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
Baric testimony on Defuse, clarifying that much of the speculation of this project is not true. No plans to create a chimera of novel viruses, no description of wanting to insert a feline coronavirus sequence as the FCS. Work was to be done in UNC and workflow involved pseudoviruses first
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DR. BARIC: Yeah. So from my perspective, let's talk about the grant for a minute. Let's make sure we put it in perspective. So DARPA was interested in addressing a problem about the warfighter. And I think there's, what, about 250,000 troops and their families across the globe. Many of those soldiers go into wild areas of the world where they come in contact with pathogens. So they can then infect members of their group, they can take the virus back to the base, and they can bring it back to the United States. So this is a real threat, potential threat to the public of the United States, because of where they go.
So DARPA came up with a proposal that they wanted to know, down to the nucleotide level, what regulates a virus jumping between species and then develop countermeasures for it. Now, if you want to know, down to the nucleotide level, what drives a cross-species jumping event, you are talking gain-of-function experiments.
DR. BARIC: They said they want you to know, down to the nucleotide level what drives cross-species jumping events.
As part of the thought process, there were two questions. There were two ideas that came forward. One was why don't sarbecoviruses have furin cleavage sites. And I've studied coronaviruses all my life. I know sarbecoviruses. I've seen zoonotic strains. They don't have furin cleavage sites. MERS strains do. Human coronaviruses do. Feline coronaviruses do. Why don't sarbecos? There should be sarbecos out there that have furin cleavage sites, so they were going to look for them.
Once they found them and they sequenced it they were going to work on it with pseudotypes. They were going to drop those spike genes into pseudotypes and ask what's -- we were also going to look at the receptor binding domain, obviously, and I think we hypothesized in there that there should be strains with 25 percent variation in spike that could still use the ACE2 receptor. And those are obviously of interest because if you're interested in developing pan-sarbecovirus vaccines or drugs you want, in essence, the bookends of the heterogeneity that exists in the virus subgenus, right. You want strains that you know and strains that are very different, because you have no idea what would emerge in the future. So if you have breadth then you have a better chance of developing something that could be used immediately.
So those are two major features. The first part would be then to find sarbecoviruses. If we found the sarbecovirus with a furin cleavage site it would be dropped into a pseudovirus, and its biological characteristics evaluated by the Chinese. They would remove the furin cleavage site. They would introduce changes into the receptor binding domain and look in the context of those pseudotypes, which is the safe system, to ask questions about what the role of those mutations were in tropism and entry of viruses in receptor usage.
Following gleaning that data, we would then use a zoonotic sarbecovirus as a receptacle to drop the spike genes of some of these viruses, and if we found one with full-on furin site we would put it in there and evaluate its biology. We would also remove that furin cleavage site and ask what the effect was on pathogenesis in replication. So it's a loss-of-function first.
At the end of that there was speculation that if the furin cleavage site looked like it was having effect on replication of pathogenesis we would consider putting it into a gain-of-function scenario where we would drop it into a null backbone. So that's how the experiment was written.
MS. SALAZAR: And who was going to be doing that work?
DR. BARIC: That part would be done by me.
DR. BARIC: So anyway, all the work with pseudotypes was not subject to gain, right. These are single-hit vectors that can't cause disease. As soon as we made full molecular clones, or chimeras, they were done in a WIV backbone, which meant that they're putting a zoonotic spike into a zoonotic strain, to eventually identify vaccine formulations that would be used in the cave, that's not subject to gain-of-function.
@BW So, pseudovirus->WIV1->parent virus; cannot construct novel chimeras because that would violate GoF but WIV1/SHC014 were cleared. Also, a multi-step process which would involve review before getting to FCS insertion much later in the path.
Fauci diary
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June 4, 2021. Very important and very strange briefing of me by the CIA in the NIH SCIF this afternoon (5:00 PM). I received an extremely strange an unexpected briefing today by the CIA related to the origin of the virus. Beth Cameron from NSC was listening in on one of the other screens. And as it turns out she was as baffled as I was by the briefing. It was very similar to some of the very disappointing briefings that I had previously received in prior years from the CIA. A young woman whose name was Camille Hartman gave most of the briefing. She was accompanied by what was probably the senior male CIA person and another young woman. Camille in my mind was almost pathetic in her naivety an obvious lack of appreciation of any of the science of what she was talking about. She gave instances of things that she said were gotten by CIA intercepts of conversations in China, particularly in Wuhan. her major point was that she feels but the Chinese have not been transparent about what was going on in their labs since there were no reports publicly of what they found out from intercepts. This included the transfer of Pangolin viruses from a group in Beijing two Wu Han. They felt that this was being used in a study using transgenic mice. I have no idea why this was any great concern to them since it would be perfectly natural for a lab that studies coronavirus to look at Pangolins. In addition, she spoke about the observation that WIV was sampling Pangolins and several members of WIV took a trip to obtain Pangolins. They also spoke about the fact that they have information from sources that unknown experiments well conducted by the military in Wu Han. The thing that blew me away about how naive and uninformed they are was the fact that they mentioned that they had word that in July of 2020 there was a super spreading event in China related to passage of virus in the laboratory. This astounded Beth and I for the same reason. Why would they suspect that a super spreading event that occur in the middle of a major outbreak in China was related to the passage of virus in the laboratory? The naivete of the briefing stunned both Beth and me. Also, in the matter in which she was asking me questions almost made me believe she was grilling me prompting me to say somewhat tongue in cheek whether I should have a lawyer with me. I got on the phone with Beth immediately after the briefing and she was very upset saying that she was going to check up the chain who and why this briefing was called and why there was no forwarding material to prepare us for what they were doing. There is something very fishy about all of this.
