An American laboratory was looking for a particularly deadly Covid variant, which is causing some discussion in the scientific community. Artificial amplification of the virus obtained by scientists stems from the desire to find countermeasures to a possible future pandemic of an even more dangerous virus than the Wuhan strain. It is a “gain in function,” a series of laboratory-derived genetic changes that produce a new function or enhance an existing one. The latest experiment comes from Boston University’s National Emerging Infectious Diseases Laboratories. This is what the British tabloid Chron is talking about, revealing that American researchers have combined the Omicron variant with the original Wuhan strain.
The result is a virus that is 80% fatal to the mice that are designed to ingest it. According to the British days, the scientific community is very critical of this. “We are playing with fire, this practice should be banned entirely,” said Israeli scientist Shmuel Shapira in reference to gain-of-function, which is recently being re-used.
It’s not the only entry collected by the Chron. According to Richard Ebright, a scientist and chemist at Rutgers University, “It is imperative that U.S. government agency officials who have put the public at risk through repeated violations of established policies are held accountable.” David Livermore, Professor in Microbiology at the University of East Anglia in the UK, notes that it is likely “that the Covid pandemic originated in the escape of a laboratory manipulated coronavirus in Wuhan, these experiments appear very unwise”.
