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.<p>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.<p>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.