Here’s a thought experiment. Imagine you could stop time at the end of 2019 and do some research.

On Dec 31 2019 anyone in the world could’ve learned:

• Cluster of unexplained pneumonia cases linked to Huanan Market

• Credible rumors from doctors on social media that sequencing showed a SARS-like virus

• Social media rumors confirmed by news reports that Huanan Market housed a black market for the live mammal trade

• Live mammals mostly gone from Huanan Market by the afternoon of 31/December; one news report found one shop with unidentified mammals; other news reports noted a pile of dead animal parts (at the end of 6th street in the southwest corner of the market)

• One of the preeminent labs focused on bat viruses with human/livestock spillover potential and best known for work with SARS-like viruses was in Wuhan across town from Huanan Market

• The lab hosts foreign researchers in Wuhan and its projects are generally collaborations with other groups in China and around the world

• In addition to identifying bat viruses closely related to SARS, the lab also identified more distantly related SARS-like viruses

• The lab had grown some SARS-like viruses by passaging from samples and by reverse genetics in a system substituting spike using BsaI and BsmBI enzymes without retaining these sites in the chimeric genome

• Leadership at the lab’s institute had published articles discussing challenges constructing biosafety labs in China and advocated more effective biosafety regulation; international collaborations for biosafety training

• Novel, SARS-like virus recently reported in sick pangolins confiscated from traffickers in Guangdong province

• Novel, SARS-like virus recently reported in bats Zhejiang province, sequenced, and used in an animal infection experiment

What was knowable from information that wasn’t yet public (this doesn’t necessarily mean the dots had been connected in private):

• One nearly complete SARS2 genome had been sequenced and submitted by China CDC to US GenBank database

• Samples from late December patients had been split four ways and distributed to multiple labs in China to analyze in parallel

• Sequencing and other work in 2019 already involved government, university, and commercial laboratories

• Wuhan lab had sampled one virus that was, at the time, the one most closely related to SARS2

• Wuhan lab had eight other samples that were nearly identical to each other and very similar to SARS2 over a short sequence

• Pangolin virus found in Guangdong and bat virus found in Zhejiang were also two of the sequences most closely related to SARS2

• All three of these viruses shared common ancestry with SARS2, but none were plausible progenitors in a lab or in nature

• A survey had identified four public markets in Wuhan trading live, mammalian wildlife including species associated with SARS in 2003. Huanan Market was the largest. This was supported by earlier observations.

Imagine you knew all of that. Then answer these questions if you like:

1. On 31/Dec/2019, was a lab leak origin more likely than not?

2. Specifically, what was the strongest piece of evidence that supports a lab leak origin at that time? Please add to the list if I missed anything.

3. Specifically, what’s the strongest piece of evidence unknown in 2019 that supports a lab leak origin?

A lot of people have not voted here: https://manifold.markets/KeenenW/did-covid19-come-from-a-laboratory-8d38660948d1

@bbb It's so incredibly unlikely there would be a concrete conclusion by Jan 1st.

@LukeShadwell that's just a poll. No redolution required. Just aggregation of opinions.

@LukeShadwell How is it not concrete? Look at what passed for evidence of lab leak in this thread.

Ironically it’s primarily stuff that has nothing to do with Wuhan and undercuts the only evidence there is: the coincidence of starting in Wuhan.

@zcoli I can tell you with certainty it isn’t concrete by the fact that this market is at 48%

@LukeShadwell The person who decides this market is on the fence about Lyme disease as a lab leak, which certainly was not a lab leak.

@zcoli The resolution criteria of this market make me quite confident that it'll be resolved properly, never mind that evidently others have much more faith than I do having put 100s of thousands of mana in. It seems like you believe this market should be resolved as a NO, despite the fact that it's clearly controversial and there is not sufficient evidence. I wouldn't want you to be the one resolving this question much more than someone who is just "on the fence" about lyme disease

@LukeShadwell The first thing you’ll find searching for how old Lyme disease is an example thousands of years old.

As far as the mad scientist variations of lab leak theory go that you see here: I’m just as certain those didn’t happen as a lab leak over 5000 years ago, because both are impossible.

I’m less certain there wasn’t the boring kind of lab leak — investigating why an animal was sick followed by a very unlikely string of coincidences that give the observed evidence — but it’s 0% to very close to 0%.

There’s just no evidence other than a location coincidence that’s not nearly as strong as it seems (many equivalent coincidences could’ve happened) and, regardless, is trumped many times over by zoonosis evidence. It’s worth a thought experiment placing yourself in Dec 31 2019, considering all of the evidence then available, and trying to blind yourself to what comes next and making hypotheses that could be supported or not by data that might be published or not.

