The labs where monsters live

Long article on Biosafety Level 4 labs. Potentially this is the stuff of *12 Monkeys*

https://multimedia.scmp.com/infograp...ies/index.html

The 47-year-old heads the Biosafety Level 4 laboratory at the Robert Koch Institute in Berlin, Germany, the type of lab that handles viruses capable of sickening or killing humans in their millions. It is the front line in the world of virology, where men and women in astronaut-like suits explore a microscopic space to deconstruct the genetic code of deadly viruses. The goal is to mount counter-attacks using tailor-built vaccines and antiviral drugs.

If “know your enemy” is the maxim to survive conflict, taking on a potentially fatal virus as an adversary, like those that cause Ebola, Aids or Covid-19, throws up especially difficult challenges. This invisible enemy is immune to reason, mutates as it spreads, and multiplies in hosts it infects before launching attacks on more people. And viruses exist in uncountable billion

from a little lower down on that link:


Germ Warfare

After the war ended, in 1945, as many as 199 Nazi officials faced trials in Nuremberg, Germany, on charges including war crimes and crimes against humanity. Among the cases heard was the so-called Doctors’ Trial of 23 medical personnel. The charges included conducting forced biological and medical experiments on thousands of inmates at concentration camps, such as Ravensbrück and Auschwitz. These experiments included infecting prisoners with such diseases as tuberculosis, malaria and yellow fever during research into the use of biological agents as weapons of war.

Seven of the doctors were convicted and hanged on June 2, 1948, nine faced imprisonment, while seven were acquitted. The doctors were tried before a US military court in Nuremberg, which meant that the extensive records of the biological experiments fell into American hands.

Japan also conducted biological and chemical research during WWII, much of it in Harbin, according to documented accounts. It included forced medical experiments on prisoners as well as attacks against civilians in China using biological agents such as typhoid, smallpox and plague-infected fleas. The unit involved was officially called the Epidemic Prevention and Water Purification Department, but is better known as Unit 731. It was effectively a biological warfare operation led by soldier and microbiologist General Shiro Ishii, whose use of biological weapons in China is estimated to have killed or injured hundreds of thousands of people.

However, unlike the Nazi doctors, Ishii and others involved in Unit 731 escaped prosecution by the US at the Tokyo War Crimes Trials (1946-48), the equivalent in Japan to Nuremberg. According to now declassified documents, US military authorities granted members of Unit 731 immunity from prosecution in return for data they had gathered on biological warfare.

Securing troves of documents on the methods and means of developing biological weapons, their results when used in military attacks, and the individuals who developed them, took on a new significance as the US faced a new adversary in the Soviet Union, and biological warfare was seen as a real threat.

In her 2017 book, "Hidden Atrocities: Japanese Germ Warfare and American Obstruction of Justice at the Tokyo Trial", medical anthropologist Jeanne Guillemin says the US military obtained biowarfare documents from Unit 731. And most, if not all, of the Nazi and Unit 731 data that made its way to America ended up at Fort Detrick, home to one of the world’s oldest BSL-4 labs, where the US military ran its biological warfare research programme for more than two decades before it was terminated, in 1969, by President Richard Nixon.

The procedures developed at Fort Detrick later served as the basis for the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention’s publication Biosafety in Microbiological and Biomedical Laboratories, considered the biosafety bible in labs worldwide.

“Thus, in what we might today call a reverse dual use model, some very important good – lab safety – has ultimately come from a programme that was designed to do harm,” Franz says.

Something else came out of the trial of the Nazi doctors in Germany in 1947: the Nuremberg Code, a list of 10 ethical principles to guide medical research and treatment of patients, written to counter the exploitation, suffering and murder of prisoners in the name of science and ideology in Nazi concentration camps. It remains one of the most influential documents on clinical work.

These principles state that voluntary consent is essential, and the results of any experiment must be for the greater good of society. Principle number six is that the risks should never exceed the benefits. It is this question – do the risks exceed the benefits? – that has split the medical research community in relation to the type of work that takes place today in BSL-3 and BSL-4 labs.

Specifically, this involves the creation of new strains of viruses in the name of research, according to a 2014 statement opposing the work and signed by more than 300 scientists. Known as the Cambridge Working Group Consensus Statement, it called for a halt to what is known as gain-of-function research, which can involve taking an existing virus and giving it new attributes, potentially making the pathogen more dangerous.

“Laboratory creation of highly transmissible, novel strains of dangerous viruses, especially but not limited to influenza, poses substantially increased risks,” the Cambridge Working Group statement says. It points to “incidents” at US labs involving viruses such as anthrax and the “fallibility of even the most secure laboratories”.

The argument about gain-of-function research blew up in 2012 after two labs, in the Netherlands and in Wisconsin, published research showing they had created H5N1 influenza virus strains that were transmissible between ferrets, which have respiratory systems similar to those of humans. Part of the rationale for the work was disagreement over whether H5N1, or bird flu, usually spread by chickens and wildfowl, could be transmitted by mammals.

