[jjazwiecki]

This is as far as my lay understanding goes: the idea was that you could better handle potential outbreaks by creating potential outbreaks in a lab, and studying them there. If you have bad priors ("we have perfect protocols, because we've never caused a global pandemic") I could see how you'd get to this being a net positive: there will be another pandemic, probably involving one of these, so let's study it before it's a pandemic.

I've thought of the intent as a little like using a fuzzer in security research, although that might not by a great analogy.

[runawaybottle]

We need to do this research on the Moon/Mars/Underwater/Arctic/Desert. Not in a city with millions of people.

You know, now that I just typed that out, I’m becoming more and more convinced common sense was lacking when it comes to that Wuhan Lab. Something simple most likely happened because the common sense just wasn’t there.

Edit:

Here are the articles related to lab leaks before 2015 (these articles were posted before 2015, before the conspiracy or any kind of anti-China agenda):

https://science.sciencemag.org/content/304/5671/659

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC416634/

https://nationalpost.com/news/a-brief-terrifying-history-of-...

I simply googled ‘before:2015-01-01 china lab leak’ to get this confirmation bias.

[bayesian_horse]

Hindsight is 20/20.

Whatever really happened, there never was a vial in that lab that said "potentially pandemic virus - handle with extreme care". Even if the virus came from (or rather through) a lab, there is no evidence what the researcher's actual intentions were. We don't even know which researchers were responsible.

[thu2111]

I don't think that's quite true. The grants and papers talk about what the goals were and the biosafety labels being used.

[bayesian_horse]

Yes, but SARS-CoV-2 can't have come from any of those papers or grant proposals directly. It has never been sequenced before.

If it evolved in a lab through any kind of "gain of function" research, this must have happened completely off the radar. The existing evidence just doesn't prove anything. On the contrary, the evidence that there was "gain of function research" going on with viruses that weren't nearly identical to Sars-Cov-2 makes it less likely that this virus originated from such research.

[thu2111]

Given the massive levels of evidence destruction involved, that seems like quite a stretch.