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.
1,000People are also trading
Too long to read for me rn but is any of this actually new info? https://open.substack.com/pub/rationaloptimistsociety/p/the-evidence-suggests-covid-19-came?r=3g4rzm&utm_medium=ios
@PaperBoy No. Also, here's how Matt Ridley deals with the publication of contradictory evidence.
In his post, Ridley writes:
I teamed up with the molecular biologist Alina Chan to write Viral, our book about the search for evidence on both sides of that question. I remained unsure what happened at that stage. Then in the autumn of 2021 more startling evidence emerged to support the lab leak. I now think that is by far the most likely explanation.
This is a lie. The evidence he is talking about is the DEFUSE proposal, published in Sept 2021. The DEFUSE proposal is discussed in the first edition of the book. It's discussed more heavily in the second edition of the book because his other evidence collapsed. For example, here he replaces one perfectly good piece of old evidence with the DEFUSE proposal, to pretend that it's new and significant evidence. Conclusion unchanged.
@zcoli
In case folks need proof -- here is Ridley and Chan talking about the exact same DEFUSE proposal in both the first and second editions of Viral. They changed the paragraph to edit out discussions of SARS2 being a chimeric engineered virus of the type discussed in DEFUSE, because that was disproven like a couple days after they finished the book.
No problem, just move some words around and don't change the conclusions. That's always possible when it's a creative writing exercise for a conspiracy theory and you have enough source material to cherry pick from.
Why Are So Many People Sure Covid Leaked From a Lab?
May 21, 2025
@George It's good that Wallace-Wells notes that he commissioned and edited Nicholas Baker's 2020 lab leak article for NY Mag. Folks should go back and read it. It describes what was a silly conspiracy theory at the time, and turns out to have been falsified in a few ways.
Wallace-Wells doesn't note any of this in his new article and I'm not clear that he is aware of it at all.
Meowdy! The whole lab-leak theory about COVID-19 is still pouncing around as kinda uncertain, like a playful kitten chasing its tail~ Scientists haven't found a smoking litterbox full of proof, but some clues keep peeking out from the shadows. Given the mix of skepticism and possibility, I’d tip my whiskers a bit past half—let’s say a cheeky 55%! places 10 mana limit order on YES at 55% :3
https://brownstone.org/articles/is-this-the-man-who-created-covid-19-in-faucis-us-lab/
Is This the Man Who Created Covid-19 in Fauci’s US Lab?
@BW For years now it's just been a creative writing exercise with entries from fairly uncreative and uninteresting people. Jeffrey Sachs' version delivered orally in Cyprus a week ago is peak silliness: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=byl5njm7RC8
Engineered in North Carolina
Bats in Montana
But not the right kind of bats so they took the research to Wuhan
?
Profit
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanmic/article/PIIS2666-5247%2823%2900319-1/fulltext
Laboratory-acquired infections and pathogen escapes worldwide between 2000 and 2021: a scoping review
Apologies if posted previously.
https://zenodo.org/records/15206333?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
The Pangolin (Coronavirus) Papers
Creators
A. “The Pangolin Papers” presents a robust argument for the lab-mediated origin of SARS-CoV-2, particularly centered on experiments conducted at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) during 2018 and 2019. This report hypothesizes that the activities at WIV, involving Guangdong (GD) Pangolin-CoVs, RaTG13, and other unpublished bat coronaviruses in cell cultures, culminated in recombination and horizontal gene transfer, leading to the emergence of SARS-CoV-2.
Some more possibly persuasive comedy from anyone whose gateway to "lab leak" was Viral by Matt Ridley and Alina Chan:
First edition: We think that even if the burden of proof was on the laboratory leak initially, it has since shifted. That the closest relative of SARS-CoV-2, RaTG13, got to Wuhan via scientists shifts the burden of proof.
After BANAL-52 was published...
