That WaPo article isn't about the quality of research at the WIV, it's an attempted (failed) debunking of the "fringe theory" that SARS-CoV-2 escaped from a lab. It has nothing to say on what good science they produced, perhaps because there wasn't any. Virology appears to spend its time fiddling with viruses based on the claim that doing so will help create vaccines, except, their work doesn't seem to have contributed to any vaccine development.

> their work doesn't seem to have contributed to any vaccine development.

On the contrary, look at covid aftermath — it quite did! /s

Touché!

> Virology appears to spend its time fiddling with viruses based on the claim that doing so will help create vaccines, except, their work doesn't seem to have contributed to any vaccine development.

Because this work is "dual-use", the civil/medical justification is just a fig leaf to cover up biological weapon development. Such research has never helped the development of medical treatments, and was never truly meant to. Covid was likely a 'strategic' weapon designed to disadvantage free democratic countries, giving an advantage to authoritarian governments which in principle were able to institute draconian controls to limit the damage of covid. It didn't quite work out that way, but those who think a biological weapon must necessarily have a limited geographic effect are being naive. The Americans who funded this research should be on trial for mass murder and treason, but they're probably going to get away with it.

> The 2004 SARS outbreak originated in a lab

This is news to me. The article you referenced opens by saying [0]:

> The World Health Organization has confirmed that breaches of safety procedures on at least two occasions at one of Beijing's top virology laboratories were the probable cause of the outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) there last month, which infected nine people, one of whom died.

This seems to be saying they traced the illness in nine people back to a lab leak, not that the entire outbreak originated in the lab.

There a lot of other studies, referenced in this wikipedia article [1], which explain that the virus originated in bats:

> Phylogenetic analysis of these viruses indicated a high probability that SARS coronavirus originated in bats and spread to humans either directly or through animals held in Chinese markets.

> In 2004, scientists from the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention of the University of Hong Kong and the Guangzhou Center for Disease Control and Prevention established a genetic link between the SARS coronavirus appearing in civets and humans, confirming claims that the virus might have transmitted from the animal species to humans.

In the last 15 years people have fallen ill of the plague, cowpox, meningococcus, h5n1, anthrax, and zika due to lab leaks in the Unites States [2]. These are just the leaks where people got sick and/or died, all lab workers I believe. None of that means these labs originated the diseases. The origin of a disease is separate from a localized outbreak.

[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC416634/

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SARS-CoV-1#Origin_and_evolutio...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_laboratory_biosecurity...