US denies bio labs in Ukraine

• State Department concerned that biological research labs will fall into the hands of Russian forces in Ukraine.
• Russia accuses U.S. of funding and developing biological agents in Ukrainian labs.
• U.S. Defense Department denies Russian claims and labels them “disinformation”.

What’s going on? 

The fact that there are biolabs with dangerous materials operating in Ukraine, appears to be undisputed.  Under Secretary of State Victoria Nuland acknowledged last week that America is working to “prevent any of those research materials from falling into the hands of Russian forces.” 

The latest round of biolab accusations started when the Russian government claimed to have evidence from a Ukrainian lab employee that dangerous pathogens including plague, anthrax and cholera, were being developed in a U.S. funded lab. This claim was and continues to be dismissed as Russian disinformation. A Pentagon spokesman called them “laughable” saying there “was nothing to it”.  

The claims that there are biolabs in Ukraine with U.S. support is not exclusively a Russian conspiracy theory. In fact, the U.S. acknowledges that it funds and supports such labs on its own Kyiv Embassy website.  Eight of the labs have public factsheets about them.  

The labs and their relationship with the U.S. government are part of the U.S. Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) empowered to “detect, deter, and defeat WMD and emerging threats". 

So what’s the big idea? 

A central issue in this current information war is whether or not the research in the biolabs is for defensive or offensive purposes. While it is illegal under international treaty to develop biological weapons, it is permitted to develop treatments and vaccines.  

A team of New York Times journalists investigated this distinction and published “U.S. Germ Warfare Research Pushes Treaty Limits". The article explains how government agencies planned and implemented some controversial programs where they would develop bioweapons to learn how to combat the very threats they created.  

What is developed for defensive use can also be used for offensive use, and either situation can lead to an accidental release from the laboratory. 

That article was published at the height of international calm, one week before September 11, 2001.  

Anthrax, defensive biolabs and mainstream consensus  

One week after 9/11, letters containing deadly anthrax were mailed to high-profile people in the U.S. causing the death of five and infecting 17, making it the deadliest bioterror attack in American history.  

The U.S. government used the anthrax attacks to build support for the invasion of Iraq. Officials, including Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, believed that Saddam Hussein was responsible for the attacks as did the “best intelligence services in Europe” according to President Bush.  

This extreme confidence that Hussein was responsible, heavily influenced the decision to invade resulting in the 7 year occupation of Iraq and costing over 4,000 U.S. lives.  

After an FBI investigation, it was determined that the anthrax letters actually originated in a U.S. biolab located in Fort Detrick, Maryland. The lab was originally part of the U.S. biological weapons program and later became part of the United States Biological Defense Program. The sole suspect at the lab committed suicide before being arrested, so no trial was held, but it remains the government’s formal conclusion that he was responsible.   

If there ever was an example of the dangers of “defensive” biolabs, and the risks of not questioning the “consensus” in biolab investigations, the anthrax attacks, with the rush to judgment (leading to war), would take the prize. 

COVID lab leak and misinformation 

If starting a war over false biolab assumptions wasn’t enough, how about a global pandemic?  

At the start of the COVID pandemic, the WHO and other scientists believed that the virus originated in wild animals, and not from a biolab.  They believed this despite the fact that the virus was discovered just a few blocks from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a biolab that researches coronaviruses and other deadly pathogens.  

Unlike the anthrax attacks’ origins, the scientists who concluded that the novel coronavirus originated from animals wrote a letter in the Lancet.  In that letter they "strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin”, calling such ideas “misinformation”.  They subsequently collected over 20,000 signatures to support their position. 

Such labels made investigations more difficult and limited access to information due to social media bans on discussion. Eventually, the lab-leak theory proved to be a legitimate and plausible explanation, and the original scientists' conflicts of interest were revealed. 

While COVID’s origins are still not known for sure, it has raised warnings about the dangers of biolabs and “gain-of-function” research where scientists make pathogens more dangerous in order to learn how to fight them. 

Relevance to the current Ukrainian situation 

The “fact-checking” claim that, “There are no US-run biolabs in Ukraine” is a typical example of the simplistic and misleading responses that come from the self-appointed arbiters of truth –  the fact-checkers. After all, on what basis do the fact-checkers know there are no such labs?    

Russian claims also need to be carefully evaluated. Firstly, they claim that the biolabs are “US-financed” and not actually “US-run” – the phrase used in the denials. The Russians claim that a lab employee said they destroyed the hazardous pathogens as the Russians launched their military operations. This should surprise no one, since the WHO advised Ukraine to do just that.  

Labeling legitimate concerns about the potential dangers of bioweapons “misinformation” in favor of populistic “consensus” has been demonstrated to be a mistake in the past. 

While each side of the Ukrainian war naturally has its spin on events, social media too, has succumbed to the temptation of black-listing and censorship. 

Large social media outlets, including Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube, have all begun censoring, blocking and limiting the sharing of Russian government news.  

Even DuckDuckGo, once a refuge from online censorship, announced that it will “down-rank sites associated with Russian disinformation”.   

The dangers of biolabs, even when used for peaceful purposes, are real. Censoring and denying that threat simply because it helps the enemy score PR points, is dangerous.

James F. Leonard, head of the American delegation that negotiated the germ treaty in 1971, said ''It's very important to be open [about biolabs and research]. If we're not open, who is going to be open?''