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Did U.S. government lie about deadly virus?: msg#00154
culture.discuss.cia-drugs
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Subject: |
Did U.S. government lie about deadly virus? |
Did U.S. government
lie about deadly virus?
Nov. 9, 2005
World Science
staff
http://www.world-science.net/othernews/051109_flufrm.htm
U.S. officials seem to have quietly reversed an assurance they gave
publicly
last month-that a deadly virus, which scientists recently recreated,
would
not leave a secure government facility.
Terrence Tumpey, a
microbiologist at the Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention, examines
reconstructed 1918 Pandemic Influenza Virus inside a
specimen vial. (Courtesy
CDC)
Now, authorities acknowledge they may mail copies of the germ, which
killed
an estimated 50 million people in 1918, to qualified laboratories that
apply
for it.
The apparent flip-flop suggests the initial assurance
might have been a lie,
or deception, meant to calm a nervous public about the
risky project, says a
director of an anti-biological weapons
organization.
But U.S. officials say they didn't mislead
anyone.
Scientists and government officials announced last month that
they had
designed a virus identical in most key respects to the infamous
1918
"Spanish Flu" virus.
The project's stated purpose was to let
scientists study the virus and
thereby design vaccines against related
pathogens, including a bird flu that
is alarming governments
worldwide.
But some experts expressed doubts from the start about the
venture's safety.
They said the virus could accidentally escape or land in
terrorist hands.
In response to such concerns, officials with the Centers
for Disease Control
and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta, Ga., a U.S. agency, said
the virus would be
held securely at the agency's headquarters, and wouldn't
be sent elsewhere
for research, according to some news reports.
The
San Francisco Chronicle reported on Oct. 6 that Jennifer Morcone,
a
spokeswoman for the agency, had given such an assurance. If researchers
from
outside the agency want to work with the virus, the paper quoted her
as
saying, "We will consider hosting researchers at the CDC if they go
through
the same training and clearances required of our
researchers."
The research journal Nature reported similar assurances by
the officials.
The Chicago Tribune cited CDC Director Julie Gerberding saying
the agency
had no plans to share the virus with other labs.
The
apparent reversal, when it came, was quiet.
It appeared in the form of a
cryptic notice-which the agency was legally
required to publish-in the Oct.
20 Federal Register, the official
publication of federal government
notices.
It said the agency would add the virus to a "list of select
agents and
toxins" maintained by the Department of Health and Human
Services.
Basically, this means the virus can be mailed out, agency
spokesman Von
Roebuck acknowledged, according to a news article in the Nov.
10 Nature.
"Labs that are registered to work with select agents-in
particular,
dangerous pathogens that are subject to specific handling
rules-will be able
to request the virus," Nature reported, citing Roebuck.
The parcels could
travel via commercial carriers, the journal added.
A
staff member who answered the phone at the CDC's media relations office
on
Tuesday told World Science that the agency hasn't announced the new
policy
publicly, as far as he knows.
The staffer, who identified
himself as Chris Cox, referred further questions
to Roebuck. Roebuck said in
an emailed statement to World Science that the
agency didn't mislead anyone,
because officials said only that they were not
planning on sending out the
virus.
He didn't deny it would ever happen, though. "Requests to obtain
the virus
for investigations at non-CDC laboratories that advance the science
and
understanding of influenza pandemics will be considered on a
case-by-case
basis," he wrote, adding that such mailings follow strict safety
procedures.
The policy dismayed the project's critics.
Edward
Hammond, director of the U.S. office of the Sunshine Project, a
non-profit
group that works against chemical and biological weapons useage,
said he
wasn't sure whether the agency's original statement was a lie.
"Did they
lie, as in did they know that they were going to flip this policy
within a
week? I don't know-it's difficult to tell, but they certainly in my
judgment
deceived," he said.
On the other hand, he said, any expert on the subject
would have known that
the policy as originally stated was "a fiction to begin
with." That's
because even without the mailing, anyone with the right
equipment could have
reconstructed the virus using the information released
as part of the
project.
The no-mailing claim "was a red herring from
the get-go," he said. "It was
intended to reassure, when they knew that the
assurance that most people
would draw from it was based on a
misunderstanding."
But the policy change raises the dangers still
further, said Jens Kuhn, a
research scholar at Harvard Medical
School.
"There's a big risk associated with it," he said. He added that
officials
didn't announce the mailing policy to begin with "probably because
they
would have gotten the same kind of heat they're getting now."
On
the other hand, it might have been a good idea not to announce it, as
this
could further encourage bioterrorists, said Kuhn, who, like Hammond,
opposed
the project from the start.
"I don't understand the logic," he said, "of
creating a threat so we can
learn to defend against that threat, that had not
existed."
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