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.
Dr Jane Qui has gone from being very dismissive of any lab leak scenario to now penning a piece in the Guardian saying it's not a conspiracy theory and blaming the likes of Peter Daszak for damaging trust in science. Quite a turnaround. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/jun/25/covid-lab-leak-theory-right-conspiracy-science
@MikePa67d Until the other day, Jane Qiu was part of the conspiracy theory in lab leak world. Now she and Peter Daszak have some sort of falling out over a movie, we get an odd opinion piece that adds nothing to the debate and absolutely does not say that Jane Qiu thinks lab leak is likely.
But, give that there's no actual evidence to support any "lab leak" theory. The lab leak hive mind is jumping on this as vindication:
Same dude, back when Qiu was part of the global coverup conspiracy:
In the real world, this shows that there is no global coverup of "lab leak" being a likely origin. For people who thought that was somehow plausible a week ago, your inferred likelihood of lab leak should drop. For the rest of us, it's a boring spat between a journalist, a scientist, and a filmmaker spilling over in public.
That kind of spillover is a bit more common than the ones that cause pandemics.
The WHO Scientific Advisory Group for the Origins of Novel Pathogens (SAGO), a panel of 27 independent, international, multidisciplinary experts, today published its report on the origins of SARS-CoV-2, the virus responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic.
SAGO has advanced the understanding of the origins of COVID-19, but as they say in their report, much of the information needed to evaluate fully all hypotheses has not been provided.
“I thank each of the 27 members of SAGO for dedicating their time and expertise to this very important scientific undertaking over more than three years,” said Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO Director-General. “As things stand, all hypotheses must remain on the table, including zoonotic spillover and lab leak. We continue to appeal to China and any other country that has information about the origins of COVID-19 to share that information openly, in the interests of protecting the world from future pandemics.”
@George The report found that there's the same level of support for an engineering origin of SARS-CoV-2 that there is for other Intelligent Design origin theories.
The report describes the consensus best supported theory by scientists:
While available data support that the HSM played a significant role in early transmission and amplification, it is not conclusive that the HSM was where the virus first spilled over into the human population, or if it occurred through upstream infected humans or animals at the market.
The report then talks about additional evidence that could possibly be collected that could support this theory further or support something else. The paper on market environmental samples from Crits-Christoph et al on this subject says the same thing:
Any hypothesis of COVID-19’s emergence has to explain how the virus arrived at one of only four documented live wildlife markets in a city of Wuhan’s size at a time when so few humans were infected [3]. Human introductions linked to the animal trade offer one explanation for this, and the introduction of the virus by an animal trader or farmer cannot be excluded, but these hypotheses are challenged by phylodynamic evidence for multiple spillovers [11].
When it comes to lab leak on the other hand, there is no specificity at all about how the evidence demanded could test any lab leak theory. This would be impossible, because the there's no falsifiable lab leak theory presented in the report. The report can't even settle on which lab to investigate. The requested data is basically all biosafety data and occupational health data for two large organizations, plus access to open-ended interviews of everyone there. By definition everything that's requested couldn't falsify lab leak theories because the underlying assumption is that everyone who might spill the beans now has been lying for over five years as part of a perfect coverup. A failure to find lab leak evidence would be rejected by anyone who finds it plausible now that there was a lab leak and a massive cover up to suppress evidence of it.
It's telling that the access requested to vaguely investigate lab leak isn't requested for investigating wildlife origins -- because there's just no need to look for what evidence might exist were it not covered up; the evidence that's not covered up is strong enough.
But you can tell from SAGO wasting time humoring the "MA-30" theory that someone susceptible to lab leak nonsense has influence in the report. Plausibly that might be the person who spoke on behalf of a report that concluded one scenario out of four was the only one with supporting data, yet decided to lead with your "all hypotheses must remain on the table."
@zcoli Sure. I'm sorry it's a bit long but for a contentious issue with a variety of relevant evidence that's needed. I've gone over it with some very serious stats and virology folks, and its >10k readers include some intense zoonosis types, who have helped by finding some errors, now fixed. It's been stable for many months now.
https://michaelweissman.substack.com/p/an-inconvenient-probability-v57
It's got very extensive references.
