1979. Ustinov had been injecting Marburg into guinea pigs with the help of a lab technician, working through a glove box. He was not in a full space suit and was wearing two thin layers of rubber gloves instead of the thick mitts normally required for such work in Zone Three. The gloves provided the flexibility to control the laboratory animals, who will otherwise squirm and try to wriggle out of a technician’s grip. Our rules required that animals targeted for injection be strapped to a wooden board to hold them securely in place. That day Ustinov wasn’t following procedure. He decided to steady the guinea pigs with his gloved hand. Perhaps he thought it would help calm them. Or perhaps he was in too much of a hurry. The technician became distracted and nudged him accidentally. Ustinov’s hand slipped just as he was pressing down on the syringe. The needle went through the guinea pig and punctured his thumb, drawing blood.
-Biohazard, pg. 128
Ustinov was cared for until death by his wife, who was also a bioweaponeer at Koltsovo. Notably, he documented his own ill-fated journey into death, writing down his own symptoms in the hopes that it would be useful to medical research until finally losing consciousness. Alibek writes that the Marburg strain had evolved inside Ustinov’s body to become even deadlier; samples of his blood were later taken and became the basis for a second bioweapon based on Marburg virus.
A virus grown in laboratory conditions is liable to become more virulent when it passes through the live incubator of a human or an animal body. Few were surprised, therefore, when samples of Marburg taken from Ustinov’s organs after his autopsy differed slightly from the original strain. Further testing showed that the new variation was much more powerful and stable.
No one needed to debate the next step. Orders went out immediately to replace the old strain with the new, which was called, in a move that the wry Ustinov might have appreciated, "Variant U." -Biohazard https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:uH5_ExiwuegJ:https://project-evidence.github.io/+&cd=12&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&client=safari
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A Russian scientist at a former Soviet biological weapons laboratory in Siberia has died after accidentally sticking herself with a needle laced with ebola, the deadly virus for which there is no vaccine or treatment, the lab’s parent Russian center announced over the weekend.
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Even though human influenza A (H1N1) virus had not circulated since 1957 and the swine influenza A (H1N1) virus that had been identified at Fort Dix did not extend outside the base, in November 1977, the H1N1 strain reemerged in the former Soviet Union, Hong Kong, and northeastern China. This strain affected primarily young people in a relatively mild presentation.18,30 Careful study of the genetic origin of the virus showed that it was closely related to a 1950 strain but dissimilar to influenza A (H1N1) strains from both 1947 and 1957. This finding suggested that the 1977 outbreak strain had been preserved since 1950.30 The reemergence was probably an accidental release from a laboratory source in the setting of waning population immunity to H1 and N1 antigens.
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The cases had been linked to experiments using live and inactive SARS corona virus in the CDC’s virology and diarrhea institutes where interdisciplinary research on the SARS virus was conducted.
The CDC’s mistakes also include allowing researchers to experiment with biological materials infected with SARS in common laboratories and the failure to immediately report the abnormal health conditions of its researchers.
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Because reporting of laboratories’ existence, size and activities, as well as accidents is all incomplete, it is difficult to obtain precise rates comparable to those of NIAID. Nonetheless using plausible assumptions Klotz and Sylvester (5) estimate a historical risk of an accidental laboratory escape of a potentially pandemic pathogen of 0.3% per laboratory per year.
While these figures may sound low, the key problem is that they increase as more laboratories undertake work on potentially pandemic pathogen and as they do so over a longer period. Even at the NIAID, the intramural estimated rate of 2 exposures per 100,000 operator-hours, a remarkably low rate that likely reflects very careful practices, one would expect 1 out of every 50 technicians working half-time (1,000 h) in such a laboratory to be exposed each year and 1 of every 600 to become infected. Over a 10-year period, with 100 such laboratories each employing 5 such technicians, one would expect 100 exposures and about 8 infections. Klotz and Sylvester estimate that with 42 laboratories working on potentially pandemic pathogen and a 0.3% risk of an escape per laboratory-year, there is an 80% risk of an escape of a potentially pandemic pathogen every 13 years (5).
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Source: http://english.whiov.cas.cn/Exchange2016/Foreign_Visits/201804/t20180403_191334.html (archived)
And, just so we are crystal-clear that this meeting did in fact happen, here is a photo attached to the press release with Rick Switzer, Jamison Fouss and Dr. Shi Zhengli in the center (with her boss on her left):
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(section 9.6) BeijingNews asked Shi Zhengli, a researcher specializing in bat coronavirus, and Chen Quanjiao, a researcher in the Influenza Virus Laboratory, both of them said it was unclear whether there was Huang Yanling in the Wuhan institute. Source: http://www.rfi.fr/cn/中国/20200217-武汉研究所外泄病毒传言未止又有消息指-零号病人-是研究员 (archived)
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(section 10.3.3.) Professor Nikolai Petrovsky: It is therefore entirely plausible that the virus was created in the biosecurity facility in Wuhan by selection on cells expressing human ACE2, a laboratory that was known to be cultivating exotic bat coronaviruses at the time. If so the cultured virus could have escaped the facility either through accidental infection of a staff member who then visited the fish market several blocks away and there infected others, or by inappropriate disposal of waste from the facility that either infected humans outside the facility directly or via a susceptible vector such as a stray cat that then frequented the market and resulted in transmission there to humans.
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Source: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/news/coronavirus-china-bars-safety-experts-from-wuhan-lab-brbm9rwtm (archived) The fact that the BSL-4 lab was not independently certified by Technip as was planned should be a warning sign that we do not know the type of security standards or protocols being observed at the WIV. The only non-Chinese company that was supposed to verify this apparently bailed out for unknown reasons, and French scientists that were supposed to go work at the lab (who could have reported safety concerns) were never sent there.
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all the above courtesy of https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:uH5_ExiwuegJ:https://project-evidence.github.io/+&cd=12&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&client=safari
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