Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

By Daria Novak The current Wuhan Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic has focused much-needed attention on China’s dual-use bio-research programs. “Dual-purpose bioresearch refers to bioscience research that can be used for beneficial purposes or abused for harmful ends,” wrote four Chinese scientists from Wuhan last summer, according to a Journal of Biosafety and Biosecurity. One of the researchers, Yuan Zhiming, is director of the Chinese National Biosafety Laboratory and a researcher at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). The three other researchers include another WIV researcher, Ma Haixia, a Chinese Academy of Sciences researcher Liang Huigang, and Xiang Xiaowei of the Huazhong University of Science and Technology in Wuhan. Together they explained that China lacks a law solely dedicated to biosafety regulation, or a complete supervisory system for handling new biotechnologies. These scientists are not the only ones aware of the deficits in China’s biosafety regime...

Kudzu, everyone knows, is a perennial vine native to much of eastern Asia that destroys growth by wrapping itself around native plants and trees and shadowing them so that they do not receive the proper sunlight to grow and flourish. Unnecessary regulatory schemes are to the economy what Kudzu is to vegetation. The operative political rule should be – less is better. The COVID-19 virus, which for inexplicable reasons has resulted in a shortage of toilet paper on grocery shelves, will have long-lasting effects. Thankfully, grocery shelves empty of toilet paper will not be one of them. The shelves have been emptied by hoarders and not by an interruption in the supply chain. So, at some time in the future, when hoarders have had their fill of toilet paper, we may expect the bare shelves to be sagging with rolls and rolls and rolls of the precious product. At some time in the future COVID-19 will itself have petered out. We know this not from any assurances of politicians, th...