One thing you’ll find doing that is that all the “new” evidence about the type of work at WIV and about biosafety concerns at WIV isn’t new. You can read about it in papers that were already published at the time and it’s already baked into the location coincidence.

@zcoli I don't believe that Lyme Disease came from a lab, I also haven't looked into it at all aside from my general familiarity with it. However, coronavirus on the other hand I did look into quite deeply as soon as I heard about it, and I don't mean I read conspiracy twitter posts. I did look into everything I could grasp - at the time there were a few things that stood out to me, one (but not the only thing) being that by far the closest relative to COVID-19 at the time, from what I found on Wikipedia was a sample at Wuhan.

I'm sure this has changed now, but you asked me to put myself in the time, and I don't need to, at the time I had probably a 50% suspicion it came from the lab. Now, it's about the same for me, it could be either way and I accept that I personally don't know as much about the topic as a whole as some people do, but it's also true that likely no one outside of national intelligence has the full story. I mean that in both cases, even if all the evidence entirely pointed to zoonosis, the only people with 100% of the evidence would still be national intelligence.

I should still be betting on this market, my perspective will be different to others perspectives & in some ways experience can blind you. In most cases, it does not, experience is way more likely to lead to the correct conclusion but it doesn't always.

@LukeShadwell What specifically does “national intelligence” know that’s not public knowledge and would change your mind?

My one recent-ish memory of 100% certainty by “national intelligence” was that I was skeptical in 2002-3 that the certainty was actually supported by facts. I did not believe that there was significant private knowledge because of the degree of thin intel that had been leaked — it was insignificant information and burned sources for no reason. Very similar between April 2020 (when White House told reporters it had concluded “lab leak” with high confidence) and January 2021.

WIV once sampled a virus too distant from SARS2 to have anything to do with the pandemic (other than giving a hint where even more similar viruses would be found, which turned out to be the case). It was also so distant from SARS that they didn’t pay any attention to it until going through data after the pandemic started. This is all evidence against any sort of scenario where someone in Zheng-Li Shi’s lab is engineering something quite similar to RaTG13.

@zcoli By its very definition it wouldn’t be possible for me to know or say what intelligence services know.

Most all of the zoonosis theory is supported by evidence that ultimately comes from China after the virus began to break out. This is rebuffed by the zoonosis side, saying that it’s clear china was in disarray and wouldn’t have had time to falsify these things, but it’s impossible for you or I to know that, we know nothing about the level of sophistication of that machine. It really rests on this idea that espionage and counter espionage are in reality much more primitive than some give it credit for.

In my view it is impossible to say with any confidence that the Chinese authorities did not carefully orchestrate this. It is also impossible to say with certainty that they did. It’s well known that it’s basic espionage to give your opponent evidence that will arrive at a conclusion, rather than telling them what the conclusion is. If you remove this lens of Chinese authorities being more incompetent than we in the west give our own governments credit for, and imagine that it was a lab leak, that they knew that very quickly before releasing anything, and that they recognised how serious it would become, it becomes impossible to with complete certainty say that this was zoonosis. If you believe that there is some non zero probability of the Chinese recognising it this early and starting a campaign immediately, then you can’t believe that there is 100% probability it is not a lab leak.

@LukeShadwell Also, let’s say it’s not a lab leak - do you really believe the Chinese authorities would not be concerned at the potential risk that it is?

The idea that you can draw a line early on in the outbreak and say that china can’t have falsified any evidence before that point because they were in disarray doesn’t make any sense. If they were entirely lost, they would at least be in damage control to make sure at any cost the conclusion reached is not that it came from the lab. That’s irrespective of whether they actually knew. The bulk of the evidence is up to question in my view.

@LukeShadwell No I do not think the evidence from China that matters the most that we have is falsified. It was published in such a chaotic and often accidental way and it's not some sort of organized chaos to throw us off the scent when data is first published by the Epoch Times in one instance, for example.

Samples from early patients were split 4 ways and published chaotically. The first sequence was sent to a US database and was in such rough shape that it was automatically rejected in QC. Doctors were discussing the data as it came in on WeChat and some random person in a sequencing lab blogged about it. The market animal investigation was prompted by a random person on Weibo having a post go viral. Plenty of examples of information that was suppressed for one reason or another transiently until people in China were pissed, complained about it, and fixed it. Examples of managers at hospitals going against directions and correctly banking on asking for forgiveness rather than permission.

In short, China's not some monolithic place where you can imagine anything is possible because any evidence you can imagine might exist were it not covered up. This is especially true in the fog-of-war situation in late December 2019 and January 2020. This isn't to say there's not unpublished data that's relevant in China or that there's not published data that's at least a little bit wrong.

And you don't need to think at all about what's possible but possibly covered up in China to reject the engineering class of lab leak theories. They're all less plausible than two step lab leak theories structured as: (1) virus sampled from an animal, (2) oops.

