The Chinese government passed a “biosafety law” on Sunday, with new procedures and restrictions set to take effect in April. Among other measures, the law ostentatiously increases the criminal penalties for medical facilities and individual staffers who “conceal, falsely inform, delay or omit the reports of infectious diseases.”
China’s state-run Global Times admitted there was some room for improvement in “biosafety governance” after the coronavirus pandemic that raged out of Wuhan, China, to cripple the entire world:
The law aims to improve China’s capacity for biosafety governance in preventing and controlling major risks in the field of biosafety, including outbreaks of infectious diseases involving animals and plants, and biosafety in microbiology laboratory settings, experts said.
It comes following controversies on biological labs’ management in China and the problems of the distribution of power and responsibility for different government authorities revealed during the COVID-19 epidemic.
For example, the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which has Asia’s highest-level biosafety lab, has been at the center of controversy with some questioning its possible links to the outbreak of COVID-19.
An aspect of the new law spotlighted by the Global Times is a greatly increased financial penalty for reselling experimental animals. One of the many theories for the origin of the coronavirus pandemic speculates that contaminated lab animals were sold for quick cash as meat in the now-infamous “wet markets” of Wuhan.
“The challenges that we have faced in ecology and human health and the pandemic that the whole world is still fighting against all acted as a high alert for us, that biosafety has to be raised to a position of national security and protected by the law,” a deputy for China’s National People’s Congress (NPC) told the Global Times.
Deutsche Welle (DW) reported on Sunday that the new Chinese law includes more extensive protections for “whistleblowers who disclose information about public health emergencies as part of wider efforts to improve its handling of disease outbreaks.”
“Under the new biosecurity law, anyone who conceals information, fails to file reports or prevents others from reporting infectious diseases could be given warnings or suspended. In the case of an emergency, health workers can under the new legislation report health risks directly to the local government and would not be punished if information turned out to be false,” DW elaborated.
The Chinese government’s oppressive abuse of early whistleblowers in the Wuhan coronavirus epidemic was a major domestic and international scandal.
As DW observed, much of the new biosafety law reads like damage control, an effort to reassure foreign business partners that lessons have been learned from the Wuhan disaster – without actually admitting the Chinese government did anything wrong.
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