A Petri dish in a lab. A genome spliced. A pathogen engineered. The spark of the next pandemic may not lie in nature – but in a lab, buried behind institutional funding, private contracts, and a wall of bureaucratic secrecy.
In the aftermath of Covid, the world is still reeling – not just from the virus itself, but from the hard questions it raised. Questions about gain-of-function research, biosafety standards, and a disturbing lack of transparency in the world’s most powerful biomedical institutions.
Now, a growing chorus of scientists, ethicists, and international law experts are sounding the alarm: we need global rules before it’s too late.
The Risk No One Is Regulating
Despite decades of warnings, there is no universal system for tracking high-risk biological research. There is no international requirement for scientists to declare when they’re creating pathogens with pandemic potential. There is no global watchdog with the power to investigate labs working with dangerous viruses.
While labs are building chimeric viruses, gain-of-function and manipulating genetic code, the public is left in the dark – and governments, universities, and pharmaceutical giants are largely self-regulated and self-funding until the taxpayer is left to bail out the catastrophe.
This registry would track and catalogue all research involving potentially pandemic pathogens, disclose funding sources, mandate biosafety disclosures, and provide an independent, public review process for high-risk experiments.
Without transparency, trust breaks down. And without trust, scientific institutions lose legitimacy.
Biological Weapons Laws Are Outdated and Toothless
The groundwork for global oversight exists – but it’s mostly symbolic.
The Biological Weapons Convention (BWC), signed in 1972, bans the development of biological weapons but it has no enforcement mechanism, no inspections, and no investigatory arm.
Even the World Health Organisation’s International Health Regulations (IHR 2005) – legally binding across 196 countries – fail to regulate the origins or safety standards of laboratory research, however they do seek to censor medical information and lobby for the removal of human rights.
Other instruments, like the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety and UN Resolution 1540, address genetically modified organisms and bio-terrorism threats but stop short of confronting dual-use research – where scientific experiments intended for good could cause catastrophic harm if misused or accidentally released.
In short: international law is not keeping pace with biotechnology.
The Ethical Elephant in the Room: Who’s Watching the Watchers?
If a deadly pathogen escapes from a lab tomorrow as alleged in Wuhan, who investigates?
In far too many cases, the bodies tasked with investigating high-risk research are the very same institutions that funded it, conducted it, or stood to benefit from its outcomes. During the Covid flu seasons, multiple inquiries into the virus’ origins were swiftly criticised as ‘whitewashes’ – tainted by conflicts of interest, opaque review processes, fringe theories on proximal origins, and a reluctance to entertain inconvenient evidence. Scientific journals, once bastions of rigorous debate, appeared more eager to shut down discussion than to foster it, racing to enforce a manufactured consensus and retracted journals that questioned the manufactured consensus or provided insights into lifesaving treatments that were not mRNA gene therapy vaccine-based. But science is not a vote. It does not bend to majority opinion. It advances through data, dissent, and the courage to examine even the rarest of anomalies. In the race to control the narrative, we risked abandoning the very principles that make science trustworthy and publicly ridiculed the real scientists and medical professionals.
This is why reformers are demanding a 10-year independence clause: that nobody involved in peer review or investigations should include anyone who:
Has worked for or been funded by pharmaceutical companies, governments, or regulators in the past decade.
Is affiliated with universities or research centres that received grants or contracts from industry, lobby groups, or philanthropic foundations during the same period.>
Belongs to legal, medical, or communications firms involved in biotech lobbying or consulting.
This isn’t conspiracy – it’s common sense, grounded in long-standing governance principles. The ‘revolving door’ between regulators, industry, and research institutions has been widely recognised as a systemic threat to impartiality and public accountability. Just as judges are bound to recuse themselves when conflicts of interest arise, scientific investigations – particularly those with global consequences – must be held to no less a standard. After all, when Caesar writes the rules, funds the research, and approves the findings, can we truly expect Caesar to investigate himself?
Public confidence is undermined when investigative bodies maintain financial or institutional ties to the very organisations they are tasked with scrutinising.
History Has Taught Us – We’re Just Not Listening
In 1979, an accidental release of anthrax spores from a Soviet bioweapons lab in Sverdlovsk killed dozens.
In 2003, SARS leaked from a Beijing lab – twice. In the US alone, more than 200 reported lab accidents involving dangerous pathogens occurred between 2000 and 2015. (Déjà vu or is it vu jaDe)
And still, there is no binding global requirement to notify the public or international community when something goes wrong.
Yet when it comes to nuclear energy, the world didn’t hesitate.
In 1957, following accidents and Cold War tensions, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) was formed, equipped with robust inspection powers and global jurisdiction.
Why is synthetic biology – arguably more dangerous – treated with less urgency?
The Legal Backbone: Human Rights and the Precautionary Principle
The legal case for stronger global oversight is rooted in well-established international norms.
The Precautionary Principle, enshrined in the 1992 Rio Declaration, states that lack of full scientific certainty should not delay measures to prevent serious or irreversible damage. This applies directly to unregulated gain-of-function research.
