Goodness, some sense
"On reading," by Simon Wain-Hobson, is a weekly discussion of scientific papers and news articles around gain of function research in virology.
Since January 2024, Dr. Wain-Hobson has written weekly essays for Biosafety Now discussing risky research in virology. You can read his entire series here.
The author was the 23rd commissioner of the US Food and Drug Administration. He has recently published a book entitled Uncontrolled Spread: Why Covid-19 Crushed Us and How We Can Defeat the Next Pandemic so readers can check out more of his thoughts.
He starts with a jab; 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 and goes on to remind us about scientists getting infected by the microbes they work on, something we’ve covered (Lab acquired infections). His sentence Often, mishaps resulted from lax oversight; in some cases, they were deliberately concealed is a good reminder that the numbers of known mishaps are underestimates.
The World Health Organization comes in for a pasting: The WHO seems both hesitant and hopelessly out of its depth when it comes to playing global watchdog for high-stakes research… The WHO’s failure to confront China over the coronavirus’s origins revealed it as a paper tiger, leaving the global community without the tough cop it needs to oversee risky science.
One reason for this of course is that no government wants a tough cop protecting its citizens. That’s their job. Governments have problems when it comes to complex issues like health for, amongst other things, they can’t easily control the narrative and must rely on ‘experts’ (Pandemic illusions, Specialist opinion).
This is such an important an issue that a few lines will be taken, again, from the first 240 page report from the independent UK inquiry into COVID.
• In 2019, it was widely believed, in the UK and abroad, that the UK was not only properly prepared but was one of the best-prepared countries in the world to respond to a pandemic. This Report concludes that, in reality, the UK was ill prepared for dealing with a catastrophic emergency, let alone the coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic that actually struck.
• Across the UK, systems had grown to be overly bureaucratic. Instead of focusing on skills, technology and infrastructure, they were focused on creating groups, sub-groups and documents.
Stunning and frightening.
Back to the 23rd commissioner. To mitigate these threats, the global community should establish a new regulator to oversee high-risk experiments. In place of the WHO, the new body could start as a multilateral pact led by a bloc of like-minded nations. Because China would reject such an accord, it could initially be led by the Group of Seven nations.
He probably has in mind something akin to the Risky Research Review Act. Contemplating opposition Gottleib is blunt: but what is the alternative to trying — simply accepting the risk of a pandemic more lethal than anything the world has ever seen?
The new body should have the power to penalize labs that refuse to comply with its provisions, such as curbs on pointlessly perilous activities such as gain-of-function studies involving deadly respiratory viruses — research so dangerous to humanity that the potential harms far outweigh any possible benefits.
Penalizing labs, well, at least that’s clear. As to pointlessly perilous activities such as gain-of-function studies involving deadly respiratory viruses… Exactly, particularly as nobody has mounted a cogent defense in favor of the purported benefits of this work, even though they’ve had more than 12 years to do so. And with this in mind, we’re treated to, If such experiments in the United States have any useful purpose at all. For info, they don’t.
Not everything is utilitarian. Science has hugely benefited from what is called basic research, the nuts and bolts of what goes on, that subtends the utilitarian side frequently referred to as engineering or technology. But when the risks are so high – the catastrophe of a pandemic – there must be a consensus around some clear and tangible benefits to the work before undertaking it.
This is not idle talk. One of the key principles of risk assessment is that benefits should be proportional to risks.
The article ends with some simple thoughts that cannot be bettered:
• The contrast between the strict oversight of chemical weapons and the lax attitude toward deadly pathogens is puzzling.
• If the global community can’t implement tighter oversight of known bioweapons commensurate with the governance of chemical weapons, it’s no wonder that high-risk studies done in civilian research sites are so relatively unmonitored.
• Right now, the world is no safer from these risks than it was before the coronavirus pandemic began. Greater governance of these dangers will protect the integrity of the scientific enterprise…
Good to know some common sense is still to be found. Do read the article.
Aside
If you would like to support the Risky Research Review Bill going to the floor of the US Senate, click here.
Unfortunately, the dream of a BWC verification protocol died a couple decades ago, and there's regrettably little reason to be optimistic that treaty will ever amount to much more than "the norm" (i.e. offensive BW work is beyond the pale). A six volume set could be written on that. At WHO, lab biosafety is allegedly a program but I'd say it's a largely marginalized subject with minimal staff. Standards-oriented work on high containment within WHO immediately runs smack into the problem of differing resources between countries / regions. I wish there were more solutions, but as to "the global community" doing something in the form of the G7 (which is hardly 'the global community'), I wouldn't be optimistic that most developing countries would buy into that because they would immediately, and correctly, perceive it as targeting them (because they would anticipate, again correctly, that the US - and maybe some others - will do whatever they want anyway). To the extent they did buy in, I suspect it'd be largely for the money (and who could blame, say, the director of a Central African BSL-3 in need of maintenance of courting the gringos for a hit of cash while not really necessarily buying their agenda?).
Superb