I can't really tell what position you're arguing against here. I personally find the risk of GoF research to probably net out to "not worth it," but that's an e

I can't really tell what position you're arguing against here. I personally find the risk of GoF research to probably net out to "not worth it," but that's an entirely different conversation than "did Fauci cause this." And no, it's nowhere near acceptable to just assume that every new virus is a lab leak. Especially when the subtext of this line of inquiry is usually that we're going to "hold 'them' accountable" somehow. Combine those two thoughts and you get something like, "anywhere that a novel virus appears in suddenly gets smacked by the international community," and I'm not sure you could create a stronger disincentive to early pathogen detection and alerting if you tried. P.S. There's almost certainly not anywhere close to "tens of thousands" of BSL-3 labs. Probably in the few hundreds to maybe thousand or two, but that'd be a stretch, and "tens of thousands" is not supported by any data I can find: https://cset.georgetown.edu/publication/mapping-biosafety-level-3-laboratories-by-publications/ https://cset.georgetown.edu/publication/mapping-biosafety-le...