Dr. Andrew Huff

First of all, you don't even know at this point whether there's a new deadly virus present in the sample.

Yeah, in the bat shit or the saliva.

You have no clue.

Once it gets back to the United States, then it goes to, at least at Equal Alliance, it would go to Ian Lipkin's laboratory at Columbia University.

where he was a specialist in, he's a pretty well-known viral epidemiologist with really good lab chops.

And another doctor who worked with us named Simon Anthony would work with him to isolate, well, first identify and isolate new viruses or novel viruses.

So that's where it typically took place.

then the mechanics of this or operations of this, that information or sample would be sent to another laboratory like Ralph Baric's laboratory where he would continue the work.

Down at Chapel Hill.

Chapel Hill and do the gain of function work.

There's a huge, I wouldn't say huge, but I mean, a non-trivial amount of these types of samples being shipped around the world globally.

And if they're properly contained and packaged, it's really not that much of a risk.

And actually, Dr. Ralph Baric developed some of these methods of how to send what's called a chimeric virus on a sheet of paper, an envelope, which is low risk.

The bigger risk becomes when you start to clone or replicate that agent at scale.

You know, human medicine, public health, epidemiology, transmission risk.

Now you look at this, you have to have a substantial quantity of a virus, which is a substance mixed in the air, be exposed to it to become infected with it because you have an immune system that works.

okay and sometimes you get exposed to these things you don't even know it because your immune system fights it off right so the i think sometimes the risk is overblown and the fear around transporting samples i think most of the time that's actually pretty low risk there's been a series of uh transporting accidents which occurred from 2008 to 2012 or 14 i want to say which actually led to the ban or partial ban on gain a function research what kind of accidents

One of the high profile ones was that I think it was Bacillus anthracis was being shipped from one of our US government BSL for laboratories under CDC control to another laboratory and it went missing and they found it.

sitting in the corner.

No, it wasn't a porch pirate, but they found it someplace and it wasn't properly secured or completely off the... Yeah, I mean, we live in a world with like Chernobyl and misdiagnoses.