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
3.00Here's some live animals in a bucket in Huanan market on 31/Dec/2019 that the person running the stall wanted to hide from a reporter -- https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/243582878 -- can anyone identify the species from the sounds it makes?
Inspectors from the local CDC were there right around the same time.
According to the WHO report, there was no evidence of live mammals for sale at Huanan market. Two people from the neighborhood showed up to testify that this had been the case for decades.
This isn't really a cover-up; it's just denying reality. What's the point of that if there's a massive cover-up of a lab leak 10 km across town? It's not as if live animal markets across China were a secret in general or anything. They were in the news regularly and are the subject of academic research including specifically this market in Wuhan.
We are waiting for peer review, but initial sequences from Wuhan lab samples are not especially closely related to SARS-COV-2.
@NicoDelon Can we drop the arguments about what secret things might be in WIV databases and freezers based on their contents not being public if disclosing the information doesn’t make a difference? I guess it’s fine to appeal to arguments about what might exist and might be covered up if you like.
This happened earlier with retrospective seroprevalence studies, proof that live, SARS2-susceptible animals were present in Huanan market, and the RaTG15 sequences. All of those were very important to Alina Chan, for example, until they were published and turned out to be consistent with wildlife spillover in Wuhan and not some other theory. They were subsequently ignored.
I’ll wait to see the data rather than draw inferences from vague news stories on this.
@NicoDelon She did not claim she did not do it. She said, "here are 56 new sequences from 2004-2024, none of them are related to the original sequence."
@PatrickDelaney the woman who may have killed 20 million people alleges she did not find evidence that she killed 20 million people.
@PatrickDelaney Evidence from China that doesn’t say lab leak must be ignored. Evidence from China that can be spun to support lab leak is accidentally revealing the truth.
@NicoDelon she never alleged that she didn’t find evidence, she never said anything about killing 20 million people. That’s all you.
On September 30, 2024, Jay Bhattacharya (Trump's NIH appointee) posted on Facebook that "dangerous gain-of-function research [] likely caused the pandemic" and commented that "This piece by Matt Ridley lays out the evidence."
I haven't read Matt Ridley's linked post There is now very little doubt that Covid leaked from a lab, and haven't looked into any evidence about the lab leak question since Scott Alexander's post Practically-A-Book Review: Rootclaim $100,000 Lab Leak Debate in April 2024. I recall watching the first ~2-3 hours of the Rootclaim debate videos then and updating my uncertain view to <20% Lab Leak (maybe ~5% lab leak, or ~1-20% lab leak; specifics don't matter to my current question), which I understood to be the approximate probability that Scott and most readers updated to after reading his post or watching the Rootclaim debate (if I'm wrong about that; please correct me).
Before I read Matt Ridley's long article or otherwise look into the lab leak question again, can someone who (like me) read Scott's post or watched the Rootclaim debate and updated on that evidence to ~1-20% lab leak, and who unlike me has been following the lab origin question, please update me on whether new evidence or analysis has come to light since April 2024 that should update me significantly upwards from the conclusion reached following the Rootclaim debate?
Thanks very much in advance!
There are a couple things here that were added since the preprint (which had already been published in April 2024): https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(24)00901-2
Including:
One additional sample with some evidence of lineage A in Huanan market in a different location (only 2 duplicate reads; not strong evidence but there are very few reads anywhere outside of the few high coverage environmental genomes and patient sequences).
A Huanan linked patient is annotated in Fig 1 that was not annotated before (lineage B; HB-01/2020). This was someone who couldn’t get any hospital to see him until he went to his hometown outside of Wuhan and became the first case there.
Not annotated (from same paper as above) is that of the earliest lineage A cases “lived about 2 km from Huanan market.”
This paper contains a few interesting patient sequences that aren’t discussed in the paper — https://academic.oup.com/ve/article/10/1/veae020/7619252
Particularly, one demonstrating likely spread from Huanan market. There’s some other evidence for that lineage spreading from the market, but this sample made it more likely.
All of this is more evidence against Huanan market centrality being some artifact of biased ascertainment.
There’s also been a lot of evidence ruling out various conspiracy theories about cover ups by scientists outside of Wuhan, but if you were at 5-20% lab leak beforehand you rightly don’t care about the mad scientist smokescreen so that’s not evidence that matters.
@WilliamKiely New evidence has emerged that infected animals were present at the Hunan market: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-03968-0
@WilliamGunn This is the sort of thing (pretty vague report on content of a conference talk and colleagues' comments on it) where it's hard to interpret as evidence. Can't tell from this report what was measured or what was compared. It's a very difficult analysis. Distinguishing between reads where mRNA or DNA was the template is just the beginning. Then you've got to deal with all sorts of variability between sampling locations and so on. I have no idea how distinct a signature there is for immune activation for SARS2 vs other infections.
Signatures of sick humans might be nearly as interesting interesting as sick animals in the data. It's unfortunate that for 1/January there isn't sequencing data for swabs that were PCR-negative for SARS2.
I have a question for non-scientists in this thread. The article says, "its cells make copies of genes that produce proteins" and "increased gene copying" rather than "transcription of mRNA from DNA" and "increased transcription." Which would be more clear for you? It's very awkward to me since "gene copying" has a very different meaning in other contexts.
@WilliamGunn the difficulty is that other animal coronaviruses were also present. In fact, Jesse Bloom found there were associations between viral and animal genetic material for some animal coronaviruses but not SARS-COV-2. https://academic.oup.com/ve/article/10/1/vead089/7504441
Steve Massey observes that sample Q61, which had the highest % raccoon dog sequences, showed the presence of raccoon dog amdovirus, and canine parvovirus and canine kobuvirus (with the potential to infect raccoon dogs).
These were present at much higher abundance that the single SARS2 read present in the sample. Therefore, it would be erroneous to attribute raccoon dog immune activation to SARS2.
https://x.com/stevenemassey/status/1864348559178391594?t=t7iv3ixfVzEBUzeK54YNHw&s=19
@MikePa67d I see it’s another “all viruses are equal” argument. Go read papers on canine coronavirus infection of dogs, raccoon dogs, and red foxes.
“By nearly all measures of science”
So the best case for a lab leak after a year plus of investigation is this weird rhetoric and a couple coverup conspiracy theories that take place in the United States?
An outbreak could’ve happened just about anywhere in the world and there’d be an equivalent six degrees of Kevin Bacon case to make for someone who (1) participated in research nearby in the USA and (2) though “lab leak” was BS. If that’s the bulk of the case for “lab leak” it’s meaningless.
And this is coming from the committee with the power to ask anyone in USA anything and almost always get answers. IDK what they’re going on about at the end about “FOIA Lady” — is she the one that will finally reveal the truth or something?
@George This committee investigated for almost two years and spent thousands of hours on the topic getting more access than any committee before.
The result when they didn’t hear what they wanted to hear: throw all that out, reference what some random people said in the news in October and November 2024, and spend the vast majority of time time on the subject on an implausible cover up theory instead.