TLDR for the paper: GoF is not necessarily the strongest candidate for this flu outbreak. However, all the candidates are man-made due to research efforts. To

TLDR for the paper: GoF is not necessarily the strongest candidate for this flu outbreak. However, all the candidates are man-made due to research efforts. To me this points out that every study on a pandemic-possible virus should have an extremely high bar to meet in terms of both safety and reason for performing the study in the first place. Effectively the only reason that is needed now to perform such research is that you want to publish a paper. The linked paper points out one possible source of the flu pandemic: vaccine development. This may have been a worthy enough cause but greater safeguards are needed. We should take the money we spend on GoF research and spend it on ensuring better safeguards for existing research. GoF research has an explicit goal is to make a virus more human transmissible: if it is too successful, you end up with the possibility of a pandemic. We now have a COVID pandemic that might have been caused by GoF research. On the flip side we can't show much benefit from this kind of research.