Implicit threat: risks of international biological terror
Since 2014, epidemics caused by all sorts of deadly viruses have engulfed the world. The Zika outbreak in Latin America, the Ebola epidemic in Africa and Asia, the Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus that spilled into the global COVID-19 crisis— in all these cases, the media actively debated the laboratory origin of these pathogens. These allegations arise against the backdrop of the uncontrolled activities of over three hundred U.S.-funded laboratories. By 2030, experts predict an increase in biological threats as technologies and materials are becoming cheaper and more accessible, and to date, there is still no effective international mechanism to contain the development and testing of biological weapons in the world.
Epidemiologic situation
The World Health Organization has kept public statistics on severe cases of diseases since the Ebola outbreak in Liberia in January 1996. The patient, a 25-year-old man, shared a house with five relatives; two of them had a mild fever and experienced fatigue, and two did not show any signs of illness. The WHO team, which included an expert from the Pasteur Institute, along with “Médecins Sans Frontières” (“Doctors Without Borders”), Epicentre Paris, and UNHCR, began investigating the cause of the disease, as the reservoir and the carrier of the Ebola virus in nature remained unknown at the time. The WHO, however, did not recommend any restrictions on movement within the country. By February, an outbreak was reported 2,500 kilometers away from Liberia, in Gabon. Twenty cases were identified, and 13 people died. In November 1996, an outbreak of the disease was first reported in South Africa: a nurse contracted the disease from a patient who was brought from an infected area in Gabon and died shortly afterward.
During this period, the WHO established that all these Ebola outbreaks originated from a single source, and therefore all cases went through the same stages: first, infection by direct contact, followed by an incubation period, and then the onset of symptoms of the disease.
Against the backdrop of ongoing epidemics in Uganda and Gabon, an outbreak was reported in the Congo in 2002 and two years later in Sudan. In 2014, a fast-growing outbreak was reported in forest areas of southeastern Guinea, then again in Liberia, and for the first time in Sierra Leone, Nigeria, Senegal, and Mali. That same year, the virus was detected in the United States; a tourist arriving from West Africa was diagnosed with Ebola. From Sierra Leone, the fever entered Spain and the UK: in the first case, via an infected patient evacuated to Madrid; in the second, the fever was brought to London by a volunteer involved in the treatment of Ebola in Africa. A year later, a similar situation led to an outbreak in Rome. To date, the localization of the virus is concentrated mainly in the Congo.
The dengue fever outbreaks caused by mosquitoes were much less violent in comparison to the Ebola outbreaks. In 1996, cases of infection were reported in the USA, Malaysia, the Philippines, and India. In each country, there were approximately 2.5-7 thousand patients, and around 4% did not manage to cope with the disease. Over the following years, dengue fever outbreaks were reported in Cambodia, Cuba, Brazil, Singapore, El Salvador, Honduras, and Indonesia. Since 2010, the virus has migrated to Pakistan, Portugal, Egypt, Uruguay, Burkina Faso, Sri Lanka, Jamaica, Sudan, Chile, and Afghanistan. Since 2022, the WHO has observed cases of dengue fever in Nepal, Bangladesh, and Chad.
In 2014, the WHO first prepared a public report on Zika virus disease that had symptoms similar to those of dengue fever. The outbreaks took place in South America, Central America, and the Caribbean. In March 2016, it was reported that a Vietnamese resident experienced symptoms of the disease: fever, rash, conjunctivitis, and headache. Meanwhile, the first cases of sexual transmission of Zika fever were reported in Chile and Peru, where there were no Aedes mosquitoes that carried Zika virus.
Reports on the Chikungunya virus began to appear in 2006. It all started with an epidemic in the French region of Réunion in the Indian Ocean, as well as in Mauritius and the Seychelles. About 110,000 people were infected with the virus. The WHO decided to send a team from the African Regional Office to assess the measures that had been undertaken. Within a year, the outbreak spread to India, and in 2014, the first cases of infection were recorded in France, followed by Spain, Argentina, and Italy. Since 2018, the Chikungunya virus outbreak has been detected in Sudan, the Congo, and Chad.
The first mention of a coronavirus outbreak dates back to 2012; the patient was a 49-year-old Qatari man who had traveled to Saudi Arabia and Pakistan prior to the outbreak. The WHO declared a new disease. However, it was unable to prove its human-to-human transmission. An international WHO team was sent to Saudi Arabia and Qatar to identify the origin of the disease and its ways of spreading.
