People are worried about the biolabs in their backyards.
From Boston, Massachusetts, to Manhattan, Kansas, to Berkeley, California, activists have tried to stop risky gain-of-function research to weaponize potential pandemic pathogens.
Now, one city has taken action.
The San Carlos City Council has banned higher-risk biolabs following public concern about environmental and public safety issues.
Check to see which biolabs could be near you here and here.
TAKE ACTION: Ask your state legislators to ban gain-of-function biolabs
On June 26, 2023, the San Carlos City Council voted to pass an ordinance prohibiting biosafety level 3 and 4 labs. It’s in these labs that so-called “gain-of-function” bioweapons research on high-risk potential pandemic pathogens like flu, SARS and Ebola typically takes place. According to globalbiolabs.org, there are no known BSL-4 labs in California, but many BSL-3 labs. The ban was supported by the Sierra Club Loma Prieta Chapter whose members were concerned about the significant public health and environmental safety issues with the labs.
A ban like this in a California city is extremely significant given the state’s history of deadly lab accidents, controversial research and connections to the origins of COVID-19.
Accidents and even deaths have occurred at California biolabs.
In San Francisco, in 2012, 25-year-old researcher Richard Din died after being infected during vaccine research involving Neisseria meningitides bacteria. Din developed a fever and started feeling dizzy. By morning, he was covered in a splotchy rash and could barely talk. A few hours later, he was dead.
In 2005, the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory shipped anthrax to labs in Florida and Virginia. Some of the vials were uncapped. The incident resulted in a $450,000 federal fine.
Livermore is one of three federal government BSL-3 labs in California. The others are run by the Naval Health Research Center and the Food and Drug Administration.
In 2010, at the University of California, Irvine where there are two BSL-3 labs, an autoclave malfunctioned while decontaminating waste from experiments with the SARS virus. The machine leaked steam and water, potentially exposing eight people to the virus. Luckily it had already reached a high enough temperature to kill the virus.
California biolabs are known for controversial and cruel experiments.
SRI International, a notorious military contractor that has raked in $3.8 billion in taxpayer money is where the infamous Anthony Fauci-funded Beagle-Gate scandal took place.
In one completely unnecessary SRI International experiment, beagle puppies were attacked by parasitic biting flies and the scientists running the experiment severed the puppies’ vocal cords to prevent them from barking or crying.
In another, the National Institutes of Health spent $2.3 million to inject them with cocaine. The White Coat Waste Project, a watchdog group that aims to stop taxpayer funding of cruel animal experiments, released an NIH report on an experiment where 6-month-old beagles were strapped into a drug-injecting jacket that dosed the puppies with cocaine and an "experimental compound." Researchers surgically implanted monitoring devices into the dogs to measure how the two drugs interacted. Following the experiment, the puppies were either euthanized or "recycled" for more experiments.
SRI International is one of three BSL-3 labs in California that aren’t run by the government or a university. The others are Allergan, best known for its Botox anti-wrinkle injections made with the botulinum toxin, and List Biological Laboratories, which produces select agents and bacterial toxins for labs around the world.
BSL-3 labs in California disseminated false information about the origins of COVID-19 to distract from research they conducted that could be implicated in the engineering of SARS-CoV-2.
The University of California, Davis, where there are seven BSL-3 labs, is home to Jonna Mazet who led the USAID Emerging Pandemic Threats-PREDICT consortium, including Wuhan Institute of Virology, EcoHealth Alliance and Metabiota, that collected bat coronaviruses that may have been used to engineer SARS-CoV-2.
“A SARS-Like Cluster of Circulating Bat Coronaviruses Shows Potential for Human Emergence,” is the shocking 2015 gain-of-function experiment that shows how a virus like SARS-Cov-2 could have been engineered. In fact, it could be exactly how SARS-CoV-2 was engineered. The lead author Ralph Baric didn’t publish the genetic sequence of the virus he created in 2015 until controversy swirled around him in 2020. There’s no reason to assume he didn’t doctor the sequence if it was strikingly similar to, or matched, SARS-CoV-2.
