Well for starters, the reason a lot of this research was pushed to China was congress had grown tired of finding ways to punish the CDC for lab leaks and mistakes here in the US. It was only recently that the CDC had been allowed to restart a lot of its more dangerous research. So how about the US stop funding dangerous research regardless of where it is at?

Either the lab leak was true and this was a self-inflicted wound, or it was highly suspicious and uselessly dangerous research, as it didn't help us stop the pandemic.

I know basically nothing about foreign policy at all, but just in the "tombert thought experiment" land I'm going to give my "asshole opinion" [1].

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> Now, the crux, whatever legislation you come up with, how does that apply to a foreign country?

Conceivably couldn't we do some kind of trade agreement/embargo on countries that don't follow a minimum level of disclosure/safety protocol? E.g. if country A is shown to have covered up a massive lab leak, we impose some kind of tariff on them for N days.

Obviously there are no easy solutions to problems like this, but I think that would be the place I start, because obviously US law doesn't really apply to places outside of the US; the only thing we could do (at least the only thing that I could think of) that's even close to punitive enforcement would be to apply leverage.

[1] "Opinions are like assholes; everyone's got one and most of them stink"

> And what kind of legislation would tickle your fancy? Intentional release is already legislated against. How do you legislate the prevention of accidents?

That's a ridiculous line of reasoning: legislation helps mitigate accidents all the time.

Pilots don't want their bird to fall out of the sky, and yet legislation around pilot training, practices and certification limited the number of accidents.