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.
1,000
3.00
@George I often observe someone posting something pointing in the direction of lab leak, followed by this market dropping.
Confusing.
@bbb How does Matt Ridley publishing the same article for the Nth time point in the direction of lab leak?
The article's not even accurate by the way -- the ProMED post wasn't some terse and cryptic description of the buzz on Chinese social media. It was copy+paste of an article from a major Chinese media company: https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/kleelerner/files/20191230_promed_-_undiagnosed_pneumonia_-_china_hu-_rfi_archive_number-_20191230.6864153.pdf
The story was also reported in English in that obscure outlet Reuters on 31/December/2019 -- https://www.reuters.com/article/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/chinese-officials-investigate-cause-of-pneumonia-outbreak-in-wuhan-idUSKBN1YZ0GO/
But Ridley writes as if it was some stroke-of-midnight revelation:
At one minute to midnight, US East Coast time, on the last day of 2019, there was a brief ‘request for information’ on ProMED-mail
At some point it becomes hard to believe a guy when he needs to invent drama to make his story more engaging.
Has Ridley correct the lie he told when he appeared on Sam Harris' podcast with Alina Chan yet? He said that Zhengli Shi's lab at WIV had the 8 closest viruses closest to SARS-CoV-2 prior to the pandemic. This is something he should've known to be a lie (it's in their book!) for a year or two at that point.
@MalachiteEagle Statements like this from WHO over the past few years are both right and also would carry more weight if they’d do anything with the data that’s available.
@zcoli https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UlCYFh8U2xM
It definitely seems that China successfully influenced the WHO to the point where individual experts felt the need to say only positive things about China. Maybe they saw other colleagues be retaliated against successfully in ways that damaged their careers if they said anything critical?
It's encouraging that the WHO can make these statements now, at least it shows some progress. Think the rot and poison of Chinese influence still goes deep within that institution though, and they might never really recover from these mistakes.
@MalachiteEagle imo the 2020-2021 era of compromising to put dumb stuff in reports (eg saying no live mammals were in HSM in WHO origins report when they were on the local news in HSM on 31/Dec/2019) in exchange for more data was way more productive than the 2022-2024 era of vaguely demanding more data without acknowledging or using the data that was published.
@zcoli I guess at this point the WHO is optimising for its survival first, and it is not optimising for the truth in any meaningful sense
Conclusion of a thread by a wildlife biologist on the implausibility any of the wildlife sold at Huanan Seafood Market was the host of SARS-CoV-2.
https://x.com/Ticklicker56/status/1872732936442675518?t=oBVrIJp-M7v-NwrVfYDhOA&s=19
Behind closed doors: The spy world scientists who argued covid was a lab leak. The WSJ article for free.
@George Here’s the story from Shari Markson that Gordon and Strobel ripped off: http://archive.today/PrweW
They did this before with an article from The Public. Taking out some details that make it more obviously a disproven conspiracy theory and acting like old news is a scoop. Adding some new errors along the way because apparently neither these reporters nor their editors think the idea that a lab accident pandemic shut the world down is worth asking someone vaguely qualified to fact check.
This is big news for anyone leaning on “the FBI concluded lab leak” as evidence: https://www.wsj.com/politics/national-security/fbi-covid-19-pandemic-lab-leak-theory-dfbd8a51
The story focuses on a retired FBI agent and a lab leak theory that was definitively disproven in 2021 when BANAL-20-52 and related bat virus genomes were published. If that’s the FBI’s theory, it’s wrong.
@zcoli not really. Whether the nearest known relative comes from Yunnan or Laos they are both locations WIV was looking to sample with EcoHealth. They don't outline the full rationale for the FBI position which was apparently informed by over 200 interviews of more than 80 people since the beginning of the pandemic.
https://nypost.com/2024/12/26/us-news/spy-bosses-silenced-defense-department-fbi-scientists-from-briefing-biden-on-covid-lab-leak-evidence/
@MikePa67d The theory is that SARS2 was a chimeric virus consisting of a bat virus backbone similar to RaTG13 and a synthetic spike receptor binding domain based on the recently published pangolin virus data (but with different codon usage).
