WASHINGTON — The Trump administration’s top infectious disease official urged lawmakers during a hearing on the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic to ban research that enhances a pathogen’s ability to spread or cause disease.
Robert Redfield, who served as the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention at the outset of the health crises, has long maintained that COVID was likely caused by a lab accident in Wuhan, China.
“I’m of the point of view that we don’t need to make pathogens more transmissible or more pathogenic in order to get ahead of the curve,” Redfield testified Wednesday to a House subcommittee on the pandemic.
His view is disputed by other scientists who believe high-risk research is necessary to develop vaccines, treatments and diagnostics for the prevention of future pandemics.
Research involving dangerous pathogens has become a hot-button debate in the U.S. Though much of the scientific community maintains that the pandemic began when the coronavirus leapt from animals to people, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and U.S. Energy Department have amassed intelligence suggesting that COVID most likely started via a lab accident in China — conclusions that Beijing strongly contests.
Republicans have been pressing the Biden administration to release classified intelligence to inform policy decisions on how the U.S. conducts and funds high-risk research.
At Wednesday’s hearing, Democrats and Republicans both underscored that there isn’t a “smoking gun” to settle the origins debate, and bemoaned the politicization of the investigative process. Members from both parties called for a non-political approach to understand how a pandemic that’s taken more than 6.8 million lives globally first began.
“Discovering the origins is vital,” said Ohio Republican Representative Brad Wenstrup, who chairs the subcommittee. “We aren’t finished — we are just beginning.”
While the debate rages, a global race to build high-containment research facilities is underway, with scant international safeguards in place to monitor risky experiments and regulate practices.
There are 69 so-called Biosafety Level 4, or BSL-4, facilities designed to study dangerous infectious pathogens in operation, under construction or planned worldwide, according to Global Biolabs, a tracking project run out of King’s College London and George Mason University in Virginia. About a decade ago, there were only 25.
Scientists have long swapped ideas about standardizing safety and security amid biolab building booms. But as geopolitical tensions mount, global cooperation is unraveling.
“International collaboration is incredibly important,” said Representative Ami Bera, a California Democrat and physician. “We have to have the systems in place to identify pandemics fairly quickly.”
Paul Auwaerter, clinical director of infectious diseases at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, warned about efforts to restrict public health research.
“If we have very strict rules and shutdown or halt research in the U.S., there may be others outside our borders carrying this out,” he said, suggesting that other countries may not have proper lab safety measures in place.
In prepared remarks, Auwaerter called for more BSL-4 facilities in the U.S.
“New labs should be positioned strategically throughout the country based on safety assessments and geographic equity to prepare for and respond to novel agents quickly and safely,” he wrote. “Biosafety practice considerations should be at the forefront of existing laboratories and for creating new labs.”
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(Bloomberg News writer Billy House contributed to this story.)
