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.
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@George Oh it's the slide deck from the people at NCMI/DIA who plagiarized their work from a conspiracy theorist that thinks SARS-CoV-2 started in USA and was misdiagnosed as vaping injuries.
I wonder how many people in the meeting rolled their eyes at the waste of taxpayer money on whatever time was spent staring at the slide that's just an image of the promotional insert that comes from NEB with golden gate assembly reagents.
@zcoli Then you finally get to the content that's somehow even more stupid. The answer to the highlighted question is, "this is irrelevant to SARS2 origins; SARS2 isn't a hybrid of a bat virus from Yunnan and a pangolin virus found in Guangdong; that's a dumb theory that you read on someone's blog post rather than reading the scientific literature that says exactly why it's a dumb theory."
@George So, the ODNI disclosure in fact addresses the 'precursor virus' point made here specifically (see point 3 posted earlier below). The argument goes - Fauci covered up for the WIV, the entire Western virologist community covered it up, the journals covered up for the community, the deep state covered up for Fauci, this all happened in the Trump admin, so Trump and co covered it up, next came along Biden and his admin covered it up too, and wait for it, President Xi covered it up too https://manifold.markets/IsaacKing/did-covid19-come-from-a-laboratory#tos2h13j4v. Maybe we should throw in the Congressional investigation committees, WHO SAGO and Five Eyes countries also for good measure.
Three excerpts from Gabbard's ODNI disclosures.
1. No intelligence evidence on deliberate engineering:
Yeah, this issue will keep coming up. I think big picture, we need to avoid the IC as being the final arbiter of technical analysis on the SARS-CoV-2 genome. Sure, we have some great technical experts, but not nearly as many as other parts of the USG (e.g. HHS and CDC) or the broader non-governmental scientific community. I do not think the IC brings any unique expertise to bear on analyzing the disease itself at this point, and we should be deferring purely technical questions on unclassified scientific research to others.
As ââââââ suggested below, where do we have value-added is analyzing the all-source intelligence record for signs of Chinese malfeasance, and on that front the answer continues to be that we do not see compelling evidence that China deliberately manufactured this virus, and there is no IC consensus on whether an accidental lab release of a natural strain or a natural outbreak is more likely.
2. No intelligence evidence of PLA involvement with WIV activities:
Much of these statement appear to be garbs...by the sources the reporter spoke to and possibly even by Brouillette for his alleged statements. Nobody in the IC has or as ever been worried about the PLA misappropriating the WIVâs coronavirus research...certainly not in mid-2019. DOE did not assess a lab-associated cause of the pandemic until early this year; it seems that Brouilletteâs alleged claim that DOE came to this assessment by late 2020 was probably a reference to a May 2020 DOE (LLNL) paper that simply assessed the necessary conditions for a lab leak were present at the WIV.
3. No intelligence evidence of a precursor virus necessary for engineering being present at the WIV:
Thanks. Attached is the May 2020 Z-Division analysis that may be related to the claim that the former DOE Dep Sec told Fauci that âDOE scientists had found evidence suggesting that the pandemic had originated at the WIV.â This, of course, is not what the paper says. It only says that LLNL assessed that âall of the necessary conditions for an accidental release of a laboratory-modified coronavirus...were present...â at the WIV. Which, by the way, is not substantiated in the paper. It claims one of the necessary conditions was âaccess to a potential SARS-CoV-2 precursor coronavirus,â but we do not now, nor did we back in 2020, have ANY reporting suggesting WIV had such a virus.
Fauci is apparently guilty of providing a list of experts for the IC to talk to when requested to do so.
Why is Laura Loomer now accusing Tulsi Gabbard of being a Russian agent? I feel like I missed 12 episodes or something đ€Ł
Laura Loomer (@LauraLoomer) on X
@0xseraphim When she got Vinay Prasad out of office (not a bad thing), it felt like she was a mouthpiece.
"Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard is releasing never-before-seen communications and documents exposing how Fauci worked with politicized career leadership in the Intelligence Community (IC) to suppress the truth about [...] the virusâ lab-leak origins [...]"
https://www.odni.gov/index.php/newsroom/press-releases/press-releases-2026/4166-pr-11-26
"Intelligence analysts who dared to halleng Dr. Fauci's Covid Origin conclusions, faced threats of retaliation, marginalization and many suffered career setbacks."
"Those who advocated for the Lab Leak hypothesis [...] were reminded by their managers that leadership would determine which analysts would be promoted and which would not."
https://x.com/DNIGabbard/status/2067792184753938484
Does something like this move the market? Right now we are at 25% YES.
@bbb What? Move the market? âVery smart peopleâ have stated that this is a âconspiracy theory.â Thatâs good enough for me. đ
@bbb
"Those who advocated for the Lab Leak hypothesis [...] were reminded by their managers that leadership would determine which analysts would be promoted and which would not."
I skimmed through all of this and found nothing to support that. I did find what might be some weird Russian disinformation, though.
Too bad for Fauci that he can't sue the government for defamation since the only time the Fauci perjury thing comes up in the released documents is people saying privately that he didn't lie to Rand Paul.
@bbb This is as connected to reality as claims that domestic left-wing political agents in Brazil colluded with China to create the virus, and that the ensuing pandemic was a communist conspiracy to overthrow Bolsonaro
It's the same bullshit where either Brazil or the United States is presented as the main character of history because domestic audiences are more receptive to that narrative. The content is a fabrication whose goal is to attack domestic political opponents by linking them with the origins of the virus
@0xseraphim didnât even know there was a Brazil lab origin theory. Does it include the false positive result from wastewater in Florianopolis?
