That page offers "only" dozens of examples in recent times, but that is certainly going to be non-exhaustive and the potential magnitude of impact of a single of these incidents is difficult to overstate. Notably while the biosafety levels for each leak are not stated, at least two came from BSL-4 labs - the highest safety standard there is.
Oh, actually you can calculate this, assuming you're utilitarian and think risking innocent lives is OK as long as it saves that many lives in expectation. If you think there's a 10% chance that Covid came from a lab leak, then the "making viruses more deadly" research that we've done so far ought to have saved more than 10% * 20 million = 2 million people. Did it? From what I've heard it's done fuck-all.
I stand by my pissed off voice here. I think it's appropriate to be pissed off about risking millions of lives for hypothetical benefits.
(To be clear, I'm only talking about research that studies deadly extinct viruses and deadly lab-created viruses. We should absolutely continue to study viruses in general.)
I'm happy to listen to expert virologists tell me about how they could advance the field without modifying/running viral code. Maybe they're a hell of a lot better at their job than most software types who rely on that. I suspect that's not how it works, though.
And hey, let's do more arbitrary probability space exploration! The Lancet says almost 20 million people have probably been saved by covid vaccinations[0]. If toying with viral DNA|RNA helped produce 10% of the research contributing to that, and/or any additional margin supporting other interventions, then I guess it fits your people-saved profile.
[0] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3...
By all means, let's advance DNA/RNA and virus research. But can we carve out a little hole for purposefully making human viruses more deadly? Like: accidentally making human viruses more deadly, OK; purposefully messing with human viruses but not making them more deadly, OK; purposefully making mouse viruses more deadly OK; purposefully making human viruses more deadly NOT OK? How is this a big ask, when lab leaks are a thing?
The Wuhan lab was doing gain of function research into Coronaviruses. Isn't that exactly what should have been helpful for Covid, if gain of function research is ever helpful for anything? But so far as I've heard, the Wuhan research didn't help with Covid at all.
So kinda funny to use "saving lives from Covid" as an example of gain of function research being useful when (i) Covid itself may have been caused by gain of function research, and (ii) so far as I've heard gain of function research hasn't helped with vaccinations at all (please correct me if I'm wrong on this).
If you've got some kind of model where these are in fact two entirely distinct things, that would explain some of the confusion in your position.
"any selection process involving an alteration of genotypes and their resulting phenotypes is considered a type of Gain-of-Function (GoF) research, even if the U.S. policy is intended to apply to only a small subset of such work."
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK285579/
Perhaps do some reflection on why you've latched onto the phrase "gain of function" and if you really understand what professionals mean by it.
> Like: accidentally making human viruses more deadly, OK
The prep for "accidentally more deadly" is going to be necessarily the same as "we're certain it will be more deadly," and in practice lots of viral research is probably "middling probability something deadly could happen."
> But so far as I've heard, the Wuhan research didn't help with Covid at all.
Where are you getting this high-level graph of coronavirus-related knowledge tagged by origin of research clearly showing a lack of contributions from Wuhan?
> Covid itself may have been caused by gain of function research
Or it might have simply been lab-escaped SARS coronavirus, making its way through an adaptation path.
Or it may have been entirely caused by constant unceasing unimaginably well-resourced natural "lab" of the world that would inevitably have produced something like it at some point, and absolutely will inevitably produce something like it again.
A lot of people died from Covid; there's a good chance it was due to virus research; even if it wasn't it certainly could happen in the future; I don't want them to have died in vain.
Point taken about the meaning of GoF, thanks.