This is a specific theory. It was definitively disproven by BANAL-20-52 and other sampled bat viruses. WIV was not involved in that work. This was a favored early lab leak theory. It was the theory that Rootclaim favored! Now we know that this was the theory favored by the FBI thanks to this story.
The fact that people stuck with the same conclusion even after their theory was disproven and engineered another vague hypothesis of how it happened does not help your case for a lab leak. It shows that it’s trivial to come up with a hand waving lab leak mechanism. Every time one is disproven, it’s simple to reach into the bag and grab another. You’ve promoted the BsmBI/BsaI nonsense here before iirc?
Conversely, there’s a narrow family of zoonotic theories: a virus in the wildlife trading network spilled over at Huanan market (doesn’t rule out other difficult to distinguish spillovers elsewhere). That’s it — that’s the theory — it’s been unchanged since a random person in Wuhan proposed it on Weibo at the end of 2019. It’s been supported by every bit of data that’s emerged since then.
Pre-pandemic artificial MERS analog of polyfunctional SARS-CoV-2 S1/S2 furin cleavage site domain is unique among spike proteins of genus Betacoronavirus:
"Collectively, these data suggest that, within genus Betacoronavirus, MERS-MA30 S1/S2 spike—a year 2017 or earlier product of directed adaptation and rational selection in an artificial (i.e., genetically engineered) mouse host—is the only instance of a complete pat7/FCS/O-glycosite composite motif fully analogous to the S1/S2 polyfunctional spike sequence domain of SARS-CoV-2."
https://bmcgenomdata.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12863-024-01290-2
@George Given some time to rebut the other's presentation, Alina Chan argues that lineage A in Huanan Market doesn't count because of something about a cruise ship and because maybe a glove came from outside the market (hint: look up pictures of workers in similar stalls in similar markets, you'll find lots of gloves). She also notes that the market is the size of 10 NFL fields (not right, but whatever) and has an upstairs. She goes on to talk about the number of cats per day eaten in Guangdong Province in 2003. That's a small slice of her reply.
Andy Dobson, who made the case for natural origins: "Again, I think I made my case. I don't hear anything that goes against it."
@zcoli I think nutpicking is not really conducive to determining the likelihood of each of the two hypotheses here
@benshindel Alina Chan presented her NYT opinion article. It's mainstream lab leak theory. If anyone has an alternative, they can post it here.
@zcoli how many A samples did they find in the market? I thought that and the fact the early market linked cases were all lineage B was a reason why they went to such lengths to come up with the multiple spillover theory which has since been shown to be flawed on PubPeer and is inconsistent with other analyses (Lv et al, 2024, Caraballo-Ortiz 2022, Bloom 2021).
The grand conclusion of this YouTube video is a conspiracy theory about a plot to cover up the cause of the pandemic on the other side of the world.
That nullifies the circumstantial Wuhan location evidence, which is the only evidence supporting lab leak. Not a great way to wrap up an argument to anyone paying attention.
@MikePa67d Let’s take Bloom 2021 as an example from your list. Can you describe what analysis in the paper supports a single spillover? I’ll save you the trouble: there is none.
There is just this paragraph:
Another explanation that I consider less plausible is offered by Garry (2021): that there were multiple zoonoses from distinct markets, with the Huanan Seafood Market being the source of viruses in clade B, and some other market being the source of viruses that lack T8782C and C28144T (fig. 3). However, this explanation requires positing zoonoses in two markets by two progenitors differing by just two mutations, which seems nonparsimonious in the absence of direct evidence for zoonosis in any market.
No analysis. Just the assumption that a zoonotic reservoir giving more than one spillover must have sufficient sequence divergence to have more distinct spillovers. Zero analysis supporting this opinion here or in the other two papers you reference.
