Plan to Build NIH-Funded Bat Research Lab in Colorado Sparks Fears of Lab Leak

[Infolurker]

Hey, who wants a gain of function bat research biolab in their back yard? Looks like NIH wants to fund 10's of millions into a Colorado bio lab with a "not to decent" history of leaks.

First I heard of it.


Plan to Build NIH-Funded Bat Research Lab in Colorado Sparks Fears of Lab Leak

https://www.technocracy.news/plan-to-bui...-lab-leak/

Colorado State University in Fort Collins is totally stonewalling public protest over its new NIH-funded biolab and bat research facility to be completed by the end of summer 2023. CSU’s horrible track record of lab leaks in the past should be sufficient to ban it from ever conducting or being involved with gain-of-function research.  ⁃ TN Editor

Colorado State University officials deny the controversial bat disease research lab will conduct gain-of-function experiments, but locals opposed to the facility cite evidence the university is already conducting risky research on deadly pathogens.


Colorado State University (CSU) is proceeding with controversial plans to construct a new research facility to study bat diseases with funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Construction is slated to be completed sometime in 2024 or 2025.

University officials and proponents of the new facility argue the laboratory is necessary to enhance research capabilities looking into emerging diseases and viruses resulting from zoonotic — animal-to-human — transfer.

While CSU denies that gain-of-function research will occur at the laboratory, some researchers connected with the new facility previously were associated with actors involved with such research, including experiments conducted in Wuhan, China.

Francis Boyle, J.D., Ph.D., a bioweapons expert and professor of international law at the University of Illinois, is concerned about the facility.
Boyle told The Defender:

“It is well known that Colorado State University has a long and ongoing history of specialization in weaponizing insects with biowarfare agents for delivery to human beings.
“This new lab will magnitudinally increase CSU’s offensive biowarfare capabilities, in gross violation of the Biological Weapons Convention of 1972 and my Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989 that provides for life in prison.”

Area residents, including a local grassroots group, and bioweapons experts, also have raised concerns over the potentially risky research, involving deadly viruses, that will be conducted at the facility and the risk of a lab leak akin to that which may have occurred at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China, and may have led to escape of the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

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