Award-winning USA Today journalist Alison Young has been exposing the dangers of creating virulent and highly transmissible viruses and bacteria in unregulated and accident-prone labs across the US, China, and other nations for over a decade, calling attention to over 100 lab accidents every year in the US alone between 2014-2019.
Young writes:
“As members of a World Health Organization expert team have made international headlines recently dismissing as “extremely unlikely” the possibility that a laboratory accident in Wuhan, China, could have sparked the COVID-19 pandemic, I can’t stop thinking of the hundreds of lab accidents that are secretly occurring just in the United States.
“As an investigative reporter, I have spent more than a decade revealing shocking safety breaches that officials at laboratories in our own country don’t want the public to know about…
“The notion that more than 2.7 million deaths worldwide – so far – could be the result of a lab accident has been met with skepticism and derision by many journalists and scientists who often portray it as a crackpot conspiracy theory fueled by former President Donald Trump’s China-bashing rhetoric. Without question, the lab-leak theory has been politically and racially weaponized in ugly ways. Nonetheless, that rhetoric needs to be separated from legitimate questions about lab safety that are deserving of investigation.
“Science, like journalism, is supposed to be about facts and about getting to the truth. But those who dare seek answers to reasonable questions about any lab accidents in Wuhan are accused of peddling conspiracies.”
