Sunday Times 2
Maverick scientist creates a virus that could wipe out 400 million people
What was extraordinary about the great flu pandemic of 2018 was not only that it came exactly 100 years after the Spanish flu of 1918, but that it also killed 5 per cent of the world’s population.
In 1918, that proportion meant some 100 million people. In 2018, nearly 400 million fell victim.
With no vaccine available, all that doctors could do was to send people home and tell them to hope for the best.
It was the worst natural disaster the world had ever seen. But the virus was no random creation of Mother Nature – it was man-made, produced by an obscure professor at a university deep in the heart of the U.S.
No vaccine: If the new strain of swine flu was released, it could kill up to a billion people( AFP)
This may sound like a science-fiction scenario that would strain credulity but, terrifyingly, it is all too possible.
Professor Yoshihiro Kawaoka of the University of Wisconsin-Madison has created a deadly new strain of the 2009 swine flu virus – for which there is no known vaccine.
If the virus escaped from Professor Kawaoka’s laboratory it could kill hundreds of millions – perhaps even a billion. Worryingly, scientists seem as alarmed as the general public.
Professor Kawaoka revealed what he had done at a secret meeting held earlier this year, and his fellow virologists appear to have reacted with despair.
‘He’s basically got a known pandemic strain that is now resistant to vaccination,’ said one scientist who did not wish to be named. ‘Everything he did before was dangerous, but this is even madder.’
So what exactly has Professor Kawaoka done before?
Only last month Kawaoka revealed in a scientific paper that he had also synthesised a bird flu virus – called ’1918-like Avian’.
He had created, through a process called ‘reverse genetics’, a flu virus extremely similar to that which caused the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic.
Kawaoka and his team declared that they had made the virus to assess whether variants of the 1918 flu were as deadly to humans as the original virus.
After testing it osn ferrets, the team found that what they had created, in the dry words of academia, ‘may have pandemic potential’.
An earlier experiment looked at making another lethal bird flu strain easier to catch.
The idea that scientists blithely create deadly flu viruses, essentially to see how deadly they are, caused outrage in the scientific community and the world at large.
‘The work they are doing is absolutely crazy,’ said Professor Lord May of Oxford, a former president of the Royal Society. ‘The whole thing is exceedingly dangerous.’
Marc Lipsitch, Professor of Epidemiology at the Harvard School of Public Health, said: ‘I am worried that this signals a growing trend to make “transmissible” novel viruses willy-nilly. This is a risky activity, even in the safest labs.
‘Scientists should not take such risks without strong evidence that the work could save lives, which this paper does not provide.’
It’s a good question. Professor Kawaoka did try to justify his research last month.
He explained that wild birds continue to harbour many variants of the influenza A virus – the strain of virus that can be transmitted from birds, including domestic poultry, through to humans.
One of the subtypes of influenza A is called H5N1 – a name familiar to many.
Not only was a form of H5N1 behind the 1918 outbreak, but its variants have started to emerge over the past ten years, and are now collectively known as ‘bird flu’.
Professor Kawaoka argues that ‘foreseeing and understanding this potential is important for effective surveillance’.
To do this, Kawaoka and his team create new forms of H5N1, then study how they function and how easily they can spread.
Naturally, the experiments are carried out in extremely secure conditions – although it is alarming to learn that Professor Kawaoka’s Department of Pathobiological Sciences at the University of Wisconsin is not rated at the most secure level.
In a paper published in 2012, Lynn Klotz, a Senior Science Fellow at the U.S. Centre for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, stated that 42 institutions were working with any number of three potentially deadly disease-causing substances – smallpox, the SARS virus, and H5N1.
Klotz estimated there was an 80 per cent likelihood of one of these diseases escaping from one of these laboratories in just under every 13 years.
‘This level of risk is clearly unacceptable,’ Klotz said.
But despite such calls from their academic colleagues, Kawaoka and other scientists, such as Professor Ron Fouchier at Erasmus Medical Centre in Rotterdam, insist that what they are doing is right, and maintain that their work is safe and therefore ethical.
But as every scientist knows, there is no such thing as a sure bet. There is always a chance that, one day, someone will walk out of Professor Kawaoka’s laboratory in Wisconsin feeling under the weather.
If that happens, then we must hope and pray that those same scientists find a cure -before millions die.
© Daily Mail, London