Bloom was saying it was unethical to use other scientists' unpublished data. In normal circumstances, that would be heavily frowned upon, and maybe even lead to

Bloom was saying it was unethical to use other scientists' unpublished data. In normal circumstances, that would be heavily frowned upon, and maybe even lead to some sort of censure. Basically, imagine you find out a rival scientific group accidentally made a dataset public. Imagine that you found out how to reverse-engineer an AWS URL at which you could access the data. Now, you analyze this data and publish your own paper on it. Most scientists would view that as a form of theft. In this case, Bloom can say that the data was so much in the public interest that what he did was ethical. However, the data didn't actually shed any light on the origins of SARS-CoV-2. I'm inclined to say the way he obtained the data isn't such a big issue, since the raw data itself isn't useful, and because the Chinese team had already published a paper that described the only interesting parts of the data. What I do fault Bloom for is making unfounded accusations against his Chinese colleagues. That's something he should apologize to them for.