zlacker

>>todd8+(OP)
Every time this comes I ask - "so what?"

So again, I ask - even if it's true, so what? It's impossible to conclusively prove, and even if proven what exactly is proven? That an accident occurred? OK, so what?

The article attempts to answer this:

> The vitriol also obscures a broader imperative, Relman says, which is that uncovering the virus’s origins is crucial to stopping the next pandemic. Threats from both lab accidents and natural spillovers are growing simultaneously as humans move steadily into wild places and new biosafety labs grow in number around the world. “This is why the origins question is so important,” Relman says.

However the reality is from the perspective of the USA it doesn't even matter. Even if China was malicious and deliberately sent it off to us, it could've been easily stopped but we didn't do it. Unless we're going to go to war over this it seems like a pointless exercise as conclusive evidence will never emerge as it requires cooperation from China.

We're worrying about whether it was created from labs in China, meanwhile we couldn't even prevent a massive superspreader event in Boston via the Biogen conference, filled with people who already has an awareness of the virus to begin with.

Even now as I type this cases of the variant are increasing and the amount of people taking the vaccine is decreasing and silly accidents like the J&J fiasco are occurring. Not to say that we can't explore both things simultaneously, but it's pretty obvious that the return on investment will differ - one will do... what exactly? And another will prevent more cases.

>>endisn+Tl
The conflict over the investigation is justifiable. It's necessary to understand how the virus got started. If it's lab-grown we will want to be very careful to scrutinize each other's labs. If it's natural we will want to be very careful to scrutinize wild game. The implications of any scenario are broad and complex, but clearly we don't want a repeat of 2020 if we can avoid it.

Another point: just because there's some uncomfortable conflict over the investigation doesn't mean we should abandon and investigation, in fact it probably means we should investigate more vigorously.

>>engine+Io
Thank you for your comment, but your comment is precisely the kind of comment I disagree with.

What difference does it make? Let's say that it's both lab-grown and wild game. OK, so that means we should scrutinize both. OK, then. Now what?

No amount of scrutiny can prevent an accident from occurring. It's not as if this pandemic happens every year. We're talking about a once in a century event. Not to mention some countries prevented the virus from spreading within their own countries very effectively, and others, well, did not.

>>endisn+lp
If the virus was a product of gain of function research, the primary purpose of which is to reduce the risk of pandemics, then the research becomes much more difficult to justify. The argument I guess becomes then, yeah, periodically we’ll cause a pandemic, and millions of people will die, but we’ll be so much better at dealing with diseases that arise naturally, as SARS and MERS did, that on balance it will be worth the extra pandemics...

Whatever you think about this, it seems unbelievably foolish to locate these labs in the middle of metropolises.

>>ckw+Ct
OK, so what. What can we do to make China stop doing this research if they want to? Are we going to go to war over this? No. Are we going to have an embargo with China? No?

So effectively this becomes a situation of "oh yeah they should've not had that accident, oh well." In the USA we've had the same problem ourselves (lab accidents with pathogens), and we banned gain of function research and ended up removing the ban a few years later.

The entire exercise is meaningless. Note - I'm not even saying we shouldn't research the origins of COVID, what I'm saying is, the result doesn't really matter.