The Revenge of the Germs
Paris that it wished to acquire a high biological safety laboratory . The request has received a very mixed reception [...] If France is helping China to build a P4 laboratory , how can it be sure that the technology it is going to transfer will not be diverted by Beijing to develop bacteriological weapons ? ” This fear is “ supported by the suspicions of the French intelligence services about the existence of a Chinese offensive biological programme .”
The Assembly of 100 , the scientific and collegiate body of the Institut Pasteur , signifies its disapproval , which the Prime Minister , Jean-Pierre Raffarin , expressed after discussing the project with Professor Chen Zhu , who was trained in Paris and is close to President Jiang Zemin . The agreement was signed in 2004 by Foreign Minister Michel Barnier . It provided for a bilateral monitoring committee chaired by Professor Alain Mérieux , who would eventually leave it in 2015 : in the meantime , China has not invited any of the fifty French scientists supposedly involved in the laboratory ’ s work .
Started in 2011 and inaugurated in 2017 , the P4 is not yet certified by the WHO at the beginning of 2020 .
Extremely annoyed by the sale of a P4 laboratory to China at France ’ s initiative , the United States has kept a close eye on the project . Following an authorized visit by US diplomats in 2018 , an alert note on security failures was sent to Washington . It fueled the feud between the two contemporary giants . There is no shortage of accidents in laboratories . Including on the North American continent .
In the decade following the attacks of September 11 , 2001 , the anthrax bacillus , responsible for anthrax , entered the terrorist arsenal and was sent for examination in unsecured shipments to more than two hundred research centers around the world , which were responsible for the contamination of at least an equal number of scientists .
In November 2014 , an investigation by the British Health and Safety Executive revealed that , over the previous five years , the total number of incidents in the various high-risk laboratories had been close to one hundred .
In February 2019 , Lynn Klotz of the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation published a report to this effect . Between 2009 and 2015 , she counted 749 such incidents , of which 594 were due to human error , mostly in the United States , but also in the Netherlands . The National Institutes of Health ( NIH or the coordination of the American Institutes of Health ), for its part , acknowledges 128 incidents over the period from 2004 to 2017 , while its counterpart , the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention ( CDC ), attests to four major accidents involving the Ebola or Marburg viruses in various P4s .
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