Lab leak fight casts chill over virology research

> I don't associate the term "NIMBY" with either scenarios, just housing.

You might not, but the broader population associates NIMBY with any scenario where a neighbourhood pushes back against some kind of change in that neighbourhood (adding a prison, a power plant, a half-way house, a school, a bar, trains, airports, etc.). There are NIMBY responses to pretty much any change, and the magnitude of that response tends to have little bearing on the relative merits of the change.

> It's not like anyone's trying to put a nuclear power plant in the middle of Boston to begin with.

No. For the most part no one is putting nuclear power plants anywhere in the US. However, there are other power plants in Boston (and for good reason). This is a direct byproduct of the NIMBYism I'm talking about.

I'm not sure I followed your reasoning entirely.

You mention rapid sequencing, rapid wastewater monitoring, PPE stocking/distribution policies, and more effective local lockdown procedures/policies. Those would all be factors that would reduce the value of "X" (as in, the consequences of bad outcomes in either scenario), rather than any coefficients in front of X.

I don't necessarily agree that the past 25 years, particularly if you are excluding COVID, is a meaningful representative sample... unless you want to compare it to the loss of life from GoF over the past 25 years excluding COVID. In that case, I'd challenge you to demonstrate a loss of life from GoF research that is over 10K. Given the ~100K lives estimate, that puts it at 10x greater benefit than not doing GoF research.

> However if we undergo a similar exercise of chances of Lab leak causing an outbreak we'll probably end up with a similar figure of 1/100. In a lab leak we'll have to contend with a more powerful variant of a pathogen that has caused a prior outbreak which may kill an order more people than the average outbreak.

There's a number of false assumptions here. Your threat assessment seems more rooted in works of fiction than reality. That the probability is equivalent is highly debatable, particularly since it is far easier (and cheaper) to apply risk mitigations to a virology lab than to society as a whole. It's also not a given that a lab leak means we'll have to contend with a more powerful variant of a pathogen. Even if it were a more powerful variant of a pathogen, that does not necessarily relate to a higher death toll. In fact, SARS-COV-2 was far less virulent than SARS-COV-1, and that's a significant contributor to why it had so much more impact.

Even if we ignore ALL of that, in the even that there was an outbreak from a virology lab doing GoF research, that would mean we would be much further ahead on research to combat the virus than if said virus were to occur in the wild. We'd have shorter times to have disease profiles, tests, epidemiological models, and vaccines, and the impact of shorter times is exponential. While it is conceivable that a leak from a lab leads to a higher death count, it is far more conceivable that a virus that didn't come from a lab would end more lives.

> if we entertain that Covid was caused by a lab lead ~10m deaths, or 100x of 100k.

Spanish flu, which existed before anyone knew how to do GoF research, killed far more people than COVID-19. At the lowest estimate, it's about 17 million people, and at the high end closer to 100 million people. The population of the world at the time was ~1/4 the population when COVID-19 hit the scene, so on a per capita basis COVID-19 isn't in the same league. AIDS, which we've been able to track back to its natural origin, has killed 42 million people. The Bubonic Plague killed... 75+ million, or about a third of the European population.

Nature is way better at killing us than any lab.

> Ultimately it seems GoF research is playing with fire without knowing if the effort actually will reduces total deaths on net.

Another way to think of it is that international trade & travel is playing with fire without knowing if the effort actually will reduce total deaths or not. We could therefore return to the days of the horse and buggy, or we could continue with the practice and put in place mitigations, like GoF research, to mitigate the risks it entails.

> This would have to not happen regularly. The researchers would need to stay for many months at a time, and undergo a separate quarantine before they re-enter society.

So you would add months of delay, significantly impaired observability, and far less agility to our response to emerging threats. Congratulations, you've just increased risk.

Yes because despite the known risks we need to understand these viruses and what causes across species transmission so that we can prepare for future pandemics (even those caused by spillover mistakes) and what we learn may also prove useful in other applications.

Otherwise we are in the dark with unknown unknowns which is not a good place. So the risk here of doing research is manageable.

> That is a tiny tiny number of people, measured in thousands at most.

Does that somehow prevent you from getting them to express those antibodies and then cloning them?