Lab That Created Risky Avian Flu Had “Unacceptable” Biosafety Protocols
theintercept.com
theintercept.com
Also, for anyone lurking the comments who hasn't read the article yet, the lab in question was at the University of Wisconsin.
> Then, months later, Kawaoka’s lab saw two accidents involving lab-generated flu viruses, just one week apart.
> The accidents, a spill and a needle prick, carried a low risk of infection. Flu viruses are typically transferred through respiratory droplets, not skin contact or injection. Nonetheless, in letters obtained by The Intercept, staff at a funding agency accused the university of shirking biosafety precautions that Kawaoka had promised to adopt. They also demanded changes to the University of Wisconsin–Madison’s protocol for accidental lab exposures. Of particular concern was a plan to quarantine all researchers exposed to modified H5N1 at home, even if they were at high risk of infection — an approach that the funding agency administrators found so alarming that they threatened to end the lab’s grant unless the university changed course.
They're already relying on researchers to self-report exposure incidents, so what other, better policy could they aspire to? Attach any negative deterrent to incident reporting, and people will simply not report things, for their own convenience. The empirical evidence for this is more overwhelming than physics' QED theory.
Pretending that their lab technicians will dutifully and conscientiously self-report exposures is exactly the same security surface as pretending that they will dutifully and correctly self-quarantine at home.
Force the universities to get insurance, an on-site monitoring room with food service and pay 24 hours per day for 14 days.
This type of research is inherently dangerous, the idea that a lab tech exposed to a potential pandemic-causing infectious agent should be just expected to go home (where they likely have family/friends) and trusted to self-isolate is plain bad policy. Coming out of 2 years of pandemic and self-isolation at the global level the idea that we will be willing to compromise on this so that a university can save money is downright moronic.
If they cannot conform to the stringent rules for that sort of research, they shouldn't be doing it. Simple as that.
A bewilderingly ambiguous sentence. Is the rarity of infection via injection adjusted for the rarity of getting stabbed with an injection of flu virus? I can think of a number of times I’ve been sneezed on but I’m challenged to recall the last time flu virus was injected into my body.
Also, they don't really know how flu viruses are transferred. The epidemiology of respiratory viruses is poorly understood and the whole aerosol vs droplet debate rages for flu just as much as for SARS-CoV-2. People touching their faces was meant to be a major pathway for transmission of SARS-CoV-2 so skin contact would seem to be likely to transmit the moment if you accidentally rub your eyes or something before realizing. And even later in the artice, it quotes an official saying: “An individual’s permanent residence is not appropriate due to the fact that many residences are in buildings with high occupancy that share air exchange and other infrastructure,” i.e. aerosol transmission is assumed.
It's good though, that The Intercept is/was doing this sort of investigation. The ultra-lax approach used by these virus labs is highly relevant information, and puts claims that COVID couldn't have come from a lab in important context. For this, we can forgive the author for an illogical statement here and there. It's clear from this sort of investigation and others that regardless of whether COVID did or did not come from a lab, the things these labs do combined with the near non-existent oversight is practically a guarantee of man-made pandemics.