What if a new COVID variant fully escapes existing vaccines?
Cleanest chain: a full vaccine-escape COVID variant restarts boosters/mandates — renewed mobility drag hits crude and travel, gold and duration bid, mRNA reformulators (Moderna/Pfizer) re-rate higher. This is the Omicron-Nov-2021 template (Black-Friday crude/airline selloff, fast partial reversal). Forward twist: vastly higher baseline immunity and antiviral availability cap the downside vs. 2020, so fade the initial crude spike-down; pandemic 0.9 roots are reasonable.
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 1–3 years 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. New COVID variant fully escapes existing vaccines and prior immunity, restarting boosters, masking mandates, and reformulation races. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Pandemic shock ▲ · Recession signal ▲ · Risk appetite ▼ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.