There are a variety of natural phenomena and human activities that are liable to create new dangerous viruses and/or bring humans into contact with them. Gain o

There are a variety of natural phenomena and human activities that are liable to create new dangerous viruses and/or bring humans into contact with them. Gain of function research presumably belongs in this category; so do certain food and livestock handling practices, development at the wildland-urban interface, climate change, and a host of other things. The question is how much incremental risk do these activities expose us to, what is the cost/benefit of curtailing them, and what can we feasibly curtail. The risks are what they are, and while we might be misjudging them, knowing the origin of a single event is not especially helpful in recalibrating. Nature breeds extremely serious viruses all by herself; a depressing possibility here is that humans just don't have that much influence over the risk of another pandemic no matter what we do.