Opinion | We Could Easily Make Risky Virological Research Safer – The New York Times

The 2007 outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease in Britain was traced to a faulty drainage pipe at a research facility. In 2015 the Department of Defense discovered that a germ-warfare program in Utah had mistakenly mailed almost 200 samples of live anthrax over 12 years. In 2018 a burst pipe released as many as 3,000 gallons of wastewater from labs working with Ebola and anthrax at Fort Detrick in Maryland onto a grassy area a few feet from an open storm drain.

Lab accidents happen, and they aren t especially rare. A 2014 USA Today investigation by Alison Young, whose book Pandora s Gamble: Lab Leaks, Pandemics, and a World At Risk is a shocking accounting of the problem, identified more than a thousand accidents reported to federal regulators from 2008 to 2012. Some were not especially dangerous. But if you ve read accounts of them at any point over the course of the Covid-19 pandemic as debate continued over its origins, chances are they ve shaken you a bit. Many of the touchstone examples have been tied to quotidian causes sloppy procedures and lax oversight. But lately debate has focused on the dangerousness of the experiments themselves, in part because knowing what is risky suggests what extra precautions might be taken and in part because it raises a more bracing fundamental question: What kind of work is worth this risk?

In January the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity issued a series of draft recommendations for tightening regulation and oversight. The proposed framework would expand the list of pathogens that would require rigorous review and close some loopholes that allowed some researchers to avoid that oversight. But for the moment, the recommendations sit in a kind of regulatory limbo, awaiting a green light from the White House and implementation at the National Institutes of Health.

For those who believe it is likely that a lab leak was responsible for this pandemic and the deaths of probably 20 million people, the need for greater scrutiny and regulation appears intuitive and urgent. And many of those who see the Covid pandemic as merely the sort of pathogenic disaster that lab accidents might cause agree that greater safety is needed.

via www.nytimes.com

Un. be. lievable.