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A report by a US media outlet claims that over the past 20 years, there have been hundreds of incidents at US biolabs, a majority of which have been kept secret from the public.
For instance, in 2016 a graduate student at Washington University in St. Louis pricked her finger on a needle after injecting a mouse and infecting it with a recombinant strain of the Chikungunya virus. The student kept the incident secret until becoming ill. US healthcare authorities decided to keep this information from the public.
Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova pointed out that a potential leak of pathogens is beneficial for US, as it allows medicine to be sold to an infected population. She called it a “lethal win-win lottery.”
Zakharova’s comments come amid an ongoing scandal around US biolabs in Ukraine. According to the Russian Ministry of Defense, these facilities have been developing strains of diseases like glanders, African and classical swine fever, the highly infectious avian influenza, and Newcastle disease.
Russia accused the US and Ukraine of violating the Biological Weapons Convention, which entered into effect in 1972 and was signed by most countries.
In June 2022, the US admitted funding 46 biolabs in Ukraine. However, the US government and Ukraine deny the military purposes of these laboratories and claim it was for peaceful research.