Lab Leak Investigation: African Swine Flu Outbreak in Spain Near USDA-Funded Lab

ASF is not dangerous to humans, but it is a “devastating viral disease that kills nearly all infected pigs and causes major economic losses to the pork industry worldwide,” according to a USDA research grant to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that was uncovered by the White Coat Waste Project (WCWP) and reported by The Highwire last month. The USDA Agricultural Research Service in Manhattan, Kansas, has also collaborated with this lab to study ASF.

The CISA-INIA said the Ministry of Agriculture could not rule out the original theory that wild boars ate a “contaminated foreign sausage sandwich” that was discarded in the trash. The European Union, including Spain, restricts pork imports from ASF outbreak areas.

On December 1, Catalonia’s agriculture minister Oscar Ordeig said, “The most likely option … is that cold cuts, a sandwich, contaminated food, could end up in a bin … and then that a wild boar would have eaten it and become infected.” There has been no evidence to support contaminated food, however. On December 5, the authorities announced they were investigating a potential lab leak, but IRTA-CReSA reportedly denied the lab leak hypothesis before authorities announced the investigation. The lab reportedly said, “Nothing alive comes out of here except the people who work there.” There are four other labs being investigated in the area.

Simon Wain-Hobson, emeritus professor of Virology at the Institut Pasteur in Paris, told The HighWire that there is absolutely no evidence to support the theory that a contaminated sausage started the outbreak. He added that it is “an unfalsifiable hypothesis, so a convenient scapegoat. Not a serious suggestion.” He added that the likelihood of a lab leak at a BSL3 lab is “Uncommon to rare, but not zero. So the more BSL3 labs you have, the greater the overall risk. This is why, in the nuclear field for years, the emphasis was on non-proliferation.”

Richard Ebright, Board of Governors Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Rutgers University and a board member of Biosafety Now, said this is another lab leak and explained potential ways a leak may have occurred. “For animal pathogens, routes of escape from a BSL-3/BSL-4 lab include release of inadequately decontaminated exhaust air (Lanzhou, China, in 2019-2020), liquid waste, or solid waste; contamination of shoes or clothes of lab staffers; escape of infected animals; and sale of infected animals or animal products,” Ebright explained.

Ebright also provided the following historical examples of lab leaks that happened in this manner:

-Inadequately decontaminated lab exhaust air, lab leak examples:

-Lanzhou, China, in 2019-2020 – Brucella BSL-3 Facility

-Sverdlovsk, USSR, in 1979 – Bacillus anthracis BSL-3 facility

 Inadequately decontaminated lab liquid waste, lab leak example:

-Pirbright, UK, in 2007 – Foot and Mouth Disease BSL-4 facility

“The situation is inherently Bayesian: the outbreak has already occurred, and we observe a triple coincidence — temporal, geographical, and genetic,” said Francisco de Asis, a Data Analyst in Spain and University Professor in Quantitative Methods. “The first carcass appeared very close to the facility; the virus is reported to be Georgia 2007, the same genotype used in the lab; and the group had just released a paper and a preprint involving that very genotype, reinforcing the temporal overlap. These are contextual priors, not proof. To my knowledge, no direct evidence has been made public in either direction.”

Spain is the second-largest exporter of pork products in the world, behind only the United States. In the area of Bellaterra, Catalonia, where the outbreak occurred, and the CReSA lab is located, there are five commercial pig farms within a 10 km radius. There are 34 breeding and production facilities within a 20 km radius of the outbreak epicenter.

While partners with regional trade agreements like China have only suspended imports from the Barcelona province, Japan, the Philippines, Malaysia, Mexico, Taiwan, and Thailand have closed all imports from Spain as a result of the outbreak. US Meat Export Federation Vice President for Economic Analysis Erin Borror said this is an opportunity for the US to gain some incremental increases in market share.

The HighWire reported recently that WCWP uncovered research being conducted at the Manhattan, Kansas, facility on a foreign tick-borne highly pathogenic disease called Crimean-Congo Hemorrhagic Fever (CCHF). One of the facilities is the new location of the lab that was once located on Plum Island, where FDA Commissioner Marty Makary said he is almost certain is responsible for the outbreak of Lyme disease that occurred while dangerous research was being conducted there by Willie Burgdorfer.

