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Apparently, a lab in china has created a virus with a 100% kill rate in humanized mice. Combined with the fact that there's a decent chance that COVID was a lab leak, this sort of thing is extremely dangerous to be doing.
I'm not sure how best to make it so that people are not incentivized to do things like this, but ceasing to fund this variety of research (it looks like the US ended one program that was pushing this sort of thing last year), and instating some sort of legal liability on those who do this, and especially if they dispose of it badly, probably seem like good decisions.
Extremely dangerous diseases are among the top few things in being both disastrous to humanity (unlike climate change) and also relatively likely (unlike a massive asteroid hitting earth). Development of them is also something that is not excessively difficult to do. This is probably the closest thing we have so far to Bostrom's black ball metaphor. People joke about Yudkowskian airstrikes on data centers; would airstrikes on labs be similarly warranted? More seriously, though, there should be far more effort put into preventing this sort of thing than there currently is.
Bostrom's concerns should probably be something more important to be aware of. The ideal is just to not develop technology in specific fields to the point that killing millions is a cheap and easy thing to do. Of course, the tradeoff is totalitarianism, a terror of its own.
EDIT: Some of the comments have argued, relatively convincingly, that this particular news story was overblown and misleading.
Ok preface this saying I think GOFR should be banned for all the reasons listed in these replies.
That said, these kind of stories strike me as IC psyops designed to paint China as an enemy. EcoHealth Alliance, Fauci, and the rest of the government (including that same IC) are just as much to blame as China. And given that these people are opening out of the USA, we theoretically have more recourse against them than China.
Is China continuing GOFR? I have no doubt that they are. But this story sounds like bullshit for all the other reasons listed in the replies as well.
This was posted to biorxiv by Chinese themselves, with lead author there in the comments claiming it's 'not GOF'.
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.01.03.574008v1.full
Are you suggesting it's all an elaborate psyop and
had nothing to do with the manuscript ?
I’m suggesting that the nypost article about the report is a routine psyop. A journalist who either 1) sees which way the wind is blowing re:China and writes a clickbait article, 2) is following a general policy that was implemented by a IC asset in the media and explicitly designed to shift our attitudes on China, or 3) is a bonafide IC asset following specific instructions to write this story.
I’ll assume my first post was unclear. Hopefully this helps. And to be clear, I think it’s likely option 2 or 3.
Does this sound outlandish or convoluted to you?
I mean, duh.
Journalism is psyops almost by definition.
The story - Chinese still doing stupid shit - is however 'not bullshit'.
I don't know. Wish we knew if at least this research was conducted with more biosafety.
A general involved with 'biodefense' died suddenly in spring of 2020 at age 53, so it might be steps were taken to ensure personal responsibility. I doubt Fauci will ever see a jail cell.
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