The 1918 flu involved no lab leak and killed [edit]: 50 million people.
I don't care for the game of fatality calculus, but if one is going to play it, that's the enemy humanity is up against.
I don't care for the game of fatality calculus, but if one is going to play it, that's the enemy humanity is up against.
You wouldn’t subject people to chemotherapy if you lacked any evidence that it was helpful.
I don't think one stops a pandemic; IIUC, one gets out in front of it with vaccination. Which we did, thanks to previous mRNA research conducted on other viruses. GOF research is one of the few ways we're aware of to get out in front of vaccinating viruses that don't yet exist but are probable to exist.
This argument treads suspiciously close to "Sometimes people use fire to burn a house down, so why do we allow cooking? People should only be allowed to use naturally-occurring fires and not create new ones."
The article strongly opposes making predictions of whether a pathogen will be pandemic because predictions are a rigged game. There are enough factors that you are very unlikely to be correct, and even then a true positive combined with successful mitigations erodes public trust because "the severity of the virus had been overblown". Geologists avoid making predictions of volcanic eruptions or earthquakes for similar reasons.
It is not directly opposed to study of pre-pandemic animal pathogens: "Surveys of animals will undoubtedly result in the discovery of many thousands of new viruses. These data will benefit studies of diversity and evolution, and could tell us whether and why some pathogens might jump species boundaries more frequently than others." This makes sense, because study of pre-pandemic pathogens is needed to set a foundation such that the post-outbreak analysis the article wants us to focus on can be completed in a reasonable time frame.
The article is arguing for rapid response and against predictions. It's not opposed to basic research of pathogens, and actually supports this specific type of research.