News

Mar 02, 2024

UW

Steve Ackerman is Vice Chancellor for Research and Graduate Education at UW–Madison. (Note: UW–Madison has been engaged in ongoing discussion with members of Wisconsin’s Congressional delegation since

Steve Ackerman is Vice Chancellor for Research and Graduate Education at UW–Madison.

(Note: UW–Madison has been engaged in ongoing discussion with members of Wisconsin’s Congressional delegation since the USA Today opinion piece published on April 11, 2023. Find more information about an April 25 letter from Wisconsin’s Republican Congressional delegation to the U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services and the directors of the CDC and NIH.)

In a USA Today opinion piece published on April 11, 2023, featuring an excerpt from a forthcoming book, author Alison Young broadly and harmfully asserts wrongdoing on the part of the University of Wisconsin–Madison that is not rooted in the facts, including those provided to her by the university and in public documents in her possession.

Young focuses on two biosafety incidents that took place in the laboratory of Yoshihiro Kawaoka in 2013 and 2019. She uses them to mischaracterize and distort the university’s handling of research involving pathogens, its efforts to mitigate risk and its compliance with research oversight requirements. The opinion piece also cherry-picks information to paint an inaccurate picture of what took place and obscures the full scope of communications between the university and federal agencies.

The outcome is a story that irresponsibly sensationalizes a topic of immense public concern in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. It targets a lab with a stellar safety record and history of strong accountability, and it seeks to undermine critical research performed for societal benefit, including the development of drugs and treatments for some of the world’s most intractable infectious diseases.

Here are the actual facts about each incident that the reporter omitted, distorted or otherwise mischaracterized:

2013 needle stick

2019 PAPR (personal air purifying respirator) disconnection

In her opinion piece, the reporter uses words and phrases designed to mislead and leaves out key details that informed the university’s decision-making, all of which are available in the documents the reporter possessed and in responses from the university, consisting of many pages of written correspondence. It is simply untrue that the university provided little information in response to her questions.

Young also claims the university attempted to avoid providing timely or adequate information about the incident to federal regulators even as the record she draws upon shows university officials communicated early and regularly with their federal counterparts beyond what was required.

Kawaoka’s lab, the Influenza Research Institute, is one of the most public research labs of its kind in the world, offering tours during its annual maintenance period to journalists, elected officials, public health officials, law enforcement officers and emergency responders. UW–Madison values transparency. The university regularly shares stories about the lab’s research, as we are proud of this important work and its societal benefits. It’s an extreme distortion to call its work anything but open and publicly available.

The university has developed a new website, which serves as an informational resource and record repository for research of this kind on campus. Ultimately, these practices show the university does not hide or downplay incidents in its research labs, but rather is a leader in safe and transparent pathogen research.