Scott Gottlieb writes about an unaddressed aspect of the COVID-19 pandemic.
In 2004, an outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome flared up at the National Institute of Virology in Beijing. Two researchers, while tinkering with a lethal coronavirus, caught the SARS bug themselves. This wasn’t the virus behind covid-19 but an earlier, deadlier strain that had sparked an epidemic in 2002 before it was snuffed out — only to reemerge from the Beijing lab. The infection spread to at least nine people before it was finally contained.
For those who still dismiss the possibility that the coronavirus causing covid-19 sprang from a Chinese laboratory, history has already offered ample reasons to worry about lab safety. Recent years have witnessed a global rush to build laboratories meant to handle nature’s deadliest pathogens — as of last year, the tally was 51 worldwide, roughly doubling in a little over a decade. In tandem have come advances in molecular biology, achieved with unsettling ease, enabling the reengineering of ordinary viruses, posing new risks to humanity.
Yet here we are, more than four years after the covid-19 virus emerged, with no real progress in establishing stricter international measures to prevent another deadly virus from escaping a research site. …
… This year, the WHO adopted changes to those regulations in response to the coronavirus pandemic, but the new measures do nothing to tackle the underlying threat of a lab accident. Nor does a draft pandemic treaty that the WHO has pursued and failed to ratify. The WHO seems both hesitant and hopelessly out of its depth when it comes to playing global watchdog for high-stakes research, more preoccupied with tiptoeing around noncompliant nations such as China — and placating international health officials who resist its scrutiny — than with enforcing meaningful oversight. …
… To mitigate these threats, the global community should establish a new regulator to oversee high-risk experiments.
