There's also very scant evidence that the WIV was doing anything along the lines of GoF. They worked a ton with Baric's group in NC and other "western" scientists who did all of the genetic engineering that I'm aware of. The purpose of this engineering is to develop vaccines and treatments for the most likely natural viruses before they exist in nature and have a chance to infect humans. Even if they were doing more pseudo-GoF than I'm aware, I'm a bit nonplussed.

The source I linked at the top with Markolin's analysis on why he thinks it was a zoonotic event is titled, "Nature’s neglected GoF laboratory" for a reason. Viruses are going to mix/match, they're going to produce chimeras, they are going to undergo directed evolution by the trillions, all completely naturally. As we encroach further into the urban/wildlife interface, zoonotic events are going to keep happening, and likely going to get worse. MERS and SARS1 were both "near miss" pandemics that we were fortunate to have avoided a SC2-like global nightmare. Wuhan was a 'control' for latent coronavirus sampling not because of the lack of bats or coronaviruses in Hubei, but because it was an urban environment. Millions of people in China live near bats and domesticated animals capable of acting as intermediate hosts. We can't just hope that every coronavirus they're naturally infected with is mild or burns out before the wrong person takes a fateful bus trip.

I'm not 100% certain GoF experiments are worth it, but they're highly mischaracterized by most of the people who are accusing scientists of all sorts of malfeasance. The vast majority of this work takes place in strains that couldn't possibly infect humans and with animal models that also have no potential for spillover. Skim this paper from 2018 and tell me it wouldn't be worth knowing more about in the lead-up to SC2: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6132729/

> and sampling of novel pathogens from remote natural sites) is a tiny fraction of virology

This is absolutely crazy to me. So far most of the evidence for a lab leak is "we don't have any close relatives" and "we've never seen the RBD or FCS like this before".

Of course we haven't! We've barely sampled any viruses!

We know a ton about how viruses enter cells and we know a ton about how spillovers happen, but we don't know very much about the potential "problem space" due to very limited understanding of the diversity of viruses out there.

> You clearly have domain knowledge here. You are using it not to enhance public knowledge, but to distract and shut down people making reasonable points in not quite the right terms.

No offense to anyone I've 'shut down' but this is akin to me wading into a discussion on cryptography with very strong opinions about quantum computing based on having read some Neal Stephenson books. I'd love to spend more time enhancing public knowledge, but it's near impossible unless people have some baseline level of understanding of the underlying science and the ability to figure out when they're being mislead.

I think Alina Chan is mostly well-intentioned but leans into the 'controversy' a bit much in order to sell books -- but her coauthor is a complete hack who knows exactly what he's doing. Ridley has no background in virology whatsoever, his claim to fame before this was being a prominent climate change denier who owns and operates a literal coal mine.

So sure, I'll continue to hope to educate people about what they've been mislead about but there's British Aristocracy with millions of dollars in book sales on the line working to gaslight everyone so here we are.