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2025-03-19 -Signs, Portents, and the Weather-
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From 2023: Lab-created bird flu virus accident shows lax oversight of risky 'gain of function' research
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[USAtoday] The story of how the H5N1 viruses came to be created – and the response to a 2019 safety breach – raises uncomfortable questions about the tremendous trust the world is placing in research labs.
This exclusive article is adapted from former USA TODAY investigative reporter Alison Young’s forthcoming book "Pandora’s Gamble: Lab Leaks, Pandemics, and a World at Risk," which will be released April 25. In this excerpt, Young reveals for the first time details of a December 2019 lab safety breach involving one of the world’s most infamous lab-created “gain of function” viruses – and the efforts that were made to downplay the event, avoid notifying health authorities and oversight bodies, and keep the public and policymakers in the dark.
Inside the high-security Influenza Research Institute at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, two experienced scientists were pulling ferrets out of their HEPA-filtered cages on a Monday in December 2019. Another researcher, still in training, was also in the room to watch and learn.
One by one, the animals were put into a biosafety cabinet, where a solution was washed into their nostrils. It’s a procedure used to collect evidence of infection, and this particular experiment involved exposing the animals to a highly controversial lab-engineered strain of H5N1 avian influenza virus.
The virus they were working with that day was far from ordinary, and there should have been no room for the safety breach that was about to happen and the oversight failures that followed.
The experiment underway involved one of two infamous lab-made bird flu viruses that had alarmed scientists around the world when their creation became widely known nearly a decade earlier. In each case, scientists had taken an avian influenza virus that was mostly dangerous to birds and manipulated it in ways that potentially increased its threat to humans.
In nature, the H5N1 virus has rarely infected humans. But when people have been sickened, usually through close contact with infected birds, more than half died. So it is fortunate that the H5N1 virus isn’t capable of spreading easily from person to person. If the virus were ever to evolve in ways that gave it that ability, it could cause a devastating pandemic.
'GAIN OF FUNCTION' RESEARCH CREATED CONTROVERSIAL FLU VIRUSES
And yet in late 2011 the world learned that two scientific teams – one in Wisconsin, led by virologist Yoshihiro Kawaoka, and another in the Netherlands, led by virologist Ron Fouchier – had potentially pushed the virus in that direction. Each of these labs had created H5N1 viruses that had gained the ability to spread through the air between ferrets, the animal model used to study how flu viruses might behave in humans.
The ultimate goal of this work was to help protect the world from future pandemics, and the research was supported with words and funding by two of the most prominent scientists in the United States: Dr. Francis S. Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, and Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
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Posted by trailing wife 2025-03-19 00:00||
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Posted by NN2N1 2025-03-19 06:26||
2025-03-19 06:26||
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Posted by Bobby 2025-03-19 13:45||
2025-03-19 13:45||
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