The WIV sent workers into remote caves that no other humans routinely entered; you can find many pictures and videos from their expeditions on the Internet. I t

The WIV sent workers into remote caves that no other humans routinely entered; you can find many pictures and videos from their expeditions on the Internet. I think their baggage-hauling laborers were mostly grad students, but I agree that an infection of such a laborer is a quite plausible origin for this pandemic--a visit to a remote cave specifically chosen for its diversity of novel viruses is obviously a much higher risk than a cave chosen at random, though it's hard to quantify by how much. In this scenario, if the WIV's worker had never entered the cave, then the virus would quite possibly never have left the cave. Even if it would have been released later by an infected non-scientist, I'd always rather die later than sooner. (I've seen people arguing sooner is better, because it encourages pandemic preparedness; I guess that's true, in the same sense that reckless drivers encouraged development of automotive airbags. I've never seen a driver make that argument to the judge, though.) So given the above, do you still think the WIV should have sent the worker into the cave? We're not talking about the whole of virology here, just a tiny subset of high-risk research that so far has provided no significant public benefit.