Boston University scientists claim they’ve created a new, lethal Covid-19 variant with an 80% mortality rate by combining the original Wuhan strain with the highly-transmissible Omicron variant of the coronavirus.
The researchers from Florida and Boston conducted the ‘gain-of-function’ research – a term describing the alteration of a pathogen to enhance its potency – at Boston University’s National Emerging Infectious Diseases Laboratories.
Following a series of similar experiments first thought to have started the global pandemic that began in China, the scientists isolated the spike protein of the Omicron variant and combined it with the backbone of the original strain of the virus that circulated in early 2020.
The paper, which has yet to be peer-reviewed, stated that this newly created virus inflicts serious disease on laboratory mice – 80% of whom died during testing- and robustly escapes vaccine-induced immunity.
Although compared to the Omicron variant, it produced five times as many virus particles in lab-grown human lung cells, researchers believe their mutant strain would likely be less deadly in humans than in mice.
News of the research, which echoes experiments thought to have created the virus in the first place, has caused outrage since it’s eerily similar to the US-funded ‘gain-of-function’ research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China that led to the global Covid-19 pandemic though it is still unclear if the specific coronavirus that caused the pandemic originated in the lab.
To add insult to injury, the United States awarded a $650,000 grant last month to the private company responsible for much of the Wuhan Institute research, EcoHealth Alliance, to study the potential for future bat coronavirus emergence in Myanmar, Laos, and Vietnam.
Commenting on the Boston experiments, the former Israel Institute for Biological Research head Shmuel Shapira described them as playing with fire that should be totally forbidden.
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