The challenges of leaving laboratory outbreaks to scientists by Alina Chan | Devcon SEA

[Music] hi thank you for inviting me to give a talk uh and thank you vitalic for that perfect opening to my talk so so who am I and what am I doing here I in early 2020 I was pushing for the lab link hypothesis to be taken very seriously and as a scientist from a reputable Institute that that gave me a lot of credibility and and once the lab League hypothesis was taken seriously by experts Bradley that's when I went to the bulletin of atomic scientists and asked them to please convene International experts to think of new Frameworks around uh risky research that could cause pandemics and so in the next 10 minutes I'll tell you about ways that I think we should structure a a future effective bio- risk and bios safety approach so as Vel mentioned that the number one one takeaway that most of us had from the covid-19 pandemic is that actually experts are not very reliable during times of Crisis and that they themselves can be a source of uh misinformation and we saw that in the covid-19 pandemic this this ranged from you know human to human transmission where the mass are protective how the virus spreads whether it's Airborne how to protect yourself uh what is hurt immunity and and whether the vaccines would prevent infection and and most of all whether the pandemic might have started in a lab and so so what do you do about the situation right where the experts are not even able to tell you what is happening in real time so fast forward 5 years since the pandemic began we now know that expert experts broadly around the world agree that both natural and lab leak hypothesis are on the table and briefly this just ranges all the way from an animal at the market infecting people to perhaps a villager getting infected and then traveling to uhan or maybe a scientist was infected in the field while collecting samples and then went to uhan or that there was an accident in the lab where the virus was being handled uh ultimately everyone agrees that the original virus the precursor of this virus must have come from bats but we just do not agree on how it made its way to uhan and so all the evidence today remains circumstantial no natural or lab Source has been found or reported and and surprisingly 5 years later no external investigation has been conducted and what we know now is that there were influential scientists who sought to squash the theory calling it a conspiracy theory uh and this starts it all the way at the beginning of the pandemic so I was really fortunate to publish my analysis of why I think the evidence strongly points towards a lamp origin in the New York Times this year and just to sum this up but if if this is the first time you've heard of this I really recommend you check out the article why do I think that covid-19 likely started in a lab this pandemic it really could have been caused by any of hundreds of different virus species and any of tens of thousands of wildlife markets in this region and in any of thousands of large cities and in any year but it was a s like Corona virus with a unique furin cleavage site this is a gain of function feature that emerged in uhan less than two years after scientists there sometimes working at low bios safety proposed collecting and creating viruses of that very same design and all the hundreds of other salac viruses we know today none of them have such a fearing cleavage side so this story why why haven't we found the origin of covid-19 it's because an incredible amount of data continues to be withheld uh so This concerns early cases the transmission chain the Genome of the virus was withheld in the early days including early sequences still being withheld we still did not have access to the activities and catalogues at both the wildlife Market in the city as well as the Laboratories in the city so all of these were not put out in the public a lot of it was withheld in private Communications private databases and scientific journals and under peer review sometimes an editor would reject a paper and it would stay hidden for for years uh and and private research documents as well as thesis and Grant proposals we only know about all of these data today because they were Unearthed by mostly internet sloops so in independent vigilante sloops as well as scientist and journalists and some of these other documents were leaked by people inside the US government or others were sued for through the Freedom of Information Act so these things had to be painstakingly pulled out of of the sources uh what the covid-19 pandemic really showed us was this complete lack of interest in finding the origin of covid-19 so if you look at the US collaborators of the uhan scientists they they admitted that their collaboration never had never given them access to the pathogen samples so these are samples from bats and and even people collected and stored in uhan uh they could not reproduce the database of the samples or virus sequences indeed they they did not have access to the database in real time that was in uhan so they didn't even know about viruses collected after 2015 even though the funding covered their work through 2019 so that that's fouryear gap they do not know about the viruses collected after 2015 in uhan they did not ask their collaborators in uhan if they had started on experiments proposed in 2018 so this included experiments where they were inserting furing clearage sites and other gain of function features into s like viruses in uhan so some would say this is strategic IGN ignorance right maybe they didn't ask because they didn't want to have information that they would then put them in a difficult spot but I would actually argue that it was structural because they they never structured their