On weekday mornings, Kimberly Dodd, a virologist and veterinarian, drives to a marina in Old Saybrook, Connecticut. She parks alongside her colleagues’ cars and, flashing her badge at the guards in a plexiglass booth, walks aboard a white passenger ferry. Inside, her co-workers recline in their seats, reading, listening to headphones, or napping. The ride to Plum Island, where they work, takes about thirty minutes.

Plum Island is situated at the mouth of Long Island Sound. Low to the sea and covered with vegetation, it’s a three-mile-long isosceles triangle, its tail pointing eastward. The island is home to more than two hundred species of birds, including kestrels, great horned owls, and little blue herons. The Plum Island Animal Disease Center, where Dodd works, also hosts a rotating cast of around forty or fifty animals—mostly cattle and pigs—that do not leave alive.

According to guidelines issued by the Centers for Disease Control, the Plum Island lab operates at biosafety level three. So-called BSL-3 labs can handle serious or lethal pathogens for which vaccines or treatments may be available, such as anthrax, plague, or the newly emerged coronavirus, which causes the disease COVID-19. In the past, Dodd has worked in labs designated BSL-4, the highest level, which can handle airborne pathogens that may be untreatable. In 2014, she travelled to West Africa to combat an outbreak of the Ebola virus. In her current job, as the director of Plum Island’s Foreign Animal Disease Diagnostic Laboratory, she studies diseases that could destroy the livestock industry, such as foot-and-mouth and African swine fever.

This article was produced in a partnership between The New Yorker and the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.

After disembarking from the ferry, Dodd boards a shuttle bus, which takes her to an office building attached to a larger white laboratory complex. She visits her office, which has a view of the water, then begins the process of entering the lab. She passes through a floor-to-ceiling security turnstile manned by two guards. She leaves her clothes, shoes, and jewelry in a locker room, then, in a second room, changes into scrubs and cotton socks; she may also, in a third room, put on rubber boots, protective glasses, double gloves, and a full-body suit made of white Tyvek. Before entering the “dirty” rooms, where pathogens or animals are present, she checks an airflow indicator to make sure that air is being pumped in, rather than flowing out. Later, when Dodd leaves the lab, she removes the protective gear and takes a protocol-mandated five-minute shower. She and her colleagues are prohibited from bringing open food containers on the ferry home; if they’ve worked in one of the animal rooms, they must quarantine themselves from livestock for a minimum of five days.

Plum Island’s safety measures and isolated location are meant to prevent the diseases studied there from escaping and infecting American herds. Stopping the spread of foot-and-mouth disease is particularly difficult: it’s capable of travelling on a trouser leg or a mud-splashed tire. After an outbreak in 2001, British farmers were forced to kill some six million sheep, cattle, and pigs, burying their carcasses in mass graves or burning them in pyres. If the disease were found among American cattle, the beef industry, worth about sixty-eight billion dollars annually, would immediately shut down.

On sunny days, Dodd sometimes spends the trip home on the ferry’s roof deck, watching the birds, the boats, and the island’s receding shore. She won’t have this picturesque commute forever. In the next few years, Dodd and most of the other scientists on Plum Island will relocate to a new facility, which is now under construction. Unlike Plum Island, the National Bio and Agro-Defense Facility (N.B.A.F.) won’t be geographically isolated. It will be located in Manhattan, Kansas, a college town in the middle of cattle country.

N.B.A.F. is part of a broad expansion in the number of American high-containment labs, which began after the 9/11 terrorist attacks and shows no sign of slowing. The attacks, and the anthrax letters that followed, galvanized spending on biosecurity; the resulting growth in BSL-3 and BSL-4 facilities expanded our research capacities. But the expansion has also created its own risks. No lab is perfect, and even well-run facilities suffer breaches. The new labs are spread out geographically, and no central authority regulates them or monitors their proliferation. The decision to build N.B.A.F. in Manhattan, which is home to Kansas State University, was deeply contentious. Supporters argued that its location at a major agricultural campus could speed its response to new threats. Critics maintained that building an animal-disease lab in such close proximity to ranches and feedlots was reckless and increased the chances of a catastrophic outbreak.

The new coronavirus has plunged us into an infectious-disease crisis with which we are struggling to cope. As we respond, the years-long debate over N.B.A.F. raises worrying questions about American biodefense policy. Will more labs help us fight outbreaks? Or are we building too many labs in too many places? Who, if anyone, is responsible for making sure that labs are well-run—or for saying “stop”?

In September, 2008, a black, red, and white billboard appeared over Highway 18, one of the main thoroughfares leading in and out of Manhattan. In black letters too large to miss, the sign read “No NBAF Germ Lab!” It had been erected by Bart Thomas, a third-generation Manhattanite and the second-generation owner of Thomas Outdoor Signs & Graphics. The year before, Thomas had heard that Kansas State University was in the running to host the replacement for the Plum Island Animal Disease Center. In New York, Senator Hillary Clinton and Representative Timothy Bishop, whose district includes eastern Long Island, were opposing plans to upgrade the current Plum Island lab from BSL-3 to BSL-4. As a result, the Department of Homeland Security (D.H.S.) was searching for other sites.

Thomas read that the proposed BSL-4 lab would handle Japanese encephalitis and the Nipah and Ebola viruses, which have high mortality rates in people. It would also study foot-and-mouth disease and be equipped to handle swine fever and avian flu—diseases capable of wiping out whole pork and poultry operations. Thomas, whose son and grandchildren also live in Manhattan, was mystified and alarmed by the idea that specimens of these diseases might be brought from an isolated island lab to his hometown.

As word of the new lab spread, a small opposition group coalesced—an alliance of neighbors, churchgoers, professors, ranchers, and other concerned citizens. Sylvia Beeman, an artist and former research assistant in the Virology and Agronomy Departments at Kansas State University, circulated a petition opposing the lab. Bill Dorsett, a carpenter and environmental activist, wrote letters to the editors of the Manhattan Mercury and the Topeka Capital-Journal. The group attended public forums held by Kansas State and D.H.S.—sometimes at conspicuously inconvenient times and locations. (One was scheduled in a building surrounded by construction.) At one meeting, Thomas pressed officials about why they thought N.B.A.F. should come to Manhattan. One official explained that, while an accident at Plum Island could affect twenty-nine million people, an accident in northeast Kansas would affect a vastly smaller number.

D.H.S. was weighing “community acceptance” as one of its site-selection criteria; the activists hoped to show that Manhattanites weren’t accepting. Dissent had been effective in other places. In Tracey, California, where Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory had proposed locating the lab, a local grassroots organization helped generate more than seven thousand calls and letters opposing it. A local patent lawyer also spearheaded a successful resistance movement at the University of Wisconsin. By 2008, D.H.S. had winnowed its longlist of possible N.B.A.F. destinations to six finalists. Besides Plum Island—perhaps opposition to an upgrade could be overcome—the other four were Butner, North Carolina (part of the Research Triangle, population 2.2 million); San Antonio, Texas (population 1.5 million); Flora, Mississippi (part of greater Jackson, population 583,080); and Athens, Georgia (population 211,802). Manhattan—a low-rise city of detached homes and historic limestone buildings—was by far the smallest urban area on the list, with fifty-five thousand residents.