A “multi-agency laboratory facility” under construction in Missouri will bring together under one roof several state research agencies — including a biosafety level 2 (BSL-2) lab and other agencies conducting research related to public health and wildlife disease — in what has been described as a “One Health” approach to the development of such facilities.
When completed, the 250,000-square-foot facility “will house laboratories for several Missouri state government agencies, including the Missouri State Highway Patrol, Forensic Crime Laboratory, Missouri Public Health Laboratory, the Department of Natural Resources and the Department of Conservation,” NBC affiliate KOMU reported.
The project comes as the U.S. Senate’s Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee on Wednesday passed S.4667, the Risky Research Review Act, out of committee in an 8-1 vote. If passed, the bill will subject research involving risky pathogens to strict oversight.
Missouri’s Office of Administration said each department’s facilities currently reside in different locations and are outdated.
“The planned campus will be home to several state agencies to provide a singular approach to human, animal, environmental, and criminal testing in Missouri,” Missourinet reported. “The new approach will enable the different government agencies to share information, expertise, equipment, supplies, and support services.”
The facility will be classified as BSL-2 and will host “specialized venues for working with forensic biology, chemistry, molecular biology, bacteriology, and the Combined DNA Index System (CODIS)” — the FBI-operated national DNA database, Tradeline reported.
New lab could ‘handle moderate-risk infectious agents’
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the microbes at BSL-2 labs “pose moderate hazards to laboratorians and the environment” and “are typically indigenous and associated with diseases of varying severity.”
Missouri’s Department of Health and Senior Services, for instance, “provides investigative and testing services related to public health and disease (human clinical and environmental),” while the Department of Agriculture “provides investigative and testing services to issues related to animal health and disease (livestock industries).”
Under typical circumstances, BSL-2 laboratories should not pose a significant threat to the public, internist and biological warfare epidemiologist Dr. Meryl Nass told The Defender. “A BSL-2 lab is equivalent to a hospital laboratory lab, for which there is no assessed danger to the community.”
Such a lab “should not do any experimental work or diagnostic work on pathogens that are designated to require BSL-3 or BSL-4 containment,” Nass said.
According to Rutgers University molecular biologist Richard Ebright, Ph.D., “The planned facility and planned facility activities do not raise concerns.”
However, journalist and author Jon Fleetwood wrote on Substack that BSL-2 labs “handle moderate-risk infectious agents that can pose health hazards to humans, such as HIV and hepatitis viruses” — and “can also handle influenza (bird flu) viruses.”
The Wuhan Institute of Virology, which conducted gain-of-function research on SARS-CoV-2, was a BSL-2 facility. In February 2023, a U.S. Department of Energy report concluded that COVID-19 emerged from a laboratory leak in Wuhan.
“The new lab raises safety concerns, especially given the COVID-19 pandemic was caused by a lab leak in Wuhan, China,” Fleetwood wrote. “While the risk of transmission is lower than in higher biosafety levels, there are significant dangers, including accidental exposure through needlesticks or aerosol generation.”
A similar facility under construction in Colorado generated controversy for planning to study bat diseases with funding from the National Institutes of Health. Some scientists and local residents warned the lab could host controversial gain-of-function research.
It is unclear if such gain-of-function research will be performed at the Missouri facility.
Christine Bowman leads a group of local citizens who formed the Covid Bat Research Moratorium of Colorado, a grassroots initiative opposing the Colorado facility under construction. She told The Defender:
“I’m not surprised another BSL-2 lab is being built. What’s it going to take to stop this? … What will leak next? Will we or Missouri be the next ground zero? These are real concerns of real people, but the experts don’t seem to hear us or learn from their own mistakes. Our backyard could easily become everyone’s backyard if we don’t stop gain-of-function research.”
A groundbreaking ceremony for the new facility in Missouri took place in June, and according to Missouri’s Office of Administration, the expected completion date is December 2026.
The cost of the facility is $183 million — money which was allocated from the federal American Rescue Plan Act of 2021, a law intended to mitigate the negative impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic.
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‘One Health’ critics weigh in
The new Missouri facility will adopt a One Health approach to laboratory research, by housing multiple agencies and areas of research under one roof.
The World Health Organization (WHO) defines One Health as “an integrated, unifying approach that aims to sustainably balance and optimize the health of people, animals and ecosystems,” as they are “closely linked and interdependent.”
According to the WHO, One Health will “help to address the full spectrum of disease control.”
But critics believe One Health has more to do with a biosecurity agenda, a global surveillance system, vaccine passports and restrictions on human behavior than it has to do with protecting public health.
