Now, an unintentional leak would be theoretically possible with these initial intentions but then wouldn’t China still have a leg up on developing treatments? If so, wouldn’t we have seen that in their vaccine development?
Of course you this is all uneducated speculation. Quite possible that engineering a deadly and very infectious virus is easier than creating a cure or a vaccine by orders of magnitude.
It’s rather simple to do the so called ’gain of function’, you let the virus have it’s run with bat cells and add lots of human cells in petri with them. Because there is no immune system, the virus have not much to stop it. Slowly it adapt to human cells, you can change the type of cells so it can adapt to other receptors and so on. Those articles where published before the whole crisis erupted.
"Moderna designed its coronavirus vaccine in 2 days" was a headline I saw. And it's been approved by the FDA. So that seems demonstrably false.
Multiple companies have come up with a vaccine by now, too.
It's a pure mapping problem. There are thousands of known viruses that affect humans. But most viruses don't have thousands of vaccines.
Additionally, there are constraints. The only contraint on a virus is that is needs to reproduce, and cause harm. Any kind of harm will do, and any kind of spreading is fine. But the vaccine needs to not hurt the person (at least, don't hurt them worse than the virus would).
Even if both processes involved similar techniques, the constraints on virus production are more favorable to the researcher than vaccine production.
To get back to whether China or any nation would intentionally create a biological weapon, however...: most industrialized countries realized a long time ago that bioweapons tends to be a bad strategy. Most western countries stopped their bioweapons programs back in the 70s for the simple reason that there was no reasonable use-case for a bioweapon that isn't done better by simply bombing something (or more recently-hacking their infrastructure). Bioweapons are strategically useful for small nations, and terrorist groups.
If a nation actually did that (release a bioweapon and pre-immunize their own citizens)... well World War is probably overselling it, but I could certainly imagine contained conflicts, sinking of cargo vessels, shooting down of planes, targeted assassinations... etc. It's very likely that every nation would have highly vested interests in making sure that whoever authorized that weapon was removed from this planet.
We're at 500,000 now with the virus, I think?
That's more Americans than have been killed in all the 20th Century wars combined [1].
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attack_on_Pearl_Harbor
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_military_casualt...
People underappreciate just how complicated and time-consuming this is.
Immune systems are terrifying things, on trigger alert (they have to be!), and you have to tickle it just right without making everything explode.
One of the keys there is that's not uniquely Chinese as a problem. Those researchers were talking about American labs.