'Biosecurity risk': FBI recently found SARS virus in luggage from China

A Chinese biologist believed to have been carrying the SARS virus among other flu samples in his luggage was stopped by U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents in Detroit a little more than a year before the Chinese coronavirus outbreak, according to an FBI report.

Yahoo News reported the biologist told the agents a colleague in China had asked him to deliver the vials to a researcher at a U.S. institute.

However, upon inspection, the customs became alarmed, concluding the vials possibly contained "viable Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) and Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) materials," said the unclassified FBI tactical intelligence report obtained by Yahoo News.

The FBI concluded the incident and two other cases cited in the report were part of an alarming pattern, Yahoo News reported.

The bureau's Weapons of Mass Destruction Directorate "assesses foreign scientific researchers who transport undeclared and undocumented biological materials into the United States in their personal carry-on and/or checked luggage almost certainly present a US biosecurity risk," the bureau said.

The FBI report was issued more than two months before the World Health Organization learned of pneumonia cases in Wuhan, China, that turned out to be COVID-19. The incident appears to be part of a larger FBI concern about China's involvement with scientific research in the U.S.

Yahoo News noted concerns about Chinese biosafety are not new.

After the SARS outbreak in 2003, there were incidents of infections caused by laboratory accidents, including eight cases at the Chinese Institute of Virology in Beijing.

U.S. scientists, such as Richard Ebright, a professor of chemical biology at Rutgers University, have insisted there's "no basis" to suspect the novel coronavirus was constructed in a laboratory.

"It has none of the expected signatures that would be present for deliberate construction," he said, according to Yahoo News.

However, he said it's possible the pandemic was a result of poor biosecurity in China.

Some researchers speculate the virus jumped from wildlife to humans at a live-animal market. And Ebright pointed out that such wildlife viruses are collected in laboratories, including in Wuhan.

"Therefore, it’s also a possibility that this virus entered the human population through accidental infection of a lab worker carrying out field collection, or an accident by a lab worker characterizing the sample in a laboratory," he said.

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