New government rules aim to put limits on risky virological work - Vox.com

Would this work be covered by US guidelines that require heightened safety scrutiny for research that could potentially spark a deadly pandemic?

When researchers with the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) planned such an experiment, a safety panel concluded they were exempt from review.

It represents “a number of important steps forward,” Tom Inglesby, director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, told me.

It’s not the stuff of conspiracy theories — as a recent investigative series in the Intercept uncovered, lab accidents are far more frequent than we might know, and rarely result in serious policy change.

While there’s no smoking gun that indicates the SARS-CoV-2 virus began life in a lab — and there likely never will be — the very fact that it’s difficult to know precisely what may have happened at the Wuhan Institute of Virology should give us pause.

The number of biolabs dedicated to work on the world’s most virulent pathogens is growing, as is our ability to fiddle with the genetics of a virus.