[mikeyouse]

Sure, but that's only if you restrict it to H5N1 instead of looking at the history of Influenza A and things like the Spanish Flu, which was the most deadly disease in human history and derived from a mutated bird flu.

https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejmp058281

Even still, H5N1 has repeatedly infected humans in the wild... the most famous case in Hong Kong infecting 18 people and killing 6 of those. So you can make the case that GoF is irresponsible given the stakes, but it seems important to acknowledge that you're basically just hoping these horrific viruses don't mutate as we predict them to.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11938498/

[gensym]

That would be the case if GoF research was necessary to defend against these viruses, but that’s not the case. AFAIK, GoF research played no part in the development of vaccines and treatments for Covid.

[mikeyouse]

Sure, but it took over a year, trillions of dollars of economic disruption and millions of lives to develop the vaccines — its all balance of probabilities and costs.

Some of the proposed research that was GoF adjacent (that was never actually performed) was to develop pseudo viruses more similar to hACE strains that would evoke an immune response in horseshoe bats, effectively vaccinating them. Would the small, but certain, risk of an accident from that research been worth it if it could’ve averted the last 3 years and every future sarbecovirus pandemic?

It still might be the case that we shouldn’t risk GoF - but the simplistic “hurr durr, greedy virologists just want their grant money and don’t understand the risk” takes are childishly simplistic. There is nobody on earth more attuned to the risk of pandemics than the people doing this research, it’s why they’re doing the research.