What if an engineered pathogen escapes from a lab?
An engineered-pathogen lab escape with pandemic potential is a demand-shock, flight-to-safety trade: short crude and the crack complex (mobility collapse), long gold, price in Fed easing — the textbook COVID-2020 playbook. The Mar-2020 COVID crash is the exact analogue: WTI cratered (briefly negative) while gold and duration rallied on stimulus. Forward angle: a known lab-leak origin front-loads border closures faster than 2020's slow recognition, so the oil-demand hit and the policy-easing repricing both arrive sooner and sharper.
Every number ships with its receipt — the odds, the range, the precedents, and a public grade at Reality Check. The statistical machinery that produces it is proprietary.
The butterfly cascade
How this trigger trickles across markets, left → right — the root shock, its first‑order moves, then the ripple effects. Drag any node; tap a market for its real price history.
Resolution timeline — how this probability is moving
Our model's odds (electric blue) over time vs the market's (Polymarket, amber), from the past toward the Tail risk horizon. Each dot is a real macro event that nudged the probability — green pushed it up, red pushed it down. Tap a dot for the source. Loading the probability audit trail…
What it would mean
If this plays out, it is a risk-off shock. A gain-of-function pathogen escapes a lab with pandemic potential, triggering border closures and a flight-to-safety panic. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Pandemic shock ▲ · Risk appetite ▼ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.