Dr, Richard Ebright, a medical biologist at Rutgers University and numerous colleagues, have created Protect our Future, an organization that will lobby to prevent possible emergence of laboratory-origin pandemics.
Dr. Ebright has been active in criticizing what he regards as high-risk research on pathogens of human health significance. His organization will continue the advocacy of the now defunct Sunshine Project that monitored biosafety committees attempting to regulate research on high-risk pathogens. The driving force of Sunshine Project, Dr. Ed Hammond, has joined 17 other biologists and experts in biosecurity to promote Protect Our Future.
During 2014, the National Institutes of Health introduced a moratorium on gain-of-function studies following releases from both U.S. and Dutch institutions on genetic manipulation of highly pathogenic avian influenza viruses. Protect Our Future is calling for a reduction in the number of approved laboratories conducting what can be regarded as high-risk research. The organization is also calling for Federal regulation over specific pathogens and toxins and is encouraging participation by the World Health Organization.
Dr. Ebright previously implicated a laboratory in the Soviet Union that he considers responsible for a 1977 strain of influenza that he believed escaped during gain-of-function studies and was responsible for up to 700,000 deaths. Ebright is also prominent in implicating the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China as being complicit in the emergence of SARS-COV-2 and the subsequent COVID pandemic. This reality has yet to be confirmed despite extensive epidemiologic studies.
The reluctance of authorities in China to cooperate with international panels organized by the WHO is unconscionable and is an impediment to understanding the origin of COVID. The lack of transparency and cooperation on the part of the Government of the People’s Republic of China since 2019 has limited the ability of scientists and international health regulators to understand how pandemics emerge in order to plan appropriate prevention and control strategies.