[hotpotamus]

I’d say as a rule, I think much more federal regulation of industry in the US (presuming you don’t mean the Wuhan lab) would be nice to have, but it seems pretty unpopular. If you do mean the Wuhan lab, then I gotta say that Xi seems like an even tougher sell on the idea.

As far as the whole leak thing goes, I always assumed it was just like every plague since antiquity; not a lab leak or creation (I think one of the problems that that crowd had was differentiating themselves from the whole “tinfoil crazy uncle” thing).

[fidgewidge]

It's unpopular for the reasons that the Pfizer executive helpfully spells out - regulators are useless because governments don't pay them enough, so make all their decisions with one eye towards a much better paying job in sector they're regulating. You get the appearance of regulation without it actually having teeth.

It's an open secret that this is a problem everywhere, not just medical regulation. The revolving door was once an issue that the left campaigned on, in fact, but you don't hear much about it any more. Probably because there's no obvious fix beyond ensuring that pay for regulators keeps up with whatever comp the private sector is willing to offer, which is the sort of solution that's not politically popular on that side of the aisle. Also it's hard. The value of less aggressive regulation to companies like Pfizer is very high. Governments meanwhile are ideologically optimized to hire more people at lower wages, not fewer people at higher wages. The whole culture of pay more to hire the best that you find in places like the tech industry just doesn't happen there, and in the USA there's even a rule limiting pay to be lower than the President (which mysteriously doesn't apply to Fauci, wonder how that one works).

You could also try hacks like laws forbidding regulators from (re)joining the industry they regulate, but that'd just make the job even less attractive and ensure that whoever the government does end up hiring are the industry rejects, who will either have an axe to grind or simply not be able to keep up with the technical issues, making them easy to bamboozle.

There's not really a great solution here, beyond maybe just being realistic about what government regulation is capable of. Private sector regulators is also a possibility. Uber is a taxi regulator of sorts, but a much more effective and innovative one, and one whose staff can't be bought off with the carrot of luxury jobs in the taxi sector.

[hotpotamus]

Then you do not believe the US government is capable of regulating the scientific research of its own citizens? I often see this thought applied to 3D printing of small arms, and I tend to agree that it’s quite problematic. I see no reason to limit this thinking to small arms though - as technology advances, what’s to stop individuals from doing their own viral research and development? If the government is incapable of stopping them, it’s probably worth thinking about your own contingency plans; it’s something I do.

[fidgewidge]

I don't know any more if any government can do that. A few years ago I thought it was possible and normal. Now? We saw things like vaccine approvals based on 8 mice all of whom got COVID anyway, that doesn't sound much like what I thought regulators would do. But it makes sense given the Pfizer guys comments about revolving doors. You can suspect it but hearing it from the horses mouth is something else.

You're so right about viral engineering being done by individuals. I don't know what can be done about that. I guess it depends a lot on how many dual uses some of the ingredients have, how much the tech can be controlled. Sort of like how you can stop people doing stuff with uranium on their own, but not mixing up fertilizer bombs. But presumably it's easier to stop large companies and government labs doing this stuff, so why not start there? Today we fail even at that.