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.
1,000
1.00https://www.nature.com/articles/nm.3985#change-history
Published: 09 November 2015
A SARS-like cluster of circulating bat coronaviruses shows potential for human emergence
@George This is the scientific manuscript that the news article you posted two days ago references. You're making it kinda obvious that you don't actually read what you post.
https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2015.18787
Published: 12 November 2015
Engineered bat virus stirs debate over risky research
Nature (2015)
@George This sort of experiment is the sort of experiment you'd expect to see -- a very-likely loss of function experiment that would very obviously be a synthetic virus if it turned out to be an accidental gain of function experiment (it didn't). More evidence that the expected lab leak, if there's a lab leak, wouldn't look like SARS2.
Consider this
https://x.com/JohnStossel/status/1842927037540962614
and this
https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/28/politics/wray-fbi-covid-origins-lab-china/index.html
@RandPaul was once labeled a “conspiracy theorist” for saying a lab leak probably caused Covid. Now the FBI and Energy Department say it's likely.
@BruceGrugett Anyone who doesn't think that Rand Paul is a conspiracy theorist on this issue hasn't read the introduction to his book.
It's a historical fiction about real people. It fantasizes about their deaths. It's dehumanizing. It's not what anyone would write if they actually had evidence to support what they claim to think is true.
@BruceGrugett Paul's exchange with Fauci a few years ago also highlighted how unclear the restrictions on gain-of-function research on potential pandemic pathogens like SARS were:
"“The entire rationale of EcoHealth’s grant renewal on SARS-related CoVs is that viruses with spikes substantially (10-25%) diverged from SARS-CoV-1 pose a pandemic risk,” said Bloom. “Given that this is the entire rationale for the work, how can they simultaneously argue these viruses should not be regulated as potential pandemic pathogens?”
https://theintercept.com/2021/11/03/coronavirus-research-ecohealth-nih-emails/
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/is-another-pandemic-really-inevitable/
Is another pandemic really inevitable?
29 September 2024, 1:18pm
A Critical Review of COVID-19 Origins: “Hidden in Plain Sight”
September 2024
Dr. Robert P. Kadlec presents the first installment of his critical review of COVID-19 origins, examining whether SARS-CoV-2 emerged naturally or as a result of a research-related incident. The paper draws on public reports and additional new open-source evidence to analyze the course of the initial outbreak, the genetic sequence of the virus itself, and events at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Dr. Kadlec served as the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response at the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services during the COVID-19 pandemic and spent more than 20 years as a career officer and physician in the United States Air Force.
Dr. Robert Kadlec: While this document does not provide unambiguous proof about the origins of SARS-CoV-2, it presents a preponderance of circumstantial evidence pointing to its origin as a research-related incident. It also raises additional questions. Why would PLA scientists be working on a coronavirus vaccine before the pandemic? What was the nature of this work, and could it be associated with a military research program focused on the neurological consequences of novel coronavirus strains?
@MikePa67d None of this is in Wuhan. When the only piece of evidence supporting the lab leak theory is that the pandemic started in Wuhan, invoking vague, alternative scenarios that involve work elsewhere only reduces the likelihood of a lab leak.
@zcoli Yet more references to work that occurred in more cities, none of them Wuhan. Add in pangolins and we've zoomed passed a net population of 100M that would be just as eerie a coincidence as Wuhan. You don't even have to think too hard and lab leak likelihood already down 90% just by considering a couple equivalent coincidences to a Wuhan outbreak.
@zcoli The Yan report is cited favorably in one part of the manuscript and Bruttel et al somewhere else. Both are mutually exclusive theories cherry picking restriction enzyme cleavage sites in some genomes.
It's almost as if ~30,000 characters guarantees a number of Bible Code like theories if you don't tell anyone about the cherry picking on the way there.
It gets worse!
The FCS is defined by four specific amino acids—Proline (P), Arginine (R), Arginine (R) and Alanine (A).
The core FCS is RRAR not PRRA.
It has been claimed that the RNA code (codon: CGG) for arginine in the SARS-CoV-2 S FCS is rarely found in coronaviruses. This arginine code only comprises 3% of the nucleic acid in SARS-CoV-2 itself
One codon out being 3% of the SARS2 genome would be a lot! This is one of those things lost in translation on the way from a conspiracy theorist to Kadlec; it doesn't matter when the audience is people who want to believe (aka everyone promoting this document as supporting evidence today).
Proximal Origin — A Tragicomedy of our Times (Part 1)
@George Just to be clear here: the best evidence you can muster in favor of lab leak is a novel length blog post about a conspiracy theory about a paper written by a few people on the other side of the world?
@George That was some Brexit lobbyists pushing a lab leak theory back in 2020. Their emails later got hacked as part of a Russian hack on Boris Johnson, and some interesting stuff came out. At first they were trying to publish their theories and sell a covid vaccine, then when that failed they pivoted to more of a social media strategy -- the group planned to get Yuri Deigin onto Bret Weinstein's show and then Weinstein onto Joe Rogan. They also thought they could sell a movie where they were the heroes, the "covid hunters":
The price here is now more or less converged with the market for whether anyone will publish a paper in one of a few major scientific journals that concludes lab leak anytime soon: https://manifold.markets/zcoli/date-first-peer-reviewed-manuscript
Somewhat closer to this site being rational — of course if there’s solid evidence to think lab leak is more likely that not, someone will formulate it as a scientific paper that is published in a major journal. I promise there’s no conspiracy or editors and reviewers that would prevent a sound manuscript from being published with that conclusion.
@zcoli which means the market is still overpriced. If such a paper is published there could still be controversy about the paper. Therefore the likelihood should be lower than that.
@Philip3773733 given that even the very reasonable original draft of Proximal Origin was rejected on the basis it was too open to lab origin the odds of any lab origin leaning paper being published in Nature seems remote.
The latest lab origin leaning paper was Chen et al (2024) in Risk Analysis. They assess 68% likelihood of lab origin using the modified Grunow-Finke assessment tool.
@MikePa67d Oh that paper? The one where co-authors independently and subjectively give classify and outbreak in different categories, meet and discuss and then vote again to harmonize their results, and then report that it’s a robust result because there’s 100% agreement?
The crypto dude who paid for it should read the study and then stop paying for this garbage.
@Philip3773733 Yes that’s true. The journals can and do publish stuff that’s wrong. Even stuff that’s very likely to be wrong (eg recent high temp superconductivity). So there’s still an asymmetry explained by this market apparently being impossible to resolve.