“With four separate infections within the last year at three different institutions in Beijing, Singapore, and Taipei, health experts fear that the next SARS epidemic may be more likely to emerge from a research lab than from the presumed animal reservoir.”—“Lab Accidents Prompt Calls for New Containment Program,” Science, 28 May 2004
It’s been less than a year since SARS-2 somehow escaped from a lab in Wuhan, China, infecting millions, triggering serious illness and death among the elderly (especially those in nursing homes) and those with serious pre-existing chronic diseases (obesity, diabetes, hypertension, and heart, lung and liver disease), and melting down the global economy.
Hammond, who now writes a blog called Strange Cultures, shared his latest findings with Dr Jonathan Latham in a recent report, “Engineered COVID-19-Infected Mouse Bites Researcher Amid ‘Explosion’ Of Risky Coronavirus Research,” published in Independent Science News.
These included details of the North Carolina lab of infamous gain-of-function scientist Ralph Baric—the first U.S. lab known to have genetically engineered a synthetic version of the live SARS-CoV-2 virus stitched together from mail-order sequences of DNA purchased over the internet.
Now, it is also the first lab known to have an accident involving a COVID-19-infected animal biting a researcher.