It's not clear to me that this story falls into the category of corrupt/insane/petty that a lot of recent actions seem to.

I don't know about this particular lab, but when someone was trying to build a BSL-4 in a dense urban neighborhood of Boston, there were a lot of protests, including by medical workers and scientists. It seemed there's a history of BSL-4 incidents, and the facilities aren't as secure as the salespeople claim.

So, it's conceivable that the stand-down is warranted. If so, a different question is whether safety is the goal, or it's merely a convenient pretext for some other goal.

"was told to stop all experimental work" - the word 'experimental' makes me wonder if the title may be hyperbolic. I don't infer from this story (article didn't feel right) that they will no longer be studying infectious diseases. Does anyone have more information on what the experimental work actually is? Or how it relates to the body of work carried out by NIAID.

“NIH has implemented a research pause—referred to as a safety stand-down—at the Integrated Research Facility at Fort Detrick. This decision follows identification and documentation of personnel issues involving contract staff that compromised the facility’s safety culture, prompting this research pause. During the stand-down, no research will be conducted, and access will be limited to essential personnel only, to safeguard the facility and its resources.”

Moss did not elaborate on the nature of the personnel issues..."

I'd be more willing to give them the benefit of the doubt if their MO wasn't to make unspecified and/or undefended accusations about persons, as a way to avoid being accountable for their agenda.

Research can broadly be divided into three categories:

1. Experimental research: Form a hypothesis. Create datapoints by some process: could be mixing chemicals in test tubes, giving patients enrolled in a study a medication, pointing a telescope at the sky, or going out to the Amazon to count bugs. Use those datapoints to confirm or refute the hypothesis.

2. Retrospective research: Form a hypothesis. Use data that already exists and is archived somewhere to confirm or refute the hypothesis.

3. Descriptive research: No hypothesis. Look at existing data and/or published research and comment on trends or the patterns that exist therein.

"Experimental" covers everything and anything you would do in a wet lab. You don't need a wet lab to do research of types 2 or 3 - you can do that in an office or at home. That said, I don't believe we have any confirmation that they used the word experimental in the actual order.

Interestingly China just recently called out Fort Detrick and it's research goals specifically in their COVID-19 origins response white paper over this previous incident:

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/05/health/germs-fort-detrick...

Now from this article:

> In an emailed statement provided to WIRED, Bradley Moss, communication director for the office of research services at NIH, confirmed the halt in research activity. “NIH has implemented a research pause—referred to as a safety stand-down—at the Integrated Research Facility at Fort Detrick. This decision follows identification and documentation of personnel issues involving contract staff that compromised the facility’s safety culture, prompting this research pause. During the stand-down, no research will be conducted, and access will be limited to essential personnel only, to safeguard the facility and its resources.

So it's not clear that this is the result of HHS ordering NIH to do anything specific or that it will be permanent or related to planned job cuts in the future. This article seems to conflate two separate stories into one confused narrative.