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
3.00Latinne et al's 2020 Nature paper has just been retracted due to data errors. 41 bat CoV sequences from Laos were "erroneously" included according to the authors.
@MikePa67d A bit of sloppiness with data makes a successful lab leak coverup less likely.
@George Yuri’s high-stakes debate on Covid’s origins 3:42 Pros and cons of Covid vaccines 10:04 Do Covid “coincidences” point to a lab leak? 21:55 Does the pattern of Covid’s initial spread suggest zoonotic origin? 27:51 Why the Wuhan market may have amplified Covid’s spread 38:59 Covid’s lineages A and B 53:29 US-China collaboration in the Wuhan lab’s virology research
@George The first couple minutes of whatever this is covers how he had nothing at stake in the debate — not even his reputation as having any expertise in the eyes of this interviewer — and how he lost the debate very badly.
@George actually not worth the listen. I think Wright is a terrible interviewer and the second half is behind a paywall.
@zcoli probably about as many as there are papers by Andersen and co claiming lab origin is implausible or there is "dispositive" evidence it came from the market which turn out to be utter bullshit.
@MikePa67d Do you have more anecdotes from fabulist intel officers that you haven’t shared yet that you based opinions on about what it and isn’t bullshit?
@MikePa67d Maybe Kash Patel will write another illustrated children’s book about how Tony Fauci secretly visited CIA headquarters in the middle of the night. Valuable evidence.
Joint Chiefs of Staff allegedly briefed in Oct/Nov 2019 of a lab leak.
https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/32257526/us-military-covid-lab-leak-pentagon/
American to the Corps presents a firsthand account of many of the most high-profile national security events of the last thirty years as experienced by LtCol. Jonathon P. Myers, United States Marine Corps. LtCol. Myers, through a combination of skill and circumstance, found himself at the center of many of the most prominent events of the last several decades, including the American response to the terrorist attacks in Benghazi; the rescue of Capt. Scott O'Grady from Bosnia; the investigation of the theft of classified information by Edward Snowden; the investigation of spy Robert Hanssen; the war against South American drug trafficking cartels; and the invasion of Iraq. The son of career CIA agents and hailing from an extended family of high-level intelligence operatives, Myers was at the epicenter of the action for three decades. His accounts provide a no-holds-barred, humorous, and sometimes emotional look behind the veil of secrecy of modern day national security, intelligence, and Marine Corps training and operations.
Myers is adding another bullet point to his resume as the Forrest Gump at the center of every modern military/political controversy?
Weird he didn't mention his secret lab leak knowledge in all of his failed Congressional campaigns. Didn't even make it into his 2021 book. How odd!
This sounds pretty official and conclusive:
https://oversight.house.gov/release/final-report-covid-select-concludes-2-year-investigation-issues-500-page-final-report-on-lessons-learned-and-the-path-forward/
COVID-19 ORIGIN: COVID-19 most likely emerged from a laboratory in Wuhan, China. The FIVE strongest arguments in favor of the “lab leak” theory include:
The virus possesses a biological characteristic that is not found in nature.
Data shows that all COVID-19 cases stem from a single introduction into humans. This runs contrary to previous pandemics where there were multiple spillover events.
Wuhan is home to China’s foremost SARS research lab, which has a history of conducting gain-of-function research at inadequate biosafety levels.
Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) researchers were sick with a COVID-like virus in the fall of 2019, months before COVID-19 was discovered at the wet market.
By nearly all measures of science, if there was evidence of a natural origin it would have already surfaced.
@MikeElias I think they are probably right it arose via research I found Robert Kadlec's report in September provided a more thorough assessment. Particularly as he covers Yusen Zhou's research in some detail.
@MikePa67d Anyone taking Kadlec seriously might be interest in Kadlec's update this week, in which a number changed from $551,000,000 to $550,000 and his conclusions didn't change at all.
Here are two pictures from the source document:
As you can see, the value is about 4M Chinese yuan, about $550,000 USD at the moment.
Kadlec's crack team, including its expert in secret Chinese, Toy Reid, didn't bother to read the document in Chinese, must have relied on Google Translate or similar, and didn't read down to see the number written in a different way. Google Translate used to give an error for the first version of the same number in the document.
