Thursday, July 15, 2021

Wuhan

The federal government is looking in to if COVID-19 escaped from the Wuhan labs to cause a global plague and we all should stop and think what that means.

This should make all of very, very nervous.

Wuhan Labs is a BSL-4 lab, the highest rating in protection from bio hazards. 

Biosafety Level 4 (BSL-4)

BSL-4 laboratories are used to study infectious agents or toxins that pose a high risk of aerosol-transmitted laboratory infections and life-threatening disease for which no vaccine or therapy is available. The laboratories incorporate all BSL 3 features and occupy safe, isolated zones within a larger building or may be housed in a separate, dedicated building. Access to BSL-4 laboratories is carefully controlled and requires significant training.

If it escaped from the lab that means what we think of maximum protection from bio hazards is not fool proof.

There is a Level 4 lab just miles from Connecticut on Plum Island, it was located there after World War II because of its isolation and it would make it harder for the diseases that they study there like cholera, anthrax, foot-and-mouth disease, and bubonic plague to get out in to the environment.

Now it is being moved to Kansas right in the middle of cattle country. They are building a brand spanking new Level 4 building at Kansas State University's Manhattan campus. Why is it being built in the middle of cattle country and not on some isolated island in Long Island Sound a thousand miles from cattle country… it isn’t because of science but because of politics. According to the Bulletin of Atomic Scientist:

Since the late nineteen-nineties, Pat Roberts, the Kansas senator, had been pushing for a biodefense facility in the state; he hoped to transform Manhattan into the “Silicon Valley for biodefense.” In 1999, at Roberts’s urging, three K-State faculty members—Ron Trewyn, a biology professor and dean, and Jerry and Nancy Jaax, medical-defense experts who’d appeared as characters in Richard Preston’s 1994 book “The Hot Zone”—developed a plan for a facility that could study infectious disease in plants, animals, and the food supply. In 2008, a version of their proposed lab opened as a BSL-3 facility called the Biosecurity Research Institute. By then, D.H.S. had begun considering sites for N.B.A.F. Roberts personally appealed to administration officials, hosting them on visits to K-State. He told a joint session of the Kansas state legislature that “securing this facility would be one of, if not the greatest, economic development initiatives in state history.”

Now these very same Republican senators are calming that COVID-19 escaped from a Level 4 lab just like the one being built in Kansas.

The Kansas protesters have accepted their inability to divert the juggernaut of political and economic interests that favor N.B.A.F. In 2019, the billboard above Highway 18 that once declared “No NBAF Germ Lab!” displayed an ad for the Parkwood Inn & Suites, touting its location, just ten blocks from Kansas State.

It is moving ahead as is a given and the very same senators who want it moved are calling for an investigation of Wuhan, and they don’t see the irony in it.

Wired News said…

“Everyone will tell you, it always comes down to the people,” Trewyn said. They have been the Achilles’ heel of lazarettos throughout history. Of course, the NBAF is carefully engineered to lower the risk of human error. 

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