Funny thing, no matter what you do, there will be a pandemic similar to this one or worse. What you're doing is prolonging the time until regulations and checks failure. Potentially ignoring the fact that there will be unknown or covert actors ignoring all of these safeties.
Instead, we would do much better to improve our tools for handling these issues by looking at successful and unsuccessful containment protocols, failed attempts to distribute a vaccine quickly enough etc.
Look, there's a pretty plausible story (see, eg, https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/coronavirus-lab-esca...) right now that we, as a society, have spent a significant amount of effort performing research that had a relatively high risk of accidentally creating and releasing a pandemic virus into the wild, and then it may well have done exactly that. It's not a wild idea that we should 1) figure out if this story is true and 2) if it is, stop doing it.
> Potentially ignoring the fact that there will be unknown or covert actors ignoring all of these safeties.
I don't mean this as negatively as it sounds, but I literally don't understand the argument you're making here. It feels like it's of the form:
"Because <bad actor> might do <bad thing>, there's no point trying to encourage anyone from not doing <bad thing>."
Is that...right? Because if so, do you also feel like police forces and laws against murder and assault are a distraction from medical research devoted to savings the lives of people wounded in violent crimes?
I think it's reasonable to suggest that "setting houses on fire less often" or "banning setting other people's houses on fire" or "mandating more fire safe construction" are all complementary strategies to "getting better at extinguishing house fire".
Instead, we would do much better to improve our tools for handling these issues by looking at successful and unsuccessful containment protocols, failed attempts to distribute a vaccine quickly enough etc.