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The peril of playing with viruses | The Spectator

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If a military team made a mistake during a nuclear war preparedness exercise and accidentally obliterated millions of people, you would not expect to find some of the very same people merrily admitting a couple of years later that they have carried out the very same kind of exercise with different live nukes and slightly fewer safeguards. Would you? That is roughly what I recently found out has apparently been going on in China. The Wuhan laboratory that conducted risky experiments on bat viruses at inadequate biosafety levels and almost certainly caused the pandemic has now revealed that it has done the same kind of risky experiments on another lot of horseshoe-bat viruses at low biosafety levels. Is accidentally killing millions not enough to give them pause? Worse, a western scientific journal, the Journal of Virology, has blithely published the whole thing as if it was just another day at the office. There in the acknowledgments of Peng Zhou’s paper are his old pals from the Wuhan

EXPLORE THE ISSUE December 22 2025 Text settings Text size Small Medium Large Line Spacing Compact Normal Spacious Comments Share Share Matt Ridley The peril of playing with viruses Copy link Copied Linkedin Messenger Email If a military team made a mistake during a nuclear war preparedness exercise and accidentally obliterated millions of people, you would not expect to find some of the very same people merrily admitting a couple of years later that they have carried out the very same kind of exercise with different live nukes and slightly fewer safeguards. Would you? That is roughly what I r

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