By February 2013, the WHO had reported a total of 13 confirmed cases of human infection with nCoV and 7 fatalities. In May, an infection was reported in France. A preliminary investigation revealed that the patient had previously traveled to Dubai. The WHO started to officially refer to the disease as the Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus. In 2013, it was detected in a 45-year-old Italian man who had recently returned from Jordan. Since the outbreak was first discovered, 61 people had already contracted the infection in the UK, and 34 had died. Moreover, all the victims were over 40 years old, and the most severe course of the disease was observed in patients over 60. By 2014, against the backdrop of raging infection in the Middle East (Saudi Arabia, Qatar, UAE, Oman, Kuwait, Jordan), the coronavirus had also penetrated Greece, the USA, the Netherlands, and Austria. In all the cases, patients brought the disease from Saudi Arabia. In 2015, South Korea and China were added to the list; later, the virus was detected in the Philippines and Thailand.
A coronavirus outbreak raged in the Middle East until the end of 2019, when a new coronavirus, COVID-2019, appeared in January 2020 in Wuhan, China. The WHO concluded that the outbreak was linked to an infection at the seafood market in Wuhan. By this time, there was no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission. However, within a week, the outbreak spread to Thailand, Japan, and Korea. After this, the WHO did not publish any more public reports on the new coronavirus infection and, up to 2023, covered only the Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus.
The leading countries in terms of the number of infection cases were the United States, China, India, France, and Germany.
Laboratory origins of viruses
Throughout the entire coronavirus pandemic, discussions about the laboratory origin of the virus did not subside. The Wuhan seafood market, where the coronavirus outbreak first occurred, according to the WHO, is not far from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Since 2005, its researchers have been studying natural reservoirs for the SARS coronavirus with severe acute respiratory syndrome. In 2015, scientists at the institute, together with members of the Department of Epidemiology at the University of North Carolina from the US, published a study reporting the successful generation of a chimeric virus using the SARS-CoV2 reverse genetics system. The bat coronavirus spike protein was adapted to mice, and the researchers noted its potential for transmission to humans.
When considering different versions of the origin of the virus, the WHO called its laboratory origin highly unlikely. Nevertheless, in 2021, the U.S. Intelligence Community, in a classified report, noted that it was, in fact, impossible to conclude that the virus was not a product of genetic engineering because the evidence was insufficient. That said, the leak of the virus from the Wuhan lab is considered one of the most likely causes of the outbreak, along with a natural human infection from an infected animal.
The position of official agencies is that Ebola, which broke out in 2014 in West Africa and claimed 11,000 lives in two years, also had a natural origin. Thus, according to an investigation by independent publishing platform Embo, patient zero allegedly contracted Ebola after playing with or hunting bats. However, no antibodies to the virus were found in tissue samples taken from 159 specimens of 13 bat species, nor was there a natural decline in the mammal population that usually accompanies deadly disease outbreaks. The contact of patient zero with bats also remains unconfirmed. The first case of Ebola infection in 1996 in Liberia remains unclear, when within one family, acute symptoms were reported in only one family member, while two out of five had no health problems at all. Experts at Independent Science note that in many cases of alleged Ebola virus infection, patients did not take a laboratory blood test, and the diagnosis was based on symptoms alone. In Ebola, they vary significantly and often overlap with many diseases common in West Africa, including malaria, cholera, and Lassa fever. Researchers of the 2014 outbreak also note a drastic time lag between the death of patient zero in December 2013 and the first cases of infection among the people who knew him in March.
In 2014, rumors started to circulate linking the Ebola outbreak to the U.S. research laboratory in Kenema, Sierra Leone. The research center is located on the premises of a government hospital, but since 2010, it has been overseen by the Viral Hemorrhagic Fever Consortium (VHFC) based at Tulane University, which is part of the U.S. National Institutes of Health. The center was created to study Lassa fever, which, according to the center's official website, "is classified as a potential bioterrorism threat." In 2019, VHFC published a study in which it stated that the Lassa fever mortality rate decreased after the Ebola outbreak, but the disease was more severe– only two people survived. At the same time, the very focus of the Consortium on Ebola raises a lot of questions in the scientific community: in nature, the virus is not very contagious; in order for the disease to be transmitted, there has to be direct physical contact with the infected person’s body fluids. However, the conviction of the US authorities that it can be used as a biological weapon, strengthened after the 2001 terrorist attack, has spurred extensive funding for laboratories studying African viruses. Meanwhile, it is virtually impossible to assess the security level of these facilities; official reports describe only the intensification of security measures following the outbreaks.