@zcoli not sure how asking what Holmes and co are talking about here (has anyone asked Holmes?) impacts circumstantial location evidence or other evidence.
Also on the number of lineage A samples: one in four high coverage environmental samples in Huanan Market are lineage A. Indistinguishable from the fraction of early human cases in lineage A.
Prior to that sample being found (and also another sample with a lineage A read btw), the absence of lineage A in Huanan market was a hugely significant piece of evidence in lab leak theory.
After the sequence was published, it became something to debunk or handwave out of existence.
The RaTG15 sequences are similar in this respect. So is retrospective serological evidence from Wuhan. So is Tony Fauci being forced to testify to congress about the imaginary coverup. And so on. This is how conspiracy theories work — demand evidence and then pretend it doesn’t exist when it doesn’t help your theory.
@MikePa67d Spending an hour or whatever on a Wuhan specific argument and then throwing it out and making it clear the video would support a lab leak anywhere because of all of the evidence we’d know about it Fauci and Farrar weren’t covering it up.
Similar to the vaccine timing conspiracy theory that would’ve applied to an outbreak anywhere in China. It undercuts the only piece of evidence there is to add evidence that would apply anywhere. It invites people to ask if Wuhan is actually as singularly suspicious as folks say — it’s not.
@zcoli I missed Kumar et al (2021) which also suggests single spillover. Informally, Francois Balloux and Virginie Courtier-Orgogozo have suggested the fact lineage A and B are only two mutations apart suggests multiple spillover was unlikely.
The multiple theory is advanced by
Pekar et al (2022), but as I said above appears to be based on a flawed analysis. The same person who discovered the first ones which prompted an erratum, now suggests the Bayes factor favors single spillover after further corrections.
You can see the comments which have not been addressed here: NizzaNeela (Pseudonym). Pubpeer comment on: The molecular epidemiology of multiple zoonotic origins of SARS-CoV-2, Pekar et al. 2022 Aug 26 [cited 2024 Aug 16]; Available from:
https://pubpeer.com/publications/3FB983CC74C0A93394568A373167CE#15
@MikePa67d Ok now you’ve added three sources, none who have published any analysis supporting a single spillover. Who has?
@zcoli btw on the joint likelihood analysis I haven’t looked into it deeply enough to say exactly what is or isn’t wrong about it. It seems more valuable for someone to do it right if they’ve got a problem with what was done before than to complain for years about someone else’s analysis choices.
FWIW, I think that one flaw from my POV is analyzing the probability that two clades are observed with 30-70% of sequences each, leaving room for up to 40% of sequences being something else. The actual observation was ~0% of sequences outside those clades. But no one’s complaining on pubpeer about the overly conservative bits of the calculation. Only concerned about things if they go in one direction.
@zcoli I missed Kumar et al (2021) which also suggests single spillover.
So I went back to check the paper -- https://academic.oup.com/mbe/article/38/8/3046/6257226 -- and, no, it doesn't discuss this at all.
It simply assumes the existence of "the index case or gave rise to all the human infections" (from the abstract and stated similarly elsewhere).
So to summarize your list of analyses supporting a single spillover:
Kumar et al 2021 does not discuss this and concludes lineage A plus C18060T is the progenitor genome. Ditto for Caraballo-Ortiz et al 2022.
Bloom 2021 gives a reason for the assumption (only 2 mutations) and mostly supports A+C29095T as the ancestral genome. Lv et al 2024 has a long paragraph making the same argument (human viruses are not very different from a shared ancestor); also most strongly supports A+C29095T as the ancestor genome.
Virginie Courtier-Orgogozo and Francois Balloux said something, somewhere, once.
It's a very difficult problem and any analytical approach will be full of approximations of parameters that are impossible to specify with any certainty. It's easy to poke holes in one set of approximations for one estimate. It's apparently very hard to do a better job of it, because it's been almost 3 years and I don't know of any alternatives to the Pekar et al analysis.