Intercept article about lab accidents

I am tempted to down vote your response but have held off because I'm not able to get a good confirmation or answer to the questions I have. That said, my concerns with the response are:

1. Just because private labs don't have to report to NIH that none, or even many, don't.
2. A quick search seems to suggest multiple federal agencies are involved with lab safety at various levels.
3. It's not clear if your complaint is really more about a particular database (NIH's) that overall reporting of lab accidents Or perhaps put differently, about some consolidation of reporting databases.
4. Your hypothetical starts with the assumption that no reporting of accidents by private labs exists. It is not clear that is true.
5. Your reference to the Gates Foundation seems like it may be arguing from a special case and then attempting to generalize in appropriately.

Additionally it appears the lead off incident in The Intercept's story is not actually a good example:

The needle pierced through both sets of gloves, but the student saw no blood, so she washed her hands, removed her safety equipment, and left the lab without telling anyone what had happened. Four days later, she ran a fever, and her body ached and convulsed in chills.

That is not a problem with reporting requirements (regardless of to which authority) but failing to follow reporting requirements. More regulation does not solve that problem.

Note, none of this is to say improvements are not possible, or perhaps even needed. But starting from an incomplete map sees like a good way to run the ship aground.

We don't (so far as I can tell) know whether the reason why private biological labs haven't ended up in the article is

• because there aren't very many of them
• because they actually have better safety practices and therefore don't often have bad accidents
• because they tend not to work on dangerous things and therefore don't often have bad accidents
• because, although they have lots of accidents, they don't have to report them in the same ways as government ones do
• something else I haven't thought of

but in any case it remains true, so far as I can see, that (1) the article presents (I'm guessing because it has) absolutely no evidence of any biosafety failures at private labs, but (2) it tries to insinuate some sort of connection between biological lab accidents and "tech billionaires", and I think that's a slimy thing to do.

(I think private biological labs ought to be subject to some regulation, including having to report major safety incidents. I do not know exactly what they are currently required to do and mistrust the spin put on it by the article, and therefore have no opinion on whether in fact they should be regulated more stringently than they currently are. My finger-in-the-wind guess is that they probably should be. I mention all this merely to clarify that it's not the conclusion I'm objecting to here.)

Do Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg run their own private biological research labs? (Asking the question is not a lightly-obfuscated way of saying I think they don't; I don't know what they do.)

So far as I can tell, Jim Walton doesn't fund anything much (though maybe I just didn't look hard enough). My point wasn't about the activities of the specific billionaires I mentioned; maybe Bill Gates is more than averagely interested in biological research. It's that it's not any more true that "your favourite tech billionaire could ..." than that "your favourite person from a super-rich family could ..." or "your favourite hedge-fund billionaire could ..." or "your favourite oil baron could ..." or whatever.