Several other much shorter blogs on my substack deal with narrower parts of the question: the gross math errors in Pekar 2022, the improper Bayes methods used by Scott Alexander, etc.
@MichaelWeissman You’re pretty critical of people on one side of the issue yet cite Jesse Bloom’s deleted sequences paper extensively. What’s up with that? Omitting critical data in a paper seems a bit worse than anything anyone said on Slack that you quote.
https://academic.oup.com/mbe/article/42/6/msaf109/8158640
I don’t know how many qualified people you talked to, but I think it’d be worth taking the time to look at the primary data yourself for some of the many inaccurate things here you’re getting from others. For one example, the discussion of D614G. This didn’t quickly dominate because it happened many times — it quickly dominated because it was followed up by another important mutation to make B.1 and then another one to make B.1.1 — lineage A without D614G was more prevalent than lineage A with D614G until about April 2021.
For another example, you cite a plasmid encoding spike using CGG. It makes sense to use human codons for expressing a protein from a plasmid in human cells. It makes sense to use human coronavirus codons for engineering a human coronavirus. It makes no sense and it’s implausible that an engineer would use human codons to engineer a human coronavirus, rather than human coronavirus codons.
Your other example here is “plasmid primers” (itself a nonsensical term) in this table:
That underlined bit is an EcoRI site. The CG at the end is added to the primer because it increases efficiency of digestion to add a few nucleotides to the end. Then, they’re lost when this is digested and ligated with something else digested by EcoRI.
Someone spent a whole lot of time cherry picking papers tangentially related to WIV and ctrl+F’d for CGG in the text. Someone whose familiarity with molecular cloning doesn’t extend to literally the most common technique is the person informing you on what is and isn’t evidence of engineering. Knowing what this is is typically part of undergrad bio curricula.
Fully documented every example of this sort of thing in your document would take hours and it’s trivial to find examples. The very serious stats and virology folks are either not reading closely at all, not as serious as you say, or happy to have you make these nonsensical arguments.
@zcoli Zach- At a couple of points I think you've got the logic screwed up.
On using D614G as evidence of the recency of the FCS insert, that was explicitly to increase the likelihood of a zoonotic CGGCGG based on recent insert sequence properties. If it's not a recent insert then the CGGCGG probability falls to the typical rate for Asian coronaviruses, 0.0001, and the sequence becomes a smoking gun against zoonosis. You seem to assume that my arguments must all be against zoonosis but this one was intended to give it the fairest break possible. Your argument is backwards.
On your disputes with Bloom about the most likely MRCA, my blog already said "(These groups also suspect that the MRCA differed from A by an additional nt shared with wild relatives but not with B. There is some reason to doubt that conclusion since A differs from the main suspect by a T→C mutation, much less common at this stage than a C→T mutation, although non-reversionary mutations are much more common than reversionary ones.)". So you're arguing about a point that I explicitly don't use.
So one of your arguments is irrelevant and the other has the wrong sign of effect on the odds for your case.
Your claim that no engineer would use CGGCGG at least has the right sign for your case. Readers can compare my arguments (based on points made by people who engineer sequences) with yours and try to make their own rough estimates of the odds for that particular factor, the fourth most important of the likelihood factors used.
@MichaelWeissman I'm not discussing your quantitative argument at all. I'm demonstrating how your post is full of things you say are facts that are untrue or conclusions from unreliable sources such as Bloom's deleted sequences paper. It's relevant that you have no expertise in this and you are basing your argument on people who are at best very wrong. It makes no sense to discuss the logic applied to things that aren't facts. If it's true that it's a point that you don't use, it also makes no sense to discuss logic hidden in between irrelevant points.
If you had concluded zoonosis based on the same sort of nonsense I would be saying the same things. I don't care what direction the argument is in.
What in the world is "the typical rate for Asian coronaviruses" ? I promise you that alphacoronaviruses and betacoronaviruses sampled in Asia are less similar in every way than betacoronaviruses sampled inside and outside of Asia.
