Thread by @Ayjchan

I want to get a bit serious about the @WHO's dismissal of lab escape as a potential origins of the covid virus.

I'm keen to see their full report. However, the handling of the current pandemic shows that a country can get likely a pass on lab escape (or bioweapons) as long as...

(1) They don't publish their research in real time - this already isn't happening in science, and why would you publish original data/seqs if you were working covertly on pathogens?

(2) They don't give you access to their lab records or data, and tell you they have good safety.

The question is what we're giving up in the future so that we can pretend this pandemic's origin is resolved today.

Do we need another mysterious outbreak in a city with a renowned pathogen lab in the next decade before we get serious about asking what's happening in these labs?

As far as the July 2020 interview with @sciencecohen @ScienceMagazine shows, the SARS research at WIV which had taken place at BL2 and BL3 all these years has been upgraded to actual BL4 post-covid.

It's not going down. It's going up.
sciencemag.org/sites/default/…

And it's going up everywhere. It could be any country with a human pathogen lab in the next epidemic... "with hundreds, maybe even thousands of such labs proliferating around the world, even low-probability events can become relatively common." motherjones.com/politics/2020/…

I'm not even saying that the Covid-19/SARS-CoV-2 virus came from a lab. I'm saying that the bar set for launching a credible investigation into #laborigins is set so high that I can't see how you could launch one unless you already had incontrovertible proof for it.

Problematically, the countries that have the most leverage over international organizations also tend to be the countries investing the most in these types of high risk pathogens research.

You can barely get people vaccinated for one new pathogen. Not to mention a new one every few years, which requires an annually updated vaccine.