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.
@PeterMillerc030 Rand Paul just undid the greatest trick the devil ever pulled if so… important to keep all options on the table
Here’s David Asher, very likely a source for most of the vague, unsubstantiated stories about new lab leak evidence e.g. the names of three sick workers at WIV. What’s he doing now that Trump is in charge and can release all the evidence he whined that Biden wasn’t releasing? He’s lowering expectations and saying really what’s important is the open source intel.

As in 2002-2003, keep that in mind when you see people who would know about secret evidence claiming confidence without explaining their logic or showing any new evidence.
https://open.substack.com/pub/jimhaslam/p/the-origins-of-usaid-predict?r=44y3h&utm_medium=ios
Origins of USAID Predict.
@George Is USAID the organization that secretly worked to cover up a Wuhan lab leak in the United States? Or was it NIAID?
Thanks for illustrating how the value of “lab leak” for many “lab leak” proponents is to wage unrelated political battles of the day and not any concern about how the last pandemic started.
Looking forward to the posts in this thread about how NIH indirects are responsible for “lab leak” next!
https://www.nber.org/papers/w33428 Got no mana in this market but I thought people might be interested in this article I saw.
@benshindel Is it well reasoned, though?
See discussion below. The coincidence of cases being around the wildlife market gets zero Bayes points. The coincidence of the first cluster being associated with that market isn’t considered at all. Ditto for the coincidence of all SARS2 genomic diversity being found in the corner of the market where the SARS2-susceptible animals were.
@Marnix Impressively long, but man the logic is bad:
https://x.com/tgof137/status/1886597906897232256
@zcoli back-of-the-envelope treating case-in-Wuhan distribution as the 1-in-100 coincidence it is and case-in-market distribution as the 1-in-4 or so distribution that it is gets you from 14,900:1 in favor of didn’t-start-at-the-market to about 1:10 in favor of zoonosis-at-the-market.
That’s before dealing with the fact that the market is central in other ways that make it more like a 1-in-1000 (or 1-in-10000 per Peter’s guess) coincidence.
The funny thing about all of this is that I’m not personally all that convinced it all boils down to animal to human transmission within the walls of Huanan market. I figure humans exposed to animals elsewhere (more animals certainly kept somewhere nearby) could be responsible for an introduction or two that would still be likely to show up near stalls selling wildlife. But the data points to Huanan market and nowhere else in the world.
@zcoli My rough calculation was: 10 million people in Wuhan, 1,000 work at the Huanan market, so 1 in 10,000 odds that the first case will be a market vendor, by chance.
Your calculation was: 10 million people in Wuhan, 10,000 visit the Huanan market per day, so 1 in 1,000 odds. That might be more accurate, might not. You'd probably want the ratio of (Huanan visitors) divided by (number of places Wuhan residents visit per day), and the denominator is probably higher than 10 million. How many places does the average person go, every day, where they could infect someone else? Probably more than 1. Maybe something like 5? (could be like: a job, 2 subway stations, a store, a restaurant) So... 1 in 5,000?
You can try to adjust the odds up and down. Maybe the Huanan market spreads covid better than the average place in Wuhan, adjust it up for that. But it's also not a common place for average people to shop, since it's a wholesale market, adjust it down for that.
The Worobey 2022 paper used check-in data from the Sina visitor system, it found that Huanan market got 1 in 9,819 of the check-ins. There were 1,600 places in Wuhan that got more traffic. They tried to flag which of those places would be high-risk for superspreading, and identified 430 of them. Huanan market still only got 1 in 2,500 of the traffic, to those high risk places.
People have argued that Sina data they used has some biases, and it does, and those could change the odds somewhat.
Establishing the exact odds here seems kind of unnecessary, when the other side of the covid origins debate is off by a factor of 1,000 or more. Rootclaim says the market evidence is worth precisely nothing and Levin says it actually leans against zoonosis by a factor of 27.
Rootclaim's analysis is equivalent to saying that 100% of lab leaks would show up first at a raccoon dog shop in Huanan market.
Levin's analysis is even harder to wrap my head around. That's like he's saying that 100% of lab leaks would show up at a raccoon dog shop across town from the lab, but only 1 out of 27 zoonotic spillovers at that market would show up at a shop within the same market.
Do these lab leak "Bayesians" even think through basic sanity checks like that?
@PeterMillerc030 I figure it’s good to be conservative because there are equivalent coincidences that didn’t happen — one of other markets with wildlife sales, a restaurant known to sell wildlife, someplace that turns out to house them, etc.
Levin’s models throw out the location evidence by seeing if unlinked cases are close to linked cases (outside the market) and if marker cases are close to previous market cases (within the market). So the “lab leak” model is that unlinked cases are near the market and that cases within the market are near wildlife stalls. 🤷
From The Sunday Times in June 2023! If you have a way to access it (it's available on Apple News+), this article is a great read

