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.
1,000Richard Ebright discusses what he considers the lab leak smoking gun after around 40:00 in this interview at length: https://youtu.be/py2TPi6VijM?si=qjXkD5_gRKMMwTSS
Pretty fair to call that the consensus synthetic lab leak theory at this point unless someone has an alternative to offer. Notably, the specific thing he’s called a “smoking gun” has been falsified — the “BsmBI” sites he talks about are unambiguously natural.
@zcoli Ebright says they proposed to insert a cleavage site at the S1/S2 site which the DEFUSE proposal does not. What do you think is the significance of DEFUSE saying S2 but not S1/S2. Haven't read the drafts. But even in Emily Kopp's article, the description is that there is a figure which shows the S1/S2 site and that the spike can be cleaved at the S1/S2 site. But not that there was a proposal to insert an FCS at the S1/S2 site. https://usrtk.org/covid-19-origins/scientists-proposed-making-viruses-with-unique-features-of-sars-cov-2-in-wuhan/
@BW The papers DEFUSE cites talk about S1/S2 and S2’ both. Obviously they’d look for natural FCS around both locations. Whoever put the figure together that’s shown when Ebright talks about the proposal being “to the amino acid” specific made some embarrassing mistakes annotating a figure borrowed from someone else’s paper, though. Probably Ebright doesn’t know about that.
You don’t need to read DEFUSE to know this would be an area of interest for the labs involved, though.
Even in the most absurd reading of DEFUSE that’s somewhat defensible (but still not correct), a project finding RaTG13 would’ve made a single point mutation that makes a better predicted cleavage site than the one in SARS2. A different project considering inserts would’ve perhaps inserted the MERS sequence given other homology.
@zcoli To finish up that last point: literally no one has made a rational argument proposing a plausible mechanism by which an engineer would choose to insert PRRA. There have been three irrational arguments that all have used lies to trick people:
The insert is found in HIV (Jan 2020 preprint and also Boris Johnson’s favored lab leak theory). It’s from a single HIV patient in a highly variable region; not characteristic of HIV in general.
It’s found in feline coronavirus. Once again, in a single cat, and also in a non-functional furin cleavage sequence. There’s also a related sequence out there but I don’t think any lab leaker has found it because they only look where they expect to find conspiracies.
It’s found in a Moderna patent. This was shown to be a cherry picking exercise. The authors of paper also obviously read about it on Twitter or similar and fabricated a story about finding it with a single Blast search.
Three different silly season theories proves how easy it is to tell a silly story about a short sequence if you can cherry pick from all of published sequences.
Does anyone have a story that’s not silly? The story based on DEFUSE is that S1/S2 cleavage sites were one of several things that would be looked for in sequencing from samples of bat viruses. That’s a perfectly fine theory; just please quit it with how impossible it is for the sequence to be natural (Ebright’s claim) if that’s your theory.
@zcoli To clarify, I suppose you are referring to this claim for the FIPV? https://x.com/ydeigin/status/1783165361191330018
Further, FCS introductions and other spike gene modifications in DEFUSE were described for chimeric constructions on existing backbones. Those that had spillover potential were to be compared with naturally occurring full-length genomes that would then be synthetically constructed. There is no description in the proposal of modifying these full-length genomes with novel backbones. While there is nothing in the text forbidding the modification of full-length genomes, the workflow is heavily and explicitly tilted towards modifications only on the chimeras in existing backbones. In the absence of certainty, the parts of SARS2 that overlap with DEFUSE more resemble human capability to pattern match and hallucinate.
https://zenodo.org/records/15083349
The Illusion of Biosafety During SARS-CoV-2 Research: Multiple Apparent Occult Lab-Acquired Infections Are Identified Under BSL-3 Conditions Adjacent to a Premier US-based Coronavirus Laboratory
https://x.com/stevenemassey/status/1904619032151810403?s=61&t=Haq8F5rHkNHGokTmpYVUsQ
Massey gives a summary here.
@George The creative writing exercises from Massey et al are pretty boring. If I were so interested and also willing to publish GISAID data in violation of the user agreement like they do, I could come up with a way more compelling BS lab leak theory from the same angle. It took me about a minute to find one that would blow these guys’ minds.
It’s quite easy when you have millions of sequences to cherry pick from and don’t mind accusing scientists of serious mistakes without considering technical rather than biological explanations e.g. cross contamination with a positive control.
@PeterMillerc030 The Paris Group on lab leaks invited Hideki Kakeya to present his theory that there have been countless Omicron outbreaks in USA — both the initial BA.1 wave and later BA.2 waves and probably another one; I forget the details; there are preprints.
It’s all a bunch of noise because genome sequencing isn’t perfect. This is especially true for sequencing in the USA from Ginkgo Bioworks, unfortunately. There’s an infinity of conspiracy theories you can come up with just from sequences they’ve published. This isn’t to say the data is worthless; just that it needs to be analyzed with an appropriate error model, and the error model from the lab leak brain trust is that errors are exclusively explained by lab leaks, because data is perfect.
See also: Antarctica microbiome sequencing conspiracy theory.
@zcoli There was one lab leak of SARS-CoV-2 in Taiwan, a researcher bitten by a mouse. You'd have to wonder if there have been more than that.
But even if there were, it begs the question of what the odds are. There have now been thousands of experiments done with the virus, with 1 accident? or possibly a few accidents?
Rootclaim thought it was 50% likely that creating a virus at WIV would infect the researcher. That seems inconsistent with the track record of every other place in the world. It's kind of hard for me to believe that WIV was orders of magnitude less safe than every other lab in the world, while simultaneously being much more competent than everyone else at creating novel pandemic worthy viruses.
EXCLUSIVEBoris Johnson is convinced that Covid WAS made in a Chinese lab: In his explosive memoir, former PM rejects theory it started in Wuhan market and says it's likely the virus WAS result of a 'botched experiment'
@GraemeStuart What does the guy who lies about vaccines to make money on youtube and donates a small bit of the profit so that he can sleep at night have to say?
@zcoli
oh -- I see he gets his lies about vaccines and his lies about pandemic origins from the same source (Dalgleish is part of the nutty group with the kinda racist and very false lab leak theory that was in the news last week).
@zcoli also, why throw such weak and purely ad hominem arguments back? I don't understand how that is helping anyone.
@GraemeStuart Sorry to be the one to break the news if you’ve been duped by either of those people. I’m confident if you can figure out their lies on your own if you care to do it.
@zcoli erm... Are you going to argue your position or not? Seems like empty argumentation to me. What exactly is your position and why do you hold it? Please send links to your evidence so I can learn more.
@GraemeStuart If you’re this deep down the do your own research rabbit hole, you should try doing some. Start with literally any claim either of them make and see where it goes.