(ORDO NEWS) — Boston University researchers combined the original Wuhan strain of coronavirus with Omicron and created a deadly version of the virus.
Scientists reassure the public, but most people are convinced that biologists are creating a new pandemic with their own hands.
The new virus, created by attaching the spike protein of the Omicron strain to the original SARS-CoV-2 virus, killed 80% of laboratory mice.
This makes it heavier than the Omicron variant, which did not kill any infected mice. However, the hybrid virus was still less deadly than the original Wuhan strain, which killed 100% of infected lab mice.
Kills 80% of those infected
Scientists at Boston University’s National Emerging Infectious Diseases Laboratory (NEIDL) created a chimeric virus to study how sub-variants of Omicron, first released in 2021, bypass immunity from past strains and still cause lower levels of severe infections.
After exposing mice to either a chimeric virus or a naturally occurring subvariant of Omicron BA.1, the researchers found that the mutated spike protein of the Omicron virus allowed it to evade immunity but was not responsible for reducing the severity of the infection.
Although the study was properly conducted in a biosecurity level 3 lab and approved by an internal biosafety review committee and the Boston Public Health Commission
There is controversy surrounding the study because the researchers did not coordinate the work with the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), which was one of the his sponsors.
After the publication of the results of the work, scientists also had to fight off accusations from people and the media that they had created a new deadly variant of the coronavirus.
“We want to address the false and inaccurate reports about Boston University’s COVID-19 research that surfaced in the Daily Mail today,” Boston University said in a statement.
“Firstly, this study did not aim to amplify the virus, which means that it did not amplify the strain of the SARS-CoV-2 virus and did not make it more dangerous.
In fact, in this study, the original strain was made even less dangerous by slowing down its spread.”
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