The recent Senate report on COVID origins is overtly political & contains many factual errors.
Some of the most glaring are extremely basic but may not seem so to a non-virologist. As I am a virologist, I can help. Let’s talk about biosafety at WIV.
First thing people need to know about working in biocontainment is that it’s not a “set it and forget it” mentality. You don’t build a containment lab and say, all done, let’s get to cooking up SARSr-CoV chimeras. Biosafety is a constant effort.
I work in one of the largest BSL3 labs in the world. I handle infectious SARS-CoV-2 on a near daily basis. Biosafety & biocontainment is at the front of my mind in everything I do. I have multiple colleagues whose full-time jobs are dedicated to the integrity of our lab.
There are multiple levels where biosafety protocols are implemented: all the way from individual (appropriate PPE & proper training) to the facility design & infrastructure (negative pressure, HEPA filters, waste disposal) to administrative (operational procedures, security).
Part of facility operations include regular maintenance. You make sure air handling is operating normally, the autoclaves are working, etc. Sometimes equipment breaks, so it’s replaced. Sometimes you realize there’s a better alternative, so you upgrade it.
The goal is to conduct essential research as safely as possible and constantly assessing whether that safety standard is met. If you can improve, you do—BEFORE a breach. Biosafety is about avoiding containment failures, not reacting to them.
That’s what I see in this report.
So when I see stuff like this, it seems pretty normal to me. Another key part of facility design is system redundancy. Here, WIV patented an auxiliary exhaust fan to maintain an air pressure gradient. You maintain negative air pressure in labs so pathogens can’t float out.
Here, WIV procured a vaporized hydrogen peroxide system to disinfect air coming from the lab. They even explain why they procured it: it’s less corrosive than an alternative. It’s an example of proactively upgrading critical equipment, not evidence of biosafety failure.
Same here. They were renovating the HVAC system to ensure lab air was contained in the lab. This is not evidence that any of the things they were explicitly trying to prevent (reversal of airflow, re-circulation of lab air) had ever occurred.
Another purchase of air decontamination equipment. Again this is a redundant system: rather than relying on filters alone, they bought a system to sterilize lab exhaust air prior to HEPA filtration. It shows there were multiple processes in place to prevent a containment breach.
Here WIV invented a sensor to detect HEPA filter malfunction on equipment used to transfer animals between labs. It improves function of containment measures, which again will be redundant (staff will also wear PPE, & the building itself has all the air handling stuff above).
And they invented a new disinfectant formulation. Liquid disinfectant is essential & we use it by the literal bucket. Many labs use Microchem, which is very effective but corrosive over time—it eventually wears out other equipment. Where can I get some less corrosive Microchem?
And…that’s it. No evidence of a breach or biosafety failure, but lots of evidence that they were operating a containment lab in a pretty standard way, with one exception: WIV was more innovative than many others and patented some of the bespoke systems they developed.
Which brings me to this. OMG in addition to upgrading and purchasing equipment for lab operations, they were also dealing with budget, procurement, and administrative issues, and as a result they were (gasp) MAKING POLICIES AND DOING BIOSAFETY TRAINING
This shows the high cost of maintenance. It’s true that BSL3/4 labs are expensive to operate (see lots of purchases above—infrastructure ain’t cheap). But here they identify this as a potential problem. Fixing problems before they cause a breach is essential to biosafety.
And one way to address issues of working with pathogens in substandard biocontainment is to pass laws preventing it and administratively regulate what labs can do certain research. Laws like this one.
And they were having a tough time getting equipment, which explains why they were so inventive. They also had meetings to remedy these shortfalls and to manage biosafety more effectively.
And November 12, they reported that they solved a lot of these problems! Contrary to the Senate report, as well as a lot of linguistic speculation by the Chinese secrets “expert” profiled in that Vanity Fair/ProPublica piece about it, there is no mention of a biosafety failure.
Now I’m not an expert in Chinese secrets or marginalia and I don’t speak Mandarin, but @zhihuachen has a great thread about how this report was actually just bragging to their bosses that aforementioned issues were solved, now let’s get back to safely kicking some virology ass.
I did like this part. I routinely work for 4+ hours in containment. Experiments take time. It’s not “an extreme test of will & physical endurance.” It’s a normal afternoon at work.
