Apparently Boston University developed a COVID strain with 80% lethality. As The Daily Mail notes:
Boston University scientists were today condemned for 'playing with fire' after it emerged they had created a lethal new Covid strain in a laboratory. DailyMail.com revealed the team had made a hybrid virus — combining Omicron and the original Wuhan strain — that killed 80 per cent of mice in a study. The revelation exposes how dangerous virus manipulation research continues to go on even in the US, despite fears similar practices may have started the pandemic. Professor Shmuel Shapira, a leading scientist in the Israeli Government, said: 'This should be totally forbidden, it's playing with fire.' Gain of function research - when viruses are purposefully manipulated to be more infectious or deadly - is thought to be at the center of Covid's origin. A Chinese laboratory located just miles from the first cluster of cases carried out similar research on bat coronaviruses. But the practice has been largely restricted in the US since 2017. Dr Richard Ebright, a chemist at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, told DailyMail.com that: 'The research is a clear example of gain of function research. He added: 'If we are to avoid a next lab-generated pandemic, it is imperative that oversight of enhanced potential pandemic pathogen research be strengthened.'
This is an insane act. Labs at places like BU are NOT secure Level IV facilities. One could just get a cleaning person have access and we are off and running. Did Fauci and his team fund this monstrosity?
Needless to say in my opinion someone should do something to stop these people.
If one reads the paper it states the funding as follows:
This work was supported by Boston University startup funds (to MS and FD), National Institutes of Health, NIAID grants R01 AI159945 (to SB and MS) and R37 AI087846 (to MUG), NIH SIG grants S10-OD026983 and SS10-OD030269 (to NAC), Peter Paul Career Development Award (to FD), and BMBF SenseCoV2 01KI20172A (AE) and DFG Fokus COVID-19, EN 423/7-1 (AE).
which is Fauci's funding site and the abstract states:
We generated chimeric recombinant SARS-CoV-2 encoding the S gene of Omicron in the backbone of an ancestral SARS-CoV-2 isolate and compared this virus with the naturally circulating Omicron variant. The Omicron S-bearing virus robustly escapes vaccine-induced humoral immunity, mainly due to mutations in the receptor- binding motif (RBM), yet unlike naturally occurring Omicron, efficiently replicates in cell lines and primary-like distal lung cells. In K18-hACE2 mice, while Omicron causes mild, non-fatal infection, the Omicron S-carrying virus inflicts severe disease with a mortality rate of 80%. This indicates that while the vaccine escape of Omicron is defined by mutations in S, major determinants of viral pathogenicity reside outside of S.
Now if that is not "gain of function" I really may not understand the term. Also work like this must be done in a Level-4 bio facility and to my knowledge only Broad has something close to that capacity. It is a highly secure and monitored facility and there are limited numbers in the US. So where was this work done?
This sounds like a disaster ready to happen!
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