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
Three excerpts from Gabbard's ODNI disclosures.
1. No intelligence evidence on deliberate engineering:
Yeah, this issue will keep coming up. I think big picture, we need to avoid the IC as being the final arbiter of technical analysis on the SARS-CoV-2 genome. Sure, we have some great technical experts, but not nearly as many as other parts of the USG (e.g. HHS and CDC) or the broader non-governmental scientific community. I do not think the IC brings any unique expertise to bear on analyzing the disease itself at this point, and we should be deferring purely technical questions on unclassified scientific research to others.
As ██████ suggested below, where do we have value-added is analyzing the all-source intelligence record for signs of Chinese malfeasance, and on that front the answer continues to be that we do not see compelling evidence that China deliberately manufactured this virus, and there is no IC consensus on whether an accidental lab release of a natural strain or a natural outbreak is more likely.
2. No intelligence evidence of PLA involvement with WIV activities:
Much of these statement appear to be garbs...by the sources the reporter spoke to and possibly even by Brouillette for his alleged statements. Nobody in the IC has or as ever been worried about the PLA misappropriating the WIV’s coronavirus research...certainly not in mid-2019. DOE did not assess a lab-associated cause of the pandemic until early this year; it seems that Brouillette’s alleged claim that DOE came to this assessment by late 2020 was probably a reference to a May 2020 DOE (LLNL) paper that simply assessed the necessary conditions for a lab leak were present at the WIV.
3. No intelligence evidence of a precursor virus necessary for engineering being present at the WIV:
Thanks. Attached is the May 2020 Z-Division analysis that may be related to the claim that the former DOE Dep Sec told Fauci that “DOE scientists had found evidence suggesting that the pandemic had originated at the WIV.” This, of course, is not what the paper says. It only says that LLNL assessed that “all of the necessary conditions for an accidental release of a laboratory-modified coronavirus...were present...” at the WIV. Which, by the way, is not substantiated in the paper. It claims one of the necessary conditions was “access to a potential SARS-CoV-2 precursor coronavirus,” but we do not now, nor did we back in 2020, have ANY reporting suggesting WIV had such a virus.
Fauci is apparently guilty of providing a list of experts for the IC to talk to when requested to do so.
"Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard is releasing never-before-seen communications and documents exposing how Fauci worked with politicized career leadership in the Intelligence Community (IC) to suppress the truth about [...] the virus’ lab-leak origins [...]"
https://www.odni.gov/index.php/newsroom/press-releases/press-releases-2026/4166-pr-11-26
"Intelligence analysts who dared to halleng Dr. Fauci's Covid Origin conclusions, faced threats of retaliation, marginalization and many suffered career setbacks."
"Those who advocated for the Lab Leak hypothesis [...] were reminded by their managers that leadership would determine which analysts would be promoted and which would not."
https://x.com/DNIGabbard/status/2067792184753938484
Does something like this move the market? Right now we are at 25% YES.
@bbb What? Move the market? “Very smart people” have stated that this is a “conspiracy theory.” That’s good enough for me. 😑
@bbb
"Those who advocated for the Lab Leak hypothesis [...] were reminded by their managers that leadership would determine which analysts would be promoted and which would not."
I skimmed through all of this and found nothing to support that. I did find what might be some weird Russian disinformation, though.
Too bad for Fauci that he can't sue the government for defamation since the only time the Fauci perjury thing comes up in the released documents is people saying privately that he didn't lie to Rand Paul.
For anyone who finds the argument from Matt Ridley in Viral, recently presented at NIH, compelling, here is a post that might make you reconsider: https://www.the-gallop.com/review-matt-ridleys-viral-case-for-a-lab-leak/
I challenge anyone to find anything from a “zoonosis extremist” as Matt Ridley calls us, that’s as intellectually bankrupt as his edits to Viral between its first and second edition.
The next post on the blog will show how the FBI “lab leak” conclusion in 2021 was based at least partly on copying a stupid reading comprehension error from Twitter conspiracy theorists.
The whistleblower's written testimony is here: https://www.hsgac.senate.gov/wp-content/uploads/letter-and-testimomy.pdf
If you take it at face value, lower level analysts at CIA favored lab leak. Upper management was also listening to a bunch of expert scientists listed by Anthony Fauci. According to the whistleblower, upper management overrode the analysts to make a non-call on origins. Later, under new management (Ratcliffe), on no new information, they changed it to an assessment favoring lab leak.
