I seriously doubt that.
For those of you who don’t know, ATCC is basically a global clearinghouse for biological samples-they offer tissue culture lines, bacteria, viruses, etc. Researchers need these for a number of reasons, such as having positive controls for assays, or to be sure they’re using the same cells as another investigator whose work they want to replicate or expand upon. I’ve used them many times to get both bacteriophage as well as isolates of bacteria for my research projects. And they won’t ship to just some random person.
When I moved institutions and set up my new laboratory, on my first ATCC order, they contacted the director of biosafety at my institution to be sure my lab was equipped and ready to handle the organisms I had requested. When that was assured, we still had to establish a
Material Transfer Agreement in order for the items to actually be shipped-a legal document between ATCC and my university, signed by an “authorized representative” of my institution. It was only after jumping through all of these hoops that I was finally able to get the requested samples.
Even if someone had chosen to order Zika, an obscure, mostly-asymptomatic virus that until this outbreak was not associated with any serious ill effects, and perpetuated the “extremely creative fraud” mentioned by the Freethought Project...why? They’d need to initially infect themselves or others in order for the mosquitoes to subsequently become competent vectors of the virus. The mosquitoes would feed on them when there was adequate virus in the blood, and presumably the insects would then be released-to what end? To spread a previously-thought-relatively-harmless virus into a new population? Again, nonsensical.
[Updated: this doesn’t mean that “Rockefeller owns the patent on Zika virus,” as sites like this are claiming. As far as I can ascertain, there are no patents involving Zika. What it means is that the virus was deposited by Jordi Casals, who was an
eminent virologist and had a large collection of viruses that he accumulated throughout his career, including Zika (but many others,
as a search of ATCC shows). Rockefeller makes no money on this-in fact, now some journals require deposition of strains to ATCC or similar banks as a
condition for publishing.]
Here we go...
