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.
Related questions
Further details of 2018 WIV thesis, titled 'Evolutionary Mechanism of Adaptation of Bat SARS-like Coronaviruses to Host Receptor Molecules'
Key Findings: WIV is holding back 5 bat ACE2 sequences from Yunnan — 3 likely from Mojiang and 2 from Chuxiong. https://x.com/TheSeeker268/status/1805984637359206556?t=6N_KPsXdE5-o64XR9tow4g&s=19
I like how that thread says it's really important that these are Rhinolophus pusillus bats and then if you search for that species name almost none of the lab leak people have talked about it in the last 4 years:
https://x.com/search?q=rhinolophus%20pusillus&src=recent_search_click&f=live
That's kind of like when y'all made up Ben Hu's name as patient zero and everyone said, "yeah, I thought it was him" but you could go back and no one had actually said that.
It also appears that picking that bat species as the important one demolishes the talking point that there are "no relevant bats in Hubei":
https://x.com/Ticklicker56/status/1697758579313295785
Though maybe I shouldn't quote ticklicker because he contradicted himself in another thread, where he insisted only one relevant bat species lives in Hubei:
https://x.com/Ticklicker56/status/1753562394943426822
Am I reading this right that the scandal is “Holding back” Ace2 sequences that are presumably identical to other available Ace2 sequences and “not reporting” a March 2016 sampling trip when other samples from the trip were published to GenBank with March 2016 collection date and Yunnan metadata long ago?
Newsflash — not all data is published in journals, publication in theses is also publication, and publication often ends at that point. It’s not a sign of a cover up just because you’re told something is on the internet in Chinese and not English and you didn’t know about it.
Anthony Fauci's Inner Circle Initially Thought COVID Came From a Lab
Sen. Rand Paul explains why FOIA litigation shouldn’t have been necessary to find this out.
RAND PAUL | 6.18.2024 6:15 PM
So in other words they didn’t suspect they had anything to cover up, took the idea seriously, and quickly rejected it for being supported by nothing but the Wuhan coincidence, which was the right thing to do at the time and should not have taken long to do. Subsequently proven right over and over as evidence came in.
Pentagon watchdog doesn’t know how much overseas gain-of-function research is done with US funds — despite $1.4B spent: report
Scientific expert declares there is ‘zero’ evidence for natural COVID-19 origin
Yup @Bayesian — same goes for anyone with phony Bayesian analysis where every factor considered points nowhere or in the same direction. Some things will always point in the wrong direction by chance, such as the coincidence that a pandemic started in Wuhan.
https://youtu.be/vtfIIG8iYIk?si=5FPUWYcIbpkXmqiW&t=1111
Jeffrey Sachs: Lessons from the COVID Commission, Lab Leak Questions, and Nord Stream — #21
The funny thing most people don't know about Jeffrey Sachs is that he's a shill for China. Like, he denies the Uighur genocide:
He also says that US politicians should not visit Taiwan.
He's also criticized the "war on Huawei".
He holds an advisory position at a Chinese university:
And, for some reason, he blames the pandemic on "US biotechnology". Notice how his particular brand of lab leak always comes back to specifically blaming US scientists.
Like, shouldn't his article be, "what might China owe the world for Covid-19?"
He's worked with some other foreign governments, too, like he took millions of dollars from the UAE to whitewash their human rights record.
And he's pretty consistent at blaming America for everything, like NATO is of course to blame for the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
It's been a while since I heard that interview with Steve Hsu, but I recall that he also blamed Nordstream bombing on the US (possible, but not proven). Didn't he even say something about the government killing JFK?
Is China threatened by the things that Sachs is saying? Of course not, they've featured him in Chinese papers:
https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202108/1230758.shtm
Not the first time he's been in that paper. Apparently he's been referenced 52 times in that paper and 179 times in the China Daily, another Chinese propaganda outlet.
Sachs blames US biotechnology in the sense it was techniques developed by scientists in the US (Baric in particular) that were passed on to scientists in Wuhan. His focus does seem to be on getting the US to share more records. He was clearly frustrated with what he saw as obfuscation in his time chairing the Lancet COVID-19 Commission. He also formed the impression Daszak wasn't trustworthy (although I think Daszak ultimately doesn't know either way).
@PeterMillerc030 He's a shill for China but he thinks sarscov2 leaked from a Chinese lab? You may want to step up your game as people might figure out you're a fraud too. (speaking from experience)
Deleted duplicate comment.
Reasonable essay by Chan. Part 4 addressing the short-comings of the arguments for Huanan Seafood Market origin are particularly good.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/06/03/opinion/covid-lab-leak.html
If the SARS outbreak trajectory occurred today totally unchanged except that the wildlife crackdown was as strong and durable as that in early 2020 preventing additional spillovers, evidence for zoonotic source of first human infections would be weaker than for SARS2 and people would have the same lab leak story today. Even if the 2003/2004 wave weren’t avoided, people would say “well one of the restaurant cases was a doctor — what are the odds of that? Bayes says he brought the virus in from someone infected in the hospital that wasn’t diagnosed or had diagnosis covered up.”