A journey into the wild world of high-risk virus hunting, a coming reckoning, and The Post’s year-long investigation into the U.S. role in pushing such research to the edge.
Researchers in a cave look down to dissect bat trappings. Photo illustration by Max-o-matic for The Washington Post; photographs by Andre Malerba/Bloomberg News and Lauren DeCicca/Getty Images.An especially risky kind of virus hunting aims to identify new viruses in animals that have yet to jump to humans. This research often involves trips to distant caves and wrangling bats to pull blood and DNA samples.
The hope is to use that knowledge to be a step ahead and develop therapeutics and surveillance that could help prevent a future outbreak or, worse yet, a deadly pandemic.
But a year-long Post investigation by David Willman and Joby Warrick has found that such research may be putting the world at greater risk for the very thing it’s trying to contain, as a result of potential accidents in the wild and in labs. The Post discovered that the world lacks oversight for such high-risk research, yet a main driver of its expansion in recent years has been the United States. Even experts within the Biden administration have been raising red flags.
The covid-19 pandemic, Willman and Warrick found, is forcing difficult and uncomfortable conversations around doing this research.
“There are thoughtful, well-informed scientific experts who are saying, ‘Look, it’s time for a reckoning. We have observable lessons from the pandemic. We need to apply those,’” Willman tells Post Reports.
Don’t miss a chance to experience Post Reports live! Post Reports senior host Martine Powers will be in conversation with author Curtis Sittenfeld at Sixth & I in Washington, D.C., at 7 p.m. on April 13. Get tickets here.
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A journey into the wild world of high-risk virus hunting, a coming reckoning, and The Post’s year-long investigation into the U.S. role in pushing such research to the edge.
Researchers in a cave look down to dissect bat trappings. Photo illustration by Max-o-matic for The Washington Post; photographs by Andre Malerba/Bloomberg News and Lauren DeCicca/Getty Images.An especially risky kind of virus hunting aims to identify new viruses in animals that have yet to jump to humans. This research often involves trips to distant caves and wrangling bats to pull blood and DNA samples.
The hope is to use that knowledge to be a step ahead and develop therapeutics and surveillance that could help prevent a future outbreak or, worse yet, a deadly pandemic.
But a year-long Post investigation by David Willman and Joby Warrick has found that such research may be putting the world at greater risk for the very thing it’s trying to contain, as a result of potential accidents in the wild and in labs. The Post discovered that the world lacks oversight for such high-risk research, yet a main driver of its expansion in recent years has been the United States. Even experts within the Biden administration have been raising red flags.
The covid-19 pandemic, Willman and Warrick found, is forcing difficult and uncomfortable conversations around doing this research.
“There are thoughtful, well-informed scientific experts who are saying, ‘Look, it’s time for a reckoning. We have observable lessons from the pandemic. We need to apply those,’” Willman tells Post Reports.
Don’t miss a chance to experience Post Reports live! Post Reports senior host Martine Powers will be in conversation with author Curtis Sittenfeld at Sixth & I in Washington, D.C., at 7 p.m. on April 13. Get tickets here.
What is it like to leave a country in crisis - only to return years later to a devastated homeland? Today, a Post photojournalist journeys back to Iraq after 24 years.
Late Friday, two conflicting rulings threw a key abortion medication’s FDA approval into question. Today on Post Reports, we break down the legal confusion and talk about what could happen next.
