by Rhoda Wilson, Expose News:
Dr. Meryl Nass highlighted an “extremely important paper by Martin Furmanski, MD, that no one knows about.”
“Yes, lab-made and lab-held viruses do jump out of the lab and have killed lots of people and caused pandemics too,” she said.
The paper Dr. Nass was referring to is titled ‘Laboratory Escapes and “Self-fulfilling Prophecy” Epidemics’ published on 17 February 2024 by the Centre for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation (“Arms Control”), an American non-profit dedicated to reducing and eventually eliminating the threats posed by nuclear, chemical and biological weapons.
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Over the years, present and past members of the Scientists Working Group on Biological and Chemical weapons (SWG) have written hundreds of issued papers, commentaries and analyses. Many of these documents were never published but distributed to relevant people and organisations. Some are over twenty years old, but are still relevant or have considerable historical or educational value. You can find the key unpublished-issued and published papers on the Arms Control Website HERE. One of the many papers listed is the 2014 paper authored by Martin Furmanski, a member of Arms Control’s SWG.
Martin Furmanski is a medical doctor and medical historian whose major research interests are investigating the development, use, and allegations of use of chemical and biological weapons. His medical training is in pathology and laboratory medicine, including microbiology and toxicology.
Furmanski’s paper presents a historical review of outbreaks of potential pandemic pathogens or similarly transmissible pathogens that occurred from presumably well-funded and supervised nationally supported laboratories. It catalogues and provides evidence for laboratory accidents that have actually caused illness and deaths outside of the laboratory in the community.
The paper was issued during the continuing intense debate over the risks of the escape of highly pathogenic avian influenza (“HPAI”) virus made airborne transmissible among ferrets: A laboratory escape could kill thousands to millions of people. Until the appearance of the Furmanski study, it was generally thought that laboratory escapes causing many deaths were an entirely hypothetical concern.
Arms Control notes that a shorter version of the 17-page paper was published in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. The link provided by Arms Control is no longer available. However, we found the following essay published by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists which “summarises a more detailed review of the historical record.”
Threatened pandemics and laboratory escapes: Self-fulfilling prophecies
By Martin Furmanski, published by Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists on 31 March 2014
The public health danger from the escape, from laboratories, of viruses capable of causing pandemics has become the subject of considerable, well-merited discussion, spurred by “gain of function” experiments. The ostensible goal of these experiments – in which researchers manipulate already dangerous pathogens to create or increase communicability among humans – is to develop tools to monitor the natural emergence of pandemic strains. Opponents, however, warn that the risk of laboratory escape of these high-consequence pathogens far outweighs any potential advance. These arguments appear in a variety of recent research papers, including ‘Rethinking Biosafety in Research on Potential Pandemic Pathogens’; ‘The Human Fatality and Economic Burden of a Man-made Influenza Pandemic: A Risk Assessment’; ‘Containing the Accidental Laboratory Escape of Potential Pandemic Influenza Viruses’; and ‘Response to Letter by the European Society for Virology on “Gain-of-Function” Influenza Research’.
The risk of a man-made pandemic sparked by a laboratory escape is not hypothetical: One occurred in 1977, and it occurred because of concern that a natural pandemic was imminent. Many other laboratory escapes of high-consequence pathogens have occurred, resulting in transmission beyond laboratory personnel. Ironically, these laboratories were working with pathogens to prevent the very outbreaks they ultimately caused. For that reason, the tragic consequences have been called “self-fulfilling prophecies.”
Modern genetic analysis allows pathogens to be precisely identified, and because all circulating pathogens show genetic changes over time, the year that a particular example of a pathogen emerged can generally be determined, given a sufficient database of samples. If a pathogen appears in nature after not circulating for years or decades, it may be assumed to have escaped from a laboratory where it had been stored inert for many years, accumulating no genetic changes; that is, its natural evolution had been frozen.
The swine flu scare of 1976 and the H1N1 human influenza pandemic of 1977. Human H1N1 influenza virus appeared with the 1918 global pandemic, and persisted, slowly accumulating small genetic changes, until 1957, when it appeared to go extinct after the H2N2 pandemic virus appeared. In 1976, H1N1 swine influenza virus struck Fort Dix, causing 13 hospitalisations and one death. The spectre of a reprise of the deadly 1918 pandemic triggered an unprecedented effort to immunise all Americans. No swine H1N1 pandemic materialised, however, and complications of immunisation truncated the programme after 48 million immunisations, which eventually caused 25 deaths.
Human H1N1 virus reappeared in 1977, in the Soviet Union and China. Virologists, using serologic and early genetic tests soon began to suggest the cause of the reappearance was a laboratory escape of a 1949-1950 virus, and as genomic techniques advanced, it became clear that this was true. By 2010, researchers published it as fact: “The most famous case of a released laboratory strain is the re-emergent H1N1 influenza-A virus which was first observed in China in May of 1977 and in Russia shortly thereafter.” The virus may have escaped from a lab attempting to prepare an attenuated H1N1 vaccine in response to the US swine flu pandemic alert.
The 1977 pandemic spread rapidly worldwide but was limited to those under 20 years of age: Older persons were immune from exposures before 1957. Its attack rate was high (20 to 70 per cent) in schools and military camps, but mercifully it caused mild disease, and fatalities were few. It continued to circulate until 2009, when the pH1N1 virus replaced it. There has been virtually no public awareness of the 1977 H1N1 pandemic and its laboratory origins, despite the clear analogy to current concern about a potential H5N1 or H7N9 avian influenza pandemic and “gain of function” experiments. The consequences of escape of a highly lethal avian virus with enhanced transmissibility would almost certainly be much graver than the 1977 escape of a “seasonal,” possibly attenuated strain to a population with substantial existing immunity.
