Even when there’s not a direct connection, it’s usually a good sign to take a look at what’s going on. In this case, even if COVID was a random isolated mutation in an unrelated marketplace nearby, it shone a spotlight on a place doing gain of function research on novel coronaviruses where if one did escape lab confinement, we were woefully unprepared to deal with the full consequences of that outbreak (eg: COVID). Whether or not the lab leak theory is true, we should be taking exactly the same precautions as if it were.