Sam Altman, the recently fired (and rehired) chief executive of Open AI, was asked earlier this year by his fellow tech billionaire Patrick Collison what he thought of the risks of synthetic biology. ‘I would like to not have another synthetic pathogen cause a global pandemic. I think we can all agree that wasn’t a great experience,’ he replied. ‘Wasn’t that bad compared to what it could have been, but I’m surprised there has not been more global coordination and I think we should have more of that.’
Yes, but we can reason based on what we know.
Most likely the municipality were trying to cover up corruption in the regulation of the wet markets. Maybe they ignored health and safety laws in return for bribes, and didn’t want that to come out.