Erdman faults the IC for not doing what open source sleuths were doing i.e. piece together sparse data to make inferences. He believes that they were doing a better job than the IC. His reddit post features a host of disparate theories, with some clearly inspired by Steven Quay. https://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/ni98ax/questions_you_should_ask_about_covid_19/
It's bad news for those like @bens and others who think that there exists secret and unfalsifiable IC evidence that can prove their case.
But most interestingly, he gives a timeline that appears to be based on all of the internal emails that he has had access to as a member of the DIG. In the timeline he states "Credible reporting does indicate that the pandemic may have begun in November 2019 in Wuhan, China and was the product of a lab incident."
This is also the start date for where scientific consensus on origins lies. It is fatal to lab leak which proposes cryptic undetected transmission for several months leading to the establishment of two lineages, the market being a superspreading location. Hence the suspicion based on the purported September database shutdown etc. A November timeline would however require two lab leaks of different lineages that would also have to survive the 4% combined odds of successfully establishing, and subsequent transport to the market without any sign of being detected elsewhere in Wuhan.
@BW Elsewhere Washburne who spent some time in the govt claims that he has had access to non-public information, chatted with the MI6 director etc. One of the claims he makes is that Biden and Blinken collaborated with Xi to shut down the disclosures required under the Covid origins act and berates the author for talking about conspiracies. https://open.substack.com/pub/drbobmorris/p/how-to-build-a-conspiracy-theory?r=g2g7h&utm_campaign=comment-list-share-cta&utm_medium=web&comments=true&commentId=257563246
Erdman's first gateway drug to COVID-19 origins conspiracy theories was the silliness from Sørensen and Dalgleish (which is in the SARS2-engineered-from-HIV genre of conspiracy theories). Quay was next, which is why Erdman was all about Orf8 ("the diabolical gene" per Quay) in his testimony.
Erdman even interviewed Quay for his podcast back in November 2023. It appears to be very likely that Erdman is the same person who was the whistleblower to the House select subcommittee in September 2023. It's unlikely Erdman had any relevant information to report at the time. He's said on multiple other occasions that he was unemployed circa late 2022 and beyond. His report now only discusses things he learned via work for Gabbard's investigation. If that's the case, Senators Paul and Johnson were very nice to give Erdman the opportunity to walk back false statements about bribes to analysts and Fauci secretly visiting the CIA.
Oh, and Erdman and his organization also settled a case with DOJ last year with an undisclosed windfall to benefit the organization (Feds For Medical Freedom v Biden). This was a case that was going nowhere since the federal vaccine mandate had long ended.
But no one's going to say this is some sort of conspiracy in which Trump's DOJ pays off Erdman in exchange for Erdman testifying to vague misdeeds at CIA under Biden. Because all it is is a dumb waste of money by an incompetent government and has nothing to do with how the pandemic started.
Forget COVID origins, what about Hantavirus origins?!
@bens Conspiracy theorists' heads are spinning now deciding between focusing on:
CIA whistleblower who in reality revealed that access of Gabbard's team to all of the intel community's reports failed to find any cover up. He did find that there was consensus in the intel community against some specifics of various popular COVID origins conspiracy theories (ie origin in November rules out September database blah blah blah), but of course people just ignore that. The fact that he revealed nothing about suppressed analysis and/or evidence is proven by the fact that everyone's focused on a bullet point in his testimony that says Fauci did something "intentionally" on the other side of the world.
Hantavirus outbreak origins
Ebola outbreak origins (they'll get around to it if they haven't yet; surely it'll be unusual in some way that can be said to be suspicious)
The conspiracy behind firing Tracy Beth Høeg and Marty Makary. Apparently it's impossible to realize two people simply had zero aptitude for the jobs they were given and did bad jobs, irrespective of what the administration's priorities are.
@MachiNi I left out African Swine Fever Virus that also came up again today as a possible recent lab leak.
@MachiNi not until they started impacting domestic policy and international relations. It’s fascinating how stuff that’s obviously false is impacting the real world.
Take Robert Kadlec. He thinks SARS-CoV-2 was a bioweapon. He’s assistant secretary of defense in charge of policy for a portfolio combining nuclear, chemical, and bio defense.
Unsurprisingly since USA doesn’t have offensive chemical and bio weapons capabilities, creating this position led to the mission creep to be able to credibly threaten to use nuclear deterrence to respond to non-nuclear unconventional attacks. This requires being able to attribute the attacks (also a challenge for some nuclear scenarios).