July 7, 2021 I had a very important meeting today with the NSC led by Beth Cameron and Maher Bitar who is the senior director for intelligence programs at NSC. We met in the EEOB SCIF and discussed the briefing document that the NSC had presented lto the President a week or so ago. Beth wanted me to have an official briefing because of the catastrophic briefing that the amateurs from the CIA gave me several weeks ago. There were no new surprises for me in the briefing except that it became clear that the FBI has no idea what they're talking about since they are convinced that the origin of COVID-19 is from a laboratory leak. The reasons that they give do not make any sense. In contrast the NSA gave some reasonable hypotheses leaning heavily towards a natural jump of species in the environment. I spent some time explaining to Maher and Beth my own theories that the Chinese act like they're covering up something even when they have nothing to cover up. They manifested this in their response to the original SARS-CoV-1 when they insisted this was just an atypical influenza when in fact it was the beginning of a coronavirus pandemic. In addition, they likely shot themselves in the foot when they denied the presence of wild animals in the market when we know they were present and the Chinese cleaned out the market before adequate testing of animals could occur. In essence, they clouded the possibility of proving a natural emergence. I urged the NSC folks to work closely with qualified card-carrying evolutionary virologists such as Kristian Andersen, Eddie Holmes, Bob Garry, Andy Rambaut, among others. I also explained to them the multiple reasons epidemiologically and molecularly why it is almost certain that the virus evolved naturally from a species jump, even though I emphasized that I keep an open mind about the possibility of a lab leak . However, in this regard , I emphasized that just because two alternatives are possible that does not mean that they are equally probable. I believe that they understood where I was coming from and that it turned out to be a very good meeting
August 28, 2021 The intelligence community report on the origins came out and in some respects it was good news in that they felt fairly confident that it was not a bioweapon nor that it was bioengineered. They still left open the possibility that it could be a lab leak ; However, more elements of the intelligence community felt that it was a natural occurrence compared to the single component (FBI) who seemed to feel strongly that it was a lab leak , although this is based on no data at all. The reaction to the report was rather typical with Bob Garry saying that he was pleased that it ruled out bio engineering and David Relman making the incredible statement in a Nature news article that he would like to see all of the records of the NIH in their dealing with Chinese scientists. Truly amazing! There is no doubt that he has an agenda here and that is unfortunate.
In contrast the NSA gave some reasonable hypotheses leaning heavily towards a natural jump of species in the environment.
No one's ever reported that the NSA concluded natural origin was more likely, although for a while it has been something that could be inferred with high confidence by comparing a couple published documents.
Folks might reflect on the breathless coverage across the international news media every time there's a hint that some part of the US intelligence apparatus thinks or once thought that COVID came from a lab, and compare it to the total silence when it comes to the position of the NSA. This is big news! We almost never hear what the NSA thinks, and this would've certainly been redacted had it gone through any review prior to publication.
There have been other examples of this. For example, wall-to-wall coverage when Jesse Bloom announced he'd found some sequences withdrawn from the SRA, and zero outlets revisiting the story when it turned out that the sequences did not support his conclusions and that he had deleted the collection date and not told anyone it was January 30.
@BrendanFinan This was such a funny and revealing move by the White House. The case for "lab leak" on the website is copied from a house oversight committee report, which is, in turn, copied from an Alina Chan op-ed in the New York Times.
So, what it accomplished is showing that the White House has no evidence favoring "lab leak" other than the vague and often false arguments in that op-ed.
@Marion8w2 Peter Daszak has Bloom dead to rights here. At about the same time Bloom was feigning curiosity and collegiality with Zhengli Shi, Bloom was on the phone with Rand Paul talking about how suspicious the DEFUSE proposal was, and inspiring the twisted fictional introduction to Paul's book.
