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
The US shared “gobsmacking” evidence with Britain at the height of the Covid pandemic suggesting a “high likelihood” that the virus had leaked from a Chinese lab, The Telegraph can reveal...
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2024/05/04/us-shared-gobsmacking-lab-leak-evidence-with-uk-pandemic/
U.S. Tightens Rules on Risky Virus Research, New York Times
"Marc Lipsitch, an epidemiologist at Harvard and a longtime critic of the government’s policy, gave the new one a grade of A minus. “I think it’s a lot clearer and more specific in many ways than the old guidance,” he said. But he was disappointed that the government will not provide detailed information to the public about the risky research it evaluates. “The transparency is far from transparent,” he said."
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/07/science/covid-lab-leak-biosafety-rules-virus-research.html
Ralph Baric's testimony reported, thinks zoonotic spillover is likely although cannot rule out lab origin. Baric notes:
They were making chimeric viruses in Wuhan in risky BSL-2, he warned them they should use BSL-3.
Market origin doesn't fit the timeline with likely emergence in October 2019.
Market double-spillover story per Pekar et al is unlikely.
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/story/ralph-baric-wuhan-lab-leak
@MikePa67d We may disagree on the when, where and the animal host - I'm more of a raccoon dog person - but we're all confident that it was zoonosis.
October origin could still have been from the market, we'll just never know 🤷♂️
New essay from Yuri Deigin on COVID-19 origins.
@MikePa67d This is not true. But I’m sure once he gets around to it Yuri will just edit it and say his conclusion does not change at all when he learns that he was totally wrong about what he considered to be critical evidence.
@zcoli not sure what the source for that claim is. I think the basic point Bloom makes is that samples in Jan 2020 aren't particularly informative about origins.
@MikePa67d My source is the description of the sample in the paper it’s reported in and its description in metadata uploaded along with the sequencing reads and assembled sequence. Yuri is badly wrong on something he finds important. But it doesn’t matter; he will just ignore it now that the data isn’t in his favor.
While I reminisce my swindles of yesteryears, a new one has been unfolding here before me. I say with pride that my student has become the master. @PeterMillerc030 😉
@KristianAndersen Massey’s on thin ice here. How does a back of the envelope adjustment in a blog post compare to cropping sequences out of a figure in a scientific manuscript that would have showed that, no, you did not identify a true intermediate genome? Because that’s what Massey et al did. Further he wrongly claimed that this single sample, were it described accurately, falsified Pekar et al 2022.
Obvious screw up not keeping back of the envelope estimates separate from other things, but what’s the significance here? The equivalent calculation in Pekar 2022 accounting for the revision to that case and ruling out artifactual
intermediate sequences shifts the edge of 95% CI from 30/Nov to 8/Dec for date of infection of the primary case, I think. Is someone somewhere in the world leaning on this figure for some reason?
A rebuttal of some mathematical claims about early Covid-19 made by Scott Alexander.
https://arguablywrong.home.blog/2024/04/09/how-likely-is-it-for-covid-to-establish-itself/
As evidence against an earlier introduction, Scott also presents a doctored version of Fig. 3E from Pekar et al.'s "Timing the SARS-CoV-2 index case in Hubei province", 2021. It seems this misleading image was used for the Rootclaim debate.
https://twitter.com/nizzaneela/status/1777989261817508165?t=iKdlIodfWEfzFVWxGlVtrA&s=19
It's only misleading if you present it without context.
Here are Peter's slides, in the document he says "Using December 10th as the first ascertained case makes it most likely that the first case is late November or early December."
@Odoacre He presented as if it were unaltered from Pekar et al (2021), no? I'm not sure how that isn't misleading even if inadvertent. It's also wrong as set out in this thread.
https://twitter.com/nizzaneela/status/1777996139385491577?t=7YlIZWk6f1y8YnCGTm86rQ&s=19
Further on how you can't simply adjust it 10 days. Since this of course another paper has come out suggesting spillover was Aug-Oct 2019 which is closer to the estimates of Caraballo-Ortiz, Kumar and Bloom.
https://twitter.com/Dissenting2020/status/1778352829356188094?t=Ex9dei9g5ZnYCJ_3DlStxQ&s=19
@MikePa67d And don't get me started on not mentioning the difference between the 91Q and ZY6 mutations, how can we ever trust anything Peter and Scott said?
@DavidKochanov Personally I only trust obscure Nepalese journals that nobody except me has ever heard of.
@Odoacre I looked up the blog post where I first used this. It literally says that it's an adapted figure!
Though I will agree it's not as clear in the debate slides where I pared down all the text.
I also looked up how Rootclaim responded to my slide (their text in yellow):
He responded the same way to every slide where I put some date or some model that estimated dates. And he would have replied the same way to literally any model I wrote down.
That's right, Saar doesn't care when the pandemic started, he's just got a gut feeling that it was probably a lab leak. I would have loved spending more time discussing epidemic models, that would have been an easy conversation to win.
@PeterMillerc030 "We don't make any claims based on dates" isn't particularly accurate with Rootclaim appealing to dates associated with all sorts of things. Is selectively throwing out useful data a precondition of the terms of a new rootclaim debate?
@zcoli Dates are like probabilities. Saar thinks they're only worth paying attention to if they support his theory.
@PeterMillerc030 Dates in tabloids are data. Dates attached to patient samples that are corroborated in many ways can't be trusted.
@zcoli The real problem is that we can't trust complicated models. That's why it's key to get your arguments from the simplest sources possible, and the Daily Mail is an excellent source, much easier to read than any scientific paper.
Scott has a new post with responses to his responses, and concludes with:
If it helps, I’m currently working out terms for a 6-digit lab leak bet of my own (no guarantee this will come to fruition, most of these fall apart in the resolution criteria stage). I feel bad for not being willing to answer every possible lab leak argument going forward, but hopefully offering lab leakers a few hundred thousand dollars if I’m wrong will be a suitable consolation prize.
For now, I’m still at 90-10 zoonosis.
Let's bet on this.
@Joshua I read that to be exclusively a bet, like "I bet 100k that there won't be a consensus for zoonosis by 2030" or something, rather than a bet about winning a certain debate. does he mention a debate related to the bet?
@Bayesian I think he means a bet in the same way that Miller and Wilf bet $100k, and the bet was then settled by judges that heard their arguments.
You can bet on no debate happening in the MC market I made though!
@Joshua The post doesn't even touch on many strong arguments against Rootclaim's case as it stands today. Here is a 12-nucleotide "clean insert" in SARS2 with CGG-CGG-CGG encoding R-R-R. If my math is right this wipes out Rootclaim arguments that are 20:1 ("12 nucleotides clean insertion") and 5.3:1 ("Insertion is from a foreign source") in favor of lab leak. This is hardly the only example with these sorts of features and for every one that's observed in sequencing data there are countless ones that aren't observed.
https://cov-spectrum.org/explore/World/AllSamples/Past6M/variants?variantQuery=ins_22204%3ATGGCGGCGGCGG
Sticking at 90:10 is a good way to entice someone to take the other side of the bet, though.