zlacker

"This is the most shocking article I have ever read in my life."

Dare we inquire how long you have lived. :)

But seriously, I am not sure that the scientific community, nor all national governments, have reached a clear consensus on gain of function research. It is still a developing issue. Welcome to be corrected on that. Such research could potentially help to prevent pandemics as well as accidentally start them. The idea that scientists in the US might have been working with scientists in other countries, including China, on GoF research is not shocking to me. Here is a paper from 2016 on the ethics of GoF research:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4996883/

Perhaps the old saying about mistakingly attributing malice to incompetence applies here.

As for the cover-up, it is difficult to imagine that David Baltimore is wrong. I used a textbook he co-authored when I was in school; he is one of the pioneers of the biotech industry. It seems unlikely this was not created in a lab. Then again, it is probably easier to prove someone in a lab made a mistake than to prove soemthing exists in nature.

>>1vuio0+(OP)
Gain of function research outside of hyper-secure settings is, frankly, idiotic. It’s massively more dangerous than criticality experiments because of the potential for exponential spread.

>>Abraha+41
From the beginning gain of function research has been done at levels as low as BSL-2, and this article claims the Bat Lady said that all their coronavirus research prior to the pandemic was done at BSL-2 or -3 levels. The Wuhan Institute of Virology's BSL-4 lab would likely be booked up for research known to be very dangerous, and as you go up in levels it's more and more inconvenient to get anything done from the physical protections (there are also supposed to be biological ones).

>>1vuio0+(OP)
Even if it wasn’t created or modified in a lab, it’s not hard to imagine it was known and known to be dangerous. The conditions described about how these researchers were sifting through bat guano are quite poor to say the least. From the start of the pandemic I sort of shrugged about how it started. I thought denying a lab leak so early on was quite odd, or at least no one should trust that. For simple reasons: governments lie and do dangerous things, harming its citizens and other global citizens in the process. Then they classify it all and lie about it. There are so many examples of this, it’s like shooting fish in a barrel. See: Rocky Mountain flats plutonium production, etc.

>>Throwa+32
Plus it appears that the lab was poorly run: She noted that a September 2019 paper in an academic journal by the director of the WIV’s BSL-4 laboratory, Yuan Zhiming, had outlined safety deficiencies in China’s labs. “Maintenance cost is generally neglected,” he had written. “Some BSL-3 laboratories run on extremely minimal operational costs or in some cases none at all.”