Kris Newby, author of Bitten: The Secret History of Lyme Disease and Biological Weapons, told The HighWire that the National Bio and Agro-Defense Facility should not have been moved to the middle of livestock country because of the risks to the country’s agriculture and economy.

Bryce Nickels, Rutgers Professor in the Department of Genetics and Founder of Biosafety Now, told The HighWire that he questioned the relocation of the Kansas facility to farm country because the US has a competitive advantage for having beef that is not contaminated by foot and mouth disease, which was eradicated from the country in 1929.

“It made no sense to me why politicians would push for moving dangerous research that could lead to infection of the U.S. cattle population into Kansas,” Nickels said. A Kansas-based farmer explained to him that international meat packing companies would have an incentive for the US market to also be contaminated.

Nickels said he believes the latest outbreak appears to be a result of sloppy labwork rather than a deliberate release, but added that he could never rule out that deliberate releases could happen for a number of different reasons.

“It’s very clear that one of the problems with research on dangerous pathogens is that there’s an incentive for there to be outbreaks in order for there to be funding for such research, so there’s this perverse incentive for outbreaks. If they occur, that leads to more enthusiasm for research on the topic.”

Last month, the first documented death attributed to Alpha Gal Syndrome was reported of a man in New Jersey. The syndrome is transmitted through Lone Star Ticks and causes a meat allergy. A journal article titled “Beneficial Bloodsucking” published in July 2025 argues that this syndrome can be utilized as a “moral bioenhancer.” The authors state, “We argue that if eating meat is morally impermissible, then efforts to prevent the spread of tickborne AGS are also morally impermissible.”

Ebright told The HighWire, “There is no documented example” of deliberately releasing a virus for the sake of utilizing a “moral bioenhancer,” but said “it would fall within the categories of–and is not substantively different from the documented examples of–use of a bioweapon for economic sabotage or policy advocacy.”

Ebright said one example of economic sabotage is “criminal gangs’ dispersal of ASFV-infected animals and ASFV-infected animal products on farms in China in 2019, motivated by a desire to profit from resulting market disruption.” He said one example of using bioweapons for policy advocacy is “US biodefense researcher Brice Ivins’ mailing of anthrax spores to politicians and journalists in the US in 2001, motivated by a desire to draw attention to bioterrorism and to restore funding for a terminated anthrax vaccine program.”

The potential for lab leaks is a real question in the pursuit of scientific advancement in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, in which the CIA and the FBI say the most likely source is the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which was conducting gain-of-function research on coronaviruses where the outbreak initially occurred. Ebright and Nickels have called the research conducted at the CReSA lab reckless.

“Getting a bottom-tier publication in a bottom-tier journal – a publication almost no one would read or cite – is a poor motivation for performing useless and reckless research that causes an outbreak requiring mass culling of wildlife and farmed animals,” Ebright wrote. “Every BSL-3 or BSL-4 bioweapons-agents lab is an invitation for false-flag deliberate release of a bioweapons agent. The easiest way to disrupt an economy or embarrass a government is to release a bioweapon agent on the doorstep of a lab that studies that bioweapon agent.

Wain-Hobson said, “Getting an efficient ASFV vaccine is a worthy goal. Would I support such work? Yes. The rider here is that biosecurity and containment are top-level, but accidents will happen – we can’t pretend otherwise.”

WCWP was the watchdog group that first revealed that the US was funding gain-of-function research in Wuhan. Justin Goodman, Senior Vice President of Advocacy and Public Policy for WCWP, said NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya has sent another $2 million for the Colorado bat lab that conducts research on BSL-4 viruses – Nipah and Sosuga, and BSL-3 viruses – MERS and SARS. The HighWire reported on this lab in May 2024, after WCWP uncovered details of the studies being conducted there. Bhattacharya has been criticized for continued backing of gain-of-function research advocate Jefferey Taubenberger in Dr. Anthony Fauci’s old role at NIAID and for continued funding of animal studies.