EJT isn’t asserting that COVID-19 isn’t a lab-engineered disease, he’s merely not asserting that it is one. Whatever the origins of COVID-19, it happens that it infected a large fraction of the population but didn’t kill all untreated victims. EJT reckons it would be possible to engineer something that has both those properties. Seems simple enough.
EJT is not (so far as I can tell) making any specific proposals about what money should go to which virologists or epidemiologists or vaccine researchers or whatever. It may be true that COVID-19 came from a lab. Whether that’s true or not, it may be true that some lines of disease investigation do more harm than good in expectation. In which case, we would likely do well not to pursue them. But what would be necessary to invalidate EJT’s suggestion that we invest in making pandemics less likely or less harmful isn’t “some research into this stuff is harmful on net”, but “on average research into this stuff is harmful” or even “on average research into this stuff will be harmful even if we try very hard to direct the research in beneficial-and-not-harmful directions”, and I see no reason to believe that proposition even conditional on COVID-19 having come from a lab.
(I personally think it’s plausible but far from certain that COVID-19 escaped from a lab, and highly unlikely that it was engineered rather than collected in the wild and merely being kept in said lab. I haven’t looked deeply into the matter and am not claiming that anyone should take my opinions on these propositions as evidence for anything; I give them merely for context.)
EJT isn’t asserting that COVID-19 isn’t a lab-engineered disease, he’s merely not asserting that it is one. Whatever the origins of COVID-19, it happens that it infected a large fraction of the population but didn’t kill all untreated victims. EJT reckons it would be possible to engineer something that has both those properties. Seems simple enough.
EJT is not (so far as I can tell) making any specific proposals about what money should go to which virologists or epidemiologists or vaccine researchers or whatever. It may be true that COVID-19 came from a lab. Whether that’s true or not, it may be true that some lines of disease investigation do more harm than good in expectation. In which case, we would likely do well not to pursue them. But what would be necessary to invalidate EJT’s suggestion that we invest in making pandemics less likely or less harmful isn’t “some research into this stuff is harmful on net”, but “on average research into this stuff is harmful” or even “on average research into this stuff will be harmful even if we try very hard to direct the research in beneficial-and-not-harmful directions”, and I see no reason to believe that proposition even conditional on COVID-19 having come from a lab.
(I personally think it’s plausible but far from certain that COVID-19 escaped from a lab, and highly unlikely that it was engineered rather than collected in the wild and merely being kept in said lab. I haven’t looked deeply into the matter and am not claiming that anyone should take my opinions on these propositions as evidence for anything; I give them merely for context.)