Biosafety level

Think like a sneezing or coughing cat.

Yersinia pestis requires biosafety level 3, that's BSL-3, containment for all propagative work, that's, for example, culture manipulation, animal studies, aerosol generating procedures.

It is also classified as a Tier 1 select agent in the United States.

and it appears on equivalent high-consequence pathogen lists in most jurisdictions alongside other very famous select agents such as anthrax.

And the terrifying reality is that the infrastructure to build these pathogens already exists globally, hidden in plain sight under the banner of public health.

Jacobson notes there are roughly 3,600 BSL-3 and BSL-4 laboratories operating around the world right now.

BSL-4 stands for Biosafety Level 4.

These are the maximum containment laboratories designed to study the most lethal, incurable pathogens known to humanity.

OK, so just talk us through, because we haven't really got into what is happening in Russia, but talk us through what we know about that right now, Miles, and how US scientists could have been helpful in trying to get to the bottom of what it is.

Well, the situation's fluid, but what we know is that sometime around 10 days ago, an incident happened in this lab in Siberia, in Russia, what's called a BSL level three lab.

That's a biological security level.

That's one of the highest security level labs you get.

It only goes up to BSL level four.

And allegedly a test tube or something broke in that lab.

And what had been initially reported was is that a strain of the pneumonic plague was released and one lab worker, a 28 year old, was exposed and later, several days later, died of that exposure.

These are BSL-4 labs where there is pathogen research going on under the guise of defensive research.

There are over 1,500 BSL-3 labs.

You can work with plague in a BSL-3 lab, hantavirus, rabies.

Again, all kinds of, air quotes, defensive research going on there.

But all subject matter experts will tell you this is also called gain-of-function research, and it is dangerous.

W- who else in the world would you say is deeply involved in this?

Yes.

So before I tell you what the State Department says to that question, let me give you a few more numbers, which is because America is hardly the only nation with BSL-4 and BSL-3 labs.

Audiences include the Vatican, the UN, and so on and so forth.

Okay, breaking, there's a pneumonic plague outbreak at a BSL-3 lab in Siberia, Russia.

Remember when the Russians used to talk about how, you know, those Ukrainians with their bio labs and that sort of thing.

Tucker Carlson talked about that quite often.

And then they will immediately let Tiger text me and Justin, who is the supervisor, and also the other areas of the laboratory so that they are aware that there is a PUI in-house and that They need to know if they've already done some testing on the blood, for instance, or they can just get prepared and get the name so that no testing is done outside the BSL facility.

We call it a BSL-2+.

We know there's no such real thing as a BSL-2+, but it's an enhanced BSL-2, not quite a BSL-3.

So anyway, so we're notified by the TIGER text.

During this time period, between the time that they notify the TIGER, the rule-out team, okay, through TigerTex, chemistry, hematology, and microbiology are sending, you know, their texts that are currently in the laboratory into the BSL2+.

The requisitions are going to stop in our central receiving area.

The tests are going to be ordered by the laboratory personnel that are trained.

And then the specimens continue into the ante room for our BSL-2+.

And this includes your – like there are – there's this thing called a biosafety level.

And so there are labs that have different biosafety levels, one through four.

And even in BSL-4 labs, lab leaks are not unheard of.

And so that does have this kernel – that is really the kernel of truth here that something like – putting something like aerosolized Ebola into a delivery system, even if it is for legitimate research, or gain-of-function, which is where they take a bioagent that is highly infectious or highly lethal and give it the other characteristics.

Because typically, in nature, bioagents that are highly lethal, like Ebola... tend not to spread very far because they do not have a high incubation time and the people are infected start showing symptoms and start dying very quickly versus something like the flu which is highly infectious but generally not not as lethal as ebola and gain of function research attempts to combine those two things for ostensibly legitimate research purposes things like vaccines And this presents a danger of something like a lab leak, which has, if I, I'd have to look up the numbers again, but the last time I looked a couple of years ago, since 2001, between like 2001 and 2016, there were more than, if I remember correctly, more than a thousand lab leaks in the United States.

They ran the biosafety level one and level two experiments.

Which, for clarity, are standard laboratory environments.

BSL one and two mean they were working with low-risk biological agents, things like basic E. coli strains on open workbenches or in standard biosafety cabinets, not in full hazmat suits.

It is safe, standard verification.

Standard verification, yes, but absolutely mandatory verification.

And again, this is also beyond all the ethics questions and that Dr. Pattison has prefaced with as well.

But in terms of, you know, As the patient's not doing well and we're trying to investigate, how do we handle all of the samples we're collecting? I believe we performed a risk assessment and some materials we did try to hold BSL-2 plus precautions, like work everything up in biosafety cabinets, handle specimens within the biosafety cabinets.

potentially prion level precautions if we were handling the CSF, just because of that level of unknown, because this is beyond what our staff are used to expecting from non-human transplanted

human

But I don't know that would have received the same type of reaction.

Yeah, well, it's interesting, you know, because you've got sweat in sport, commonplace, nothing about it, right? Urine is honestly like not super infectious, right? Like I work in a BSL-2 laboratory that's like a biosafety level classification system.

And saliva is taken more seriously than urine when it comes to exposure to pathogens.

And so you've got these tiers, right, of like sweat to urine to saliva to I guess feces is interesting because you're not going to get a lot of like you're not going to have like bloodborne pathogens, but it's just bacteria and it's gross.