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.
1,000New post from Jim Haslam.
by chopping up the SARS2 genome
Apr 13, 2025
"U.S. Right to Know published another great FOIA find. This one was from the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), which is like the CIA but for the Pentagon. They identified the SARS2 restriction sites before anyone else in the lab leak debate.
Harvard epidemiologist Miguel Hernán: “It is very unlikely that COVID did not come from a Chinese laboratory” t.co/0VF7timDQu
https://manifold.markets/George/scientists-or-influencers-outside-c?r=R2Vvcmdl
Scientists or influencers outside China have been paid by the CCP to advocate for a natural origin of Covid 19.
From your description:
I am going to add something I had not thought of initially. The influencer or more than one can originate in China posting on websites outside PRC.
This is pretty easy fake money given how often influencers in state media appear in English language videos including on websites hosted outside PRC e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0QN_S13ZsaE
Admittedly, it might be surprising to see what's a blatant piece of Chinese propaganda from May 2020 saying there's a natural origin if you've fallen for the American propaganda that claims that everyone in China was lying that it started as an American lab leak. The truth is more complicated, and even more so with all the propaganda flying around on this question.
@bens "Knowledge that U.S. troops may have contracted COVID-19 in Wuhan during the October 2019 games may have been well received by U.S. allies. Military athletes from Germany, France, Italy, and Luxembourg who competed in the October 2019 games also reported coming down with COVID-19-like symptoms during their stay in Wuhan, which they described as a "ghost town," the Daily Mail reported."
@bens Anyone actually going to read the report? It says there was nothing at all unusual about the fraction of people who happened to get sick.
This story in general is why you shouldn’t trust what you read in tabloids and, specifically, is why you shouldn’t trust what you hear from Jamie Metzl.
“Ghost town” comes from what some random person emailed Jamie Metzl. It’s contradicted by literally everyone else.
Tabloids reported people who recalled being sick in October 2019 — they never report how antibody tests went that were available at the time and would have still been positive if infected when this was reported circa April 2020.
Guess what? Spanish athletes who had this concern were offered C19 antibody tests. The results came back. Positivity rate no different than for Spanish people in general.
You won’t read about this in the Daily Mail, because that’s a tabloid. You won’t really read about it at all because no one’s going to go out hunting to be interviewed about how they thought they had C19 but actually wasted everyone’s time and contributed to dumb conspiracy theories about bioweapons in both the USA and China that distracted governments from theoretically doing useful things in the middle of a pandemic eg passing the law that required this report that was certain to report nothing.
@zcoli Are we going to get another round of people discovering fabulist Connor Reed’s fabricated diary again about how he thought he killed his cat with COVID-19 or something?
The silliest thing about this is that I regularly come across “evidence” that would make for far better conspiracy theory bait. Even as a creative writing exercise this is all so lame.
People demand new data. Get new data. Turn to be wowed by Richard Ebright, a liar, declaring yet another thing a smoking gun. I guess it’s just about having fun fantasizing about a mad scientist myth being exploited to destroy science R&D in the USA.
@bens The ketamine joke was better. Enjoy the impossible conspiracy theory from the Free Beacon saying that the USA covered up COVID-19 infections in October 2019... absolutely senseless given that the President of the United States decided it was a lab accident in China circa April 2020 and all he was missing for his argument was a shred of evidence.
@zcoli i don’t think there was any kind of conspiracy to cover up any of that! I think your position, however, requires multiple conspiracies on the part of agencies and governments around the world though, to be promoting lab leak at the behest of… who exactly?
@bens Huh? Who's promoting lab leak other than tabloids looking for clicks? All I see are vague reports of what people thought years ago. More and more often revealing that they thought SARS2 was a chimera of a bat coronavirus and a pangolin coronavirus, which was disproven in Sept 2021.
The headline of the article you shared: "Biden Administration Concealed Congressionally Mandated Report on Earliest Suspected American COVID Cases" -- apparently you now say you don't agree with this conspiracy theory? But it was "woah" before? Pretty obvious what the legit rationale not to publish this is that the executive branch could invoke given conspiracy theories in China about USA bringing in SARS-CoV-2 via the games.
