Their concerns about that research — and its possible role in the pandemic’s origin — were growing more mainstream. Days earlier, a group of 26 scientists and biosecurity experts had called for an investigation into a possible lab leak. In the coming weeks, a chorus of prominent scientists, including the head of the World Health Organization, would make similar appeals.
Conspicuously absent from the Congressional letter — and subsequent requests from the subcommittee — were the signatures of any Democrats. The omission seemed illustrative of a broader dynamic: The pandemic has brought unprecedented public attention to the safety practices of laboratories that work with dangerous pathogens. But it has also polarized a conversation about lab security that, until recently, was largely bipartisan — in the process leaving Congressional Democrats hesitant to engage publicly on biosafety and biosecurity issues, according to some analysts. (Biosafety deals with laboratory accidents and biosecurity with intentional breaches.)
“Understanding how this pandemic started is one of the most important public health questions of our time — and it is necessary to prevent future pandemics,” wrote Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, who signed the House letter along with her colleagues Morgan Griffith and Brett Guthrie, in a statement to Undark earlier this year. “We continue to urge our Democrat colleagues to join us in our pursuit for the truth,” the statement said, adding that the committee “has a tradition over many years of bipartisan oversight into biolabs.”
At stake are questions about what lessons, exactly, the United States should learn from a pandemic that has now killed more than 1 million Americans. In the biosafety and biosecurity world, some observers hope that this moment will prompt substantial reforms to an oversight system they describe as patchy, poorly enforced, and ill-equipped to handle new kinds of research.
Amid partisan gridlock in Washington, however, another possibility looms: That, having lived through a devastating pandemic that some scientists believe could have emerged from a high-security laboratory, policymakers may actually expand such research in order to prepare for future pandemics — but without substantive changes to oversight.
Reforms are receiving “a lot more attention,” said Gregory Koblentz, a biodefense expert at George Mason University. But, he added, “the part that really concerns me right now is this kind of hyper-partisan polarization of this issue, which might make it harder to translate the level of concern that people are expressing into an effective policy response.”
Today, the U.S. has hundreds of laboratories equipped to deal with deadly pathogens, including 10 active facilities rated at the highest level of security, or BSL-4, which can handle some especially dangerous pathogens. These labs allow scientists to do crucial biomedical research, helping fight threats like Covid-19. In some cases, scientists enhance a pathogen’s ability to spread or infect people in order to study it — a practice often called gain-of-function research.
Experts sometimes compare work with the most dangerous pathogens to nuclear power: Both fields offer benefits (low-carbon electricity, insights into diseases.) And, in both areas, a single major safety incident could trigger a catastrophe.
An independent federal agency, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, oversees nuclear activities in the U.S. Nothing similar exists for pathogens. Oversight is “really just composed of a patchwork, with no single entity in charge, which creates gaps in regulations, gaps in guidance, gaps in leadership, gaps in science that aren’t being addressed,” said Rocco Casagrande, a co-founder of Gryphon Scientific, a research and consulting firm that often works with government agencies.
The Federal Select Agent Program, run by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the U.S. Department of Agriculture, regulates research on certain pathogens, such as Ebola and anthrax. In the past, independent government auditors have described the program’s oversight as incomplete and beset with conflicts of interest. Other research, including work on dangerous influenza strains and some coronaviruses, isn’t subject to those regulations, governed instead by a set of guidelines, with minimal oversight from the NIH.
Meanwhile, if researchers work with a pathogen that does not appear on the select agent list, and they don’t receive government funding, they may not be subject to oversight at all. “Because I don’t have a pilot license, I am not allowed to fly a drone in certain places and beyond my line of sight,” said Casagrande. “But I can just get a really dangerous strain of flu, that’s not a select agent, and using my own money, do whatever the hell I want with it in my garage. That makes no sense.”
In a recent paper in the journal Health Security, Casagrande and five colleagues call for a single, independent federal agency to oversee all research on pathogens, similar to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Rebecca Moritz, the biosafety director at Colorado State University and the president-elect of ABSA International, the flagship biosafety professional organization in the U.S., said the idea has merit: “Just being someone who is regulated, it would be a lot easier — and there’d be a lot more consistency, probably — if there was one organization in charge of biosafety and biosecurity.”
Some experts have been airing concerns about the existing oversight process for years, as have lawmakers from both parties — but with limited results. “The pattern has been: incident involving handling of select agents, news stories, committee hearings, outrage, reaction, and short-term reform,” complained Griffith, a Virginia Republican, during a 2017 Congressional hearing about the Select Agent Program. “Wash, rinse, repeat.”
One of Griffith’s Democratic colleagues, Rep. Diana DeGette of Colorado, echoed those concerns during her opening remarks, citing previous safety lapses in federal labs. “At some point,” she warned, “something very bad is going to happen unless the CDC acts.”