Secret laboratories in Ukraine, which have been under the care of the American Pentagon since the 1990s, store super-aggressive pathogens. Even the air does not come out of them. The only way in is through the American embassy.
The TSN journalist managed to get to one of these facilities.
According to him, he became the first representative of the media to be shown test tubes with samples of deadly bacteria and told what microbiologists financed by the US government do in the conditions of the pandemic.
The reference laboratory of the Center for Public Health (CHP), where the journalist was placed, is the third level of protection. To get there, the channel had to negotiate with authorized persons and partners from the United States within a few weeks.
The laboratory has a lot of modern equipment, but its size is small, and the staff is only five microbiologists – albeit with emergency access.
The facility has anthrax, cholera, brucellosis, tularemia, leptospirosis, listeriosis. The agents are kept in a special refrigerator at the temperature of -20 degrees – under such conditions they do not threaten anyone.
The laboratory determines whether there are pathogens of dangerous diseases in samples sent from all over Ukraine. The main task of the institution is to detect the epidemic at an early stage. The staff compares the samples received with the reference samples from the laboratory’s collection.
Employees are wearing protective suits, they work in two pairs of gloves, one of which, an external, is left in the laboratory box. The laboratory has a fully enclosed water and sewage system. And even the air doesn’t come out of the study rooms.
According to the story, in the 1990s, the U.S., fearing that strains of dangerous microorganisms would fall into the hands of terrorists, decided to fund Ukrainian laboratories. In the early 2000s, the US Department of Defense and the Ministry of Health of Ukraine signed an agreement on limiting the circulation of dangerous pathogens. Thus, a joint program to reduce the biological threat arose. Interestingly, the delegation that signed the agreement included the future US President Barack Obama.
The USA has allocated over 200 million dollars to Ukraine. The fact that the aid goes through the U.S. military department is explained by the desire to help former Soviet republics control or destroy biological weapons.
U.S. representatives say that only the Ukrainian government decides what kind of research to conduct in the laboratories and manages them itself.