If we really have to do it, then we can do it in the middle of a desert with quarantine procedures instead of near/in population centers.
You have a very limited imagination. ;-) I assure you that extensive research into biological (not involving viruses), chemical, and nuclear weapons... and really a wide variety of weapons research is easily more dangerous. There's plenty of opportunity in other areas like materials science, genetics, etc., as well.
> If we really have to do it, then we can do it in the middle of a desert with quarantine procedures instead of near/in population centers.
Now you'll want to have an ultra-secure means of transporting highly dangerous biological samples, not to mention research teams & observers, at very high speeds to the middle of a desert. Are you sure you've improved the risk profile?
Personally, I think we just shouldn't do this at all.
If you're worried about lab contamination, the risk is from the researchers moving amongst the population. I agree that you'd rather not, but I don't agree that regularly putting them on planes to and from major population centers really reduces the risk.
> Personally, I think we just shouldn't do this at all.
[Shrugs]. Some people are pro-pandemic.
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.
They very much are not.
Viruses and bacteria are unique in the fact that they can harm the whole globe as opposed to chemical and other disasters that will likely only harm the immediate area.
And harming the whole globe is all the more certain for infectious diseases if you put them in the middle of a large city with lots of air travel.
> Now you'll want to have an ultra-secure means of transporting highly dangerous biological samples, not to mention research teams & observers, at very high speeds to the middle of a desert. Are you sure you've improved the risk profile?
Why would you need to transport things at high speed for speculative research involving newly generated viruses/bacteria?
I never said anything about analysing things involving people who are actively infected, but there the disease is already out in the public, so the risk profile is completely different.
First of all, you added in bacteria, which are not viruses.
However, this statement isn't a useful statement "X is unique because it can harm the whole world, as opposed to Y that will likely only harm the immediate area".
The implication is that X will almost always harm the whole world, and Y will almost always impact the immediate area, but that's not necessarily true.
(I would remind you the "1% chance we'll ignite the entire atmosphere" of the Manhattan Project. Fortunately, any future nuclear weapons we might develop will almost certainly be less powerful... oh wait.)
It also implies that the risk of X and the risk of Y doing harm are equivalent, and that's undoubtedly not true. It's ignoring the reality that nature is already doing X all the time, and primarily in high population centers.
> And harming the whole globe is all the more certain for infectious diseases if you put them in the middle of a large city with lots of air travel.
I would think it'd be all the more certain if you're regularly putting the researchers working in the lab, along with any biological samples they might have, on flights to and from such large cities.
Pandemic risk is a systemic problem and has to be evaluated as such. Controls/mitigations you have in place generally have way more impact than where the experiments are run, and it's really not as simple as "well if the lab is away from people that reduces the risk".
> Why would you need to transport things at high speed for speculative research involving newly generated viruses/bacteria?
Because this research is not isolated from reality. Much of what they do is take samples from the real world, observe virology in the real world (both human and non-human populations), and work with front line healthcare workers who are usually the first to see new viral threats. Without that you pretty much eliminate the value of the research entirely.
> I never said anything about analysing things involving people who are actively infected, but there the disease is already out in the public, so the risk profile is completely different.
The threat doesn't come directly from a virus that is already out in the public. It comes from how a virus that is already out there might evolve. You appear to believe that nature is conducting fewer and less significant experiments in evolving viruses than people in labs. I don't think that is supported by the evidence.
The pandemic risk profile with a virus that is already out in the public is that it might evolve into something that has never been out in public before. Nature is conducting these experiments every day, all day. I'd be more worried about the outcomes of those experiments than anything going on in a lab.
Would that that were true. I'm curious how you explain how your perception aligns with the reality that no lab, anywhere, at anytime since the outbreak, has been able to produce COVID-19 variants as fast as occurred naturally.
Nature is experimenting all the time, with the overwhelming majority of viruses out there, with absolutely no interest in controls, mitigations or protections for the human population... and nature is far trickier to observe. We've gotten pretty good at reducing the risk from nature, but make no mistake, even with all the GoF research we could possibly hope for, it far outpaces our capacity to experiment. The only advantage GoF labs have is that they can direct their research in specific areas where there is greatest risk. That's the whole challenge.
Otherwise we are in the dark with unknown unknowns which is not a good place. So the risk here of doing research is manageable.
I am not a vegan.
I hate to say it (because I agree the risks are significant), but I suspect the need to use this as a tool to model both probable futures and not-yet-understood behaviors of viral mutation may be arguments in favor of continued GoF research, despite the risk. I concur with other commenters that maybe we should be putting this stuff in the wilderness behind service providers that must undergo quarantine procedure before returning to densely-populated areas.
The research must have been pretty misleading then, because all the experts appeared to be taken by surprise by the fact that it mutated at all, given their original plan was "two shots and done". Something that has now become promoting infinity boosters to a world that has stopped listening (uptake of the current round is extremely low).
But again, why should we listen to claims about virology? People who have been living in ivory caves may not realize this, but it's been proven beyond all doubt that the entire profession engaged in a conspiracy against the public to mislead people about the likelihood of a lab experiment gone wrong. Not just the many authors of the proximal origins paper, but so the other scientists who saw this coverup happening in public and said nothing.
And I'm sorry you feel misinformed, but nothing I read ever suggested anyone was taken by surprise by its mutagenic rate. To the extent experts thought it might be a "two shots and done" virus, they were overly optimistic about policy and vaccination uptake; were the vaccine manufactured and rolled out quickly enough and deployed globally, it could have been cut off from human reservoirs and died out, but a combination of logistics and public distrust meant we missed that window and now it's endemic. Its mutation rate pretty much guarantees it'll be with us indefinitely as long as the public has the stomach to tolerate that.
That's why the vaccine protects against serious illness and death, because at that point the virus has spread beyond the mucous membranes.
It's more likely that people misinterpreted "after two shots quarantine is no longer necessary" as "the disease is eradicated after two shots."
If you know it came from a lab then there's a chance that the lab workers have knowledge that can help fight it. If you lie and claim it couldn't have come from a lab, that whole line of investigation gets closed off.
> they were overly optimistic about policy and vaccination uptake
They were overly pessimistic and were making those claims back when they thought they'd only get 60-70% uptake. This is the famous Fauci admission that his claims about herd immunity were made up in response to opinion polls. Uptake was higher than expected and effectiveness was drastically lower.
This business whereby scientists are always innocent, it's only politicians and the media that misrepresent them, is crap. Scientists lied and manipulated a naive and plastic public deliberately in order to protect and advance their own careers, they did it at scale and nobody in that community seems to care. Smart people now understand that scientists are both less honest and less wise than both politicians and journalists as a group. At least the latter groups have strong internal competition and different factions trying to establish what's true. Scientists seem to behave as a bloc regardless of what's right or wrong.
How do they protect and advance their careers by being wrong?