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.
1,000All the people obsessed with this theory basically have full reign of the government and the agencies now to investigate it all they want. But that doesn't sell. Conspiracies and fear mongering is where the money is at, isn't it? So shut the fuck up and do something about it. If China is to blame for all of this then retaliate. Could have done that in 2020 but here we are, another opportunity. Nut up or shut the fuck up. We're entering a time now where a lot of people are just done with this nonsense. We've listened to crazy people and are where we are today because of it. Time to stop nodding your head at work and at family gatherings to keep peace and just start telling people to get their shit together or shut the fuck up.
@Predictor Nah, people will fall over themselves the next N times the same pair of people at Wall Street Journal have another vague report promising lab leak evidence and delivering nothing.
@bens It's trivial to find recent examples of culturing animal viruses with human cells that poses more of a risk than a coronavirus predicted to bind human receptors e.g. viruses already thought or known to be associate with human illness and viruses serial passaged to observe adaptation.
The most trivial example are viruses that make animals sick. Is it better to find out if they likely pose a risk to humans by seeing if it's possible to culture them at BSL-2 on human cells or is it better to find out when you sequence a sample from a sick human and observe homology with the thing you couldn't afford to study before because of expenses of BSL-3?
It's not an easy question to answer; treating it like an existential threat with infinite cost vs no benefit is how you conclude "these people are insane" but that's not actually the case.
What level of biosafety is called for for particular experiments is an important thing to debate, but Baric and Lipkin are totally exploiting mad scientist lab leak stuff to use this as an example. They're also right that it's an important thing to have and adhere to international standards, and it's another political choice they make to not discuss recent trends there with the United States ceding any authority on this by exiting the WHO and ending aid for international research collaborations that's important for harmonizing biosafety standards.
@zcoli My gf works in a BSL-2, I'm not a moron. I think that these experiments described in the Cell article (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0092867425001448) should under no circumstances be conducted in a BSL-2. They shouldn't have been doing this kind of work prior to 2020, and they sure as hell shouldn't now. Unearthing, transporting, culturing, and experimenting on bat viruses with potential to make the leap to humans (the explicit goals of this study in Cell) pose extremely minimal benefits compared to the risks, especially if they're being performed in BSL-2 labs that offer basically zero risk mitigation.
I don't think this is a heterodox view either. These are Columbia and UNC virology professors making this case: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/03/opinion/risky-virus-research.html?rsrc=ss&unlocked_article_code=1.1E4.zLJe.u5BMyevq2KXi
As to your claim that Baric and Lipkin are "exploiting mad scientist stuff" to make this claim... I hope you stay far, far away from virology research if that's your attitude toward biorisks.
@zcoli SARS started from civets and raccoon dogs sold in wet markets, in 2003.
Then China kept farming the same 2 species and selling them in unsafe wet markets, and they caused a worse pandemic in 2019.
For some reason, that doesn't trigger people's outrage, but articles about mad scientists do.
Today we're paying very little attention to the ongoing risks from wildlife handling, and we're probably headed for a natural H5N1 pandemic, and we're busy reading US scientists' emails to try to figure out how some imaginary lab leak in China happened.
I mean, lab safety is also important, and I'm all for better regulations. Working through the WHO or international structures would be a good way to do that.
The one thing no one can ever answer, is... if WIV actually created SARS2 through unsafe BSL-2 experiments, why are they still doing experiments at BSL-2, 5 years later?
Seems obvious that should update you against "covid is a lab leak" not for the theory.
WIV actually created SARS2 through unsafe BSL-2 experiments, why are they still doing experiments at BSL-2, 5 years later?
That’s right. Would be the first time in human history people haven’t learned their lesson.
@NicoDelon Yes, 3 people at the lab got hospitalized with covid and maybe one of their wives died (depending on which version of David Asher's story you believe). Then Wuhan's hospitals got overrun and the city shut down so hard that people were locked in their buildings. The world economy crashed and 20 million people died around the world.
And the WIV scientists concluded, "that was fun, let's do it again".
Like I said, no one has a good answer to that question of why they'd still work at BSL-2.
SARS started from civets and raccoon dogs sold in wet markets, in 2003.
Then China kept farming the same 2 species and selling them in unsafe wet markets, and they caused a worse pandemic in 2019.
@bens It’s not a “claim” — it’s what they’re doing. Baric could easily find a more dangerous example in his backyard. He chose SARS2 because of lab leak nonsense. Premising a biosafety debate on a fantasy isn’t the path to optimal policy.
And, per Baric and Lipkin’s testimonies to Congress, neither find a lab leak original of COVID-19 to be remotely likely.
@PeterMillerc030 I absolutely think they should stop unsafe wildlife handling practices as well! These are not mutually exclusive!
@PeterMillerc030 Have you perhaps considered that the fact that these scientists are now demonstrably continuing with unsafe lab practices should update you higher on the likelihood that a virus previously leaked from their lab?
@bens Nope, that makes no sense.
Jim Haslam is saying that Baric only wrote the op-ed because Baric actually created the virus and wants to redirect blame at the (innocent) WIV scientists:
https://x.com/jhas5/status/1896693364730306867
I don't think that's true, but it makes more sense than what you're suggesting.
1) I don't really care what either of them are saying or whether they're insane or whatever, I think it's unwise to do (gain-of-function) work on viruses with plausibility of human crossover in a BSL-2 lab! Do you disagree?
2) You think that the theory that Baric is writing an op-ed arguing against unsafe lab conditions to deflect blame from accidentally leaking COVID... is a more likely theory than the lab leak theory in general? That seems like the Conjunction Fallacy.
