Is there some scifi solution to step outside of the game? Are the problems involved in understanding the systems involved (to the extent that you can predict realistic risk and mitigate) solvable?
I don't know the level of realistic risk for a devastating virus naturally occurring, nor the potential for us to address it without this kind of research, so I don't know what is within reason here. It would be cool to see any studies that attempt to address these two questions.
Edit: And a systematic review of past and considered lab leak scenarios probably wouldn't hurt either. If we still have to do this work, and just decide it must be done by isolated monks/robots in space, for humanity ending risks I guess that's worth discussing
Of course there is, of course they already use it, and of course the people who think banning research is the peak of enlightenment aren't remotely interested in making this kind of distinction.
If we assume it is directly proportional to the number of people (more people to encounter animals, more people to incubate potential pandemics), there were roughly 450 billion people-years lived between the Black Plague and the Spanish Flu and the Spanish Flu and COVID-19.
That would put the next zoonotic spillover around 2065.
It discounts all factors we are ignoring and pretends we can establish an accurate duration between rare events with a few occurrences
With earthquakes you at least have stress accumulating over time, even if the stress is not necessarily accumulating or being released at a constant rate.
A zoonotic spillover is pure repeated throws of the dice, no accumulated pressure.
Large-scale wet markets or bushmeat markets increase the chances because there are more rolls of the dice.
However there is no reason to believe that such misadventures take place in a single generation and immediately produce a viable and successful agent.
Producing something that spreads to humans but not will will none the less produce many orders of magnitude more useful and numerous dice rolls. Such actions may not be immediately obvious even if they were fatal. People after all get sick and die all the time.
I doubt we have enough data to meaningfully forecast risk.
My own self-critique above was more that, even if you could accurately deduce that there is a 1.54e-12 chance per person-year of a person encountering a novel disease that can spread as a global pandemic, you can't then schedule the next one for 450 billion people-years later, when the probability exceeds 50%, because it's a random occurrence and there's nothing stopping it from happening after ten or a trillion throws of the dice.
But I'll still stand by the logic of my original back of the envelope number; insomuch as the risk is proportional to the population, we should expect the next global pandemic twice as fast as the last one, and I think there's a good chance many of us will be alive to see it (as opposed to the gap between the Spanish Flu and COVID-19, where the survivors of the first were infants for the last and centenarians for this one).
That would either save the planet, or go a long way in that direction.
On the surface that might sound ok. However if we undergo a similar exercise of chances of Lab leak causing an outbreak we'll probably end up with a similar figure of 1/100. In a lab leak we'll have to contend with a more powerful variant of a pathogen that has caused a prior outbreak which may kill an order more people than the average outbreak. So perhaps a million deaths alone, or if we entertain that Covid was caused by a lab lead ~10m deaths, or 100x of 100k.
Ultimately it seems GoF research is playing with fire without knowing if the effort actually will reduces total deaths on net.
A much more effective route seems to simply invest in rapid sequencing, rapid wastewater monitoring, PPE stocking/distribution policies, more effective local lockdown procedures/policies.
You mention rapid sequencing, rapid wastewater monitoring, PPE stocking/distribution policies, and more effective local lockdown procedures/policies. Those would all be factors that would reduce the value of "X" (as in, the consequences of bad outcomes in either scenario), rather than any coefficients in front of X.
I don't necessarily agree that the past 25 years, particularly if you are excluding COVID, is a meaningful representative sample... unless you want to compare it to the loss of life from GoF over the past 25 years excluding COVID. In that case, I'd challenge you to demonstrate a loss of life from GoF research that is over 10K. Given the ~100K lives estimate, that puts it at 10x greater benefit than not doing GoF research.
> However if we undergo a similar exercise of chances of Lab leak causing an outbreak we'll probably end up with a similar figure of 1/100. In a lab leak we'll have to contend with a more powerful variant of a pathogen that has caused a prior outbreak which may kill an order more people than the average outbreak.
There's a number of false assumptions here. Your threat assessment seems more rooted in works of fiction than reality. That the probability is equivalent is highly debatable, particularly since it is far easier (and cheaper) to apply risk mitigations to a virology lab than to society as a whole. It's also not a given that a lab leak means we'll have to contend with a more powerful variant of a pathogen. Even if it were a more powerful variant of a pathogen, that does not necessarily relate to a higher death toll. In fact, SARS-COV-2 was far less virulent than SARS-COV-1, and that's a significant contributor to why it had so much more impact.
Even if we ignore ALL of that, in the even that there was an outbreak from a virology lab doing GoF research, that would mean we would be much further ahead on research to combat the virus than if said virus were to occur in the wild. We'd have shorter times to have disease profiles, tests, epidemiological models, and vaccines, and the impact of shorter times is exponential. While it is conceivable that a leak from a lab leads to a higher death count, it is far more conceivable that a virus that didn't come from a lab would end more lives.
> if we entertain that Covid was caused by a lab lead ~10m deaths, or 100x of 100k.
Spanish flu, which existed before anyone knew how to do GoF research, killed far more people than COVID-19. At the lowest estimate, it's about 17 million people, and at the high end closer to 100 million people. The population of the world at the time was ~1/4 the population when COVID-19 hit the scene, so on a per capita basis COVID-19 isn't in the same league. AIDS, which we've been able to track back to its natural origin, has killed 42 million people. The Bubonic Plague killed... 75+ million, or about a third of the European population.
Nature is way better at killing us than any lab.
> Ultimately it seems GoF research is playing with fire without knowing if the effort actually will reduces total deaths on net.
Another way to think of it is that international trade & travel is playing with fire without knowing if the effort actually will reduce total deaths or not. We could therefore return to the days of the horse and buggy, or we could continue with the practice and put in place mitigations, like GoF research, to mitigate the risks it entails.
But looking at the reported events (that have made their way onto Wiki), since 2000 we've had lab leaks and "incidents" in the US (repeatedly.. to say the least), Japan, Taiwan, China, Russia, UK, Australia, France, the Netherlands, and many more places. That includes incidents at BSL-4 labs, the highest biosecurity rating. And the leaks/incidents involve some pretty crazy stuff: polio - lab worker was infected without anyone's knowledge, ebola - lab worker infected at a BSL-4 lab, smallpox - vials of active smallpox found casually laying around in cold storage at a rando facility, anthrax - 75 exposed, and more.
It seems completely obvious from the absurd volume of reported incidents that we're bee-lining to a global biosecurity accident, almost certainly far more serious than COVID, completely of our own making, again.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_laboratory_biosecurity...