"Scientists Being Scientists" There Are Definitely Biological Weapons In The Ukraine Warzone

thebulletin  |  “There is no place that still has any of the sort of infrastructure for researching or producing biological weapons,” Pope said. “Scientists being scientists, it wouldn’t surprise me if some of these strain collections in some of these laboratories still have pathogen strains that go all the way back to the origins of that program.”

The program is encouraging host countries to reduce the scope of their pathogen holdings to as small of a collection as necessary for legitimate scientific research, Pope said.

“What we have today and what these countries maintain are small amounts of various pathogens that by and large are things that are collected out of their environment that they need for research to be able to legitimately surveil disease and develop vaccines against,” he said.

This work, Pope said, continued in Ukraine until recently. “They have more pathogens in more places than we recommend,” he said. The program had been helping Ukrainian researchers sift through their frozen pathogen collections, with the goal of persuading the Ukrainians to preserve their genetic information of samples via sequencing before destroying the live samples.

Pope said his program had been close to an agreement with the Ukrainians on consolidating samples, but the invasion has now made that project uncertain. “All of that, obviously, has been derailed here with the recent events,” he said.

The Cooperative Threat Reduction Program, Pope said Thursday, has not had contact with biosafety staff at the labs in Ukraine since the Russian invasion. Phone lines have been jammed in Ukraine, he said, and “I don’t know what kind of contact we will have in these labs in the near future.”

Some Ukrainian labs, like the Ukrainian Ministry of Health’s Public Health Center, Pope said, are major facilities, others small. Some are new, while others date back to the Soviet-era and the country’s bioweapons program.

The US government has worked with 26 facilities in Ukraine. Before the invasion, the program provided direct material support to six Ukrainian labs. The program also provides biosafety and scientific mentorship training to Ministry of Health personnel throughout the country.