Jonna Mazet’s PREDICT consortium contributed funding for this study via its contribution of the “RsSHC014-CoV sequence that was isolated from Chinese horseshoe bats” that Ralph Baric used to build his gain-of-function virus.
Jonna Mazet was an author on the 2013 paper, “Isolation and Characterization of a Bat SARS-Like Coronavirus that Uses the ACE2 Receptor,” that announced the discovery of RsSHC014 and stated that it was found during “a 12-month longitudinal survey (April 2011–September 2012) of SL-CoVs in a colony of Rhinolophus sinicus at a single location in Kunming, Yunnan Province, China.”
A theory on the origins of COVID-19 that has been promoted by Philip Zelikow, is that RsSHC014 didn’t come from bats, but was actually a virus that came from men who got sick with a SARS-like virus when exposed to bat guano and ended up in a Kunming hospital in April 2012. Jonna Mazet’s PREDICT partner Shi Zhengli published about the so-called “Mojiang miners” in November 2020.
Jonna Mazet was at the center of the COVID origins controversy, but instead of helping to shed light on the controversial virus hunting and gain-of-function experiments she was involved in, she joined a task force formed to obscure the truth.
Mazet was part of the Standing Committee on Emerging Infectious Diseases and 21st Century Health Threats that held their first meeting on March 11 2020, the same day the pandemic was declared. It was formed by Robert Kadlec (read Whitney Webb’s Engineering Contagion series, including Head of the Hydra: The Rise of Robert Kadlec) with a list of missions that included “Consider, identify, and discuss strategies for addressing misinformation” and “Availability of and access to information, samples, and other materials to determine the origin and evolution of emerging infectious diseases.”
In addition to UC Davis, several other University of California campuses have BSL-3 labs, including three at Berkeley and seven at San Francisco. The Scripps Research Institute has six BSL-3 labs that handle dangerous pathogens, including genetically engineered Ebola. The UCLA High Containment Program has two BSL-3 facilities. The University of Southern California operates one BSL-3 lab.
The California Department of Health runs three BSL-3 laboratories for work with infectious diseases and a network of 14 BSL-3 laboratories at the county government level, including the San Diego County Public Health Lab and the San Joaquin County Public Health Laboratory. The department has no way to determine which labs operate at those containment levels, nor does it require reports on laboratory-associated incidents to be reported to them.
San Carlos residents are right to keep dangerous, cruel and controversial research out of their city.
Ask your state legislators to do the same in your state!
TAKE ACTION: Ask your state legislators to ban gain-of-function biolabs!
*SAMPLE TEXT TO YOUR MEMBERS OF CONGRESS*
You will be able to modify this text on the next page, after entering your information.
Dear [Member of State Legislature]
The San Carlos City Council has banned higher-risk biolabs following public concern about environmental and public safety issues.
We should do something in our state.
Shockingly, there are no statewide restrictions, regulations or even reviews of gain-of-function research on dangerous pathogens.
State regulators don’t even know where this research is taking place, what research is being done, or what safety problems or security issues the research might have.
Lab accidents occasionally result in sickness and even death, but the only way the public hears of them is through public records requests. Not all labs are public and the ones that are keep minimal records and redact their disclosures.
Labs also occasionally have security breaches, as we know from the 2001 anthrax attacks that the FBI pinned on a scientist at the U.S. biological weapons laboratories at Fort Detrick.
The origin of COVID-19 is still a mystery, but the genetic code and published research points to the likelihood that it was engineered in a lab. How it ended up creating a global pandemic is anyone’s guess, but it would be foolish not to get a better handle on gain-of-function experiments with potential pandemic pathogens.
You can see which biolabs are near us here (https://www.usatoday.com/pages/interactives/biolabs/) and here (https://www.globalbiolabs.org/map).
Thank you for your attention to this important issue.
[Your Name]