@zcoli apparently you think there is a conspiracy from both the last Democratic AND Republican administrations to conceal the truth about COVID, given that both have the official position that lab leak is more likely than natural release?
@zcoli also, there was a reason I said "presented without comment".
The Free Beacon is trash of course, but the pdf they linked is "of note" at a minimum:
https://freebeacon.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/2019-World-Military-Games-Report-1.pdf
@bens No conspiracy -- just people rationally responding to costs and benefits on an issue where there's no cost of being stupidly wrong and sometimes a small benefit... the DOD report that there was no COVID-19 signal in their delegation to Wuhan isn't notable unless you previously believed the impossible that there would be anything to find.
@zcoli You mean, you think it's notable that no one in the US delegation tested positive for a disease for which there were no tests in the entire world? lol wut
@bens "US delegation didn't test positive for COVID despite COVID tests not existing... negative update surely"
@zcoli Everything old is new again. A lot of individualss and organizations seem to be capitalizing on the moment. After a rehash of those theories and the scientific consensus remains intact, the media will need to find new material.
@bens You really didn't read the report that warranted a "woah" ? There were antibody tests in spring 2020 all around the world that would've likely detected an infection from October 2019. Like I said, Spanish athletes were tested. It's in the news, in Spanish. As with the DOD report, no signal above background. Not surprising because, again, it's impossible. Not because tests didn't exist. Because the scenario is literally impossible.
@bens Excluding the MI6, there are scientists in the defense organizations who believe their thesis . Chretien/Cutlip of DIA even have an unclassified paper that was part of the house investigation. They are just not privy to anything that is not available to anybody else. And as the reports trickle out these are theories that didn’t stand the test of time.
@BW as time goes on, natural release's likelihood decays to zero as no natural reserves of COVID are found
@zcoli Ya, I mean, I'd expect after the disease had been spreading among the spanish population for months that of course there would be no remaining signal in antibody tests of athletes. The statistical power of those tests is like... approaching nil
@bens Did you read the recent news about potentially finding the natural host for mpox which was first identified in 1958?
Finding a host is important but cannot be the main factor for rejecting natural origins as many seem to believe. We still don’t know the natural reservoir for the 1976 Ebola
@bens The background percentage of infections in Spain circa April 2020 wasn't that high and the false negative rate for 6-month old infections with a decent test is not that low. If a good number of people who got tested because they thought they had had COVID-19 got tested, the results would show that they were more likely than others to test positive. It didn't happen. The Spanish Defense Ministry said so. It wasn't reported in the Daily Mail because, again, not newsworthy in a tabloid.
@zcoli As far as "natural reserves" go -- several contemporaneous examples of other SARS/SARS2-like viruses in pangolins, two of which have decent evidence of being a not far from being a human pandemic threat. For each instance of interrupting a black market and finding some sick pangolins, there are many others that went undetected. The existence of a reservoir of closely related viruses in trafficked wildlife in 2019 was maybe the 2nd piece of evidence we got, following the fact that the virus was first identified based on a disease cluster in the biggest wildlife market in town.
@BW there is no consensus. Energy Dept scientists at LLNL, FBI, CIA, Germany's BND. Epidemiologists like David Fisman, Tim Spector, or Harvard epidemiologist Miguel Hernán: “It is very unlikely that COVID did not come from a Chinese laboratory”. French Academy of Medicine and WHO don't appear to see it as clear cut at all.
@MikePa67d David Fisman? The guy who runs away any time anyone tries to actually discuss the topic with him and who peer reviewed one of the papers with important data disproving a part of lab leak canon?
@zcoli Spector? Hernán? People who have zero record of serious commentary on this issue and had some ignorant quotes in stories you read this week on the Internet?
Can someone post literally one falsifiable lab leak theory formulated as a scientific manuscript — one that has not been falsified yet? Thanks.
@MikePa67d btw the DOE FOIA that lab leak complains has everything redacted. It doesn’t have everything redacted. There’s a couple things discussing removing bullet points for the October 2021 public summary of C19 origins intel based on recently published information.
The thing they probably removed: the fact that the lab leak theory favored by some elements of the IC was disproven by publication of the BANAL genomes.
All those lab leak people demanding declassifying everything are gonna wind up embarrassing people who bet against natural selection and lost.