More importantly, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) guarantees the right to life (Article 6), while the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) guarantees the right to health (Article 12). States are legally bound to uphold these rights – including by preventing avoidable pandemics.
Further, ethical codes like the Nuremberg Code and the Declaration of Helsinki require that all scientific experimentation be conducted with full accountability, minimal risk, and prioritisation of human welfare. Risky research on potential pandemic pathogens clearly fits within this framework. Despite our former Health Minister declaring in February 2021 that we were in the world’s largest clinical trial, Australia seemed to forget its obligations to human rights and institutional protections in times of crisis, giving the green light to unthinkable measures of control and brutality.
Human Rights by Consensus
Despite the global weight of international human rights instruments, the Australian case of Kassam v Hazzard [2021] – the nation’s first major judicial test of pandemic powers – marked a devastating precedent. From the Supreme Court of New South Wales to the High Court of Australia, core civil liberties were systematically dismantled under the guise of public health. Only now are the full consequences of that judgment beginning to surface, but its legal and ethical reverberations will be felt for years – until robust, enforceable human rights protections are no longer optional, but fundamental.
A global jurisprudential reset is inevitable. As the world confronts the moral and legal aftermath of Covid-era governance, Australia’s recently published human rights report – Collateral Damage: What the Untold Stories from the Covid Pandemic Reveal About Human Rights in Australia – lands as a muted and delayed reckoning. Its release feels more like a retrospective apology yearning for appeasement than a meaningful intervention. Human rights need protecting when the abuse is unfolding – not after the dust settles. Charging across no man’s land once the guns have fallen silent may signal remorse, but not courage. A more honest title for the report might have been Damage Control.
Notably absent from the Commission’s findings were the deeply human costs of vaccine injury and death, the silencing and de-registration of doctors and scientists who dared question official narratives, and the religious discrimination that saw churches, synagogues, mosques, and temples closed – while brothels remained open. If that’s the science we were told to trust, then the phrase itself has been weaponised to be reflective of a society that is morally bankrupt.
Science, by its very nature, is rooted in critique, dissent, and open inquiry. To declare it unquestionable is to betray its core and yet people pushed this ideology. The Covid response has exposed something far deeper than policy failure – it has unveiled a shift toward moral and institutional decay. As the age of Enlightenment fades, we are slipping into a new era: not of progress, but of controlled consensus. The age of dis-Enlightenment is upon us, and it has arrived draped in the language of safety, while quietly eroding the pillars of liberty under the glare of lady justice with money and power dictating facts and policy.
Follow the Money, Then Build the Firewall
One of the largest blind spots in global biosafety is funding transparency. Billions flow from pharmaceutical giants, governments, and philanthropic foundations into research institutions. In many cases, these relationships are neither disclosed nor regulated when it comes to investigations.
A 2021 analysis by Nature found that many top university programs relied on foundation grants and pharmaceutical partnerships to remain viable. But these relationships can breed dependency, and dependency compromises independence.
It’s no longer enough to ask, ‘Is this lab safe?’ We must also ask, ‘Who is funding the people asking the questions?’.
The 10-year blackout rule – banning anyone who received industry or public health money within a decade from participating in review bodies – is a minimum standard if we are to rebuild public trust.
The Registry That Could Save the World
The proposed Global Pathogen Research Registry would be a revolutionary leap in transparency and biosafety. It would:
List all high-risk biological research projects globally
Mandate disclosure of funding, purpose, and biosafety protocols
Require independent audits and enforceable penalties for non-compliance
Be governed by a firewall-separated peer review board, free of conflicts of interest
Publicly available in real-time
Cannot be censored or redacted
It wouldn’t stop innovation – but it would make dangerous research accountable to humanity, not just to funders.
Conclusion: One Lab Away
The next pandemic could be one experiment away. One pipette. One gene sequence. One error in judgment.
If we fail to act now, we may be left only with hindsight – and headlines.
A global registry, strengthened international law, and strict independence measures are not radical. They are common sense. And they may be the last barrier between a free society and a future plagued by secrecy, bio-surveillance, bio-extortion and preventable catastrophe.
This isn’t cautionary – it’s catalytic. GLOBE is the call to conscience the world has been waiting for. The Global Law on Oversight of Bio-Experimentation (GLOBE) would enshrine the principle that no scientific body should be the judge of its own experiments. For too long, the same institutions that fund, approve, and conduct high-risk pathogen research have also been the ones investigating their own mistakes – if they’re investigated at all.
GLOBE flips the script. It demands firewalls between funders and reviewers, full transparency of experimental intent, and an independence clause to shut the revolving door between regulators and industry. Just as judges must step aside when conflicts of interest arise, science must recuse itself from self-policing when the stakes involve global health and freedom.
Why GLOBE? Because pandemics know no borders – and neither should bioethics.
It’s time for a treaty that doesn’t just respond to disasters, but prevents them. A global movement. A universal law. A new standard of integrity that remains in the public eye.
GLOBE: Because science without accountability is not progress – it’s peril.