According to a 2021 report by the Missouri Veterinary Medical Association, the Missouri facility, which in 2021 was still in the planning stages, “would apply a common ‘One Health’ approach when assessing laboratory needs, space issues, and current and potential concerns.”
Lisa Cox, communications director for the Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services, was quoted in the report:
“This transformative investment in Missouri state agency laboratory infrastructure is a ‘One Health’ approach to disease and environmental testing in Missouri and would create a unique campus of laboratory science functioning together in state-of-the-art facilities linked together to deliver quality, comprehensive and rapid laboratory services for current and future health/environmental threats to Missourians.”
Paula Nickelson, director of the Department of Health and Senior Services, said in July, “The opportunity for forensics as well as scientists who concentrate on environment, animals, and humans to come together is very unique.”
But for Nass, the Missouri facility’s One Health approach raises questions.
“It’s very unclear what the One Health approach is. It is supposed to be a multi-expert committee approach to handling problems,” Nass said. “You have to define what the problem is and then, if appropriate, you can put together a One Health committee of veterinarians, plant pathologists, human doctors, environmental experts, etc.”
According to Nass, “Since they haven’t told us what the problems are that this new building is going to work on, it is putting the cart before the horse by claiming it needs a One Health approach to solve them.”
Francis Boyle, J.D., Ph.D., professor of international law at the University of Illinois and a bioweapons expert who drafted the Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989, told The Defender the One Health approach “reduces human healthcare toward the level of animals.” He added:
“The One Health Agenda also violates Article 12(1) of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights: ‘The States parties to the present Covenant recognize the right of everyone to the enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health.’
“The U.S. has signed the Covenant, though it has not yet ratified it. Nevertheless, pending such ratification, the U.S. government is obligated to act in a manner so as not to defeat the object and purpose of the Covenant.”
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Oversight of gain-of-function research would have ‘saved more than 20 million lives’
Amid the development of these new facilities in Missouri and Colorado, there is legislative push to enact legislation that would add significant layers of oversight to laboratory research — and particularly gain-of-function research.
The Risky Research Review Act, now headed to the Senate for a vote, aims to establish a Life Sciences Research Security Board within the executive branch that would oversee gain-of-function research “and other high-risk life sciences research that potentially poses a threat to public health, safety, or national security.”
According to the Washington Examiner, “The bill would restrain agencies from providing federal funding for high-risk life sciences research without approval from the board” and “would determine whether the project plans met the minimum required biosafety containment level.”
Ebright told The Defender that the bill “provides a definition of gain of function research of concern that contains no subjective language, provides an objective list-based definition of covered potential pandemic pathogens, and establishes penalties for incomplete or false attestations by researchers, institutions, and funding agencies, and eliminates conflicts of interests by reviewers.”
“These features will end the ability of ethically challenged researchers, institutions, and funding-agency officials to avoid review by failing to identify, flag and forward for review proposals with gain of function research,” Ebright said, citing controversies involving U.S. government-funded gain-of-function research in Wuhan.
“Had the oversight mechanism in the bill been in place in 2024-2019, it likely would have prevented the COVID-19 pandemic, saved more than 20 million lives, and saved more than $25 trillion,” Ebright said.
Ebright, Nass and other scientists and researchers, including Dr. Robert Redfield, former director of the CDC, provided statements in support of the legislation. The New York Post, in a commentary published Tuesday, also expressed support.
And in an op-ed published Tuesday in RealClearPolitics, Jay Bhattacharya, M.D., Ph.D., professor of Health Policy at Stanford University, and Bryce Nickels, Ph.D., co-founder of Biosafety Now! and professor of genetics at Rutgers University, also took a position in favor of the proposed legislation.
“The decision on the Risky Research Review Act could be a watershed moment for preventing lab-generated pandemics,” they wrote, noting that the plan is distinct from a White House proposal for high-risk scientific research, unveiled in May.
“We found the proposed policy to be a step backward,” Bhattacharya and Nickels wrote. “The proposed policy is complex and convoluted. More importantly, the proposed policy permits scientists and institutions to engineer more infectious and deadly viruses to regulate themselves.”
“Unchecked, such research could definitely cause another pandemic,” they added.
Others, including Boyle, maintain that gain-of-function should be outlawed entirely.
“All so-called gain-of-function research, both public and private, should be terminated immediately and criminalized expressly by name,” Boyle said, attributing the COVID-19 outbreak to such research performed at laboratories in Wuhan and at the University of North Carolina’s BSL-3 lab.