@NicoDelon Most people are irrational. A reporter went and talked to some vendors working at the Huanan market and they said civets were harmless and that Covid was made at Fort Detrick. Mirror image of the average dumb American.
Could WIV scientists also be that clueless? Maybe if there was some kind of non-engineered viral infection that no one even knew about... Certainly not for some deliberate gain of function experiment gone wrong.
@bens Of course lab safety is important.
This reminds me of 2020, when I criticized BLM protests. I said that people shouldn't riot during a pandemic, the protests would likely backfire and increase crime, and the police brutality problem itself was statistically much smaller than most people think.
People responded, "you mean you don't think that black lives matter?"
Today, I'm saying that Covid was almost certainly not a lab leak, future pandemic risks are disproportionately natural, we're overly focused on the lab risk, and we're not even approaching that in the right way (i.e. you'd want strong international institutions and agreements).
And people just respond, "you mean you don't care about lab safety?"
Robert Wright and I had a good discussion about lab safety and priorities at the end of that interview.
@PeterMillerc030 I guess I'd agree with you that if my credence of lab leak was <1%, I'd be much less concerned about lab safety in virology labs.
But I think lab leak is much more likely than <1%, and so I am alarmed about this. I think I'm being self-consistent there. I also think that natural release is still quite plausible, so I'm also alarmed by wildlife handling practices. However, I also think it's less tenable to mandate global changes in wildlife handling practices (eliminating all wet markets or whatever) than it is to simply ask that gov-funded and highly-educated, well-trained virology researchers adopt pretty common sense safety practices!
I'm with you on rioting during pandemics as well.
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/story/inside-the-fbis-lab-leak-investigation
Exclusive: Inside the FBI’s Lab Leak Investigation
As bird flu spreads, and Team Trump begins dismantling America’s public health apparatus, a former FBI scientist and investigator speaks out about the evidence that led the bureau to suspect that COVID-19 was sparked by an incident at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
https://x.com/ayjchan/status/1895961698596512053?s=61&t=Haq8F5rHkNHGokTmpYVUsQ
I'm glad experts in virus evolution are pointing out that the Covid-19 pandemic was not started by 2 spillovers.
Journalists reporting on Covid origin, please take note.
Plus, all early cases at the Huanan market were of the later lineage, ie it was not patient/ground zero.
@George Nod's paper is pretty bad, I read it and wrote a short review:
https://x.com/tgof137/status/1896008441317245055
And another paper recently came out confirming the 2 spillovers hypothesis is the most likely:
https://academic.oup.com/ve/article/11/1/veaf008/8033464
@George The fact that she won’t acknowledge that a very early lineage A sample was found in Huanan market, coming from someone infected with lineage A… tells you all you need to know.
It’s also something no one’s been able to make a model of that’s consistent with origin in a lab.
The lack of a market-linked lineage A sample was a very important piece of evidence for Chan for a long time! Once it was published, she decided it wasn’t important anymore.
Chan wrote a whole book premised on the early 2021 version of the lab leak theory that was disproven by other data both published after the pandemic and submitted to GenBank prior to the pandemic (ie impossible to fabricate without time travel). This only made her more confident in lab leak.
@zcoli It's interesting for me to compare this new discussion over 2 lineages and intermediate genomes to what Scott Alexander and the 2 Rootclaim judges thought was important.
I mean, maybe that debate was not the best way to solve a scientific question, but it was a decent effort to get an unbiased take on which arguments hold up and which do not.
The thing that Nod claims he disproved was called "Two basal polytomies". I disagree with his new paper, but I still only gave that part a factor of 4, and most people didn't even count it.
Scott gave the 2 polytomies thing no weight.
The 2 Rootclaim judges gave all lineage A/lineage B evidence no weight.
Daniel Filan thought the 2 lineages evidence leaned against zoonosis, but he still concluded zoonosis was more likely.
Eric explained his reasoning as such:
I was embarrassed that I didn't explain that stuff well enough, when I saw they didn't count it.
But in a way, it's nice to know that it's not even necessary. All those people thought the case for a market origin was strong enough, regardless of the exact details of Pekar's arguments.
I also don't think that's so unreasonable. When I first started talking to Saar about doing the debate challenge, I left a comment where I said:
At that point in time, I hadn't studied Pekar's arguments as well, and I said I wasn't sure I'd rely on them. I still made the bet with Saar because the case for zoonosis is strong enough either way, and I knew that the case for a lab leak would fall apart on cross examination.
Scott later explained why finding a T/T intermediate would not change his mind:
So at this point Twitter is just arguing over minutia, small technical details of Pekar's argument, when the market case is strong enough, with or without it.
@PeterMillerc030 The only way a TT intermediate that’s not a very early sample would change your mind much is if you were squarely on the fence to start with. Given the low fraction of infections that were sequenced, strong conclusions can’t lean on the absence of a particular one when there were hundreds of thousands of infections and only a few hundred sequences.
I never leaned heavily on 2 clades as evidence of two (or more) spillovers because I’ve never wrapped my head around the multiplicity of how many similarly odd things could’ve happened, but didn’t. The BA.1 / BA.1.1 split is an example of something similar, albeit explained by a fitness advantage for the derived lineage which doesn’t appear to be the case for A/B.
It would be possible to test this empirically by scanning the SARS2 tree for single introductions of rare Omicron lineages in locations with strong surveillance. There should be some instances with similar epidemiological parameters to the first several weeks of the pandemic.