zlacker

you mean figuring out what caused a global pandemic, deaths of millions of people and trillions dollars of economic damage is of no consequence?

>>sayona+(OP)
if we figure out, what then? Are they to blame for all the death?

>>endisn+d1
well how about establishing safety procedures, research guidelines and international regulation body governing dangerous GoF research so that such outbreak doesn't happen again.

>>sayona+22
Can’t we do that either way?

>>endisn+d1
Yes absolutely. If someone engineered something so deadly in a lab, in a non war political climate, and can be so irresponsible as to leak it and cause all this death then yes. They are absolutely responsible.

>>endisn+o3
you've gotta know the details, kind of like those 19th and 20th century epidemiologists who went to the ground zero of say cholera outbreak* and investigated how it started and what was its source, and how exactly it originated and spread, and such investigations were helpful to bring about vaccines and preventive measures (and more recently see Ebola response for example).

Now while we do have effective Covid vaccines (at least for some variants of the virus), knowing the exact origin of a major pandemic, either it came from a natural source or a lab, is of major importance for science, medicine and public health.

Arguably we're lucky COVID was not as deadly as some other viral pandemics of the past** and we have to gather as much info as possible on its origin and distribution in order to prevent something like this (or worse) happening in the future.

*https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waldemar_Haffkine

**https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Death