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Backers can't investigate their own bet
Gain-of-function
Gain-of-function means taking a virus and intentionally making it more dangerous to animals or humans. In 2011, Anthony Fauci wrote an editorial in The Washington Post arguing that the pros outweigh the cons.
The psychology of bias
A behavioral psychologist would point to what that does to a person afterward. Once someone has told the world that a thing should definitely be done, there is zero chance of staying impartial about what happened. Picture going home at night and thinking that something you did contributed to the deaths of fifteen million people: that would make it impossible to go to bed, so the brain is much more likely to trick you into believing it didn't happen.
A person with that kind of bias would not be allowed on a jury.
Why does a public stance warp later judgment?
Psychologist Leon Festinger described cognitive dissonance in his 1957 book A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance. People feel discomfort when their actions or statements clash with new evidence, and they tend to relieve it by reinterpreting the evidence rather than revising their stance. The effect grows stronger when the person has committed publicly and invested effort. In Festinger's earlier study of a doomsday group, When Prophecy Fails, the core members grew more devoted after the predicted date passed.
Why did gain-of-function research draw debate?
In 2011, researchers in the Netherlands and at the University of Wisconsin reported making H5N1 bird flu transmissible between ferrets through the air. The work raised questions about whether publishing the methods could help someone cause harm. The researchers announced a voluntary pause on the experiments in 2012, and the journals Science and Nature published the papers after review. In 2014, the US government paused federal funding for new gain-of-function studies on influenza, SARS, and MERS viruses.