Professor Shmuel Shapira, a leading scientist in the Israeli Government, told the Daily Mail that ‘This should be totally forbidden, it’s playing with fire.’
Experts saying this is the same type of situation that happened in Wujan, China when the gain of function research led to the Covid-19 pandemic. That research was funded in part by The National Institute of Health – which is also a major funder of the Biocontainment Laboratory at Boston University along with Anthony Fauci’s NIAID.
In the pre-print, scientists claim their research is an effort to find out what makes Omicron so transmissible attaching the Omicron spike protein to the original strain of Covid-19. What they found was that the resulting virus was five times more infectious than Omicron.
How many times did virologists say they were not making chimeric SARS viruses more deadly? How many???
Latest preprint shows they made a chimeric SARS-CoV-2 w/ Omicron S gene and ancestral SARS-CoV-2 backbone that showed 80% mortality in humanised mice. pic.twitter.com/KVYGTXPb7E
— Paul D. Thacker (@thackerpd) October 17, 2022
The new research has not been peer-reviewed.
“In…mice, while Omicron causes mild, non-fatal infection, the Omicron S-carrying virus inflicts severe disease with a mortality rate of 80 percent,” the researchers wrote, adding that while the spike protein is responsible for infectivity, changes to other parts of its structure are responsible for its deadliness.
The Daily Mail Reports:
The researchers also looked at the effect of different strains on human lung cells grown in the lab – which Covid latches on to before instructing healthy cells to make copies of itself. They found that the modified strain produces five times more viral particles than the original Omicron strain (which all the rodents survived).
This study provides important insights into Omicron pathogenicity. We show that spike, the single most mutated protein in Omicron, has an incomplete role in Omicron attenuation. In in vitro infection assays, the Omicron spike-bearing ancestral SARS-CoV-2 (Omi-S) exhibits much higher replication efficiency compared with Omicron. Similarly, in K18-hACE2 mice, Omi-S contrasts with non-fatal Omicron and causes a severe disease leading to around 80% mortality. This suggests that mutations outside of spike are major determinants of the attenuated pathogenicity of Omicron in K18-hACE2 mice. Further studies are needed to identify those mutations and decipher their mechanisms of action. –Biorxiv
