U.S. Research Scientists Are Blind to China’s Threat

U.S. public-health agencies jumped to an unwarranted conclusion in 2020 that Chinese scientists had done nothing deliberate or accidental to cause the Covid pandemic. Scientists at the National Institutes of Health and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases continued to defend engagement with China on pathogen research even as other parts of the U.S. government identified serious biosecurity risks from collaboration with Chinese labs.

All government research agencies have different cultures. U.S. public-health agencies have historically been rooted in “open science”—the view that scientific collaborations should be encouraged globally, and that geopolitics shouldn’t constrain cooperation between well-meaning researchers. Little thought is typically given to the national-security implications of joint research. Even when confronted with credible information about the risks of their research partnerships, the public-health agencies often ignore them. Some in the open-science agencies refuse even to acknowledge that research can have national-security implications. But the issue can’t be wished away.