The fact is that the composition of the FCS is evidence against an engineering origin because no engineer would choose it, but natural selection doesn't care about codon usage tendencies that take hundreds of years to approach what we observe today. Might be worth a rethink on what timescale you're talking about here with "recency".
If the "plasmid primers" thing falls in the category of "points made by people who engineer sequences" then those people are lying to you in one way or another.
@zcoli Here's the relevant passage from my argument "In a broader set of relatives, the fraction of ArgArg pairs coded CGGCGG ranges from 0 outside Africa and Asia to 1/10790 in Asia to 1/5493 in Africa."
The broader set is betacoronaviruses.
https://www.preprints.org/manuscript/202110.0080/v2
I agree with your statement "I'm not discussing your quantitative argument at all." since you instead make ad hominem remarks and discuss factors that end up not being used.
@zcoli Here's your other engineering example for FCS insertion with one CGG:
In the one example of which I’m aware in which a collaborator of the WIV group added a 12nt code for an FCS to produce a viral protein via a plasmid (reminiscent of the 12nt addition in SC2) they only used CGG for one of its three Arg’s.
Let's check out the abstract; nope, this isn't correct at all. It's a plasmid for producing antibodies.
Your analysis is based on "facts" from people who are habitually wrong and/or lying (I think this one comes from Yuri?). Seriously, just slow down and pick any one thing and dig into the primary data yourself. Start with what you think is the most important factor. In this case, all it took was reading the abstract of the paper you linked or looking at any of the figures to realize this was nonsense. And it's so wildly nonsensical that whoever you heard it from should be ignored on everything else as well.
https://doi.org/10.1093/molbev/msaf109
In 2021, Jesse Bloom published a study addressing why the earliest SARS-CoV-2 sequences in Wuhan from late December 2019 were not those most similar to viruses sampled in bats. The study concluded that recovered partial sequences from Wuhan and annotation of Wuhan links for other sequences increased support for one genotype as the progenitor of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. However, we show that the collection date for the recovered sequences was January 30, 2020, later than that of hundreds of other SARS-CoV-2 sequences. Mutations in these sequences also exhibit diversity consistent with SARS-CoV-2 sequences collected in late January 2020. Furthermore, we found that Wuhan exposure history was common for early samples, so Bloom's annotation for a single familial cluster does not support that an early genotype was undersampled in Wuhan. Both the recovered partial sequences and additional annotation align with contemporaneous data rather than increase support for a progenitor. Our findings clarify the significance of the recovered sequences and are supported by additional data and analysis published since mid-2021.
New work published. Shows that an earlier paper relied on unreported data exclusion and selective annotation to conclude that the the first human SARS-CoV-2 infection or infections that led to the pandemic were not viruses with lineage A or lineage B genomes. Both lineage A and lineage B were found in Huanan market, consistent with the pandemic originating in that market's trade in live animals susceptible to SARS-CoV-2 infection.
Approaching halfway through 2025, here's a market on this question that will actually resolve. If I were betting I would pay attention to the threats to prevent US public research bucks from going to pay publication fees for scientific manuscripts at journals that don't toe the line. I doubt any editor at these journals finds lab leak likely, but I also doubt it's a hill they'd choose to die on since journals don't suffer much at all for publishing flawed work.
Folks often compare SARS-CoV-2 to SARS-CoV emergence and cite the lack of any definite connection to consumption of wildlife as an important difference in favor of lab leak. This isn't a solid argument at all -- (1) the SARS-CoV outbreak definitively linked to wildlife consumption was in late 2003; one of the seven earliest cases (the 4th; over a month after the earliest) was a chef with relevant animal contact; (2) another one of the seven earliest cases was a market worker without animal contact, much like SARS-CoV-2; (3) identification of SARS-CoV-2 in live animal markets happened several months after the earliest retrospectively identified case.
