Miss a day, miss a lot. Subscribe to The Defender's Top News of the Day. It's free.

Virologists last week during a public meeting pushed back against the possibility of tighter regulation of viruses tweaked in the lab to be more lethal.

An enhanced pandemic potential pathogen is a virus or microbe that has gained increased transmissibility (the capacity to spread from person to person and reverberate throughout a population) or virulence (the capacity to cause serious disease).

Experiments that are reasonably anticipated to generate deadlier pathogens are supposed to receive heightened oversight from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) under what is nicknamed the HHS “P3CO Framework,” overseen by a review committee.

Critics of the committee, established in 2017, say its work is hidden from public view, suffers from glaring loopholes and needs a reboot.

For example, work that contributes to vaccine development or results from viral surveillance efforts in nature is exempted from this extra layer of review.

Speculation by some in the U.S. intelligence community that COVID-19 may have seeped out of a lab at the pandemic’s epicenter may have prompted the April 27 public meeting to consider whether current policies are adequate.

Reporting irregularities by EcoHealth Alliance, a nonprofit partner of the lab involved in gain-of-function research on coronaviruses and funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), also led many to conclude the P3CO review process needs to apply to more research projects and be more accountable to the public.

One million Americans have died of COVID-19. A review by the U.S. intelligence community last summer about whether the novel coronavirus spilled over from an animal or spilled out of a lab was inconclusive.

White House COVID-19 testing czar Tom Inglesby was harshly critical of the existing framework during last week’s meeting, which was co-hosted by the Office of Science and Technology Policy and the NIH.

Inglesby’s top recommendation: Scientists should be required to explain in detail the goals of undertaking gain-of-function research in the first place, and why less perilous methods could not reach the same goal.

“There must be an extraordinary and public justification,” he said. “I do think there are experiments we shouldn’t do.”

But lobbying groups representing virologists and other life scientists pushed back.

“The systems of review should not be a solution looking for a problem,” said Felicia Goodrum, president of the American Society for Virology.

Goodrum said regulation risks “tying two hands behind our backs” when it comes to modeling pandemic risks.

Goodrum added that the inherently unpredictable nature of manipulating viruses means that it’s unwieldy to determine whether or not an experiment will make a virus more dangerous, so the regulations should be lax.

“We must be careful about dichotomizing research as simply either ‘risky’ or not because it is not possible to absolutely predict the biology of a virus with the committee,” she said.

But Gregory Koblentz, deputy director of the biodefense graduate program at George Mason University, said an EcoHealth Alliance grant that funded research that made coronaviruses more deadly by swapping their spike proteins is emblematic of lapses in oversight at the NIH.

The research was not regulated as gain-of-function work, but the NIH did add language to the grant requiring extra reporting if the viral engineering led to viruses that were 10 times more pathogenic. (The chimeric viruses proved to be much more pathogenic than even that threshold, but EcoHealth Alliance did not report it.)

That language amounts to a “tacit admission” the NIH reasonably anticipated the work was gain-of-function, Koblentz said.

Stefano Bertuzzi, CEO of the American Society for Microbiology, conceded labs should report more often to Congress and scientists could do a better job allaying public concerns, but stated the framework is otherwise sufficient.

Bertuzzi signaled he is concerned that Congress could step in.

Labs taking steps toward greater transparency “helps guard against well-intended but sometimes overly prescriptive legislative approaches that could undermine the important work that needs to take place,“ Bertuzzi said.

Gigi Gronvall, the senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, said that the “breathless hyping of risks” overshadows strong existing biosafety measures, such as U.S. efforts to train staff at maximum containment labs abroad.

Asked which risks have been misunderstood, Gronvall said “there is a lot of gray” and that proper expertise is needed to interpret gain-of-function experiments, but did not go into further detail.

Indeed, some experts called for decreased transparency for controversial research.

Colorado State University Biosafety Director Rebecca Moritz called for limiting the scope of public records requests.

U.S. Right to Know submitted a public information request for records about the university’s research on bat coronaviruses in collaboration with EcoHealth Alliance, the U.S. Department of Defense and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

The documents raise questions about the contagion risks of, for example, the shipping of bats and rats infected with dangerous pathogens.

Kanta Subbarao, director of the World Health Organization Collaborating Centre for Reference and Research on Influenza, disputed the idea that research that contributes to vaccine development or results from surveillance should be included in the framework.

Many representatives of the life science and biodefense fields emphasized weighing any regulation against lost opportunities for science.

But members of the public who participated in the meeting were much more skeptical of the value of certain gain-of-function work.

Alina Chan, a molecular biologist at the Broad Institute, said the public should not be surprised by news of controversial gain-of-function experiments for the first time in scientific papers, long after the research has been approved and completed.

Chan called for controversial experiments to be published on preprint servers and the genomes of novel viruses to be deposited into publicly available databases within a year of discovery.

She also called for greater transparency from private “virus hunting” organizations and middlemen between the NIH and labs, an apparent allusion to EcoHealth Alliance and the Global Virome Project.

Kevin Esvelt, a biologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said creating novel viruses in the lab, combined with the ease of synthesizing viruses from a genome sequence, poses a national security threat.

“More Americans have died of COVID than would perish if a Russian Topol SS-25 thermonuclear warhead were to be detonated in the center of Washington, D.C.,” said Esvelt.

“Pandemic viruses can be more lethal than thermonuclear weapons. That makes them a proliferation concern.”

Originally published by U.S. Right to Know.