[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?