Regardless of how that story is often misrepresented, it certainly would add support to wildlife origins of SARS-CoV-2 if an early case was more clearly linked to wildlife consumption. Well, here you go:
When he was going through the discharge procedures on the morning of January 21, he suddenly told our nurse that he had a fever before being admitted to the hospital and had been to the South China Seafood Market in early December. What’s more, he was a chef and often handled live poultry and wild animals from the South China Seafood Market.
The atmosphere suddenly became tense. At this time, the pneumonia epidemic in Wuhan was already very serious, and his "honesty" of having a change of heart made us immediately highly alert.
After further questioning about his medical history, he admitted that he went to the South China Seafood Market for the last time on December 3, but he continued to come into contact with live animals from the market. He began to have a fever in early December. After treatment, he was discharged from the hospital on December 30, but he still had intermittent coughing symptoms. He was hospitalized in our department on January 17 because of palpitations and dizziness.
So, the patient had (1) live animal exposure at Huanan market, (2) one of the earliest known onset dates compared to confirmed cases, and (3) was discharged from an unnamed hospital, unfortunately, just before the outbreak was recognized and the Wuhan-wide response began.
That's translated from here -- https://finance.sina.cn/2020-01-28/detail-iihnzahk6649439.d.html -- a firsthand report from the patient's doctor with additional details. The case is reported in other news stories as well. The patient wasn't tested and the symptoms were atypical, so it's probably not included as a December onset case (e.g. not in the WHO report). But it's also very likely COVID-19 because the patient very likely infected his doctor, who did have a confirmed infection.
Presumably someone will argue that this is part of an elaborate cover up to frame the market. It's not; the doctor, Zhou Ning, spoke about his infection in Spring 2020 webinars to help people in other countries get ready for the pandemic and avoiding healthcare worker infections. He doesn't mention the epidemiological data at all because it's not relevant to that audience -- he was interested in sharing relevant information with colleagues and not in playing a role in some kind of cover up.
Too long to read for me rn but is any of this actually new info? https://open.substack.com/pub/rationaloptimistsociety/p/the-evidence-suggests-covid-19-came?r=3g4rzm&utm_medium=ios
@PaperBoy No. Also, here's how Matt Ridley deals with the publication of contradictory evidence.
In his post, Ridley writes:
I teamed up with the molecular biologist Alina Chan to write Viral, our book about the search for evidence on both sides of that question. I remained unsure what happened at that stage. Then in the autumn of 2021 more startling evidence emerged to support the lab leak. I now think that is by far the most likely explanation.
This is a lie. The evidence he is talking about is the DEFUSE proposal, published in Sept 2021. The DEFUSE proposal is discussed in the first edition of the book. It's discussed more heavily in the second edition of the book because his other evidence collapsed. For example, here he replaces one perfectly good piece of old evidence with the DEFUSE proposal, to pretend that it's new and significant evidence. Conclusion unchanged.
@zcoli
In case folks need proof -- here is Ridley and Chan talking about the exact same DEFUSE proposal in both the first and second editions of Viral. They changed the paragraph to edit out discussions of SARS2 being a chimeric engineered virus of the type discussed in DEFUSE, because that was disproven like a couple days after they finished the book.
No problem, just move some words around and don't change the conclusions. That's always possible when it's a creative writing exercise for a conspiracy theory and you have enough source material to cherry pick from.
Why Are So Many People Sure Covid Leaked From a Lab?
May 21, 2025
@George It's good that Wallace-Wells notes that he commissioned and edited Nicholas Baker's 2020 lab leak article for NY Mag. Folks should go back and read it. It describes what was a silly conspiracy theory at the time, and turns out to have been falsified in a few ways.
Wallace-Wells doesn't note any of this in his new article and I'm not clear that he is aware of it at all.
Meowdy! The whole lab-leak theory about COVID-19 is still pouncing around as kinda uncertain, like a playful kitten chasing its tail~ Scientists haven't found a smoking litterbox full of proof, but some clues keep peeking out from the shadows. Given the mix of skepticism and possibility, I’d tip my whiskers a bit past half—let’s say a cheeky 55%! places 10 mana limit order on YES at 55% :3