Experts: America funds dangerous secret experiments

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States is secretly funding secret virus-related experiments after US officials banned it years ago, according to two separate medical experts.

The discovery was published in the Washington Post and was co-authored by Mark Lipplich, professor of epidemiology and director of the Center for Communicable Diseases Dynamics at Harvard University School of Public Health, and Tom Engelsby, director of the Health Security Center and professor of environmental health and engineering at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

In 2014, US officials imposed a ban on testing to boost some of the deadliest viruses in the world by making them airborne, in response to widespread concerns that a laboratory accident could ignite a pandemic worldwide.

Experts say most infectious disease studies pose modest public safety risks, but given that these proposed trials are designed to produce a highly pathogenic influenza virus that can spread among humans, the government concluded that work should not continue until it can be approved through a strict system Reviews potential hazards, and is created specifically for this purpose.

Light green
The authors say the US government has decided to go ahead with this research, explaining that it gave the green light last year to fund two groups of researchers, one in the United States and one in the Netherlands, to conduct trials to promote transmission of avian influenza, as originally proposed before it was suspended.

The experts say it is surprising that, despite the potential health consequences of this work, neither the approval nor the deliberations or judgments that supported these experiments have been made public.

The article notes that the US government confirmed the report only when a reporter learned about it through informal channels.

Experts say the lack of transparency is unacceptable, adding that government decisions to approve potentially dangerous research are a violation of their responsibility to inform and engage the public from the outset about what may endanger health and lives.

Opposing experiments
The experts say they are among hundreds of researchers, medical professionals, public health professionals and others who previously publicly opposed these experiments when they were first announced.

In response to these concerns, the government has issued a general framework for 2017 to carry out a special review of "improved" pathogens that may be able to turn into serious epidemics.

In this context, auditors should consider the alleged benefits and potential risks before the work is adopted so that it is determined that the potential risks compared to the potential benefits of the community are justified.

The framework also requires that health experts prepare and respond to public health, and that biosafety, ethics, law and others assess the work, but it is not clear from the public registry if this happens.

Competitiveness and confidentiality
The article also states that no description was given of who reviewed these proposals and did not mention any evidence considered, nor how competing claims were assessed or whether there was a potential conflict of interest. This secrecy means that we do not know how these requirements have been implemented - if any - at all for government-funded experiments now.

A spokesman for the Department of Health and Human Services told Science magazine that the agency could not make revisions public, because doing so could reveal information about applicants' schemes that could help their competitors.

Experts say this bureaucratic logic suggests that preserving the trade secrets of a few eminent scientists is more important than allowing citizens who are risk-taking in the event of an accident and those financing their work to examine the decisions of public officials on whether these studies are worth the risk.

For this kind of research, there is no justification for keeping the proceedings of the risks and benefits confidential - and they have serious doubts about whether these tests should be conducted at all.

The experts conclude that there is a need for a general discussion and debate about the risks and benefits of these types of experiments. They say that viruses know no boundaries.