Just in case you thought Covid wasn’t bad or dangerous enough, Boston University is working to increase its lethality. In its recent defense of gain of function, the university claims that it is not the dangerous.
Oh really? The work is summarized in the research paper:
The recently identified, globally predominant SARS-CoV-2 omicron variant (BA.1) is highly transmissible even in fully vaccinated individuals and causes an attenuated disease compared to other major virus variants known to date. The omicron spike (S) protein, with an unusually large number of mutations, is believed to be the main driver of these phenotypes. We generated chimeric recombinant SARS-CoV-2 encoding the Omicron S gene in the backbone of an ancestral SARS-CoV-2 isolate and compared this virus to the naturally circulating Omicron variant. Omicron-S-carrying virus robustly evades vaccine-induced humoral immunity, mainly due to mutations in the receptor-binding motif (RBM), but unlike naturally occurring Omicron, replicates efficiently in cell lines and primary-like distal lung cells. While Omicron causes mild, nonfatal infection in K18-hACE2 mice, Omicron S-carrying virus causes severe disease with a mortality rate of 80%. This indicates that while Omicron vaccine escape is defined by mutations in S, the main determinants of viral pathogenicity lie outside of S.
Added bold italics
In plain language, they took the omicron variant of Covid-19, which is highly transmissible and can infect even fully vaccinated people, and altered one of the genes in the virus to make it much more dangerous. Subjects were mice. Mice infected with normal omicron had nonfatal infections.
The work used Omicron’s spike protein and the key finding was that pathogenicity (the ability to kill) occurs outside of the S or spike protein. The new variant infected targets that had been vaccinated against Omicron and caused severe disease mortality at a rate of 80%.
Unlike other scholarly research work that relies on outside funding, Boston University’s published work never mentions how the work was funded. And the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), which actually funded the work, says it wasn’t aware the research was aimed at modifying the coronavirus.
If you were hoping that the 2019 coronavirus outbreak would have taught the scientific community about lab safety, that doesn’t seem to be the case. The paper, titled “Role of the Spike in the Pathogenic and Antigenic Behavior of SARS-CoV-2 BA.1 2 Omicron,” was attended by 23 senior scientists and undoubtedly countless laboratory assistants.
Some of the scientists are concentrated in the greater Boston area (including at Harvard University), one at the University Hospital in Erlangen, one at a branch of the Cleveland Clinic in Florida, one at the University of Wisconsin and one at a medical center in Mainz, Germany.
NIAID plus the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and two Department of Defense agencies are the same organizations that have funded coronavirus research in China, mostly at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, an institute under the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
The Wuhan Institute previously worked with the Galveston National Laboratory in the United States, the Center International de Recherche en Infectiologie in France, and the National Microbiology Laboratory in Canada.
In 2021, two Chinese scientists from the Microbiology Laboratory in Canada were fired. At least one of these scientists had visited the US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID), the government’s most sensitive biological laboratory, which houses highly classified research.
All of these institutes, including that of Wuhan, conduct clandestine research on bioweapons. USAMRIID and Wuhan are known as Level 4 (BSL-4 or Biosafety Level 4) labs, the safest for conducting hazardous research, especially gain-of-function. The National Emerging Infectious Diseases Laboratories at Boston University is also a Level 4 (BSL-4) laboratory complex.
How dangerous is this job? In the case of China, the US government was so concerned about the Wuhan Institute of Virology that it twice sent representatives there in 2018 and interviewed senior “bat” scientist She Zhengli.
In 2019, the US Centers for Disease Control (CDC) inspected and failed the USAMRIID lab in Fort Detrick, Maryland. The laboratory there was closed for months so that a clean-up campaign could take place and identified risks could be remedied.
A number of private American laboratories and organizations, as well as the private company Eco Health Alliance, were also directly involved in the laboratory research in Wuhan. Despite its successes in funding Wuhan and working with China, the Eco Health Alliance received a new grant from NIAID for coronavirus research in recent weeks.
It may be important to understand what causes pathogenicity in Covid – the alleged rationale for Boston University’s research. It is now understood that Covid vaccines do not prevent the disease from infecting vaccinated individuals but do reduce the worst symptoms associated with Covid.
This comes at a price, including myocarditis (inflammation of the heart muscle), particularly in teenage boys. If pathogenicity is found elsewhere in Omicron (and perhaps, but not for sure, in other Covid variants), other types of vaccines may be developed. However, gain of function is a particularly dangerous path.
Gain-of-function is “medical research that genetically alters an organism so that the biological functions of gene products can be enhanced. This may include altered pathogenesis, transmissibility, or an altered host range, i.e. the types of hosts that a microorganism can infect.”
Boston University would need to clarify that their research did not improve biological functions by altering genes in the virus, or explain why they altered the pathogenesis of the virus (namely, making it far more deadly). If Covid itself was originally made in a lab, making it capable of infecting humans, Boston University has made it even more dangerous.
Boston University insists the functional research was no win at all. It is claimed that the NIAID money was only used to purchase the specialized equipment needed for the research and not to fund the scientists – and therefore NIAID did not fund the project at all.
The second argument is disingenuous hair-splitting to justify not reporting the research to NIAID. NIAID grants require recipients to submit progress reports, and at least one such report was submitted before the work was completed. It’s hard to imagine how such a report could be written without explaining what the work was about.
This problem can be solved very easily: NIAID should publish the interim report it received from Boston University and publish the original grant documents to help us understand if NIAID has been misled or failed in oversight or if the funding is a program that served to hide the profit functional research with covid.
Even without information on the grants and progress report, the fact remains that the US government, particularly NIH and NIAID, bears responsibility for funding dangerous research.
Follow Stephen Bryen on Twitter @stevebryen
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