Like Daszak says in the email, he's the PI on the grant, requests go through him, and the data is published. The raw data for RdRp sequencing that characterizes most of this work is Sanger sequencing -- actual raw data from machines is almost never published for this, yet, Zhengli Shi has done it in response to requests from Bloom and others.
By the time of this email, Shi had also published sequences and raw data for RaTG15-related viruses, which Bloom demanded multiple times, eg:
I get how people can see this email shared without that context by someone prompting you to conclude it's part of a coverup, but it's just not.
And it's absurd that Bloom doesn't speak up to say so after he's caused Zhengli Shi and others so many headaches to accomplish nothing other than wasting everyone's time for so many years.
[2020-05-24 15:47:18] [Eddie Holmes]
One that latter point, I am struck by the complete lack of intelligence on this: surely, if they were growing a virus in the lab, incident or not, there would be standard chatter about it on email, text, weichat, whatever, but there's nothing. There's a mountain of chatter about the pneumonia cases in Wuhan back in December before the disease was officially reported, but there is nothing about the lab.
2020-12-18 02:19:24] [Eddie Holmes] Just been talking (off the record) to this guy from CNN who has been delving deep into the early outbreak. He's also talked to all the intelligence folk. He's says there's absolutely zero evidence for lab escape. Intelligence agrees. Nothing in the early records from China.
@BW [2021-03-29 16:22:36] [Eddie Holmes] Had a long chat with Dominic: (i) he thinks that it could well be raccoon dogs or mink neither of which have been tested and that there was great push back from the Chinese about even investigating this idea. So, these animals have not been tested; (ii) he said that the WIV staff came across as totally open and honest. He said that privately Shi told them she was very worried about a lab escape and they did 2 internal audits and found nothing
[2021-03-29 16:24:13] [Kristian Andersen] … but they again, she would need to consider it a possibility - we did
[2021-03-29 16:32:52] [Eddie Holmes] Dominic also said that it clear that the intelligence services have nothing
[2021-03-29 20:44:38] [Kristian Andersen] Yeah, I get the sense that the Chinese are trying to deflect as much as possible away from the market, not being concerned with the lab leak because they know it didn’t come from there. But it certainly isn’t helping - the market, by far, seems like the most logical explanation.
[2021-03-29 20:47:17] [Eddie Holmes] That’s it!! Both Daszak and Dominic told me the same - they don’t like the market link because it makes them look ‘dirty’ and undermines their culture
@BW [2021-04-22 16:24:56] [Eddie Holmes] The ASTMH story makes the simplest point that I’ve made so many times before: if they had a cool bat CoV, particularly one with a FCS, they would have definitely published it prior to the pandemic. No bigger driver than a high impact paper.
[2021-04-22 16:42:14] [Robert Garry] Absolutely spot-on @Eddie Holmes - Shi et al, are damm serious scientists. Yes -I get it- a lot of ppl hate the CCP for good reason. BUT - WTF have we been doing over the past 4 or 5 decades? Chinese, Taiwanese, other Asian scientists were trained in the best US, European and Australian labs. I remember "training" with C-C King aka Dana King - she was a freaking mess in graduate school, but went back to Taiwan and is now a [lower case] "god" of Taiwan virology. WE built this. It's should not be about ideology, the CCP or political BS.
@BW [2021-05-21 17:22:03] [Eddie Holmes] WIV are in an impossible position: don't release the data and they are accused of hiding it, release it and they are accused of faking it. Having no PCR/antibody positives at the WIV and they are accused of lying, having n = 1 case at WIV then that would be patient zero.
@BW 2022-01-17 18:58:47] [Eddie Holmes] I think that Sunday Times journo will take the same line that PO1 was an attempt to stop the lab leak conspiracy etc I've told her multiple times that our conclusions were :100: driven by the science and that the if the science had suggested something different we would have written something different
@zcoli I'm sure there are some individual analyst reports that lab leak can point to for support - the NCMI guys' reverse genetics for instance. The suggestion that the DIA did not take them seriously adds to their lab leak creds. What the DNI release suggests is that the IC management was not very confident in the value of the scientific contribution of their own staff relative to the wider community.
@George Oh it's the slide deck from the people at NCMI/DIA who plagiarized their work from a conspiracy theorist that thinks SARS-CoV-2 started in USA and was misdiagnosed as vaping injuries.
I wonder how many people in the meeting rolled their eyes at the waste of taxpayer money on whatever time was spent staring at the slide that's just an image of the promotional insert that comes from NEB with golden gate assembly reagents.
@zcoli Then you finally get to the content that's somehow even more stupid. The answer to the highlighted question is, "this is irrelevant to SARS2 origins; SARS2 isn't a hybrid of a bat virus from Yunnan and a pangolin virus found in Guangdong; that's a dumb theory that you read on someone's blog post rather than reading the scientific literature that says exactly why it's a dumb theory."
