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
3.00Pre-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.
Latinne et al's 2020 Nature paper has just been retracted due to data errors. 41 bat CoV sequences from Laos were "erroneously" included according to the authors.
@MikePa67d A bit of sloppiness with data makes a successful lab leak coverup less likely.
@George Yuri’s high-stakes debate on Covid’s origins 3:42 Pros and cons of Covid vaccines 10:04 Do Covid “coincidences” point to a lab leak? 21:55 Does the pattern of Covid’s initial spread suggest zoonotic origin? 27:51 Why the Wuhan market may have amplified Covid’s spread 38:59 Covid’s lineages A and B 53:29 US-China collaboration in the Wuhan lab’s virology research
@George The first couple minutes of whatever this is covers how he had nothing at stake in the debate — not even his reputation as having any expertise in the eyes of this interviewer — and how he lost the debate very badly.
@George actually not worth the listen. I think Wright is a terrible interviewer and the second half is behind a paywall.
@zcoli probably about as many as there are papers by Andersen and co claiming lab origin is implausible or there is "dispositive" evidence it came from the market which turn out to be utter bullshit.
@MikePa67d Do you have more anecdotes from fabulist intel officers that you haven’t shared yet that you based opinions on about what it and isn’t bullshit?
@MikePa67d Maybe Kash Patel will write another illustrated children’s book about how Tony Fauci secretly visited CIA headquarters in the middle of the night. Valuable evidence.