Burr may want to consider hardier staff, if they imagine a few hours of pipetting are so taxing.
And then WIV also had some biosafety training. Working in containment is “complex and grave” in that you need to be serious about biosafety & ready to respond to failures. That means you need to be properly trained. Training is ongoing & is part of how you prevent breaches.
And that’s it! No evidence of a biocontainment breach or a biosafety failure, other than lab leak fan fiction invented by people with no clue about how biosafety actually works reading documents that reflect the daily considerations & challenges of operating a containment lab.
Let’s hope that the bipartisan investigation which Sen. @PattyMurray said is ongoing consults experts who actually understand how operational biosafety works rather than a bunch of political science majors & Chinese secret translators.
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Very important to note here that qPCR positives are not the same as "virus particles." It's much easier to detect viral RNA by qPCR than it is to detect infectious virus or intact virus particles (as the article correctly notes).
1. This suggests there are undetected herds shedding virus into the milk supply. Viral RNA does not materialize out of thin air—it is the product of a current or very recent viral infection.
No virus replicating in cows, no viral RNA in milk.
No viral RNA, no PCR positives.
1+. qPCR detects virus by amplifying small specific fragments of the viral genome. There's no indication that they pulled entire H5N1 genome sequences out of this, which would likely require signaling. Influenza is segmented, however, so no word on which segments they amplified.
Here is the article linked above and what it actually says: “The Texas Animal Health Commission said in an email that sick cats tested positive for the virus.”
There may be more cats affected but I did not find a single credible report of more than these 3 cats (for now). Also to be clear there is no evidence that it is “spreading rapidly” in mammals & sequence data suggests transmission from birds.
The only things created or crafted here are these grossly incorrect heaps of horseshit generated by @caitlintilley @DailyMail & @nypost.
This article and others like it are very misleading. This was not gain-of-function research, no matter how many loud non-experts say it is.
This article describes this recent preprint published on @biorxivpreprint. Briefly, scientists in Beijing cloned a pangolin SARS-related coronavirus they had isolated & infected human ACE2 transgenic mice with it. All the mice died.
Mice have ACE2 (the receptor that many SARSr-CoVs use to enter a cell) but it’s not similar enough to human to allow efficient entry of SARSr-CoVs that infect humans. So to study these viruses in mice, you need mice that express a human ACE2 transgene.
In this commentary, me and 77 of my colleagues argued that virology research is essential to pandemic preparedness. Biosafety is a cornerstone of virology research, but technical expertise is required for regulation that actually works & can’t be excluded from policy development.
All of the co-authors are US-funded virologists like me, who have technical expertise in experimental virology or vaccinology, or biosecurity and biosafety policy experts who agree that technical expertise is required to implement effective oversight.
This recent paper in @ScienceTM has a few of my favorite things:
✔️host-targeting drugs
✔️promising broad-spectrum antivirals
✔️international collaboration
It also demonstrates why continued virus discovery & virology research are critically important. science.org/doi/10.1126/sc…
Led by researchers at @harvardmed, @WuHanUniv, & @IcahnMountSinai, Dang, Bai, Dong, Hu, and colleagues targeted a protein called USP2, a deubiquitinase that stabilizes ACE2.
ACE2 is the receptor that allows SARS-CoV-2 and other SARSr-CoVs to enter cells and cause infection.
How does USP2 stabilize ACE2?
One way cells regulate protein expression is by tagging them with a little protein called ubiquitin, which means “degrade me”.
Not in the figurative sense, but in the sense of “take me to the proteasome and chop me up.”
If you’ve heard/read scary stuff about virology/microbiology/pathogen research and the inevitable apocalypse it will bring, please know most of that shit is made up and funded by the factions of existential doomers warring as described in this excellent thread.
As I’ve stated before many times, research on emerging pathogens presents myriad risks. But the risks can be mitigated and this research is essential for fighting the pandemics of tomorrow.
Wealthy tech dudes with derivative imaginations are trying to stop this essential work.
And by derivative, I mean these Effective Altruists/Accelerationists/Assholes probably think our pipets make pew pew noises and we virologists spend our spare time in lairs engaging in gain-of-function contests and asking ChatGPT where to stick the furin cleavage site.