Laboratories

High-security laboratories that handle the most dangerous viruses and bacteria have reported more than 100 accidents or near-misses to safety regulators in the past five years, official reports reveal.

One blunder led to live anthrax being sent from a government facility to unsuspecting labs across the UK, a mistake that exposed other scientists to the disease. Another caused the failure of an air handling system that helped contain foot and mouth disease at a large animal lab.

The risk of a man-made pandemic from a lab escape is not hypothetical. Lab escapes of high-consequence pathogens resulting in transmission beyond lab personnel have occurred. The historical record reveals lab-originated outbreaks and deaths due to the causative agents of the 1977 pandemic flu, smallpox escapes in Great Britain, Venezuelan equine encephalitis in 1995, SARS outbreaks after the SARS epidemic, and foot and mouth disease in the UK in 2007. Ironically, these labs were working with pathogens to prevent the very outbreaks that they ultimately caused.

On July 1, 2014, during clean-up and inventory in preparation for a move of the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) laboratories located at the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) campus in Bethesda, MD to FDA’s White Oak campus in Silver Spring, MD, vials labeled as Variola (the virus that causes smallpox) were discovered. The six vials of Variola were found among another 321 unclaimed vials (for a total of 327 vials) inside cardboard boxes stored in the back left corner of an FDA laboratory’s cold storage room.

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It was noted that the integrity of one vial was compromised (labeled Nor. SPL. ANT — presumed to be Normal Spleen Antigen — which is neither a pathogen nor a Select Agent or Toxin).

The director of the CDC, Dr. Thomas Frieden, recently revealed that, in June 2014, CDC laboratory workers improperly handled and stored what turned out to be live anthrax and that earlier in the year, the deadly H5N1 (“bird flu”) influenza virus was inadvertently mixed with a far more benign influenza strain in a CDC laboratory and then shipped to an outside laboratory. Senior CDC officials were notified of that event only after the revelation of the anthrax accident. We have now learned that vials of smallpox virus labeled “1954” have been sitting for decades in a U.S. Food and Drug Administration laboratory in a red brick building at the heart of the NIH campus (4)— truly the stuff of science fiction movies.

But worries surround the Chinese lab, too. The SARS virus has escaped from high-level containment facilities in Beijing multiple times, notes Richard Ebright, a molecular biologist at Rutgers University in Piscataway, New Jersey.

In 2008, a sterilization device malfunctioned and unexpectedly opened, exposing a nearby unvaccinated worker to undisclosed pathogens.

In 2009, a new high-security bio research facility, rated to handle Ebola, smallpox, and other dangerous pathogens, had its decontamination showers fail.

In 2011, a worker at a lab that studied dangerous strains of bird flu found herself unable to shower after a construction contractor accidentally shut off the water. She removed her protective equipment and left without taking a decontaminating shower.

Janet Parker was the last person to die of smallpox. … An investigation performed afterward suggested that Janet Parker had been infected either via an airborne route through the medical school building’s duct system or by direct contact while visiting the microbiology corridor one floor above.

The evidence shows that SARS-CoV2 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.