I don't think we're disagreeing much or at all - I may have misused 'on the other hand'. I totally agree that this is a horrible, terrible, history-defining capital-B Bad Thing if it's confirmed to be true. And I probably don't grasp the consequences nearly as well as you do. But just a week or two ago, there was a discussion about the mutation rate of coronaviruses and that covid-19 may be an indication of a slow natural process happing faster than expected. And part of me is vaguely...relieved? if it turns out to be human error instead of a future of dozens if not hundreds of new coronaviruses popping up. Despite it still being a terrible thing that has happened. I mean - at least have tools to kneecap further clearly-a-bad-idea-in-hindsight-research. We can exercise agency. Unless I'm completely missing what you mean here, this is exactly my point too. I wasn't dismissing the gravity of the neglience in any way.And as bad as evil is, at least there's a logic that can be countered.
Let me restate that you are correct that human error would be a better cause if and only if we can contain and kill the thing. That's a big if. But in that case, we can presumably put the genie back in the bottle and design and adhere to international safety standards going forward. My fear is that we have created something unkillable. Time will tell, to use a banality.
I guess something like that. Obviously it's a bit early to be talking in those terms, since we don't even have good testing, let alone a vaccine. At least if we had testing, we could probably use convalescent serum (antibodies from patients who are recovered), and it might confer some immunity. That's under testing right now, but I don't have a lot of faith even in that, because to do that properly you need to be able to titrate the dose. That's impossible without relatively precise serology. I keep reading that it's going to be online "next week" and then that week comes and goes with nothing to show.