zlacker

One real great reason to care one way or the other is that the lab leak vs. natural origins debate heavily informs whether or not GoF research makes sense at all, as in, whether it should be pursued or globally & aggressively banned.

The basis for GoF research (at least, the publicly-espoused thesis, bioweapons research being a likely secondary interest) is that such research can help us stop or reduce the impact of a pandemic. If the natural origin theory turns out to be the truth, then this adds lots of weight to the idea that we SHOULD be aggressively pursuing GoF research in order to fix the next naturally-occuring viral pandemic. However, if sars-cov-2 actually came from a lab leak, then we have evidence that such research is both far more risky than we thought and as well that natural pandemics are less likely than we think, so we should probably not do it at all.