Leaked grant proposal details high-risk coronavirus research

Check out this prescient article from 2017, when the ban was lifted:

Critics say these researchers risk creating a monster germ that could escape the lab and seed a pandemic...

Marc Lipsitch, an epidemiologist who directs the Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics at the Harvard School of Public Health, called review panels “a small step forward.”

Recent disease-enhancing experiments, he said, “have given us some modest scientific knowledge and done almost nothing to improve our preparedness for pandemics, and yet risked creating an accidental pandemic.”

Therefore, he said, he hoped the panels would turn down such work.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/19/health/lethal-viruses-nih...

Here's four reasons:

- Only with accountability can there be some deterrence. Especially if there were actors outside of China that were involved.

- The details of the post-mortem will give us valuable insights that we can't get by simply imagining up a worst case from our armchair. If a plane crashes, we want to figure out why it crashed and make specific improvements, rather than just assuming what happened and acting based on a loose and inaccurate mental model.

- If it did leak, there needs to be a cultural reckoning and introspection as to how this was allowed to be so taboo for so long.

- If it did leak, public knowledge of that may be what causes there to be sufficient political will to get regulatory safeguards implemented

I'm going to take a wild guess that when you first heard Trump call it the "China virus" you were as utterly horrified and revolted as I was. You had every right to be.

Like me, you probably viewed it as a deliberate attempt to distract from his administration's incompetence. Like me, you probably decided right then and there that it was a natural virus and recognized that a bulk of the people saying otherwise just HAPPENED to be people who wanted Trump re-elected.

There comes a point where you have to recognize that you have made decisions with incomplete information and emotional biases, and that those decisions sometimes need to be completely cast out, with an objective, reasoned look at the latest facts.

At this point, the evidence that you reasonably state needs to be found has long been eradicated by the second most powerful nation state the world has ever seen. An authoritarian one, with the ability to make any critic disappear. There will never be an actual smoking gun, because the CCP had months of knowledge of what they had accidentally released before the rest of the planet knew it existed. All of the evidence was within their borders. The eradication of this evidence is itself an incredibly strong indication of guilt, particularly combined with the mountains of circumstantial evidence that point to this being a lab leak. If a detective walks into a suspected murderers bedroom, and finds that all of the surfaces have been bleached and the carpet has been ripped up, he doesn't have definitive evidence that the suspect is a murderer. But he does have evidence that they are trying to hide something.

> information (like titles) can be meaningfully extracted

From a technical perspective it's probably simpler to just grep the page for the user-submitted title.

I doubt Wuhan GoF researchers will be publishing their findings anytime soon, until then it's all speculation.