Lab leak fight casts chill over virology research

> What work is that? Unnaturally bringing bats and pangolins together in a meat market? The only "real world" excuse ever offered.

GoF research in virology is specifically to replicate what happens in nature in hopes of forecasting outcomes and giving us more time to respond to them. If it isn't doing what happens in nature, it is, by definition, a failure.

> I've read their reports and their annual revisions. I'm not convinced they're needed, and since the "science" here is purely a wild guess using models projected backwards in time to fit existing data, the results aren't particularly meaningful either.

Those "guesses" have proven to amazingly insightful. You may not find them useful, but even energy companies have found these forecasts useful for their business.

> Do any of these require you to invent novel phenomenon to "study?" If not, then your comparison is purely the making of a strawman.

Yes, they do. More precisely, I would say they involve artificially controlled experiments that are used to forecast outcomes in nature.

...and I wasn't making a comparison or a strawman. I was taking your statement as an assertion, and identifying that in fact many scientific fields employ methods that you describe as "anti-science".

> Interestingly.. was any "forecast" of the virus they created in a lab provided to anyone?

No. One might almost think that perhaps "the virus" wasn't created in a lab. It's unlikely, given the large number of virologists who've said it wasn't created in a lab, but maybe?

> Even if we did have it, would it have made a difference in timelines?

Yes. Hugely, particularly for testing. Most of the vaccine development cycle is tied up in testing for safety and such, so the impact there is smaller, but it's not zero.

> You clearly see the exact problem.

I do. I don't think it's the same problem that you are seeing.

What risk could possibly be worse than a global pandemic? That seems to be what gain of function research purports to be studying to prevent- and in this case it appears that the research virus caused the very thing it was supposed to (indirectly) prevent.

The fundamental problem with GoF research is that the virology community has shown that it's not trustworthy enough to be working with things that are this dangerous.

In China, there has been almost a complete information blackout after COVID. Most of what we know that points to a leak that actually comes from China has been accidentally disclosed or was published before the pandemic.

In the U.S. and Europe, it's sadly largely the same story. We now know through FOIA requests that the authors of the pivotal Proximal Origin thought privately that there was a significant likelihood that SARS2 was lab derived, but what they published was that "we do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible." They also sought to conceal some of the true authors of the paper in order for it to appear more independent and credible. They, and their colleagues then relentlessly smeared and called conspiracy theorists, anyone who publicly said the very same things that they said privately to each other.

EcoHealth and DARPA refused to provide a copy of the DEFUSE grant proposal. It ultimately had to be leaked by an anonymous source in the government. When it finally came out it ended up being more or less a direct blueprint for how you'd create SARS2 from existing bat viruses, and it was submitted just a year before the outbreak started in Wuhan. One of the collaborators on that project was to have been the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Throughout, (and there is much more), not a single person who has brought any of this to light has been a virologist. Some have been biologists in other fields, some have been outside the scientific establishment entirely.

Being responsible for an animal that harbors a virus that could kill 10,000,000 people or more if you make a mistake is an awesome responsibility, and only people of the utmost integrity can be trusted with something that dangerous. What we've seen is that sadly, nowhere near this level of integrity exists in the virology community.

No. I am saying I don't know what it means to ask people about something in a survey that isn't a topic of discussion, i.e., asking about things that people don't care about.

There will be an opinion but that doesn't mean anyone cares about it or there is discussion about it.

Why are we so focused on understanding the biology of viruses, while making almost no effort to block them physically or install any more filters in public?