i’m not one for moral panics, but this pathogen research is troubling:

The scientific benefit of making viruses more pathogenic is debatable: research tends to use old strains (may not be applicable to our current situation), there is a bias towards more spectacular and lethal virulence because it gets published and funded, there is no reason to think evolution will move in the same way (it is highly contingent, and hence what is learned may not help make vaccines or drugs), and the key experiment (doing it with humans) is unethical, and hence unfalsifiable. The ethics is also really problematic, since the rate of lab releases is not negligible and a flu outbreak can easily kill people – it has a skew distribution with a heavy tail.

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