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
3.00Latest breaking news supporting lab leak: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14113769/Covid-obviously-Chinese-lab-leak-covered-Beijing-British-expert-says.html
TL;DR Someone who made an irrelevant app and who has no new evidence or analysis said on a podcast that he thinks it’s likely a lab leak because USA and China are both covering up what happened.
Something like that — hard to figure out what the article actually says. This didn’t stop the story from being promoted as new supporting evidence by the lab leak social media crowd who insists that they are certain of lab leak origins and have found too many smoking guns to count. If I had smoking gun evidence, I probably would care what someone’s gut feeling was on a podcast.
@George This wouldn’t explain the lack of anyone here making a rational argument for lab leak unless China is paying everyone. You need to think bigger.
The origin of Covid-19, part 1: Evidence for and against an origin at the wet market
@MikePa67d let's see what we have here... skimming through for a few seconds:
I also want to point out they do this funny reporting of relative risk p-value in their paper. And to get a better p-value you need to sample more. If you sample more, you get better p-values. So it's a little bit misleading.
One of sillier complaints about that manuscript. What's a "better" p-value? The most highly sampled regions within the market are not the highest positivity even though sampling for many of them was posited on suspected cases nearby (e.g. the southeast corner of the west half to he market). No one's confused about the low sampling density in the east half of the market being a bit underpowered to detect significant enrichment of positive samples.
Again I'll point out: the hottest areas are not actually where you have the animal stalls.
At this point, the narrator is highlighting an area with an animal stall that might not have been sampled.
Let's skim a bit more:
Lipkin changed his story once he was asked about it in by the House subcommittee:
Oh look, it's SARS2 in Brazil in November. This is clearly a contamination artifact because the sequencing is published: it has mutations that definitely didn't occur until 2020.
The person who made this video is clearly informed enough to not make these mistakes, so I guess they aren't mistakes.
@Rwin If you think that publication of proof of a lab leak is a sure thing, put your fake money where your mouth is.
For what it's worth, I wouldn't put the odds of this (a paper in one of these journals that's peer reviewed and concludes lab leak more likely than not) happening too low myself, even though I think a lab leak of any kind is an extremely unlikely origin and a lab leak origin where there was genetic manipulation or selection by passage of an isolated virus is essentially impossible. These journals all publish papers that don't pan out now and then.
@Rwin This is the truth. We just need to FOIA a few more documents. Surely the proof of this Chinese conspiracy is hidden in some American scientists' emails.
@PeterMillerc030 Exactly! Bobby Kennedy is going to expose the Chinese government any day now. It probably is just a matter of hours. One more McChicken and the Wuhan Flu conspircacy will be confirmed.
@Rwin RFK knows that the plandemic came from the US government itself:
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/rfk-jr-kennedy-covid-pandemic-planned-b2650127.html
That's why we need to hold the people who were in charge in 2019 and 2020 accountable, by re-electing the people who were in charge in 2019 and 2020.
former cdc director's perspective:
https://x.com/DanielleFong/status/1857814479599173763?t=NqKBhdOsM_g2jrZbDTS8aQ&s=19
@bbb Redfield claiming personal responsibility for China finding human to human transmission outside of Huanan market is a massive red flag that he makes stuff up.
Redfield thinking that the words “roost” and “ruse” are the same and repeating this mistake in probably a half dozen retellings of the same story… a good demonstration of the effect of the cloud of yes men who surround everyone with a bit of power in DC.
@bbb Are you just hoping people don't click through and listen to the very beginning where Redfield says how important it is to "correct, you know, I think, you know, the terrible disinformation that people have about Kennedy being anti-vaccine."
@bbb I realize you want people to click through to the tweet that says Redfield is 100% convinced of lab leak. Choosing that rather than listening for yourself and providing an accurate summary, which would undermine Redfield’s credibility, is what you opted for… to be more precise.
Folks can go listen to the handful of mentions of lab leak there if they like — they probably would be smart not to look past Redfield talking about how he’s worried vaccines are integrated into mitochondrial DNA and produce spike which leads to some chronic disease he’s invented and chosen to call “suffocation syndrome.”
This is all a preamble to promoting the vaccine from Novavax. And, no, he doesn’t disclose that he’s a paid advisor for Novavax.
Big news today accidentally revealed in a letter from Senator Marshall: https://www.marshall.senate.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024.11.14-Marshall-LTR-to-IC-OIG-1.pdf
The DEFUSE proposal was considered in the mid 2021 intelligence review after all. That’s why it was in a folder for the guy to find who leaked it. The story so far was that DEFUSE upended everything and was major new evidence. Nope; it was available to the US intel community in 2021. It just wasn’t evidence supporting a lab leak.
And it wasn’t on a confidential server because anyone covered it up. An investigation confirmed its standard for documents with proprietary unclassified information. The guy blew the whistle on nothing out of the ordinary.
What's up with Richard Ebright and the lab leak crew's post-election interests being primarily about prosecuting Anthony Fauci? I thought they were sure the US government had lots of information that would support lab leak that they wanted released?
Weird how that's not the priority if the point is to prove how the pandemic started. Add in the lack of any serious scholarship in 5 years and one might think this is more about politics than a genuine interest in how the pandemic began.
Hopefully the Biden admin declassifies everything vaguely relevant, warts and all. And makes it clear that there's very little left that doesn't compromise methods. Otherwise it's four more years of vague leaks.
We had a definitive answer to this question in March of 2020.
There is no question whatsoever that it came from a lab.
The FCS codon sequence is artificial and not found in nature.
Whoever made it, signed it as human-created.
The preponderance of evidence is that it came from the Wuhan lab.
There is a possibility it came from the military lab at the nearby university in Wuhan.
Fauci funded the gain-of-function research that created this virus in direct violation of a order from Obama to cease such funding for such research.
The Wuhan lab has had prior leaks and has published papers on the techniques used to insert the FCS sequence.
Congress voted unanimously 435-0, 100-0 to declassify the origins of the virus as coming from the Wuhan lab.
@ShannonBarber Can you go into detail on any one of those things? Prove any of them?
FYI, if your evidence (which isn’t true in the first place) is centered on one lab, and you leave an out that maybe it was another lab… it’s very clear you lack evidence to be certain of anything.