Putting amateurs with no experience in charge of biosafety regulation and oversight is a sure way to make virology research less safe. Their preferred approach is disparaging people with actual expertise, rather than developing evidence-based policy that will actually stop “lab leaks.”

For example, Ed Hammond, now a senior policy advisor on biosafety in the office of NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya, has offered no regulatory insight or technical expertise, nor substantive criticism of virology. Instead he said that I’m “just a mouth (and a dirty one at that).”