What happened after an explosion at a Russian disease research lab called VECTOR?
By Filippa Lentzos | November 27, 2019
At a huge Soviet-era virology campus in Siberia called VECTOR, a sudden, unexpected explosion in September blew out the windows and set parts of a building ablaze. Around the world, people sat up and took notice. Global public health and security officials were concerned the explosion might have affected labs holding dangerous viruses. Biosecurity experts questioned whether it was a deliberate attack, and international security analysts and biodefense experts deliberated how to read the situation—acutely aware that biosafety breaches in a similar facility 40 years ago had caused a large and deadly anthrax outbreak that eventually exposed the Soviet Union’s prohibited biowarfare activities.
From media reports on the explosion, it was unclear exactly which parts of VECTOR, and which labs, had been affected by the explosion and fire. Of particular concern was the facility housing the unique smallpox-causing variola virus, one of just two such repositories in the world, both routinely monitored by the World Health Organization. Following the media reports, VECTOR management responded to queries from the World Health Organization with reassurance that the smallpox repository had not been affected, according to an organization spokesperson. From the organization’s perspective, there was no need to follow up with a visit or ad hoc inspection.
The World Health Organization-led international inspection team last visited VECTOR in February 2019, and while the report from the inspection is still in review, previous inspection reports have found that VECTOR meets international standards of biosafety and biosecurity for smallpox research. The unit visits VECTOR and its US counterpart, the smallpox repository at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, every other year.
Yet while the World Health Organization was reassured by the response from VECTOR officials, others still harbored concerns.
A little more than a month earlier, an explosion at a Russian military test site led US intelligence officials to suspect Russia had been experimenting with a nuclear-powered cruise missile. The explanations from governmental authorities about what happened and whether there was or wasn’t any increased level of radiation changed rapidly in the aftermath of the so-called Nenoksa incident. Given that the World Health Organization ended up concluding the smallpox repository was intact, and VECTOR did publish a brief report on its website on the day of the incident, officials at VECTOR might have benefited by taking pains to be as transparent as possible. Telling the health body about the explosion directly instead of letting it learn about the accident through media reports might have been a start. Given VECTOR’s past, it should have been.
An offensive history. VECTOR was once the center of the Soviet biological warfare effort’s virology work, and home to many of the world’s leading experts in weaponizing viruses. It didn’t advertise this fact, though. The Soviet Union had signed on to the international treaty prohibiting biological weapons, the Biological Weapons Convention, which entered into force in 1975. VECTOR’s public cover story was that it was developing biological pesticides for use in agriculture. In fact, only a very small core of people knew that VECTOR’s classified mission was to research, develop, and lab-test viruses to arm biological weapons. In their seminal book The Soviet Biological Weapons Program, Milton Leitenberg and Ray Zilinskas estimated that by the time the Soviet Union collapsed in 1990, VECTOR had the capacity to produce two tons of weaponized variola virus a year.
More at: https://thebulletin.org/2019/11/what-happened-after-an-explosion-at-a-russian-disease-research-lab-called-vector/