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Right now the impasse shows every sign of continuing. The World
Health Organization is launching a second global investigation of
Covid’s origins, this one led by more qualified investigators than the
first, but China continues to reject further inquiries into what
happened. In Washington, there’s now increasing pressure on the
White House to play hardball with China — to force cooperation by
:
imposing serious new penalties, like sanctions on Chinese
laboratories.
There’s little reason to think these might work. And even if they did,
the hardball approach would be a huge mistake in the long run.
Covid-19 is only one of many pandemics we’re likely to see this
century, and — given China’s vast animal and human population,
extensive surveillance network, unparalleled virus sequencing
capabilities and its massive biomanufacturing capability — we’ll
need China in the future, both to investigate and to help fight the
next one, and the one after that.
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Like it or not, Joe Biden and his successors in the White House need
China as a long-term partner far more than they need it as a
scapegoat.
President Joe Biden visits the Viral Pathogenesis Laboratory at the NIH in Bethesda, Md., in Feb. 2021.
| AP Photo/Evan Vucci
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Following the fall of the USSR, the U.S became alarmed about the
security of that country’s biological weapons program. The U.S. was
concerned what might come out of its biological weapons facilities
and stockpiles — and who might hire the 60,000 scientists trained
to produce these living munitions.
Following the attacks of Sept 11, 2001, and the American anthrax
:
attacks soon afterward, the U.S. increased efforts to prevent Soviet
biological weapons, and the skills to make them, from being
acquired by terrorists. Many U.S. efforts involved redirecting former
bioweapons labs to peaceful purposes like vaccine production. This
leveraged both the Soviets’ scientific expertise and the preexisting
biocontainment infrastructure.
The risk wasn’t gone, though. These labs were still handling
dangerous pathogens, and pathogen escape and infection of
laboratory workers remained a concern of western security
agencies. To counter the risk of laboratory leak or infection, the U.S.
didn’t turn to security forces, satellites or spies. It used infectious
disease experts.
Sens. Richard Lugar, right, and Sam Nunn, center, are pictured with Defense Secretary Leon Panetta,
left, at the Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction symposium in Washington in 2012. | AP
Photo/Charles Dharapak
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The basis of the whole CTR model was collaboration, and it was
built on doctor-to-doctor contacts. It paired Western scientific
partners directly with local scientists to help them develop new
diagnostic tests, or vaccines, or disease treatments. It prioritized
working with younger scientists willing to train in the U.S. and then
return to their home laboratories. It used American labs to confirm
:
the work being done overseas, and small grants from American
agencies to seed larger local investments.
But payoffs have come both from partnerships and new on-the-
ground knowledge. One key finding from CTR work, over the years,
may be directly relevant to the Covid outbreak: In many cases,
infections attributed to biocontainment laboratory activities actually
occurred outside the lab, often during field collection of viral
samples. Squirming, clawed and toothy animals bite and scratch
during collection of body fluids. Teeth and talons easily penetrate
the thin gloves required to maintain dexterity when handling fragile
wildlife. And overhead, angry bats release a fine patina of virus-
laden urine aerosols. As part of CTR field surveillance programs, I
have collected viruses from Asian bats carrying coronaviruses, and
from birds infected with bird flu, and can attest that the margins for
personal protection during these expeditions are razor thin. The fact
that researchers are not infected every time they do a field
collection is a question that continues to stump us.
In cases like this, the actual point when infection occurred in the
field can go unnoticed. In two Asian cases, for instance, “lab-
acquired infections” among researchers were actually acquired
during field collection, but symptoms were delayed for 2 and 3 days,
after the researchers had returned to their home city and gone back
to work in the lab. And there are other human factors at work: In
China, if a researcher develops symptoms and suspects lab
infection, they are inclined to hide the mistake from their superiors.
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Given what we still need to learn about Covid-19, how might the
U.S. collaborate with China on health security?
The answer may not lie with China’s leaders, who are disinclined to
cooperate with the West for bigger reasons. Over the last decade,
China has fueled an aggressive expansion of its domestic
biotechnology research and its drug and vaccine manufacturing
capacity, and keeps data and practices secret for competitive
reasons. This secrecy also extends to biosecurity. I’ve been told
directly by a Chinese official: The Communist Party views
biosecurity — including oversight to prevent dual-use research,
where biotechnology could be used to make either life-saving
products or biological weapons — as detrimental to its aspirations to
dominate global biotechnology markets.
Medical workers in protective suits at a coronavirus detection lab in Wuhan in Feb. 2020. | Cheng
Min/Xinhua News Agency via AP
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The U.S. edge in technology gives us some other carrots we can use
to bring to the table. For example, while China has far surpassed the
genomic sequencing capacity of the U.S. in raw processing power,
our systems remain better at predicting pathogen and tumor
evolution and identifying escaped mutants before they actually
occur. This is an extremely valuable field that is still in its infancy in
China. We are also on the edge of being able to design variant-proof
vaccines, while China is still chasing yesterday’s virus. Several U.S.
companies are now able to construct new antibodies against targets
purely on a computer. The actual manufacture of the antibody is a
:
formality.
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