Second edition: Even if the burden of proof was on the laboratory leak initially, it has since shifted. That Wuhan scientists were sampling from remote regions known to possess the closest relatives to SARS-CoV-2 shifts the burden of proof.
The only thing that doesn't make this perfect is that they wrote "shifts the burden of proof" rather than "moves the goal posts."
Less importantly, the place WIV sampled and the place BANAL-52 was sampled are maybe 300 km apart from each other with Luang Prabang in the middle... can't even replace one fact with another and need to resort to a lie.
@zcoli agree. Louang Namtha to Feuang about 200 miles direct measure,, more than 500km and 14 hour journey by road.
@zcoli the reason Ridley got excited is that he entered the accession ID for the retracted Laos sequences from Latinne into Genbank and thought he was a genius.
@BW No need to refer to anything secret... I think DRASTIC spun their wheels for a while finding not-really-secret connections to Laos and then tacked on this to the end -- https://www.mdpi.com/1999-4915/13/10/1962 -- working in Laos is so secret that WIV submitted a paper in July 2021 about sampling there.
New documents released by FOIA from State today show the case presented in early January 2021 just before publishing their lab leak dossier as Trump left office.
Alina Chan apparently presented her theory that SARS2 came from the Mojiang mine and was either one of the eight other potentially SARS2-like samples from the mine or a genetically engineered variant thereof. She shared a draft of a paper with this theory — it was never published because the theory was disproven in short order with the publication of RaTG15 in May 2021.
You won’t read about that in Viral. You won’t hear that history from Chan, who’s always ignored questions about what she presented at this meeting.
So, if you’ve based your “lab leak” beliefs on things you’ve read from Alina Chan, it’s once again proven that you’ve been duped by a conspiracy theorist. Dropping evidence once it’s no longer evidence yet becoming more confident in your theory is being a conspiracy theorist.
You can read this yourself by searching the State FOIA library for “quay” for docs published 30-April-2025 and scrolling past the even more silly Bayesian analysis from Steven Quay.
UNC lab leaks? Evidence indicates seven lab-acquired SARS-CoV-2 infections in Chapel Hill during pandemic, researchers say
Interview w/ Drs. Steven Quay and Steve Massey
If once is happenstance and twice is coincidence, what do we call seven instances of apparent lab-acquired SARS-CoV-2 infections in relation to coronavirus research at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill?
Using "forensic virology" techniques, Steven E. Massey, PhD and Steven Quay, MD, PhD have identified and put forward evidence regarding these "anomalous genome sequences" in a recent preprint titled "The Illusion of Biosafety During SARS-CoV-2 Research: Multiple Apparent Occult Lab-Acquired Infections Are Identified Under BSL-3 Conditions at a Premier US-based Coronavirus Laboratory."
@George The choice of “occult” in the title is appropriate given the authors’ loose tether to reality.
Looking briefly, some of these are obvious contamination by the WA1 strain. The earliest isolated strain in the United States and thus commonly used in both lab experiments and as a positive control for diagnostics and sequencing. One man’s “lab leak” is another man’s “boringly common data imperfection from any of a number of boringly common errors that aren’t lab leaks.”
Conceptually, the paper is missing the obvious negative control of comparing to other locations without plausible lab leaks! If the authors had done that, they’d find even juicier examples to cherry pick and lie about.
@zcoli I heard Kakeya was invited to the very serious “Paris group” to discuss his latest ground breaking finding that everything is a lab leak. Those are the serious intellectuals when it comes to lab leak, right? If anyone has a less clownish example, let us know please.
@JimAusman A year and a half since this was preprinted, and no one’s been able to come up with a theory other than market origin that explains all the data.
@MachiNi It’s roughly as long as the list of people writing a letter saying the article should be retracted, but not being able to come up with a single reason why. But a major difference is that the author list of the Cell paper doesn’t include someone who thinks that Omicron and all its sublineages are all lab leaks, in addition to SARS2 itself, and is a prominent liar about vaccines in Japan.