The guy in charge of this wants a system that would’ve determined SARS2 was a bioweapon! Albeit, not one intentionally deployed so probably no nuclear response, in that instance.
So, having the entirety of the US government and many other governments bewildered by conspiracy theories because it’s politically problematic to loudly call bullshit increases the likelihood of dumb responses to future rare events. Even aliens are taken too seriously because it’s a pet issue for a couple folks in Congress. But perhaps that’s a net positive for libertarians who think there’s a negative opportunity cost to government spending time on real things 😂
Not sure exactly why this situation exists; some parallels with 2002/3 but also different in many ways.
I don’t have as much insight into China, but perhaps it’s not so different there. Their white paper on COVID origins is quite similar to the Covid dot gov page. Answering the origins question isn’t a huge deal; I’m concerned with this irrationality coming up again the next time there’s a similar question.
Anyone have a guess at who Rand Paul's whistleblower will be at the hearing tomorrow? Check out his posts on X on his two accounts the last few days if you want to see some potential hints.
If someone wants to make a separate market about whether or not the whistleblower will offer evidence that objectively increases support for a laboratory origin of COVID-19, I might bet on that.
The hearing should be shown live here tomorrow: https://www.congress.gov/event/119th-congress/senate-event/338388
@zcoli https://nypost.com/2026/05/12/us-news/rand-paul-says-cia-whistleblower-will-allege-ongoing-deep-state-coverup-of-covid-origins-at-public-hearing/
This story has the most details I've seen so far. They don't exactly match the details Paul gave in a different interview I saw, but that's to be expected given this is all quite likely to be as factual as David Grusch's testimony was. Not sure if other dimensions will be invoked to explain the absence of evidence to back allegations this time around, though.
Very willing to eat my words if the guy shows up with evidence that the CIA suppressed actual evidence of a lab leak. But I figure it's the same guy who previously blew the whistle about Fauci's secret trips to Langley and the CIA paying off analysts to conclude natural origins. Those were never substantiated even though some in Congress took them seriously enough to investigate.
@MachiNi someone duping Paul with a whistleblower disclosure that can be read in one of two ways but is guaranteed to be read one way by conspiracy theorists in order to testify before the committee makes for a nice fiction to think about though.
Did anyone read Matt Ridley's paper that he says is too hot for peer review?
Is this really the best argument that lab leak advocates can come up with? It appears to have won approval from all of the lab leak advocates, so I guess so. But, does Ridley know what he's talking about?
Let's take Reference 33, for example, which Ridley uses as evidence that phylogenetic analysis dates the first infection to "the end of September—beginning of October."
First, it's weird he doesn't just read from the abstract which says they "estimate the time of SARS-CoV-2 zoonotic spillover between August and early October 2019." He picks a subset of the analysis in second.
More importantly, the analysis is very, very obviously invalid. Let's just take a look at the first time in the paper that one of those estimates (August 2019) pops up and see the corresponding figure (Figure 3A):
In case you are unaware, the "13" in RaTG13 stands for 2013, the time it was sampled.
In this figure, the authors show that they estimate that the time the common ancestor of RaTG13 and SARS-CoV-2 was around was in 2019. "Lab leak or not?" is a somewhat important question, but Ridley is missing the even bigger time travel story here!
I didn't read the whole thing but digging into a random citation I see an immediate error:
This is underlined by the fact that the WIV’s bat and rodent pathogen database, with a password-protected section for unpublished viruses, was made inaccessible to outside access on 12 September 2019[63], prior to the outbreak, and has never been accessible since.
Cite 63 is https://www.help.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/report_an_analysis_of_the_origins_of_covid-19_102722.pdf
Which actually says:
On September 12, 2019 between the hours of 2:00 and 3:00 a.m. local time,166 the WIV took down its online depository of data on viral sequences called the Wildlife-Borne Viral Pathogen Database.167 The database was intermittently accessible from December 2019 to February 2020, before being permanently taken offline February 2020.
This error is, "no doubt", accidental.
@draaglom yeah I’m not intending one example to be exhaustive.
The one and only figure in the paper being a screenshot complete with capturing a blinking cursor and some red squigglies for spell check speaks for itself.
Ridley says it went out for peer review — amazing it didn’t get desk rejected.
A funny thing about the databases (there are many databases in the conspiracy theory) is that lab leak people don’t notice when most of them went online again years ago.