The dangerous games conducted on viruses in laboratories continue to be carried out, despite heavy suspicions about the artificial origin of Covid19. And the manipulation of pathogens still generates monsters. This time the spotlight is not on China, but on a laboratory located in Boston, United States. On October 14, a pre-print study was published, conducted by researchers from Boston University's National Emerging Infectious Diseases Laboratories, one of 13 biosecurity level 4 laboratories, the highest, in the United States.
As can be seen from the scientific publication, which the Daily Mail reported exclusively, the scientists carried out a gain of function experiment, the technique to make viruses more aggressive by manipulating them in test tubes, by modifying the spike protein of the coronavirus detected in Wuhan at the end of 2019 by replacing it with the spike protein of the Omicron variant of Covid19. The result is an openly artificial new coronavirus, which the researchers call Omicron S, and which has been found to be far more lethal than the currently circulating pathogen. It was tested on genetically modified mice with the introduction of the human Ace2 receptor into their heritage. In these transgenic guinea pigs, we can read in the scientific paper that while Omicron causes a mild and non-fatal infection, the virus carrying Omicron S, the one with the modified spike, causes a serious disease with a mortality rate of 80%. In practice, eight out of ten mice infected with the new engineered virus died.
This gain-of-function experiment therefore produced a new pathogen that appears to be far more dangerous than the circulating Omicron covid, although the lethality found in mice is not necessarily the same as that found in humans. What is certain is that these are dangerous games that some researchers, in the secrecy of maximum security laboratories, continue to carry out, despite the alarms and condemnations of a large part of the scientific community.
The Daily Mail cites the reactions of some of the leading international experts: Shmuel Shapira, one of the leading scientists of the Israeli government, stated that this type of virus manipulation should be totally prohibited:
You are playing with fire.
Richard Ebright, a chemist at Rutgers University, New Jersey, hoped that supervision of these laboratory techniques would be strengthened:
It is particularly worrying that this new research by the United States government seems not to have been the subject of an analysis, mandatory by law, on risk-benefit, like the previous experiments on SARS-related coronaviruses conducted at the Wuhan Institute of Virology that could have caused the Covid19 epidemic.
David Livermore, a microbiologist at the University of East Anglia in the United Kingdom, joins the chorus of alarm about this type of research:
Given the strong probability that the Covid pandemic originated from the escape of a laboratory-manipulated coronavirus in Wuhan, these experiments seem profoundly unwise.
The excuse with which they are conducted is always the same: they are useful for devising strategies to help fight future pandemics. Although clearly the risk is more than anything else to trigger pandemics in the event of an accidental spill.
Gain-of-function experiments, i.e. manipulating viruses to make them more aggressive, have been the subject of criticism for years. In 2014, US President Barack Obama imposed a moratorium, but in 2017, with a government provision led by Donald Trump, the authorizations returned and these searches are still funded directly by the state.
The hypothesis on the artificial origin of Covid19, the spread of which has led to restrictions on individual freedom never seen in the last century, should have taught the world that certain experiments are dangerous, as well as immoral. And pathogens continue to be manipulated with the declared intent of creating ever more lethal biological bombs, for study and prevention purposes, they say. But the products of these experiments are biological weapons, invisible but lethal, and we can only hope that by mistake or, worse still, by deliberate order, they do not cross the threshold of the laboratories where they are created.
References:
https://www.1news.co.nz/2022/10/18/scientists-make-new-covid-variant-with-80-kill-rate-in-mice/
