States Hide and Kill Biodefectors

Defections from secret biological programs are sometimes handled not by legal process or scientific review but by operational secrecy—relocation, evidence destruction, and extra‑legal threats or killings. Those practices both impede outside verification of risky research and put would‑be whistleblowers at extreme personal risk. — Calls attention to a policy gap: international biosafety and whistleblower regimes must account for states' willingness to use clandestine and violent measures to hide biological programs.