The World’s Most Dangerous Guessing Game
Updated
Three thousand, six hundred, twenty-five. That is not a case count. That figure represents the number of high-containment Biosafety Level-3 and Level-4 laboratories now identified worldwide. More specifically, there are 3,515 BSL-3 labs and 110 BSL-4 labs that handle pathogens capable of flattening cities and rewriting history. Yet, and this should concern everyone, detailed public information on pathogen and location work is only available for 955 of the BSL-3 labs. That is the polite way of saying what Nicolas Hulscher stated bluntly on LinkedIn: that most of these facilities don’t want anyone to know where they are or what they are doing. And the real kicker? Let’s talk about the United States, because America isn’t just on the list—we practically are the list. A recent mapping study reports that the U.S. accounts for 47.1 percent of the world’s BSL-3 laboratories. Nearly half. In one country.
So, what is the governance model of this frightening scenario? Because knowing “there are rules” is not sufficient. Neither is “trust the system” nor “it’s classified.” And after the nightmare that humanity was subjected to during the COVID-19 pandemic, neither is the blind assurance of “we’ll alert those that need to know if there are leaks.” A newly published study in the Journal of Public Health backs up these concerns, opening with the acknowledgement that there is no international organization with a comprehensive register or global oversight of BSL-3/BSL44 labs. What?
That’s right. There exists a worldwide network of facilities capable of amplifying catastrophic risk, and there is no unified registry, no standard baseline, and no consistent global framework to track these labs. There isn’t even the equivalent of a public fire code. Meanwhile, real-world punchlines arrive regularly. Recently, in Las Vegas, police investigated a suspected “biolab” inside a home, linked to the owner of an unauthorized lab case in California. The police reported vials with unknown liquids in refrigerators, and the FBI joined the case.
Remember when we were told that the only thing we had to fear was misinformation? Now, before those walking around with blinders on try to spin concern over these labs as “anti-science,” it is crucial to note that, historically, high-containment labs have served legitimate functions, including diagnostics, surveillance, research, and countermeasures. Thus, the question is not whether a country should have capacity. The bigger question becomes what happens when capacity becomes an industry, and when secrecy becomes the business model? Because secrecy is unacceptable and has very real consequences.
A scoping review in The Lancet Microbe examined publicly reported laboratory-acquired infections and pathogen escapes around the world between 2000 and 2021. The review identified lab-associated infections in 309 individuals involving 51 pathogens. Those numbers are real, published in a literature review. Even the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has highlighted those eye-opening findings and pointed out the obvious problem: if these figures are in public records, what is missing from the record?
Which brings us to the money. To understand why the biolab networks keep expanding, look no further than the funding pipelines. In the United States, “high-containment” is not just a public health capability; it’s a federally financed ecosystem. NIH—especially NIAID—has spent decades funding biodefense and emerging infectious disease research infrastructure, including biocontainment facilities and networks built specifically to support high-risk work. Once these labs exist, they don’t sit idle. They require ongoing operational support, upgrades, specialized staff, and a continuous pipeline of projects to justify the overhead. In plain terms: capacity creates demand, and demand attracts funding.
Then there is the countermeasure market. Here, in this lucrative arena, the government doesn’t just sponsor science. No indeed. It helps create a buyer. Project BioShield was designed to accelerate research, development, and purchase of medical countermeasures against CBRN threats, explicitly using federal authority to incentivize and procure products. This is not inherently sinister; it’s a structure. But structures have gravity. If procurement and preparedness are built into the funding model, then the research, trials, validation, and containment labs become part of a self-reinforcing loop. In other words, threats justify countermeasures, countermeasures justify infrastructure, and infrastructure justifies more funding. Add the national security aspect, and the biolab possibilities are endless.
Meanwhile, oversight is not the neat, centralized safeguard the situation deserves. U.S. government watchdogs have warned about fragmented oversight and the lack of comprehensive, consistent standards across the federal high-containment ecosystem. And when research drifts into the category of enhanced potential pandemic pathogens—the kind of work that can, in theory, generate “oops” moments with global consequences—the U.S. relies on the HHS P3CO framework for pre-funding review.
The official story about these dangerous labs is that there is a “robust” process that balances benefit and risk. But make no mistake, the unofficial reality is that Americans have been asked to accept enormous stakes with very little visibility into how decisions are made, what gets approved, and what gets waved through. And globally, the oversight picture is even more uneven. The Global Health Security Index tracks “dual-use research and culture of responsible science” as a biosafety/biosecurity indicator, which is a diplomatic way of admitting that many nations either lack durable oversight structures or don’t present them with transparency.
Sure, the good old World Health Organization (WHO) recently urged nations to move towards stronger laboratory biosecurity guidance and risk management, as reflected in a 2024 update. Still, while guidance certainly sounds useful, it is neither enforcement nor transparency. It is also not a registry and holds no one accountable. Thus, the deeply uncomfortable reality remains. Specifically, we are living under a global biolab expansion that has outpaced public consent, standardized oversight, and transparency. These facts don’t necessarily mean every lab is a villain—although after COVID-19 crippled the world, the waters are murky—but they do mean the system is built to behave like one. Think about that.
If nearly half of the world’s BSL-3 labs are in the United States, then Americans—of every political stripe—should be demanding a simple baseline: a transparent national accounting of where these labs are, what biosafety level they operate at, and what categories of agents they handle, with narrowly tailored redactions where security truly requires it. “Trust us” can’t be the default setting for an infrastructure this consequential. Because when thousands of high-containment labs are scattered across the planet, and most don’t publicly disclose what they do, it doesn’t just create “preparedness.” It creates a standing invitation for the next crisis—and an excuse to monetize the response.
