[Retric]

The actual future risks don’t change based on which specific origin happened.

The correct response is likely to spend significantly more on doing actual research and a great deal on making sure everyone is well contained. It’s likely a good idea to locate such labs outside of highly populated areas as part of a defense in depth strategy.

[hn_throwaway_99]

> The correct response is likely to spend significantly more on doing actual research and a great deal on making sure everyone is well contained.

Strongly, strongly disagree. When even a teeny risk of escape means that millions of people could die, I think a much better argument is to simply make certain types of research completely off limits.

I'm certainly not the only person who thinks this. Zeynep Tufekci, who in my opinion had the most rational commentary during the pandemic, argued that much virus research just doesn't work from a cost/benefit analysis. For example, even if the root cause of COVID wasn't a lab leak, it's probably not a great idea having researchers milling around bat caves collecting sick bats and what not - it's very possible a zoonotic virus made the jump not necessarily in the lab but from researchers specifically looking for zoonotic viruses.

[Retric]

Looking at risks alone always biases you to avoid doing anything.

The benefits of research here are also human lives. So doing nothing has a real cost and the benefits extend indefinitely into the future.

Suppose you’re deciding between a 1% chance of a lab leak costing 10 million lives and a 20% chance you save 50 million lives over the next 100 years. That’s heavily weighted towards doing something, while still carrying significant risk. Some people would still say the risks aren’t worth it, but it’s not an obvious decision.

[mlyle]

I think you need to discount possible farther future benefits, because so much change can intervene and make the analysis invalid.

That is, when people want to do something-- risks tend to be understated and possible future benefits tend to be overstated.

I don't back the precautionary principle, but I do think risk in cost-benefit analysis has to be viewed from a pretty cautious place, in general (not just science).

[Retric]

Ultimately, we don’t know the actual benefits and I just picked numbers from thin air to illiterate a point. But yea linear extrapolation of such estimates hundreds of years into the future is nonsense.

[ajmurmann]

What is there to research with GoF that could be worth the massive risk? We had a vaccine for COVID in a weekend. Approval and manufacturing where the bottlenecks.

[Retric]

There’s a lot of GoF research on a lot of different diseases with a wide range of goals.

One goal for disease likely to cause pandemics is ultimately to create better treatments for those already infected. There’s a long lag between a vaccine being designed and scaling production and distribution to actually protect people. That means there’s going to be a lot of people infected in an outbreak, including many vaccinated people.

[ajmurmann]

Are there any examples of medication that was developed for a disease that came out of GoF where the medication was approved and preventive mass production took place?

[Retric]

My understanding is success have come more from protocols more than medication.

Take antimicrobial resistance, you need to understand how microbes gain resistance by actually creating resistant bacteria/fungi etc before you can develop efficient countermeasures.

With COVID there was a lot of confusion around using masks and disinfecting public spaces in the early days. A better model of the disease could have been really useful both in the early days and how people responded to mixed messages.

[morepedantic]

The risks don't change. Our risk assessment accuracy changes.