But there are certain lines of circumstantial evidence in favor of the latter. Scientists from Wuhan were however known to be carrying out routine trips to those caves to take samples. Last year, Chan published research showing that, unlike SARS, SARS-CoV-2 was not evolving fast when it was first detected in humans — another piece of circumstantial evidence that could point to lab origin. In a time of both misinformation and too much information, quality journalism is more crucial than ever. By subscribing, you can help us get the story right.
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The biggest challenges posed by the novel coronavirus, she continued, had to do with contact-tracing and communications—preparing the public, sharing accurate numbers, and battling the spread of misinformation. The question is: How many labs like N. If a government is worried about fires, it can build more fire stations without increasing the risk of fires breaking out. But high-containment labs are different.
Even as researching pathogens reduces our collective risk, opening new labs increases it. In , Lentzos and another biosecurity expert, Gregory Koblentz, of George Mason University, published a paper contending that a dramatic increase in the number of labs and scientists working on dangerous pathogens was adding to our collective risk. They identified a number of potential dangers, including accidental releases, worker infections, theft, and insider threats.
Foreign governments, they suggested, might also interpret the massive expansion in American research, much of it funded by the Department of Defense, as cover for an offensive bioweapons program, sparking a biodefense arms race. In their paper, Lentzos and Koblentz discuss the circumstances under which a government should consider not building a new lab.
American biodefense funding is often unpredictable: while Congress has approved a coronavirus-response package of more than eight billion dollars, the White House budget for , released in February, proposes cutting the C. Governance is another crucial factor: rules and enforcement mechanisms need to address dual-use research, responsible science, and transparency. In the United States, the governance of high-containment labs is a disorganized endeavor.
The National Institutes of Health and the Occupational Health and Safety Administration both exercise some oversight, and the Federal Select Agent Program inspects labs that handle pathogens on its list. For example, in , researchers in Canada reconstituted the horsepox virus, which, because it is extinct, is not a select agent.
Since its report, the G. The forty-seven-acre site soon to be occupied by N. The exercises have included as many as three hundred and fifty people, representing multiple federal and state agencies. Like Koehn, he is confident that the state is prepared. In a article for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists , Benedict explored how the myth had laid the groundwork for the Fukushima disaster in Japan:. Nuclear companies and regulators themselves came to accept the myth as reality, believing that they had done everything possible to make their power plants safe.
But this myth led to a perverse outcome: If the power companies identified and made necessary improvements, or staged accident-preparedness drills, they would reveal that nuclear power was not absolutely safe, and the public, they believed, would end its support for nuclear power.
Fearing a lack of acceptance, nuclear operators were reluctant to undertake safety upgrades, and even concealed problems. Where the Academy had suggested that the likelihood of a foot-and-mouth release at N. Construction began in Over time, even risks once seen as extraordinary can come to seem ordinary. With his wife, Julia, and their son and daughter-in-law, Anderson now manages the family ranch outside of Alma, Kansas, twenty-five miles southeast of Manhattan. Their cattle end up at feedlots around western Kansas, Iowa, and Nebraska, where up to fifty thousand animals are gathered in a single location—ideal conditions for contagion.
Whereas his father, who died a few years ago, protested the lab vociferously, Matt spends most of his time thinking about breeding, fence-building, calving, pricing, and the rest of his business. Many ranchers around the country worry about foot-and-mouth coming from imported beef.
Matt now assumes that he will have to worry about it coming from a lab, too. Kimberly Dodd expects to move to Kansas sometime between and She is looking forward to the expanded scale and scope of her work: bigger facilities, more training programs, a staff twice the size.
When she visits Manhattan, she flies to Kansas City and drives west for two hours on Highway 70, often with colleagues from New York who may be dubious about their new surroundings. And then you hit the Flint Hills in the late afternoon, with the light changing. The Kansas protesters have accepted their inability to divert the juggernaut of political and economic interests that favor N. Later, I met with Sylvia Beeman, the former research assistant, and Bill Dorsett, the carpenter, at Sparrow, a coffee shop across the street from campus.
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But while the World Health Organization WHO has published a manual on the different levels , the standards are not enforced by any treaties. But she adds: "The 'stick' comes with the purse strings.
If you want to do projects with international partners they require labs to be operating to certain standards. Or if you have products to sell in the market, or perform certain services, e. The cables recommended giving them even more help.
The short answer is we don't know from the information provided in the Washington Post. But, generally speaking, there are multiple ways that safety measures can be breached at labs dealing with biological agents.
According to Dr Lentzos, these include: "Who has access to the lab, the training and refresher-training of scientists and technicians, procedures for record-keeping, signage, inventory lists of pathogens, accident notification practices, emergency procedures.
But how unusual were the concerns expressed in the diplomatic cables? Accidents happen. In , forgotten vials of smallpox were found in a cardboard box in a research centre near Washington. In , the US military accidentally shipped live anthrax samples instead of dead spores to as many as nine labs across the country and a military base in South Korea. In four instances between and , the Sars virus was accidentally released at laboratories in Singapore, Taiwan and Beijing.
There are variations in safety standards across the large number of labs at the lower end of the BSL scale and many lesser breaches don't make it into the news. But there are relatively few labs that are designated BSL Wikipedia lists over 50 around the world, of which WIV was one, but there is no authoritative list.
They have to be built to very high specifications because they deal with the most dangerous pathogens known to science. As a result, they generally have good safety records.
So any concerns about procedures at one of these facilities would be more than noteworthy. Yes, almost as soon as the novel coronavirus came to light, there was speculation - much of it uninformed - about its origins. One online theory that surfaced in January suggested the virus could have been engineered in a lab as a bioweapon.
This allegation has been repeatedly dismissed by scientists, who note that studies show the virus originated in animals - most likely in bats. Viruses can also be engineered for the purposes of scientific research. For example, studies may improve the ability of a pathogen to cause disease, to investigate how viruses could mutate in future. But a US study of the coronavirus genome published in March found no signs it had been engineered.
Pathogens can be made to mutate in a laboratory without the directed manipulation of their genes. In so-called "passage experiments", viruses or bacteria are passed from one lab animal to another in order to study how the agents adapt to their hosts.
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