On the one hand, yes, I agree; I thought virology research was crazy back in 2017? when someone at Event Horizon shared a paper which did a cost-benefit analysis and thought the net effect of BSL-4 labs was something like a hundred deaths per year per lab.
But I think it is important to be able to accurately understand what other people think so that you can talk to them instead of past them. (I still remember, with some bitterness, an op-ed exchange where two people debating virology said, roughly, “these things are so dangerous we shouldn’t study them” and “these things are so dangerous we have to study them”, and that was the end of the discussion, with agreement on the danger and no real ability to estimate the counterfactuals.)
Did we need to know anything but “Covid is an airborne infectious respiratory virus”? How much research prior to the event did it take to know that?
This account of vaccine development claims that having done research on spike proteins back in 2016 was helpful in being able to rapidly develop the vaccine once the genome was uploaded, for example.
[To be clear, I think it’s important to distinguish here between gain of function research, which was disliked enough for there to be a funding moratorium (that then expired), and storing / working with dangerous viruses at all, which I think also is below the cost-benefit threshold, but this is a harder case to make.]
On the one hand, yes, I agree; I thought virology research was crazy back in 2017? when someone at Event Horizon shared a paper which did a cost-benefit analysis and thought the net effect of BSL-4 labs was something like a hundred deaths per year per lab.
But I think it is important to be able to accurately understand what other people think so that you can talk to them instead of past them. (I still remember, with some bitterness, an op-ed exchange where two people debating virology said, roughly, “these things are so dangerous we shouldn’t study them” and “these things are so dangerous we have to study them”, and that was the end of the discussion, with agreement on the danger and no real ability to estimate the counterfactuals.)
This account of vaccine development claims that having done research on spike proteins back in 2016 was helpful in being able to rapidly develop the vaccine once the genome was uploaded, for example.
[To be clear, I think it’s important to distinguish here between gain of function research, which was disliked enough for there to be a funding moratorium (that then expired), and storing / working with dangerous viruses at all, which I think also is below the cost-benefit threshold, but this is a harder case to make.]