@LukeShadwell Oh shit it’s albino mice with human lungs. Do you think Fu Manchu novels are in the non-fiction section at the library?
This is illustrating Matt Ridley’s theory and specifically illustrating one of the lies he likes to tell. The book Viral was very obviously written around the idea that there were 8 viral genomes at WIV more similar to SARS2 than RaTG13.
But, before the book was done, the genomes and the underlying sequencing data were published: they weren’t very closely related to SARS2.
Ridley didn’t care. He just started lying and continued to say these were the 9 closest viruses before the pandemic.
I guess we've moved from Fauci being responsible to USAID being responsible. At exactly the same time people are searching for a rationale to end foreign aid. Definitely based on the facts and not politics, right? https://dailycaller.com/2025/02/05/elon-musks-linking-usaid-bioweapons-covid-wuhan/
What happened to Ratcliffe's day 1 priority to clear the air on SARS-CoV-2 origins? His claims that Biden was inappropriately blocking evidence from being published...
Apparently it wasn't a day 10 priority either. Would anyone bet it will be a day 100 or a day 1000 priority? All the people who wouldn't shut up about Biden not releasing the evidence they knew was there and would prove them right are quiet now. Everyone I know who figures "probably zoonosis" said they wanted to see more data then and continues to say it now.
https://www.science.org/doi/full/10.1126/science.abj0016
Jesse D. Bloom et al.
Investigate the origins of COVID-19.Science372,694-694(2021).DOI:10.1126/science.abj0016
both R. Baric and A. Chan signed this letter dated May 2021
In May 2020, the World Health Assembly requested that the World Health Organization (WHO) director-general work closely with partners to determine the origins of SARS-CoV-2 (2). In November, the Terms of Reference for a China–WHO joint study were released (3). The information, data, and samples for the study's first phase were collected and summarized by the Chinese half of the team; the rest of the team built on this analysis. Although there were no findings in clear support of either a natural spillover or a lab accident, the team assessed a zoonotic spillover from an intermediate host as “likely to very likely,” and a laboratory incident as “extremely unlikely” [(4), p. 9]. Furthermore, the two theories were not given balanced consideration. Only 4 of the 313 pages of the report and its annexes addressed the possibility of a laboratory accident (4). Notably, WHO Director-General Tedros Ghebreyesus commented that the report's consideration of evidence supporting a laboratory accident was insufficient and offered to provide additional resources to fully evaluate the possibility (5).
@George Why do you think Baric signed the letter demanding a better investigation?
Lab leakers think that he made the virus:
https://x.com/tgof137/status/1864053065898500481
If that were true, wouldn't an investigation just prove that he's guilty?
@PeterMillerc030 I believe in an interview he has stated he doesn’t know, is unsure, the origins of the virus. A virologist unsure of its origins is a many degrees of separation from “lab leakers are cranks.” The letter advocates for a Roger’s Commission (space shuttle Challenger) hopefully filled with several Richard Feynman,> IQ160 who are “a real pain in the ass.”
@George Here’s what Baric thought in his congressional interview, since you’re citing his authority and all:


In other words, it’s like hearing “I’d say [the odds are] more like one in a million” and responding “So you’re tellin’ me there’s a chance!”
@George 5% probability of another congressional committee or challenger type commission. Ds don’t want it and Rs have other priorities. Pipe dream.
@George Yes, it's a true mystery. We need Feynman to solve this. Exhume the body!