@zcoli I don't think so. It's more the reverse with the Florianopolis wastewater result: propaganda outlets for the Chinese communist party used this to push the false narrative that the virus was circulating outside of China before the Wuhan outbreak and therefore did not originate in China.
https://web.archive.org/web/20250710161045/https://www.cmaona.org/relatednews/2020/1020/22.html
In this case the content was a fabrication whose goal was to redirect criticism away from the CCP. This is because the idea that the Chinese government mishandled covid is a threat to their power and must be suppressed at all costs.
@0xseraphim I donât think that result or the others around the world that China cites were fabricated⊠US CDC for instance. Just people thinking they found the needle in the haystack and not doing the needed checks.
I saw a conspiracy theory about that for one of the Italy examples and itâs pretty dumb.
@zcoli to be clear I wasn't claiming that the wastewater results were a fabrication. I was referring to the content of propaganda websites falsely claiming that it was proof that the virus originated abroad
@0xseraphim there is one Italian study that I bet is a bit âfabricatedâ in terms of being rejected in previous journal submissions for reporting the product of obvious contamination as likely 2019 SARS-CoV-2, but I chalk that up to occasionally, boringly dumb scientific publication issues without China having anything to do with it đ
Itâs this paper â https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0013935122013068 â it reports B.1 defining mutations as possibly existing in Italy in 2019, and cites the Brazil contamination example as supporting evidence. That lineage definitely emerged in Wuhan in January 2020.
For anyone who finds the argument from Matt Ridley in Viral, recently presented at NIH, compelling, here is a post that might make you reconsider: https://www.the-gallop.com/review-matt-ridleys-viral-case-for-a-lab-leak/
I challenge anyone to find anything from a âzoonosis extremistâ as Matt Ridley calls us, thatâs as intellectually bankrupt as his edits to Viral between its first and second edition.
The next post on the blog will show how the FBI âlab leakâ conclusion in 2021 was based at least partly on copying a stupid reading comprehension error from Twitter conspiracy theorists.
The whistleblower's written testimony is here: https://www.hsgac.senate.gov/wp-content/uploads/letter-and-testimomy.pdf
If you take it at face value, lower level analysts at CIA favored lab leak. Upper management was also listening to a bunch of expert scientists listed by Anthony Fauci. According to the whistleblower, upper management overrode the analysts to make a non-call on origins. Later, under new management (Ratcliffe), on no new information, they changed it to an assessment favoring lab leak.
Erdman faults the IC for not doing what open source sleuths were doing i.e. piece together sparse data to make inferences. He believes that they were doing a better job than the IC. His reddit post features a host of disparate theories, with some clearly inspired by Steven Quay. https://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/ni98ax/questions_you_should_ask_about_covid_19/
It's bad news for those like @bens and others who think that there exists secret and unfalsifiable IC evidence that can prove their case.
But most interestingly, he gives a timeline that appears to be based on all of the internal emails that he has had access to as a member of the DIG. In the timeline he states "Credible reporting does indicate that the pandemic may have begun in November 2019 in Wuhan, China and was the product of a lab incident."
This is also the start date for where scientific consensus on origins lies. It is fatal to lab leak which proposes cryptic undetected transmission for several months leading to the establishment of two lineages, the market being a superspreading location. Hence the suspicion based on the purported September database shutdown etc. A November timeline would however require two lab leaks of different lineages that would also have to survive the 4% combined odds of successfully establishing, and subsequent transport to the market without any sign of being detected elsewhere in Wuhan.
@BW Elsewhere Washburne who spent some time in the govt claims that he has had access to non-public information, chatted with the MI6 director etc. One of the claims he makes is that Biden and Blinken collaborated with Xi to shut down the disclosures required under the Covid origins act and berates the author for talking about conspiracies. https://open.substack.com/pub/drbobmorris/p/how-to-build-a-conspiracy-theory?r=g2g7h&utm_campaign=comment-list-share-cta&utm_medium=web&comments=true&commentId=257563246
Erdman's first gateway drug to COVID-19 origins conspiracy theories was the silliness from SĂžrensen and Dalgleish (which is in the SARS2-engineered-from-HIV genre of conspiracy theories). Quay was next, which is why Erdman was all about Orf8 ("the diabolical gene" per Quay) in his testimony.
Erdman even interviewed Quay for his podcast back in November 2023. It appears to be very likely that Erdman is the same person who was the whistleblower to the House select subcommittee in September 2023. It's unlikely Erdman had any relevant information to report at the time. He's said on multiple other occasions that he was unemployed circa late 2022 and beyond. His report now only discusses things he learned via work for Gabbard's investigation. If that's the case, Senators Paul and Johnson were very nice to give Erdman the opportunity to walk back false statements about bribes to analysts and Fauci secretly visiting the CIA.
Oh, and Erdman and his organization also settled a case with DOJ last year with an undisclosed windfall to benefit the organization (Feds For Medical Freedom v Biden). This was a case that was going nowhere since the federal vaccine mandate had long ended.
But no one's going to say this is some sort of conspiracy in which Trump's DOJ pays off Erdman in exchange for Erdman testifying to vague misdeeds at CIA under Biden. Because all it is is a dumb waste of money by an incompetent government and has nothing to do with how the pandemic started.