@LukeShadwell

https://oversight.house.gov/release/covid-origins-part-2-hearing-wrap-up-intelligence-community-officials-provide-further-evidence-that-covid-19-originated-in-a-wuhan-lab/

@George This seems to say pretty much what I'm saying? Unless I haven't read deep enough

@zcoli I understand your points here but at the end of the day intelligence services do much more sophisticated things than this, they did much more sophisticated things 100 years ago that are now documented.

You don't have to imagine China is a monolithic place any more than you have to imagine the US or the UK is. China is more centrally controlled than those countries are, and this is exactly the type of thing that intelligence is made for. You also don't have to assume that china intentionally caused a leak or that there was a leak at all for it to be reasonable that Chinese intelligence would very quickly try to control the information stream and make sure nothing points to them.

Your comment is in my view somewhat self contradicting, because you are saying that China is not capable of controlling the flow of information but that at the same time they were controlling it. It's not anywhere near a conspiracy theory to say that it would be entirely within the normal operations of an intelligence service to purposefully release information that points to a certain conclusion in what is by design a convincing way.

There's the very well known example of Operation Mincemeat that is a decent proxy to argue with. Britain was completely preventing any information being released on military planning. But lo and behold, the Spanish (another layer of deception, being that the Spanish were neutral but German appeasing) found the body of a British Sailor in the sea, and on him they find correspondence detailing a fake plan for invasions from the Mediterranean. The Germans fully believe this because to them, it seems impossible that this would be the work of British intelligence. Of course the body was planted with those documents, and the conclusion of German intelligence was already decided, it was planned.

To say that modern intelligence agencies, not to mention intelligence agencies of one of the most centralised countries on the planet, would not be capable of this is ridiculous. I'm not saying and I have never said that any of this means that there was a lab leak, but what it does say is that the evidence that came from China cannot be deemed with certainty real, no matter how impossible it appears to people who have no intelligence background. These agencies exist to deceive.

The fact that on many occasions various US intelligence agencies have come out in favour of the lab leak hypothesis might also say something, but then of course you have to consider what it is they are trying to achieve by that too.

@zcoli If you want to convince me that I’m wrong about the potential of falsifying the data, tell me what theory the Chinese government was trying to push that was actually reasonable. If they genuinely were not trying to falsify this specific data, what did they put out that they seriously put effort into to try and deceive the scientific community? Just blocking evidence being released is not intelligence, it’s just censorship. It’s pretty certain that their intelligence agencies would’ve been doing something to shape the narrative to the one they wanted, so what was it? What I’ve read from the zoonosis side is that they supposedly didn’t ever really give a reasonable explanation, something about it coming in on a lobster from Maine, early on saying that it didn’t come from the market, whatever else.

To me that looks like them saying the virus came from sources that the combined released data conveniently disproves while also conveniently pointing at an explanation that they have explicitly said they don’t like, which makes it way more believable and gives the satisfaction of proving them wrong. From their perspective, just losing a little favour because they didn’t clean up their wet markets is a whole lot better than it coming out that they themselves accidentally released a virus adapted in a lab to spread quickly in humans, and has serious potential for causing a global pandemic.

@LukeShadwell The congressmen were shown the intelligence reports, likely not the sources or methods, and conclusions reached by the different (18?!?) agencies.

@LukeShadwell You're thinking way too hard about this and it's very hard to understand what you're saying.

Do I understand this is correctly: In order to prove to you that "this specific data" isn't fake, I must demonstrate that "their intelligence agencies" did "something to shape the narrative."

I don't see how this is logical, and I don't know if "intelligence agencies" had much to do with this, but this should suffice (from the WHO origins report):

It's more of a geopolitical decision, but the rhetoric shifted from from animals+market to "who knows could be anywhere maybe even the USA" in April 2020 -- roughly the same time this happened -- https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-us-canada-52305562 -- before that, there were a few attempts by some people in China to spread US origin conspiracy theories, but this wasn't a mainstream POV:

That's from Health Times, a publication of Peoples Daily, in early March 2020 (machine translation).

You can say the same for the first instances of "lab leak" from within the US government that were also strongly discouraged. Things changed when people stopped panicking about the crisis and started focusing on who to blame for the things that went wrong without much priority given to whether what they said was accurate or not.

I agree with you from a geopolitical POV that China's leadership is shortsighted not to embrace some uneasy conclusion on origins in the illegal trade, for what it's worth. Although obviously my opinions on that are very ignorant of what might be valuable to decision makers in China. USA and China both agreeing that every scenario remains plausible no matter how ridiculous and that it's irresponsible to determine what's more or less likely reflects how conservative people are influential in both cases -- don't rock the boat if you're at the top in the current status quo. Saying "You know, even if that adversary country does bad stuff, they don't do impossible stuff" is a good way to get yourself shut out of the discussion.

