Thread by @Ayjchan

Editors at scientific journals, you can do something to stop risky pathogen research - form a pact to collectively refuse to publish research where pathogen sequences have been kept private for more than 2 years and where chimera of known/novel pathogens have been created.

https://twitter.com/ayjchan/status/1463672554061717506

If you refuse to publish this type of risky pathogen work, scientists will hesitate to spend their millions on research that they cannot publish in journals or present at conferences in order to advance their careers.

Accordingly, any scientist asked to peer review such a paper must be able to report it to an external party. I wish that the Cambridge working group or a similar organization was active so that they could receive and manage whistleblower reports.

Journals that glamorize risky pathogen research need to be properly censured and penalized for incentivizing the type of work that could lead to millions of people dying.

For example, research where SARS1 virulence factors have been inserted into SARS2 should not be published at top journals. Scientists elsewhere will want to do the same experiment according to their own biosafety standards to also publish in a top journal. selectagents.gov/resources/sagr…

Journals,
Regarding accepted practices for uploading new virus sequences, this must be a recognized international database that is not under the control of a single country or entity that take the database offline, scrub data, or even alter the data when a lab leak is suspected.

As we have all seen, the data may as well be non-existent if it is only available on a database that can be unilaterally taken offline in the early days of a crisis.

Before covid, many in the science community (including me) did not understand the full risks of this specific type of pathogen research, but we should learn from the pandemic.

Journals must demonstrate leadership in deterring risky pathogen work, don’t leave it to scientists.