The abolition of modern virology, roll the clock back on them a hundred years. Allow the development of vaccines for extant viruses, but completely ban all Dr Frankenstein activities with viruses. No more "invent a virus in a lab to beat nature to the punch" horse shit, with is flagrant weapons development under the cover of civilian research. As soon as the virus started circulating through the population, did these researchers share their knowledge and help develop a vaccine? No, they buried their involvement and covered up everything they knew. They were no help at all, and never intended to be. Burn their books which describe how it is done, and silence the people who already understand it with the threat of criminal imprisonment for sharing their knowledge. Encourage major religions to amend their rules with strong taboos against this research, and institute harsh economic sanctions against any nation that doesn't participate in this ban.
Does this seem extreme? It shouldn't. This field of research has the power to kill billions and no demonstrable upside. It is even more dangerous than nuclear weapons; because at least a technician at a nuclear weapon production facility would be hard pressed to release his work on the global public of his own initiative. Smuggling a virus out of any lab is trivial, all it takes is a single madman's willingness to sacrifice himself as patient zero.
We're the villagers in an "evil wizard" scenario. The wizards have been meddling in dangerous forces beyond the understanding of common people, and it's getting people killed. The solution is to storm the wizard's tower and throw the wizards off the top of it.
> The abolition of modern virology, roll the clock back on them a hundred years.
This kind of sloppy hyperbole is tremendously damaging, feeding the false narrative that we must choose between the benefits of modern virology--smallpox wasn't eradicated until 1977!--and the catastrophic risks of experiments on novel potential pandemic pathogens.
Almost all modern virological research involves either existing pathogens already present in humans, or novel pathogens in systems incapable of replicating in humans. The WIV's research was a narrow exception, and one that was controversial long before this pandemic. For example, here's David Relman asking Ralph Baric a question about those risks, back in 2014:
That narrow area carries almost all the risk of a catastrophic research accident, and has yet to deliver any significant benefit. It could be banned with minimal impact on almost all modern virological research. That narrow regulation is what we need, and there are people (like the new NGO Protect Our Future) working to draft and enact it. Your conflation between modern virology in aggregate and that narrow area doesn't help them, and I hope you will stop.
Hackernews now advocating for burning books, wow. This is the end result in allowing political ragebait threads instead of focusing on tech and startups.
That's as dense as claiming we should punish the Cambridge Analytica incident by reverting the entire humanity's computing technology by a century. There are numerous perspectives in which you and I are the evil wizards simply because we're in this move-fast-and-break-things industry. Don't burn the field just to punish a few.
The abolition of modern virology, roll the clock back on them a hundred years. Allow the development of vaccines for extant viruses, but completely ban all Dr Frankenstein activities with viruses. No more "invent a virus in a lab to beat nature to the punch" horse shit, with is flagrant weapons development under the cover of civilian research. As soon as the virus started circulating through the population, did these researchers share their knowledge and help develop a vaccine? No, they buried their involvement and covered up everything they knew. They were no help at all, and never intended to be. Burn their books which describe how it is done, and silence the people who already understand it with the threat of criminal imprisonment for sharing their knowledge. Encourage major religions to amend their rules with strong taboos against this research, and institute harsh economic sanctions against any nation that doesn't participate in this ban.
Does this seem extreme? It shouldn't. This field of research has the power to kill billions and no demonstrable upside. It is even more dangerous than nuclear weapons; because at least a technician at a nuclear weapon production facility would be hard pressed to release his work on the global public of his own initiative. Smuggling a virus out of any lab is trivial, all it takes is a single madman's willingness to sacrifice himself as patient zero.
We're the villagers in an "evil wizard" scenario. The wizards have been meddling in dangerous forces beyond the understanding of common people, and it's getting people killed. The solution is to storm the wizard's tower and throw the wizards off the top of it.