[belltaco]

You could say the exact same thing about nuclear energy and nuclear weapons and yet they have seen massive and widespread use.

Dangerous things need to be contained really well, regardless of whether this virus leaked or not.

Natural dangerous respiratory virus outbreaks do occur from time to time so it's better to be ready against them which also steels us against lab leaks.

[cameldrv]

Personally, I think that on balance, nuclear energy is a positive thing. It generates a lot of carbon and pollution free electricity. When containment is lost, the consequences are at least mostly localized.

With this GoF research, the potential downside is extremely large. COVID was really bad. As it is, it's responsible for 3.5 million confirmed deaths so far. This is several orders of magnitude worse than Chernobyl.

This isn't even the worst case scenario though. GoF work has also been done with enhanced flu viruses that could have IFRs above 10%. With something like that you could be looking at upwards of 100 million deaths. Those are really extreme consequences, on par with a total nuclear exchange between the US and USSR.

And then, what do we get out of all of this? For all of the Coronavirus GoF research they did, how did any of that help us at all against COVID?