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.
New paper out on the environmental samples taken at Huanan market (i.e. the raccoon dog DNA evidence):
https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(24)00901-2
Twitter thread from Angie Rasmussen, summarizing the findings:
https://x.com/angie_rasmussen/status/1836863854594179094
Twitter thread I wrote describing some of the history of this data and the arguments around it:
https://x.com/tgof137/status/1836601755809067152
https://reason.com/2024/09/14/faucis-pandemic/
Should We Blame Fauci for the COVID Pandemic?
America's COVID celebrity is facing scrutiny for funding risky research that may have sparked the pandemic—and for allegedly covering it up.
CHRISTIAN BRITSCHGI | FROM THE OCTOBER 2024 ISSUE
@bbb Let's see... the Reason article provides no new evidence but they drew Fauci as a clown, so that's a super compelling argument:
I'm sure they tried to get that Fauci clown drawing peer reviewed, but the top journals are all just too corrupt to publish scientific arguments like that one.
The Reason article also claims that covid is a deadly bio-engineered virus created by Fauci, but then complains that Fauci advocated for lockdowns and we should have all just caught covid.
"Biosafety Now" is playing the same game, now that they've added Jay Bhattacharya to the group.
https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/great-barrington-declaration-author-joins-covid-19-lab-leak-pushing-group/
Now they can simultaneously complain that "scientists killed 20 million people" and "scientists should have just let more people die from covid".
@bbb What's the evidentiary value of someone who happened to get rich (once the settlement was sorted) in the dot com bubble?
@George Again with something that isn't evidence supporting that SARS-CoV-2 is a lab leak. It's almost as if you lack any evidence of this.
Is the point that it says "WIV" ? What are these people at WIV who aren't Zhengli Shi guilty of, exactly? As far as I can tell, the only fault is lacking a time machine to be able to find a better match in a sequence published in 2024.
And to the extent it suggests a "lab leak," which is not certain at all, it's the expected type of "lab leak" of an attenuated strain commonly used in labs and to produce vaccines.
@zcoli My understanding of this one is that it is a leak of a live strain from a production facility before it was properly attenuated, which should never happen. So not insignificant, in that it shows that BSL3 facilities in China do leak (and CoV research was being done at BSL2). The WIV connection of course is a geographical coincidence, since that is presumably just the nearest location where the viral genome could be sequenced.
@brp From what I understand about vaccines available and in trial in China at the time, the vaccine connection would've been to imported vaccines. There's also the relatively boring explanation of leak from one culture dish to another during passage of an attenuated strain in a virology lab. Obviously still concerning but not evidence supporting a SARS2 lab leak.
@George Like Rootclaim occasionall screws up, just reading the abstract this is confusing the time a virus is detected with the time a virus first infected humans.
@IsaacKing Has your opinion changed after many, many months of attempts to offer evidence in this discussion in favor of lab leak section being nothing but irrelevant conspiracy theories? If I’ve missed something that’s an exception please let me know.
If you missed it below, I recently learned from Dali Yang’s book (and verified in other source) that Zhongnan hospital got the alert to look for suspicious pneumonia cases. They found two. Not only looking for market-linked patients. Both patients happened to be linked to Huanan market. Zhongnan hospital is something like 1 km from WIV and a dozen km (and one river) from Huanan market.
I also recently learned that a fairly large sample of Zhongnan hospital patients were tested to determine if their sample was lineage A or lineage B. 91% were lineage B. Just like the earliest sequencing focused on Huanan market patients.
Every time I learn about new data the Huanan market bias looks more and more like a bias towards the correctly identified epicenter of the pandemic.
What’s a rant from an incredibly unhinged and unethical psychiatrist or something supposed to prove?
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22571733
Galileo's Middle Finger: Heretics, Activists, and the Search for Justice in Science
How the science sausage is made. 👍👍
https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB61/
U.S. INTELLIGENCE ON THE DEADLIEST MODERN OUTBREAK
National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 61
Edited by Robert A. Wampler and Thomas S. Blanton
November 15, 2001
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/risa.14291.
Use of a risk assessment tool to determine the origin of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2