Thread by @Ayjchan

One takeaway from this pandemic is that we must act urgently to make pathogen research funded by the US more transparent. Recently FOIA’ed emails and documents show that by 2018 the US was funding chimeric human pathogen MERS research in Wuhan.

theintercept.com/2021/11/03/cor…

I am starting to feel like a broken record on this, but somehow many experts in infectious diseases and biosafety still believe that all we need to do to prevent future pandemics is to keep working on the wildlife trade, which is important but so are lab-based outbreaks.

Researchers bringing thousands of high risk wildlife trade animal and human samples across 8 countries into one city can itself be considered a thriving conduit of pathogens into the human population.

https://twitter.com/ayjchan/status/1456984320036507648

The genetic engineering of potential pandemic pathogens, sometimes at surprisingly low biosafety levels, sometimes leading to unexpected gain of function, is another layer of unnecessary risk.

technologyreview.com/2021/06/29/102…

We don’t have any more time left to waste on arguing whether a natural or lab #OriginOfCovid is more likely. Even if there is a 1 in 10 chance the Covid-19 pandemic emerged due to pathogen research, we must act now to mitigate this 21st century pandemic risk.

I’m just a postdoc. I can’t unilaterally organize a US moratorium on risky pathogen research. And I haven’t seen any signs of one being organized by scientific or political leadership.

Do we need to see any more FOIA’ed documents to know that the existing ePPP framework is not strict or transparent enough to prevent US dollars from funding risky potential pandemic pathogen research at home and abroad?

https://twitter.com/Ayjchan/status/1464287967661461510