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
@bens I'm mostly joking but historically, taking the opposite position to donald trump has been a good heuristic 🙃 an inverse-Cramer strategy for truth-seeking, if you will
@diracdeltafunk I almost made the same comment! it does seem that Trump is anticorrelated with truth on anything that is at all polarised.
(While we're on the topic, I think it's commendable for manifold that the whitehouse announcement did not move the market whatsoever, actually)
@diracdeltafunk Given how many people appeal to the opinions of various government agencies, this is very true for those people. The best thing the White House can come with is copying an OpEd from a lying conspiracy theorist.
@diracdeltafunk he thought he’d win the election and did; he’s always said he could get away with anything and he does.
@MachiNi more seriously my point is that betting against DT on manifold hasn’t been a recipe for success.
The new white house report on Covid highlights a number of major mistakes made by the US government in 2020.
I wonder who was the head of the US government in 2020.
Bad orange man is at fault. People with letters after their names are not to blame. They are, after all, “very smart people.”
@PeterMillerc030 Once travel bans too late to matter and 15 days to slow the spread weren’t enough, “the buck stops here” went out the window in April 2020.
Not coincidentally, that’s when people whispering “lab leak” in the President’s ear won the day.
He subsequently ignored those voices until now, more or less. Not good politics to talk big and be unable to prove it. It’s back now because he’s bluffing in a trade war and the exact same dudes who convinced him this was an ace up his sleeve to get out of a jam 5 years ago are doing the same thing now.
Once again it’ll accomplish nothing vis-a-vis China other than trade international credibility for short lived domestic appeal if he can’t back it up. And borrowing an argument from a lying conspiracy theorist’s OpEd proves that he can’t back it up.
Folks who want to reform biosafety regulation should pick a rationale that isn’t so embarrassing than lying about the last pandemic.
Lmao this has now gotten incredibly stupid hahahaha https://www.whitehouse.gov/lab-leak-true-origins-of-covid-19/
@bens In case anyone actually thought that the President of the United States was privy to any non-public evidence, here's your proof that he's not. The "lab leak" case on that site is simply plagiarizing Alina Chan's NYT op-ed (it cites a Congressional report which simply repeats what Chan wrote; the 5 points are in a different order here with slightly different emphasis for some, but it's the same 5 points).
Chan is not exactly an honest source, erasing parts of her book when they were disproven and telling no one about it.
For fun, here's a prominent member of the lab leak brain trust back in 2021:
David Asher: I mean, obviously there was a cluster of cases. The WHO kept looking for the first cluster. Well, we put out information that there was a cluster. I also want to note that there is information which needs to be confirmed in the sequencing. Everyone says, "Oh, the sequencing. Everybody understands it. It's very transparent." I've had numerous experts to the U.S. and foreign governments in sequencing, so called bioinformatic science, tell me that there's all sorts of indications in the sequence. In fact, there was an article written in a European publication. It was by Wiley, a well peer reviewed article, where they identified a bat borne backbone for the coronavirus mixed together with the receptor binder of a pangolin.
Now, how a bat and a pangolin get together and mate, that's a new one on me since they don't really coexist in the same communities. There's no evidence of them being able to penetrate the skin of an armadillo-like creature like a pangolin. Anything is possible, but there are curiosities and artifacts in the sequence themselves that are extremely disturbing. I'll let the experts on science, and we hope in the future to have a panel just on the science side. It's hardly cut clear that that exonerates the Chinese.
The paper he references there is from Deigin and Segreto and it features the "SARS2 = bat backbone + pangolin RBD" hypothesis that was disproven in September 2021.
The hypothesis I've held since I first started paying attention to this in February 2022 that there is literally no secret evidence favoring lab leak and that it's all a game of telephone between David Asher type clowns continues to pass every test as new evidence arises. Same as the hypothesis that SARS-CoV-2 emerged in the wildlife trade!
https://www.whitehouse.gov/lab-leak-true-origins-of-covid-19/
Nothing new just a political torpedo aimed at Cuomo. 🍿🍿🍿
@George Same old bullshit about Covid origins, but I do agree that Cuomo's response to Covid was terrible.
It's crazy that people forgot about that and are thinking of electing him again.
But electing Trump again was even crazier.
@Sebastianus See how far you need to scroll through the comments to find a single fact supporting the "yes" side of the question.
Time for Accountability on the Covid Lab-Leak Coverup
Fauci misled Congress when he denied the NIH funded gain-of-function research in Wuhan.
By
Mike Gallagher
April 15, 2025 4:43 pm ET
@George What's the deal with Palantir's head of defense being a liar in a way that's somewhat consequential for US-China geopolitics?
Gallagher: "2022 report revealing that seven U.S. service members likely contracted Covid-19 at the World Military Games in Wuhan"
The actual report: "Data surveillance reports from military treatment facilities indicate no statistically significant difference in COVID-19-like symptoms cases at installations with participating athletes when compared to installations without them. In addition, no significant increase in COVID-19-like signs and/or symptoms was documented for the dates of October 2019 through March 2020."
@George that isn't really an article about covid though, that's a column about internal US politics and propaganda