| The civilian world was quite aware of the incident; they just mostly swallowed the cover story whole. A Harvard prof (Matthew Meselson) went to Russia to investigate, and came back with a public report agreeing that the anthrax came from tainted meat. Obviously some people doubted that, but until the fall of the USSR there was no incontrovertible evidence, just the same circumstantial patchwork as we have for SARS-CoV-2 now. Even closer to the SARS-CoV-2 case, the 1977 flu pandemic killed ~700k people and near-certainly arose from a research accident, probably a failed vaccine trial: > The 1977-1978 influenza epidemic was probably not a natural event, as the genetic sequence of the virus was nearly identical to the sequences of decades-old strains. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4542197/ That article argues that vaccine trial accident doesn't count as a "lab accident", which seems like legalistic wordplay to me; but I believe the historical context is good. But in 1978, the WHO wrote: > Laboratory contamination can be excluded because the laboratories concerned either had never kept H1N1 virus or had not worked with it for a long time. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2395678/pdf/bul... It took decades for the consensus to change, and there's still been no official admission (though note the unverified personal communication from C. M. Chu via Peter Palese in Gronvall's paper, 27 years after the accident). |