Sounds honest, but selfish given how the most recent pandemic took out the 'city social lives' of hundreds of millions of non-virologists. Hard to understand the cost:benefit there.
> They also said that this is safe, because no pandemic to date started from a lab,
That's got to be the least reassuring safety argument I have ever heard.
>They also said that they do not understand why a year and a half in people keep on talking about this baseless conspiracy theory.
Kills millions directly; massive indirect costs; a year and a half later virologists don't understand that its a problem that we're not certain it didn't come from a lab.
Not an expert, but at these stakes, it makes it sound like there's no adults in charge.
It has only been a year and a half. It typically takes several years or even decades to trace a new virus in humans back to its origin.
I mean we should be sure it wasn't a lab escape because lab escapes have a prior probability extremely close to zero.
There are lots of smart folk, and intelligence agencies, trying to figure out whether covid is a natural event or a lab leak, and very few analyzes seem to be starting off with "as we all know, because of X, Y, and Z, lab escapes are effectively impossible, and these labs are so well designed that human error never results in accidents, so..."
It would appear the virologists are not trustworthy.
Not quite the same order of magnitude, but a certain reaction comes to mind:
> THAT IS NOT REASSURING! HAVEN'T YOU PEOPLE EVER HEARD OF THE ANTHROPIC PRINCIPLE?
But the 2007 British foot and mouth disease outbreak indeed started from a lab. Fortunately this disease can be controlled fairly well as long as you are willing to slaughter anything in wide circles around the case clusters. So, no global pandemic.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_United_Kingdom_foot-and-m...
A similar human disease would be much harder to stop.
They said that no scientist wants to work in a remote location, they want to have a city social life. Which is why these labs are typically located in million+ cities.
They also said that this is safe, because no pandemic to date started from a lab, and that eventually it will be proven that this pandemic is zoonotic too.
They also said that they do not understand why a year and a half in people keep on talking about this baseless conspiracy theory.