Bioweapon labs have a history of being built on small islands for this reason. > This seems like an obviously necessary mitigation against the unknown risk of

Bioweapon labs have a history of being built on small islands for this reason. > This seems like an obviously necessary mitigation against the unknown risk of introducing synthetic pathogens that haven't been created in billions of years of evolution. I'd wager that it's likely that the COVID variant that was made in a lab was also created through evolution at some point. Every infected person with the virus has billions of viral replications taking place in their body, and each virus itself will have its own mutations. There's a high chance such mutations already took place, somewhere and in someone/something, but those mutants never created their own worldwide outbreaks. I think it's worthwhile to understand how mutations can affect a virus at the heart of a pandemic. Finding such mutations in the wild is a roll of the dice, and the chances of encountering something like it rise the longer and more widespread the epidemic is.