From: ACS Division of Chemical Health and Safety <DCHAS-L**At_Symbol_Here**Princeton.EDU> on behalf of Ralph Stuart <membership**At_Symbol_Here**DCHAS.ORG>
Date: Monday, November 7, 2022 at 3:23 AM
To: DCHAS-L**At_Symbol_Here**Princeton.EDU <DCHAS-L**At_Symbol_Here**Princeton.EDU>
Subject: [DCHAS-L] Chemical Safety headlines (13 articles)

LAB THAT CREATED RISKY AVIAN FLU HAD “UNACCEPTABLE” BIOSAFETY PROTOCOLS
https://theintercept.com/2022/11/01/biosafety-avian-flu/
Tags: us_WI, laboratory, follow-up, environmental

T STARTED WITH a bold idea. “Someone finally convinced me to do something really, really stupid,” virologist Ron Fouchier told Scientific American in 2011. Fouchier, of Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam, and another scientist, Yoshihiro Kawaoka of the University of Wisconsin–Madison, had separately tweaked the H5N1 virus — an influenza that primarily infects birds — in a way that made it spread more easily in ferrets. H5N1 is a prime pandemic candidate, and ferrets are often used as proxies for humans in flu experiments. When word got out that the two scientists were planning to publish papers detailing their experiments, making a blueprint available to the world, the outcry was extreme. The scientists were trying to better understand H5N1 in order to prevent a pandemic, but critics worried that their experiments could instead cause one — or provide would-be bioterrorists with an outbreak manufacturing guide.

The New York Times ran an editorial titled “An Engineered Doomsday.” The backlash was so severe that in 2012, Kawaoka, Fouchier, and other prominent flu scientists voluntarily agreed to pause the transmissibility work. The debacle prompted an overhaul of policies, now being reconsidered in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, governing work with so-called gain-of-function research of concern.

The story is well known. And yet, what happened next has never been reported in its entirety.

Early on, Fouchier told Science that he had created “probably one of the most dangerous viruses you can make.” But after controversy broke out, as the science communicator Peter Sandman has written, Fouchier and his supporters shifted to downplaying the danger. In early 2013, flu scientists ended their voluntary pause, arguing that when the research was done at enhanced biosafety level 3, or BSL3+, the benefits outweighed the risks. Kawaoka, who was normally the more taciturn of the two, hosted journalists in his lab, where he explained his safety procedures. “The influenza virus is sensitive to detergent,” he reportedly said while explaining the process of showering out. “They die.” A biosafety staffer at the University of Wisconsin got up before a university audience to dispel what she called myths about lab oversight. The address was broadcast on local television.

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.

At the center of the debacle was the National Institutes of Health, whose National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases had funded both Kawaoka’s and Fouchier’s labs. (Fouchier was a sub-awardee on a grant to a U.S. institution.) The agency oversees biosafety protocols on the same research it funds, and its oversight arm has a reputation for being timid, generally resolving issues through polite dialogue. “We want to be cautious about when we use that stick,” said Jessica Tucker, acting deputy director of NIH’s Office of Science Policy, referring to the threat of termination.

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