In Congress, Debate Rages About How To Prevent the Next Lab Leak
At a hearing held by the U.S. Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee on the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic earlier this week, Sen. Mitt Romney (R–Utah) asked why there’s “so much energy” around the question of whether the pandemic began in a lab or spilled over from a natural source.
“We’ll never be 100 percent sure about one or the other,” said Romney. “Given that it could have been either, we know what action we need to take to protect from either….One, we should clean up the wet markets. And two, tighten the labs.”
In recent months, the idea that COVID might have originated from a lab, and specifically the Wuhan Institute of Virology, has been upgraded in the discourse from a “conspiracy theory” to a plausible explanation for how the pandemic began.
Simultaneously, people who are often skeptical or agnostic about a lab leak have argued that definitively answering the question of COVID’s origins is of secondary importance. Rather, we should be focused on preventing the next pandemic.
In this vein, last month, the Biden administration released new guidance for how research-funding agencies like the National Institutes of Health (NIH) should vet proposed experiments involving pathogens of enhanced pandemic potential—the subset of so-called “gain of function” research that could potentially cause a disease outbreak via a lab leak.
This new guidance “will enable the oversight system for research involving biological agents and toxins to better address these risks,” reads the text of the White House’s new policy.
Critics of the new policy argue that it suffers from the same flaws that undermined past government guidance on the funding of potentially pandemic-causing gain-of-function research.
“The administration says that this is done. ‘We’ve issued some guidance, we’ve changed some of the recommendations from NIH, and we’ve fixed the problem’,” Sen. Rand Paul (R–Ky.) tells Reason. “The problem is that’s sort of the fox fixing the problems for regulating the hen house.”
The federal government has gone through multiple policies intended to subject gain-of-function research on potential pandemic pathogens to some risk-benefit analysis and to prevent funding of the most dangerous experiments.
That includes the Obama administration’s pause on gain-of-function research funding in 2014 and the later Framework for Guiding Funding Decisions about Proposed Research Involving Enhanced Potential Pandemic Pathogens (P3CO) in 2017.
Both the Obama administration pause and the P3CO framework have widely been considered to be ineffective. Both policies ultimately left the NIH in charge of deciding which of the experiments it funds should get additional, outside review.
Under the now-superseded P3CO frame
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