Worth reading / rereading - on the risks of gain of function research from 2014 from The Cambridge Working Group #covid19 #GainOfFunction http://www.cambridgeworkinggroup.org/ 

“Whenever possible, safer approaches should be pursued in preference to any approach that risks an accidental pandemic.”

Accidental release of pathogens from labs is an ongoing concern - it has happened in the past and has potential to happen again

We need to safeguard against such releases but have to assume that even with safeguards there is still a risk of such release - which is why creation and study of new gain of function mutants of certain pathogens should be done, if at all, with extreme caution

That being said if we have 100s of examples of emergence of pathogens by means that do not involve accidents real or purposeful release from labs

Worth reading this by @KelseyTuoc on why we need to keep worrying about #GainOfFunction research: Why some labs work on making viruses deadlier — and why they should stop https://www.vox.com/2020/5/1/21243148/why-some-labs-work-on-making-viruses-deadlier-and-why-they-should-stop

“The people proposing the work are highly respected virologists,” Inglesby said. “But laboratory systems are not infallible, and even in the greatest laboratories of the world, there are mistakes.”

Also notes: “.. SARS-CoV-2, is definitely not a biologically engineered pathogen. It was not released on purpose, & it is likely to have been the result of accidental transmission through human contact w/ wild animals, like almost all disease outbreaks in history have been.”

I personally have been deeply worried about both purposeful and accidental release of pathogens for many years. I have had many grants on this topic from places like DHS and DARPA and am definitely still worried about this issue.

And whenever there is a new pathogen or a new version of an old pathogen circulating in humans, it is worth asking "where did this come from?". And we need to do that with SARS-CoV-2 unquestionably

But much as it might support my personal narrative and scientific history of saying we need to worry about purposeful and accidental release of pathogens, the evidence for such a possibility for SARS-CoV-2 is lacking

That is not to say the possibility of a lab release has been completely ruled out - it has not (as I told @fredguterl for his article https://www.newsweek.com/controversial-wuhan-lab-experiments-that-may-have-started-coronavirus-pandemic-1500503). However, the best explanation currently is that SARS-CoV-2 came into human without involvement of a lab

I look forward to seeing other papers / preprints / stories on the origin of SARS-CoV-2. And I will try when possible to scrutinize them to point of possible flaws, whether I want to agree with their conclusions or not, so that we end up with the best science on this topic ...