Belarus (bbabo.net), - Scientists from Boston University (USA) announced the successful completion of work on the creation of a new variant of Covid-19. Combining the "original strain from Wuhan" and the "highly transmissible" omicron resulted in a variant with a lethality rate of 80%, according to a report published in BioRxiv.
The scientists explained that their "invention" "reliably overcomes vaccine-activated immunity" and causes "serious disease" - 80% of laboratory mice infected with it died during testing.
“Although our mutant strain is likely to be less deadly in humans than mice, it produces five times more viral particles in laboratory-grown human lung cells compared to the Omicron variant,” the American virologists write.
The news sparked outrage on American social media. People believe that scientists "played dangerously" and remind that a similar "gain of function" study at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China once led to a global coronavirus pandemic.
It was previously reported that the US funded these studies at the Wuhan Institute, although it is still unclear whether the specific coronavirus that caused the pandemic originated in the laboratory.
“Such experiments should be completely prohibited, this is playing with fire,” said Shmuel Shapira, the former head of the Israel Institute for Biological Research, commenting on the Boston experiments.
“How many times have virologists said they are not making chimeric SARS viruses more deadly? How???" asks reporter Paul Tucker.
It should be noted that the Boston team are not the only scientists returning to potentially dangerous research in the wake of the pandemic. The EcoHealth Alliance, the private company that funded much of the Wuhan Institute's performance improvement research through 2020, received a $650,000 grant last month to study "the potential for a future emergence of bat coronavirus in Myanmar, Laos and Vietnam."
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