collaboration in a way that gave them full access in real time to the samples and even the sequences and this problem really it goes Way Beyond Eco Health Alliance to even up upwards in government earlier this year the Department of Defense and the US said that they had not been closely tracking their funded projects they could not even tell how much how much funding they given to to Chinese research that would enhance pathogens with pandemic potential and unfortunately the new US government policy on this s of research that kicks in next may still leaves many loopholes open in fact the entire research pipeline that could have caused the covid-19 pandemic Remains Not subject to oversight so you can go anywhere collect any novel pathogens no oversight you can serly passage them so adapt them to human cells even human a cells and even humanized Animals still not subject to oversight so really nothing has been done here to deal with this risk of pandemics coming from labs in this manner so unlike other Technologies you know like nuclear chemical even in transportation even even flying planes where where you have a serious accident there's no independent body care for these sort of pandemic risk research to to Really conduct external oversight so there's no independent external organization that would uh have oversight of the of this work around the US let's say and and and when that's an incident there's no investigation to go in by this independent body it's is usually all self- investigation self-reporting so this is a real problem because we are we're now truly in an era of of pandemic starting from Laboratories unlike 20 years ago today research for pandemic risk is proliferating due to many technological advances in gene sequencing and synthesis as well as dropping cost so now more and more labs are gaining access to this ability to to to create viruses in the lab from from scratch just just from based on the sequences it's not very expensive and it's uh and unfortunately a lot of this is happening at low bios safety in ways that cannot contain airborne viruses like covid-19 let's say and it's importantly not being systematically tracked so there's no one really systematically tracking it even at a national level in the US so why why is the case and I think that that the two problems here that that really underly this challenge so the first is that there are many penalties and and fear of retaliation for for viral to be calling out their peers so imagine if you start pointing fingers at your at your colleagues for doing risky research you can immediately find yourself alienated and shut off grum uh funding applications as well as Publications so this would essentially destroy your career uh and and those who are for gain of function so they they want gain of function to happen they say that you you can't put regulation on us you can't put all this oversight on us because then the us will lose the Competitive Edge so the problem with this is that even even these scientists this leading experts as seen in the case of covid-19 cannot accurately predict the risk of their cutting age experiments it's really hard for them to know what will happen when they're working with novel pathogens and putting in new features so the the second problem here is that we we are kind of stuck in this 911 dichotomy of of outbreaks being either natural or deliberate and and this is a problem because I think that the risk of pandemics coming from Lab accidents is much higher than the risk of a pandemic coming from a deliberate uh biotech Terror incident so unfortunately this story of let let's defeat the bad guys let's let's defeat the terrorists it gets much more interest and funding is much more sexy than than telling people let let's just stop people from having accidents let's protect the good guys from having accidents in their Labs so that this whole field of accidental lab leaks has been really neglected in my opinion and and it it it is it's compounded by this fact that many many virologists are afraid to call out their peers so very little is being done and I have this quote that really exemplifies this problem so early on in the pandemic an influential virologist said it really bothered me that this was some suggestion this was a lab construct so the virus that was causing the pandemic if it turned out to be true it would really bother the hell of me not just because of people dying and so forth it's an indictment of the field right so these virologists and and not just him they think that if covid came from a lab it would indict the entire field of virology so this this is a major conflict of interest so where do we go from here clearly we should investigate the original covid-19 so that we can restore public trust imagine if you know a few decades on the road it's found that this pandemic started in a lab we need to be able to look back and see our public leaders as well as our scientists leading the charge on investigating and finding the lamp origin we don't want to look back and see them being complicit in a cover up suppressing an investigation so there Tre three things that I think should inform and a viable bios safety strategy so the first thing is that ENT is necessary Sor but during a crisis as we have seen is challenged by Miss and disinformation a great amount of information is actually kept private and and not even for malicious reasons we need a system to counter misinformation from experts uh and and journalists especially should be much more skeptical and seek diverse input so that they don't find themselves amplifying the misinformation and finally we we really truly need an independent organization and regulation that focuses on reducing the risk of accidental pandemics so thank you again for inviting me to give this talk