientist lab leak stuff to use this as an example. They're also right that it's an important thing to have and adhere to international standards, and it's another political choice they make to not discuss recent trends there with the United States ceding any authority on this by exiting the WHO and ending aid for international research collaborations that's important for harmonizing biosafety standards.
@zcoli My gf works in a BSL-2, I'm not a moron. I think that these experiments described in the Cell article (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0092867425001448) should under no circumstances be conducted in a BSL-2. They shouldn't have been doing this kind of work prior to 2020, and they sure as hell shouldn't now. Unearthing, transporting, culturing, and experimenting on bat viruses with potential to make the leap to humans (the explicit goals of this study in Cell) pose extremely minimal benefits compared to the risks, especially if they're being performed in BSL-2 labs that offer basically zero risk mitigation.
I don't think this is a heterodox view either. These are Columbia and UNC virology professors making this case: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/03/opinion/risky-virus-research.html?rsrc=ss&unlocked_article_code=1.1E4.zLJe.u5BMyevq2KXi
As to your claim that Baric and Lipkin are "exploiting mad scientist stuff" to make this claim... I hope you stay far, far away from virology research if that's your attitude toward biorisks.
@zcoli SARS started from civets and raccoon dogs sold in wet markets, in 2003.
Then China kept farming the same 2 species and selling them in unsafe wet markets, and they caused a worse pandemic in 2019.
For some reason, that doesn't trigger people's outrage, but articles about mad scientists do.
Today we're paying very little attention to the ongoing risks from wildlife handling, and we're probably headed for a natural H5N1 pandemic, and we're busy reading US scientists' emails to try to figure out how some imaginary lab leak in China happened.
I mean, lab safety is also important, and I'm all for better regulations. Working through the WHO or international structures would be a good way to do that.
The one thing no one can ever answer, is... if WIV actually created SARS2 through unsafe BSL-2 experiments, why are they still doing experiments at BSL-2, 5 years later?
Seems obvious that should update you against "covid is a lab leak" not for the theory.
WIV actually created SARS2 through unsafe BSL-2 experiments, why are they still doing experiments at BSL-2, 5 years later?
That’s right. Would be the first time in human history people haven’t learned their lesson.
@NicoDelon Yes, 3 people at the lab got hospitalized with covid and maybe one of their wives died (depending on which version of David Asher's story you believe). Then Wuhan's hospitals got overrun and the city shut down so hard that people were locked in their buildings. The world economy crashed and 20 million people died around the world.
And the WIV scientists concluded, "that was fun, let's do it again".
Like I said, no one has a good answer to that question of why they'd still work at BSL-2.
SARS started from civets and raccoon dogs sold in wet markets, in 2003.
Then China kept farming the same 2 species and selling them in unsafe wet markets, and they caused a worse pandemic in 2019.
@bens It’s not a “claim” — it’s what they’re doing. Baric could easily find a more dangerous example in his backyard. He chose SARS2 because of lab leak nonsense. Premising a biosafety debate on a fantasy isn’t the path to optimal policy.
And, per Baric and Lipkin’s testimonies to Congress, neither find a lab leak original of COVID-19 to be remotely likely.
@PeterMillerc030 I absolutely think they should stop unsafe wildlife handling practices as well! These are not mutually exclusive!
@PeterMillerc030 Have you perhaps considered that the fact that these scientists are now demonstrably continuing with unsafe lab practices should update you higher on the likelihood that a virus previously leaked from their lab?
@bens Nope, that makes no sense.
Jim Haslam is saying that Baric only wrote the op-ed because Baric actually created the virus and wants to redirect blame at the (innocent) WIV scientists:
https://x.com/jhas5/status/1896693364730306867
I don't think that's true, but it makes more sense than what you're suggesting.
1) I don't really care what either of them are saying or whether they're insane or whatever, I think it's unwise to do (gain-of-function) work on viruses with plausibility of human crossover in a BSL-2 lab! Do you disagree?
2) You think that the theory that Baric is writing an op-ed arguing against unsafe lab conditions to deflect blame from accidentally leaking COVID... is a more likely theory than the lab leak theory in general? That seems like the Conjunction Fallacy.
@NicoDelon Most people are irrational. A reporter went and talked to some vendors working at the Huanan market and they said civets were harmless and that Covid was made at Fort Detrick. Mirror image of the average dumb American.
Could WIV scientists also be that clueless? Maybe if there was some kind of non-engineered viral infection that no one even knew about... Certainly not for some deliberate gain of function experiment gone wrong.
@bens Of course lab safety is important.
This reminds me of 2020, when I criticized BLM protests. I said that people shouldn't riot during a pandemic, the protests would likely backfire and increase crime, and the police brutality problem itself was statistically much smaller than most people think.
People responded, "you mean you don't think that black lives matter?"
Today, I'm saying that Covid was almost certainly not a lab leak, future pandemic risks are disproportionately natural, we're overly focused on the lab risk, and we're not even approaching that in the right way (i.e. you'd want strong international institutions and agreements).
And people just respond, "you mean you don't care about lab safety?"
Robert Wright and I had a good discussion about lab safety and priorities at the end of that interview.
@PeterMillerc030 I guess I'd agree with you that if my credence of lab leak was <1%, I'd be much less concerned about lab safety in virology labs.
But I think lab leak is much more likely than <1%, and so I am alarmed about this. I think I'm being self-consistent there. I also think that natural release is still quite plausible, so I'm also alarmed by wildlife handling practices. However, I also think it's less tenable to mandate global changes in wildlife handling practices (eliminating all wet markets or whatever) than it is to simply ask that gov-funded and highly-educated, well-trained virology researchers adopt pretty common sense safety practices!
I'm with you on rioting during pandemics as well.