All up not the worst outcome.
Best outcome would have been that it was already spreading globally (as suggested by wastewater analysis) and China just detected it first.
Next best would be that it was brought into the wet market, but by a person.
Slightly worse is if it jumped from animals at the market, as that vindicates the racists. <— we are here
Worse than that is accidental lab leak of natural virus.
Worse still is accidental lab leak of manufactured virus.
Worst of all is intentional release of manufactured virus.
As someone who receives funding from NIH (and possibly NSF too, can’t remember) this is very true. They hardly even care that you actually do the study you told them you were gonna do with their money, as long as it’s vaguely related.
Which is how research funding should be imo. Just give researchers money.
Yep, exactly. They're basically the only "basic X" funders in the country, where X is biology, physics, anthropology, mechanical engineering. And since "basic X" can be just about anything non-applied and has to be flexible, they do the right thing and let researchers wander as necessary.
In contrast, one time I worked on a project funded by DARPA and it was a pain in the dick. We had to give them progress reports every couple months, they were constantly up our asses, and they constantly changed what they wanted. My PI eventually dropped them because they were a pain and also the ethics of doing research for the military.
The good news is we discovered absolutely nothing, and wasted a lot of their money to build a table where a rat could basically play the “Simon says” game, which only got used like twice.
:rat-salute:
Yeah DARPA is the worst and dominates entire fields of engineering. They're always looking for an applied military angle and many people delude themselves into thinking their research could never help the military, but even with the MIC run by bumblefucks they know what they want to get out of these relationships.
And yeah they're notorious for having multiple on-site visits per year + several intermediate reports. Just to check in, eh?