How this pandemic has left us less prepared for the next one
The Wall Street Journal, December 31, 2021
China put up barriers to studying the origins of COVID-19, leading to a conflict that means less scientific collaboration and more mistrust among global powers that must work together to head off the next disaster. Dr. James Le Duc, retired director of the Galveston National Laboratory, a top U.S. biocontainment facility, urged the director of the Wuhan lab in an email at the beginning of the pandemic to investigate whether the new virus could have resulted from a lab accident. Now, Le Duc doesn’t communicate with colleagues in China on work matters, he said. “Science is shared,” he said. “When you interfere with those collaborations it hurts everybody and is just very sad.”