If COVID-19 is a man-made disaster, searching for the people, the institutions, and the governments that authored this disaster is not scapegoating, it’s necessary fact-finding before doing justice. What might justice look like in practice? It might include global bans on gain-of-function research. This one measure alone would constitute a kind of quiet revolution, an admission that not every kind of scientific research is in fact beneficial to humanity. The reputation of the entire scientific enterprise itself would suffer immensely from the fallout. If it was a gain-of-function research project gone wrong, then the public-health officials who supported and authorized it will meet a dramatic fall from the stature they attained in the past year. And if subsequent research and investigations can show that actions of the Chinese government — its stonewalling, and its manipulation of the World Health Organization at the outset of the pandemic — contributed to an overall worse global outcome, it might be time to bring up the word “reparations” in international affairs again.