A 2014 editorial in mBio, a journal published by the American Society for Microbiology, argued that the work carried out by the labs was essentially a “species jump” that gave a virus the capability to transmit between mammals, something it had previously lacked.

Gain-of-function research has also been conducted on coronaviruses, the family from which Covid-19 sprang. This work on coronaviruses disturbs Amir Attaran, a professor in the faculty of law and School of Epidemiology and Public Health at the University of Ottawa, in Canada. He is one of the original signatories and a founding member of the 2014 Cambridge Working Group.

If you take one of those lesser human coronaviruses and you combine its host range with a bat coronavirus from the wild having more aggressive properties, more virulent properties, you could end up with something that is very, very dangerous. Amir Attaran, lawyer and biologist

“You are in an area of research [that] were a mistake to be made, you could be introducing into the world and to billions of people, something at least as bad, if not worse than the virus causing Covid-19.”

Supporters of gain-of-function research argue it is necessary to improve detection of dangerous viruses and facilitate vaccine development against future pandemics. Attaran argues the emergence of Covid-19 undermines this view.

“We’ve done gain-of-function research on coronavirus,” he says. “It didn’t prepare our surveillance to catch Covid-19, not in the least. As for vaccine development, none of the front-running candidates for a Covid-19 vaccine had anything to do with gain-of-function research.”

These candidates either used existing technology, such as an inactivated vaccine, or built on research conducted on other viruses, he says.

The conflict among scientists regarding the work done on the world’s deadliest viruses in BSL-4 labs raises another question: who is in charge of monitoring what is going on?

According to Koblentz at George Mason University, government oversight is critical to BSL-4 lab security, but, he says, the people working in BSL labs are the linchpin, highlighting the “insider threat” – as seen in the US anthrax attacks – as the greatest security challenge.

“One thing that US labs have is a personnel reliability programme, which is designed to monitor researchers to ensure they are not suffering from mental distress, financial distress. If someone has been radicalised or blackmailed, then you need to know,” he says. This is “not just about bioterrorism but also about preventing the theft of proprietary information or protecting intellectual property because some of this research and the samples people work with can be very valuable”.

Koblentz says much of that oversight is up to the BSL-4 scientists themselves, and Kurth in Berlin says a network among BSL-4 researchers already exists. “The family of BSL-4 research is very small. We know each other, we meet regularly.”

Kurth says no BSL-4 lab in Europe has a staff of more than 50, in contrast to North America, he says. Smaller teams reduce risk of rogue personnel or sabotage, though “there is never 100 per cent certainty” when it comes to lab security.

But for practical global oversight and verification of BSL-4 labs, Attaran says, “There isn’t a good international inspection regime, which is terrifying.”

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) was set up to monitor and prevent the military use of nuclear technology and has 171 member states; the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons has 193 member countries working to eliminate chemical weapons, according to its mandate. But Attaran does not think the WHO is the right body to police global biosecurity: “I do not believe for a moment it is within WHO’s competence to do that.” However, he feels the first step should be a moratorium on gain-of-function research, and that would be best achieved through the WHO.

Franz, formerly of Fort Detrick, also does not see a biosecurity system under the WHO as the answer, because it is underfunded and understaffed. Koblentz says any organisation created to prevent proliferation of biological weapons would have special headaches.

“You can’t have a bio-IAEA because it would have to inspect tens of thousands of locations,” he says. “It would just not be feasible.”

[ Source ]

Unusual Features of the SARS-CoV-2 Genome Suggesting **Sophisticated Laboratory Modification Rather Than Natural** Evolution and Delineation of Its Probable Synthetic Route


Yan, Li-Meng; Kang, Shu; Guan, Jie; Hu, Shanchang
September 14, 2020

The COVID-19 pandemic caused by the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 has led to over 910,000 deaths worldwide and unprecedented decimation of the global economy. Despite its tremendous impact, the origin of SARS-CoV-2 has remained mysterious and controversial. The natural origin theory, although widely accepted, lacks substantial support. The alternative theory that the virus may have come from a research laboratory is, however, strictly censored on peer-reviewed scientific journals. Nonetheless, SARS-CoV-2 shows biological characteristics that are inconsistent with a naturally occurring, zoonotic virus. In this report, we describe the genomic, structural, medical, and literature evidence, which, when considered together, strongly contradicts the natural origin theory.

The evidence shows that SARS-CoV-2 should be a laboratory product created by using bat coronaviruses ZC45 and/or ZXC21 as a template and/or backbone. Building upon the evidence, we further postulate a synthetic route for SARS-CoV-2, demonstrating that the laboratory-creation of this coronavirus is convenient and can be accomplished in approximately six months. Our work emphasizes the need for an independent investigation into the relevant research laboratories. It also argues for a critical look into certain recently published data, which, albeit problematic, was used to support and claim a natural origin of SARS-CoV-2. From a public health perspective, these actions are necessary as knowledge of the origin of SARS-CoV-2 and of how the virus entered the human population are of pivotal importance in the fundamental control of the COVID-19 pandemic as well as in preventing similar, future pandemics.

The_Yan_Report.pdf