A lot of these research industries are like a more extreme version of Big Pharma.
We all know how Big Pharma is well known for it's accountability to the public, right?
/s
This topic came to my attention because I saw a censored/banned Kim Iversen video from youtube
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TEQdQUa05hU
I'm gonna start this rant with a disclaimer: I think there's a 0% chance Covid started in some biological warfare lab. Emphasis on the "biological warfare" part.
There IS evidence that some controversial events several decades ago WERE biological warfare-related, but they are much much older and irrelevant to this discussion, foreign countries (understandably) have conflated them somewhat.
But back on topic with that being said, there's also no evidence that the oil company BP intentionally released a spill over the gulf, nor is there evidence the Japanese Fukushima nuclear reactor intentionally leaked radiation.
Those were just a mix of management fuckups, ignoring safety regulations, and accidents.
Anyways I read a more mainstream new Yorker piece on teh topic, and noticed interesting omissions. So I'm going to add on to what an NYmag piece speculated on, by adding some background:
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/coronavirus-lab-escape-theory.html
...But in the end, Baric was allowed to proceed with his experiments, and the research papers that resulted, showered with money, became a sort of Anarchist’s Cookbook for the rest of the scientific world. In November 2015, Baric and colleagues published a collaboration paper with Shi Zhengli titled “A SARS-like Cluster of Circulating Bat Coronaviruses Shows Potential for Human Emergence.” Into a human SARS virus that they had adapted so that it would work in mice, Baric and Shi et al. inserted the spike protein of a bat virus, SHC014, discovered by Shi in southern China. They dabbed the mice nasally with virus and waited, looking for signs of sickness: “hunching, ruffled fur.” They also infected human airway cells with the mouse-adapted bat-spike-in-a-human-virus backbone. In both mice and human airway cells, the chimeric virus caused a “robust infection.”
...Richard Ebright was trenchantly unenthusiastic. “The only impact of this work,” he said, “is the creation, in a lab, of a new, non-natural risk.”
Ebright was ONLY allowed to proceed because the experiments were OUTSOURCED to a newly created lab in Wuhan, China.
This is a very important detail nymag left out, and their framing makes it implied that he was able to negotiate with local authorities on the matter.
Very few labs in teh world are given clearance to work on this type of virology research, and China completed it's first qualified lab in 2014 in Wuhan
That will remain China's only qualified lab for a few years, until the remaining facilities are completed
China meanwhile finished it's first lab qualified to handle those experiments in 2014, so they've only had labs (and the local regulations) for less than a decade:
https://archive.vn/hqbbK
Only one lab in China can safely handle the new coronavirus
By Nicoletta Lanese - Staff Writer January 22, 2020
...The Chinese government moved to construct such a lab following the 2003 SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) epidemic, during which more than 8,000 people caught the infection and more than 750 died worldwide, according to the CDC. Laboratories that handle pathogens receive a rating of 1 to 4, depending on what class of microbe they can feasibly contain, with 1 representing the lowest risk and 4 representing the highest risk. Designated at Biosafety Level 4 (BSL-4), the Wuhan lab can hold the world's most dangerous pathogens at maximum biocontainment levels.
Coincidentally enough, China (due to it's novel program) lacked the same regulations as US labs, hence US scientists outsourced research there to violate safety regulations:
https://archive.is/7uruo
Dr. Fauci Backed Controversial Wuhan Lab with U.S. Dollars for Risky Coronavirus Research
BY FRED GUTERL ON 4/28/20
...Many scientists have criticized gain of function research, which involves manipulating viruses in the lab to explore their potential for infecting humans, because it creates a risk of starting a pandemic from accidental release.
In 2019, with the backing of NIAID, the National Institutes of Health committed $3.7 million over six years for research that included some gain-of-function work. The program followed another $3.7 million, 5-year project for collecting and studying bat coronaviruses, which ended in 2019, bringing the total to $7.4 million.
The NIH research consisted of two parts. The first part began in 2014 and involved surveillance of bat coronaviruses, and had a budget of $3.7 million. The program funded Shi Zheng-Li, a virologist at the Wuhan lab, and other researchers to investigate and catalogue bat coronaviruses in the wild. This part of the project was completed in 2019.
A second phase of the project, beginning that year, included additional surveillance work but also gain-of-function research for the purpose of understanding how bat coronaviruses could mutate to attack humans. The project was run by EcoHealth Alliance, a non-profit research group, under the direction of President Peter Daszak, an expert on disease ecology. NIH canceled the project just this past Friday, April 24th, Politico reported. Daszak did not immediately respond to Newsweek requests for comment.
So let me go back to the 2014 articles with a piece from the Guardian, 2014, talking about the likely odds of accidental leaks from HIGHLY REGULATED US labs:
https://archive.vn/IZXkz
Virus experiments risk unleashing global pandemic, study warns
May 2014
Virus experiments risk unleashing global pandemic, study warns
Benefits of scientific testing in the area are outweighed by risks of pathogenic strains spreading round world, say researchers
Public health experts have warned that controversial experiments on mutant viruses could put human lives in danger by unleashing an accidental pandemic.
Benefits of scientific testing in the area are outweighed by risks of pathogenic strains spreading round world, say researchers
...They calculate that if 10 high-containment labs in the US performed such experiments for 10 years, the chance of at least one person becoming infected was nearly 20%. If an infected person left the laboratory, the virus might then spread more widely.
Let me put this in perspective:
The US only even has like 10 (13 to be exact) labs with the clearance to handle those experiments, and those 13 labs have a very well aged/developed set of regulations (over the past several decades) to go along with it. The oldest of those labs is at Fort Detrick, established back during the WW2 era, making it almost 80 years old, and that place was originally a biological warfare facility before such research was banned. So we already have a baseline knowledge of how weaponizing research in this field needs to be monitored and restricted.
But even with our best case scenario there by assuming the probabilities stay constant, we can isolate a single (highly regulated) lab for 5 years, and that leaves us a 1% risk of infection beginning from that lab accidentally.
So the question that arises is what risks remain for less regulated labs, does that probability change..?
For an analogy on regulations, let's remember the first major vaccine ever created was the cowpox-derived smallpox vaccine, with "vaccine" stemming from the Latin word "vacca" meaning cow.
It was created by Edward Jenner intentionally giving an 8 year old child cowpox, then testing the same child with multiple sources of smallpox, something that would not be legal today for various reasons. Everything Jenner did would be extremely illegal today, yet he's still the "father of vaccines" worldwide.
Given the (available in the world) knowledge Jenner had at the time, we can look past the problems with some of his actions, while accepting it would be problematic if a modern actor used those same strategies for research. But what if some researcher intentionally visited a country with no such safety regulations, just to experiment with drugs today? That would be very bad, right, even if it was technically legal (unregulated) in the host country?
The very fact that this dangerous research was outsourced (REGARDLESS of what happened, even if covid was 100% natural) in the first place should remain extremely relevant for public discussion.
there doesn't seem to be anything here