[lmm]

> If we work under the assumption that this was a lab-made virus that leaked, then they plainly must have actually created it. What's the point of having a real virus if you aren't using it to generate real data?

Assuming experiments had been completed by then they'd have, what, some figures for how infectious it was in humanized mice. Maybe months down the line they'd've written a paper showing that this splice made it 40% +/-25% more infectious than the strain it was derived from or whatever. So yes, there would be data, but it's hard to imagine it would be a meaningful data compared to what was already being measured with a) humans rather than mice, and more importantly b) orders of magnitude larger sample sizes.

> This isn't true. They would have information on how it was created,

The how would be that they ran up that DNA sequence and inserted it into a blank virus. There's nothing that knowing "how it was created" tells you that you don't already know from the DNA sequence.

> any work that they had done to devise a vaccine for it

They weren't working on that.

[ozr]

Re: most of this: an actual virologist has responded and explained the data that would have typically been collected and how it would have helped.

To the last point though:

> They weren't working on that.

Says who? If they lied about accidentally releasing it, why wouldn’t they lie about what they were doing with it in the first place?

[lmm]

> Re: most of this: an actual virologist has responded and explained the data that would have typically been collected and how it would have helped.

I think they're looking at the best case scenario. Yes, if people were studying the virus then they were hoping to learn something about its effects on humans. But whatever experiments they were performing were presumably in-progress rather than complete, and the odds that they were working on antibodies or the like are pretty narrow.

> Says who? If they lied about accidentally releasing it, why wouldn’t they lie about what they were doing with it in the first place?

What they were working on was public record dating back to years before there was any reason to hide anything. And it makes very little sense to work on a vaccine for a virus that doesn't exist in the wild.