The fundamental problem with GoF research is that the virology community has shown that it's not trustworthy enough to be working with things that are this dang

The fundamental problem with GoF research is that the virology community has shown that it's not trustworthy enough to be working with things that are this dangerous. In China, there has been almost a complete information blackout after COVID. Most of what we know that points to a leak that actually comes from China has been accidentally disclosed or was published before the pandemic. In the U.S. and Europe, it's sadly largely the same story. We now know through FOIA requests that the authors of the pivotal Proximal Origin thought privately that there was a significant likelihood that SARS2 was lab derived, but what they published was that "we do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible." They also sought to conceal some of the true authors of the paper in order for it to appear more independent and credible. They, and their colleagues then relentlessly smeared and called conspiracy theorists, anyone who publicly said the very same things that they said privately to each other. EcoHealth and DARPA refused to provide a copy of the DEFUSE grant proposal. It ultimately had to be leaked by an anonymous source in the government. When it finally came out it ended up being more or less a direct blueprint for how you'd create SARS2 from existing bat viruses, and it was submitted just a year before the outbreak started in Wuhan. One of the collaborators on that project was to have been the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Throughout, (and there is much more), not a single person who has brought any of this to light has been a virologist. Some have been biologists in other fields, some have been outside the scientific establishment entirely. Being responsible for an animal that harbors a virus that could kill 10,000,000 people or more if you make a mistake is an awesome responsibility, and only people of the utmost integrity can be trusted with something that dangerous. What we've seen is that sadly, nowhere near this level of integrity exists in the virology community.