The labs, the leaks – and the silence
A new book sheds light on a disturbing pattern of lab-associated infections that threaten humanity.
Some brief “housekeeping” as Substackers say (don’t ask me why). I’m taking a full-time position with RFA in Taipei as China Correspondent (I’ll be in Taipei from next Monday), which I’m very excited about but which also means I won’t be lighting up the Greater Sinosphere with topical news items because that’s now what I will be doing for RFA.
ChinaDiction will – and feel free to jump ship to newsletters with a genuine news component if you’re disappointed – from now on be striving to put up one book review with some kind of Greater Sinosphere connection at least once a week.
If you enjoy the reviews, please stick with me and spread the word. If you don’t, thanks for your past support and best, Chris.
Pandora’s Gamble: Lab Leaks, Pandemics, and a World at Risk
Alison Young
Center Street (April 25, 2023)
352 pages
ISBN-10 : 1546002936
ISBN-13 : 978-1546002932
In late 2021, a lab worker in Taipei was bitten by a mouse in a Biosafety Level (BSL) 3 lab.
In fact, she was bitten twice before quitting her job for unknown reasons, although it’s obviously possible she came to dislike working with mice.
On November 26, the researcher developed a cough that worsened over the week that followed. On December 9, she tested positive for Covid-19 after a PCR test. The authorities set about tracing 85 people the lab researcher was known to have interacted and shared spaces with.
It is unknown whether she was infected by the mouse bites, or whether some other breach of protocol had occurred at the Taipei lab.
Remarkably, no one was infected by the virus that had hitched a ride with her.
And unfortunately, it was not even a once-in-a-lifetime event.
Leaks of SARS-1 from labs in China, Singapore and Taiwan in 2003 and 2004 led the WHO to warn that a return of SARS would most likely emanate from a lab.
And in 2022 – yes, the year after a researcher was bitten twice by mice – another coronavirus researcher in Taiwan exposed 110 people, while in 2003 her supervisor had been infected with SARS in a lab.
Such near misses are documented in compelling but horrifying succession in a new book that sheds light on a ring-fenced world of pathogen leaks from the supposedly secure sites in which we research biological threats to humanity.
Journalist Alison Young’s Pandora’s Gamble: Lab Leaks, Pandemics, and a World at Risk basically posits: The only rare thing about leaks of potentially lethal pathogens from labs is the public hearing about them.
In 1977, for example, a decades-old strain of H1N1 influenza virus appeared in what was then the Soviet Union, where a 22-year-old man in Moscow fell ill on November 1, 1977.
By January 1978, this H1N1 flu virus was spreading around the world, with cases starting to be identified in the Philippines and United Kingdom
The flu virus was nearly identical to the H1N1 flu virus of 1950 – as if “preserved – truly frozen in nature or elsewhere,” wrote researchers in 1978.
Other experts were blunter, saying:
‘This virus from 1950 almost certainly escaped back into nature from frozen storage’ —or, more specifically, that it ‘probably escaped from a laboratory.’
Young is an investigative journalist who has covered biosafety issues for close on two decades, and her measured, meticulously researched book documents incident after horrifying incident in which public relations trump public safety when it comes to laboratory-acquired infections.
She talks to Karen Byers, “a biosafety manager at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston,” who has been maintaining running tally of reported incidents of lab-associated infections in the U.S. and abroad.
From 1979 through 2015, about 3,230 lab-associated infections with forty-one deaths had been publicly described in various scientific journal articles and other publications, her research has found. Of these known infections, most occurred in either clinical or research labs.
But the cases in Byers’s tallies are just a fraction of the infections that are actually occurring among lab workers. Underreporting is a widely acknowledged problem, with lab personnel fearing stigma and reprisal when incidents occur.
When it comes to studying lab accidents and assessing the evidence for various safety practices and equipment, ‘There isn’t any funding for it,’ said biosafety consultant Rocco Casagrande.’Basically, almost all of the data on performance of these equipment, accident source terms, accident frequency … especially the things that are truly empirical where someone has set up the test to actually determine what the evidence is from 1980 and before.’
That’s the U.S.
When Young’s book turns to China, it’s not that we find a drastic uptick in accidents; we find the same kind of accidents that Young’s sleuthing has liberated from bureaucratic shelves at home.
In 2014, she writes, the National Institute of Virology in Beijing accidentally released the SARS virus, leaving …
… The WHO and Chinese health authorities scrambling to contain a growing outbreak of cases linked to the lab’s researchers, their family members, and the health care workers who had treated them.
By summer the outbreak that began at the National Institute of Virology had been contained—but only after three generations of transmission, with nine confirmed cases of SARS and one death. It was lucky that the toll wasn’t much higher.”
The problem:
‘To the best of our knowledge, there is no internationally maintained database or inventory for high consequence biological agents,’ Kazunobu Kojima, a World Health Organization biosafety expert, told me.
‘WHO has no access to such information on who’s doing what in terms of gain of function (GOF) or similar research work that comes with an elevated risk.’
Kojima said that countries’ annual emergency preparedness reports show biosafety approaches around the world are uneven, with resource-limited countries struggling to manage biosafety and biosecurity challenges.
Only a tiny fraction of countries around the world have any kind of oversight structure in place to limit who can possess especially dangerous pathogens, to screen buyers of synthetic DNA products, or to regulate so-called dual use research that carries risks of producing knowledge that can be used to cause significant harm, according to the 2021 Global Health Security Index, which examined biosafety and biosecurity capacities in 195 countries.
To return to the 1977 influenza pandemic that many experts suspect leaked and infected the world:
In recent years some researchers have downplayed the relevance of the 1977 influenza epidemic as a real-world example of a global epidemic caused by biological research. They don’t dispute that the origin of the virus almost certainly was not natural. But they say the event didn’t occur in the context of modern biosafety practices. And they essentially argue that if the type of research that led to the escape involved a ‘vaccine trial or vaccine development gone awry’ it is somehow not as relevant to debates over biosafety risks as other kinds of microbiological research.
One doesn’t need to be a virologist to know that this is an argument that simply doesn’t inspire confidence in face of the stakes – not to mention what we have been through over the past three or four years in the grip of a virus of indeterminate origin.
Young’s book, in short, is not only a wake-up call, but also a call to action. She argues that we need to have more oversight and regulation of labs that work with potentially pandemic pathogens. She pushes the rational argument we need more public awareness and engagement on biosafety issues. She maintains we need more ethical and responsible research, balancing the benefits and risks of studying deadly viruses.
There were two ways the SARS virus had the potential to cause a future outbreak, the WHO experts wrote [of the leaks in 2003 and 2004]. It could emerge from an animal reservoir, or it could be released by a lab doing research with live cultures or handling stored clinical specimens.
The report concluded: “The risk of re-emergence from a laboratory source is thought to be potentially greater.”
On reading Young’s book, the reader is inclined to wonder, Why the stigmatization of a possible lab leak in Wuhan and how is it we have dodged the bullet of complacency for so long?