There was actually a huge debate about the ethics and safety of gain of function research on potential pandemic viruses in 2015 after, get this...the developmen

There was actually a huge debate about the ethics and safety of gain of function research on potential pandemic viruses in 2015 after, get this...the development of a chimaera coronavirus.. "An experiment that created a hybrid version of a bat coronavirus...made up of a surface protein of SHC014 and the backbone of a SARS virus that had been adapted to grow in mice and to mimic human disease. The chimaera infected human airway cells — proving that the surface protein of SHC014 has the necessary structure to bind to a key receptor on the cells and to infect them. It also caused disease in mice, but did not kill them. Although almost all coronaviruses isolated from bats have not been able to bind to the key human receptor, SHC014 is not the first that can do so." https://www.nature.com/news/engineered-bat-virus-stirs-debate-over-risky-research-%201.18787 https://www.nature.com/news/engineered-bat-virus-stirs-debat... Research continued in 2017 after NIH ended the moratorium: https://www.nih.gov/about-nih/who-we-are/nih-director/statements/nih-lifts-funding-pause-gain-function-research https://www.nih.gov/about-nih/who-we-are/nih-director/statem... Interesting though that we don't consider this sort of research the same way we look at nuclear proliferation, we sanction countries that develop nuclear programs we we don't approve of but arguably pandemics are already much more deadly than nuclear technologies ever have been.