MERS cover-up
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By Oh Young-jin
Have you forgotten about the deathly panic that was triggered by the onset of Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) last year? To jog your memory, it started in May and brought the nation to a standstill for fear of the insidious contagion. Thirty eight of 186 patients in the top-rated Samsung Medical Center and 15 other hospitals ended up dead.
Here is one unreported case that will give you back your goose bumps.
On one day in October, a virologist working for a joint venture research center, whose name you can easily recognize, boarded a flight departing from Seoul for a major European city.
In her carry-on that she took to the cabin with her were three separate samples of the MERS virus.
It was an official trip but she didn’t tell her employer that she was carrying the samples.
As a matter of fact, she stole the samples from her own lab, entering the storage area without logging herself in. Footage from the surveillance camera showed her inside.
More importantly, she didn’t declare it at Incheon International Airport or to the airline she was flying on. Under international regulations, she was required to have hazardous material carried by air cargo and to inform the airline about the contents. For this kind of hazardous cargo, the Korean authorities have to decide whether to allow it to travel outside the country and the authorities of the state of arrival should give their permission after being made aware of the materials and the travel itinerary.
All the rules were broken.
The result was the risk of immediately endangering the lives of passengers and the spreading the virus through secondary and tertiary contagions. It was not clear whether the samples were incapacitated or not. If the vials carrying the samples were ruptured, potentially she could have infected many passengers because the confined atmosphere of the cabin provides all the right conditions for the virus to be spread by air and phlegm.
It has yet to be established whether any passenger from that flight or those whom she came into contact with later contracted the disease.
The chilling thing is that the scientist who broke all pertinent rules is neither a mad scientist nor a novice. She is supposed to be a U.S.-trained virologist who worked at the U.S. National Institute of Health and was trained in handling deadly pathogens by the FBI and U.S. Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC); and led the pertinent safety committee in the institute in question. Her theft of the samples was made known after the probe started in January 2016. Her boss was lied to and misled to believe that all procedures were adhered to.
She also acted very strangely when she arrived at her destination, the European lab.
When her contact was not there, she left the samples with a secretary. It was not clear whether the secretary was told about the contents or if proper handling procedures were observed.
Did the authorities in both countries come to know of this serious incident?
There appears there was a cover-up attempt in Korea or in Europe.
Two Europeans _ the head of the institute and his chief virologist _ didn’t report this regulatory breach to the authorities and failed to carry out an investigation. The head of the European institute was being replaced for reasons that may or may not be related to the incident.
The Korean virologist emailed her European counterpart about leaving the samples and copied it to her boss, ensuring that all procedures were followed to the letter.
When the board of the Korean lab was informed of the incident, the chairman told the institute president to keep his mouth shut, telling him that if it was known to the outside, it would be like saying goodbye to any budget increase.
After it was proved that she lied, the institute president, her boss, fired her and the Korean government sent investigators to the lab. The head investigator said that she should be in jail but no action was taken, obviously, considering that it was at the height of MERS crisis.
This whistle-blower’s account has been used in my column on two premises: the lessons of this incident are very important in handling any epidemics and key facts will be checked thoroughly about people, names of institutes and others that are not fully identified. The follow-up pieces with key information may be forthcoming, depending on further investigation.
The whistle-blower is a virologist and claimed that the MERS virus in Korea had mutated during the MERS crisis, which was denied by the authorities at the time. Early this year, the government corrected itself and admitted that it had indeed mutated.
In a way, the government has a need not to tell everything because, in the case of the MERS crisis, it could have caused greater panic. In the post-crisis follow-up measure, it is expected to come clean about the things they keep secret because it serves as an education process to inform the public, which is indispensable in making the right decisions in the future.
By keeping the public in the dark, the government either thinks light of the taxpayers’ ability to learn, or more regrettably, sticks to the anachronistic thought that it is not the servant of the people but their master. We want to break that presumptuous attitude of the government, and hope this case shows it.
Oh Young-jin is The Korea Times’ chief editorial writer. Contact foolsdie5@ktimes.com or foolsdie@gmail.com.