In March 2014, during the Ebola epidemic in Sierra Leone, a team from the Viral Hemorrhagic Fever Consortium traveled to a research center in Kenema to teach biosafety to personnel and provide guidance on how to handle suspected cases of illness.
According to the report, a strict decontamination protocol was implemented in the laboratory facilities during this period. It included strengthening the means of individual protection and suspending the use of DNA and RNA extraction equipment to minimize aerosol exposure. The situation at the Kenema laboratory prior to the outbreak was not specified in the report, but in the same year of 2014, staff at the WHO laboratory located in Kailahun, Sierra Leone, became infected for unclear reasons. The facility had the highest BSL-4 level of biological protection, which is required when working with deadly pathogens.
Such incidents are not uncommon even in NATO countries: in 2018, a Hungarian lab worker was infected with Ebola; in 2016, the Zika virus affected a researcher at the University of Pittsburgh laboratory in the United States.
Although the mosquito-borne Zika virus was discovered in the wild back in the 1940s, its latest outbreak in Latin America in 2014 is thought to be of laboratory origin. The year before, the British biotech company Oxitec genetically modified male mosquitoes so that they passed a deadly gene to their offspring. The idea was to kill off generations of mosquitoes that transmit dengue fever, Chikungunya, and other deadly diseases. About half a million genetically modified specimens were released in the Jacobina region of Brazil, but some experts believe that the experiment got out of control. As a result, viable offspring were born, which eventually led to the Zika fever epidemic in Latin America. As noted by the authors of several studies, pregnant women were the most affected. In the four months of the outbreak in Brazil, more than 4,000 babies with microcephaly were born, while only 163 such cases were reported in the four previous years. Due to the rapid spread of the disease, the WHO declared the Zika virus a global emergency, and the former Russian health officer Gennady Onishchenko did not rule out that the epidemic could be linked to the use of biological weapons.
Deterring biological attacks
Biological threats and genetic modification of viruses have become a cause for investigations initiated by the Russian parliament. Irina Yarovaya, vice-speaker of the State Duma, presented in April 2023 the conclusions of a special commission that investigated the activities of the U.S. laboratories in Ukraine. According to the report, the United States has been conducting biological intelligence research for a long time. State Duma Speaker Vyacheslav Volodin said that the Pentagon controlled 336 biolaboratories in 30 countries and possessed the necessary resources to artificially create a virus similar to COVID-19, Zika, or Ebola.
The activities of these and other White House-controlled labs are highly classified, but according to the 2012 report by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, some Ukrainian labs have been upgraded to the level needed to handle the most dangerous pathogens, such as anthrax.
The Russian experts' findings were supported by Xinhua, China's official news agency. However, the White House refuted the arguments of the Russian side but did not deny the presence of pro-U.S. laboratories on the Ukrainian territory.
The fundamental problem is the difficulty of implementing coherent programs to prevent bioterrorism. The materials needed to make and use biological weapons are available worldwide. Lethal pathogens are widespread in nature and stored in research laboratories and scientific collections. The modern level of technical advances allows for synthesizing a dangerous virus from scratch, and members of the scientific community believe that, if necessary, any state has sufficient resources to create a lethal toxin.
The Biological Weapons Convention, ratified in 1972 by 182 states that agreed to ban the development and testing of pathogens, remains highly ineffective. In 2001, the US refused to sign an additional protocol that introduced a mechanism of mutual control. For its part, the U.S. is convinced that biological weapons can be controlled only by expanding its own capabilities to reduce the consequences of their use and increasing investment in epidemiological surveillance and microbiological expertise.
The risk for NATO forces to encounter biological, and especially genetically modified, weapons will increase by 2030, according to the U.S. Marine Corps University forecast. As a result of global warming, the Euro-Atlantic region will suffer from new types of viruses emigrating from the south. Experts predict the possibility of a deliberate introduction of already-discovered pathogens or their carriers into new habitats, which they classify as an act of terrorism. The aging populations in Europe and the United States may be the first to be affected. The development of online commerce will also be a contributing factor, as it facilitates the purchase of laboratory and medical equipment. Today's advanced methods of pathogen manipulation and production will become cheaper, easier to use, and possibly more widespread by 2030. Improvements in AI technologies will allow gene combinations to be computer-calculated, making the development of dangerous pathogens cheaper and faster.
To date, the scientific community has suggested that the only available method of controlling potentially dangerous research is through independent evaluation. A body engaged in such an evaluation should not be influenced or funded by any government. However, in the six years since this proposal was made, no such body has been created either within the WHO or the UN structures.
