If you think there's a way to have a democracy without an informed electorate, then it makes sense that you'd be less concerned with censorship. I don't see how that could work, though. I'm not impressed with Biden, and significantly less so with Trump; but I'm also unaware of any system that works better. I didn't grow up in the USA, and I'd prefer a parliamentary system to the USA's republic; but that's a minor question compared to democratic vs. nondemocratic systems, and we're depending--however fragilely--on an informed electorate either way.
> Edit: the issue of the BSL level of the laboratories in question seems to have already been addressed:
I'm not sure what you think is addressed there? In that interview, Dr. Shi confirms that they were working with bat coronaviruses at BSL-2. Various papers published by her group before the pandemic also confirm this. They also had a BSL-4 lab for animal experiments, but experiments on the viruses in cultured cells were continuing at BSL-2. That's what Lipkin thought was "screwed up" (i.e., presented an unacceptable risk, regardless of whether it actually caused this pandemic).
As far as we know, all of Dr. Shi's work was performed in compliance with her institution's safety standards. The question is whether those safety standards were adequate, though--her standards were already a step below Ralph Baric's, and long before this pandemic academics like David Relman thought Baric's experiments were at or beyond the edge of acceptable risk:
Baric and the WIV later submitted a proposal to perform exactly the same kind of research as in Relman's hypothetical, not with SARS-1 and MERS but with novel bat viruses collected by the WIV:
> “We will introduce appropriate human-specific cleavage sites and evaluate growth potential in [a type of mammalian cell commonly used in microbiology] and HAE cultures,” referring to cells found in the lining of the human airway, the proposal states.
That proposal was rejected by the American government for safety reasons, but there's no way to know what work continued in the WIV with other funders.
> Edit: the issue of the BSL level of the laboratories in question seems to have already been addressed:
I'm not sure what you think is addressed there? In that interview, Dr. Shi confirms that they were working with bat coronaviruses at BSL-2. Various papers published by her group before the pandemic also confirm this. They also had a BSL-4 lab for animal experiments, but experiments on the viruses in cultured cells were continuing at BSL-2. That's what Lipkin thought was "screwed up" (i.e., presented an unacceptable risk, regardless of whether it actually caused this pandemic).
As far as we know, all of Dr. Shi's work was performed in compliance with her institution's safety standards. The question is whether those safety standards were adequate, though--her standards were already a step below Ralph Baric's, and long before this pandemic academics like David Relman thought Baric's experiments were at or beyond the edge of acceptable risk:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aw-nR6-4kQQ&t=2466s
Baric and the WIV later submitted a proposal to perform exactly the same kind of research as in Relman's hypothetical, not with SARS-1 and MERS but with novel bat viruses collected by the WIV:
https://theintercept.com/2021/09/23/coronavirus-research-gra...
> “We will introduce appropriate human-specific cleavage sites and evaluate growth potential in [a type of mammalian cell commonly used in microbiology] and HAE cultures,” referring to cells found in the lining of the human airway, the proposal states.
That proposal was rejected by the American government for safety reasons, but there's no way to know what work continued in the WIV with other funders.