It is reported by nature.com that China has plans to build a network of between five and seven biosafety level 4 laboratories across China by 2025. They will be the same sort of laboratory as the one in Wuhan which the American government believes is the likely source of the catastrophic Covid-19 pandemic which is devastating the world’s economy and costing millions of jobs (per Washington Post article).
It is now believed that the Covid-19 pandemic will rumble on for a long time and change the way of life of billions of people and possibly kill hundreds of thousands. There are concerns that when the West controls it developing countries will become incubators and lose control. We still don’t fully understand Covid-19.
The problem with these laboratories is that the pathogens they mess around with can escape the facility and therefore they are potentially very dangerous. They appear to be far more dangerous that nuclear power stations. There is another aspect of them which I find distasteful which is that they have to experiment on non-human primates.
We know that China has no animal welfare laws in a meaningful sense and therefore you have to wonder how they will manage the welfare of monkeys at these facilities. I don’t know if other animals are also tested at these laboratories but it is quite likely. Although it is unlikely that they would use domestic cats.
The SARS virus escaped from a high level containment facility in Beijing multiple times. It is important that there is a high level of transparency when a country operates these sorts of laboratories in order to improve and mantain safety. China is not known for their transparency. In contrast, they are better known for cover-ups and corruption. There should therefore be concern about creating a network of these mysterious places. Why does the world need them?
Finally, testing on monkeys while wearing fully protective suits is difficult. Monkeys can bite and scratch and fight back. They could infect a person. There are inherent dangers despite level 4 labs being contructed to contain pathogens safely. Can we trust China to deal with these dangers adequately?
Governments will say the world needs these labs to research viruses and protect the world from them but it seems to me they might achieve the opposite. For the record there are a dozen of them in the US as I understand it.
SOME MORE ON ANIMAL TESTING:
