[whatshisface]

The worry is that an adverse effect would be discovered, but then every world leader would get on the phone one after the other, and call the lab to say "hey let's not let people know about this." Or more realistically, the same would happen but with lots of implicit gesturing and the design of subtle incentives, instead of direct phone calls.

"Better than covid" is also not a great bar to meet. The real bar is, "better than N months of covid, where N is the time until a better vaccine with fewer adverse effects is discovered."

So, these are both abstract speculations. It would be nice if you could put some knowledge to them. Do you think it would be possible for an adverse effect to go unreported, while being common enough to equal those N months of covid?