@zcoli I think that you are much more qualified on this than me on the science and all of the scientific viewpoints seem sound. I’m not any kind of expert in intelligence, either, but I think your thought process is heavily focused on the idea that everything can be proved or disproved and that’s where we disagree. I would say the reason the US and china can’t agree is because everyone knows things other people don’t know, but they also know that the other country knows things they don’t know, so how do you rule anything out?

The typical solution in intelligence for this is to look at motivations, would someone benefit from x happening? Is that person capable of falsifying it? Did they have a motivation to falsify it?

@LukeShadwell The most important motivation there is motivated logic. Just look at the evidence people come up with that they say favors lab leak (the cables that Josh Rogin first leaked, for example) -- almost invariably it's things you could've already known by just reading what scientists had published before the pandemic. It's extremely reminiscent of 2002-3. And just like after 2002-3, folks are biased to conclude it was genuinely a tough call in real time in retrospective reviews of what went wrong. It was not. People said they were certain when there wasn't data to support it, with the root cause being that was a favored conclusion ahead of time. That's what happened in the USA in April 2020 (and probably also in China, but I'm not as familiar).

We've seen some of the evidence subsequently leaked -- one example is the equivalent of if a lab leak had happened in DC and China reported that patients zero were Robert Redfield, Francis Collins, and Fauci Anthony 😂 . Go watch the BBC link above and see how ridiculously specific the lab leak theory was (and how it's unrelated to the theory today). I bet the truth is that nothing remains classified that's relevant (and doesn't reveal sources) other than mediocre analysis of mostly public data.

And, again, probably the same goes for China. That weird lobster thing appears to be some people thinking they were helping get ahead of a story and not helping at all. If the data describegd in the article actually exists it would be very useful.

@zcoli I entirely agree that this exists on the lab leak side too, it exists everywhere, probably most people and governments have motivations other than raw logical truth to swing one way, both ways or neither way in this. I think you have a very good and sound argument for why it was not a lab leak, and for why it was zoonosis, and I think that there isn't nearly enough evidence to say that it was a lab leak with nearly as much certainty or detail as that it was zoonosis.

The additional variable rests on the questions:
- What do we know?
- What do we know exists but that we don't know?
- What do we not know exists and that we don't know?

If you take just the first point and imagine the next two don't exist, I would fully 100% agree with you. If we took the first two, I would still be heavily leaning towards agreement with you. But when the third question is factored in, and you approach it in the way of trying to imagine all the possible scenarios that could've happened and what might be out there that we have no idea about, that's where it becomes difficult to say. And I don't think the existence of that third point is either anti-zoonosis or pro lab leak, it's just an unfortunate fact that causes a certain amount of necessary uncertainty in all of the other, otherwise perfectly sound conclusions.

The issue I have with the “unknown unknowns” argument is that we know the White House put out in April 2020 that they were confident in a lab leak and we know from the people who were leading that and now making their case publicly — David Asher for instance — that it was conspiracy theory nonsense. We also have the letter from NIH asking EcoHealth Alliance for more info on WIV to have a contemporaneous view of the lab leak theory that’s consistent with what was leaked in April. It was the crowd sourced stuff connecting the dots between public info starting with someone’s picture not being found on a website. So, for me, a known known is that the White House was confident in a theory premised on conspiracy theory logic applied to public data.

Not going to copy + paste a wall of text here, but it’s worth going to Rumsfeld’s February 2002 unknown unknowns press conference transcript and re-reading that answer in context. Knowing in retrospect that the case was entirely based on wishful misreading of what was known and assuming the unknown unknowns must support the favored hypothesis.

There’s some history of White House demonstrations of US intelligence — sometimes it pans out and sometimes it doesn’t. The ones that pan out (Cuban missile crisis; Russia about to invade Ukraine) make clear, limited claims supported by tangible evidence presented matter of factly. The ones that don’t (Iraq has WMD and will give it to terrorists; SAR2 lab leak) make sweeping claims lacking specificity and not showing evidence, with vague evidence leaked to the press.

Do you know any examples where the latter kind of case has panned out over time?

@zcoli There's the question of whether they want to start a geopolitical crisis, and whether they want to start it now. China isn't their enemy in the same way as Russia is, and it's going to be down to diplomacy partly, I think they're basically saying, we know, you can't hide it from us, but we're not going to make a huge international crisis out of it - at least not right now unless you do something to piss us off

@LukeShadwell The weird lab leak story was quickly followed up by starting the process of withdrawing from the WHO… not caring about an international crisis in order to deflect domestic blame for stuff that sucked during the pandemic was the point of all of it.