This is like saying it's important to know whether the last dice roll was a 2 before you decide whether to bet on a 4 or 6 coming up next.
It's a bit like looking at the 737-MAX crashes and saying the investigation was pointless. Planes should be designed not to crash regardless, don't you agree?
Brilliantly put.
If so, yes, focusing on debugging a 737-MAX crash that happened to be completely full and hit an occupied building on the ground (therefore extra horrific/attention-grabbing) would be pointless.
Doubly so if the evidence required to root cause it was evaporated upon impact.
Triply so if people decided they had to know what caused that specific crash before they could address the probabilistic falling of airplanes out of the sky.
And past experiences inform future actions. It's called learning, and some of us feel it's worthwhile for no other reason than the knowledge.
Put another way, one might ask your same question about polio or smallpox or any other outbreak of any other disease. Everything we learn about every one of them prepares us in some way for the next.
It's literally the foundation of epidemiology.
But in reality, it isn't. It creates precisely the faulty logic that we're seeing in this thread, where people believe certain mitigations are justified only after certain conclusions are reached about the origin of COVID.
This just isn't true and we do ourselves a disservice to frame the conversation such that people believe that to be the case.
If we discover that COVID came from a lab and therefore decide to eliminate GoF research but not increase surveillance efforts (since eliminating GoF research addresses "the threat"), that is bad.
If we discover that COVID came from a zoonotic origin and therefore decide to continue doing dangerous GoF research in metropolises, that is bad.
If we fail to determine either of these things with sufficient certainty to take action against either threat vector, which is the most probable case, that is really bad.
If we instead acknowledge that it hardly matters where COVID came from because it indicates nearly nothing about where the next pandemic will come from, and therefore we need to mitigate both vectors, that is good.
How do you know GoF research is bad? By analysing the consequences of previous GoF research.
If lab origin is confirmed, it adds support to GoF research being bad hypothesis helps creating relevant regulations. If zoonotic origin is confirmed, it adds another data point of naturally created dangerous pathogens and weakens the argument of banning GoF research.
There are no _a priori_ truths, only approximations at a time based on past statistics.
Let me know if you are convinced, either way :)
Why would a zoonotic origin of COVID reduce the risk of GoF?
I'm not following. It seems as though you've run wildly to some conclusion not present in the conversation. Perhaps there's some outside context I'm missing.
> If we instead acknowledge that it hardly matters where COVID came from because it indicates nearly nothing about where the next pandemic will come from
It seems you would do away with the entire field of epidemiology. I find that the discipline has been quite useful to humanity. I'd like to keep it.