The "万元" characters means 10,000 Chinese Yuan, so 392.687694 万元 is about 400x1e4 = 4M RMB.
This has been comically mistranslated for several years. Finally Kadlec has corrected it.
It showed up here in August 2021 (different exchange rate at the time):
This was reported over at National Review -- https://www.nationalreview.com/the-morning-jolt/house-report-contains-shocking-detail-about-the-wuhan-lab/ -- no one bothered to check whether an unbelievable number was accurate.
It showed up in the first "Muddy Waters" report from Kadlec et al from spring 2023:
The error was noticed and ridiculed at the time, so it was surprising to see it come back in Kadlec's September 2024 report! He finally corrected it this week. Absolutely nothing changes in his logic even though a key piece of evidence drops three orders of magnitude.
@zcoli thanks, that's a bizarre error. Although I'm not sure that correcting the cost of the air conditioning renovation would make that much difference to his argument. Either way it's a significant project taking 210 days. As I say above, the most interesting part of his report is in relation to Zhou's work.
@MikePa67d You’re right that it wouldn’t make a difference. Because the whole thing is an impossible conspiracy theory about dates of secret vaccine development programs. It’s so dumb that both Vanity Fair and a congressional report got the core of the theory wrong trying to translate it into reports.
Remember that stuff based on Toy Reid’s secret Chinese? This is it: a Google translate bug and a failure to read to the next page or perform a sanity test.
It’s also an error that was loudly noted years ago. Only corrected last week. Because Kadlec isn’t talking to anyone on this except fellow conspiracy theorists,
“Either way it’s a significant project…” ffs you’re moving the goalposts when the key piece of evidence shrinks by three orders of magnitude.
Don’t you have actual evidence beyond clinging to bad translations?
@zcoli As far as Zhou Yusen goes: the suspiciously early vaccine patent was later than Moderna’s. It was trivial to replicate previous results once the SARS2 gene was available and it happened on a reasonable timeline given sequence availability circa beginning of 2020.
This is a particularly dumb theory to grasp at given that it proves a “lab leak” theory would exist for equivalent outbreaks throughout China. Zhou didn’t work in Wuhan. Although, for some reason, the weird rumor has grown that he teleported from Beijing to Wuhan and got pushed off a roof… not sure how this is supposed to support some origins theory, but conspiracy theory logic doesn’t tend to make sense when you dig into it.
Here's some live animals in a bucket in Huanan market on 31/Dec/2019 that the person running the stall wanted to hide from a reporter -- https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/243582878 -- can anyone identify the species from the sounds it makes?
Inspectors from the local CDC were there right around the same time.
According to the WHO report, there was no evidence of live mammals for sale at Huanan market. Two people from the neighborhood showed up to testify that this had been the case for decades.
This isn't really a cover-up; it's just denying reality. What's the point of that if there's a massive cover-up of a lab leak 10 km across town? It's not as if live animal markets across China were a secret in general or anything. They were in the news regularly and are the subject of academic research including specifically this market in Wuhan.
We are waiting for peer review, but initial sequences from Wuhan lab samples are not especially closely related to SARS-COV-2.
@NicoDelon Can we drop the arguments about what secret things might be in WIV databases and freezers based on their contents not being public if disclosing the information doesn’t make a difference? I guess it’s fine to appeal to arguments about what might exist and might be covered up if you like.
This happened earlier with retrospective seroprevalence studies, proof that live, SARS2-susceptible animals were present in Huanan market, and the RaTG15 sequences. All of those were very important to Alina Chan, for example, until they were published and turned out to be consistent with wildlife spillover in Wuhan and not some other theory. They were subsequently ignored.
I’ll wait to see the data rather than draw inferences from vague news stories on this.
@NicoDelon She did not claim she did not do it. She said, "here are 56 new sequences from 2004-2024, none of them are related to the original sequence."
@PatrickDelaney the woman who may have killed 20 million people alleges she did not find evidence that she killed 20 million people.
@PatrickDelaney Evidence from China that doesn’t say lab leak must be ignored. Evidence from China that can be spun to support lab leak is accidentally revealing the truth.
@NicoDelon she never alleged that she didn’t find evidence, she never said anything about killing 20 million people. That’s all you.