[fumbly]

The current plan is to 6x the funding for gain-of-function research, from $200 million to $1.2 billion, in the name of pandemic prevention. That's one serious reason for wanting to investigate whether gain-of-function research may have caused the current one.

The risks of such research have been in open debate for years, and the Obama administration even banned it for a while. It's not a far-fetched possibility, and it's a shame that the discussion about it became such a political casualty for the first year or so. The fact that heads are cooling a little now is clearly the precondition for scientists to be able to start writing letters like the OP.

[baja_blast]

> The current plan is to 6x the funding for gain-of-function research, from $200 million to $1.2 billion, in the name of pandemic prevention.

Do you have a source for this? Because if true this would be extremely frightening, even if Covid is natural the research is just too risky. GoF research should be banned, I mean it's entire justification for conducting this research in the first place is that it "helps predict new emergent diseases and develop vaccines" but it failed to predict this pandemic and did nothing towards vaccine development.

[fumbly]

"Also, current plans are to expand worldwide collaboration on risky virus research sixfold, through the $1.2 billion Global Virome Project. Shouldn’t we figure out if this research sparked the pandemic before drastically expanding it?"

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/global-opinions/cong...

[bagacrap]

That's a pretty weak reference because it's part of an opinion piece with no references.

However there's an article in Nature which makes it clearer that the 1.2B figure is just an amount requested by those who suggested the project. A far cry from "current plans" to fund that amount.

[Izkata]

> even if Covid is natural the research is just too risky. GoF research should be banned

This was actually the reason we stopped the research in the US in 2014: Risky with no clear benefit. It was restarted in 2017 after investigations and new guidelines for the research to hopefully improve safety measures.