Chinese scientists are experimenting with a mutant Covid-19 pressure that has a 100 per cent kill streak in “humanised” mice.
The lethal virus — often called GX_P2V — attacked the brains of mice that had been engineered to replicate comparable genetic make-up to individuals, in accordance with a examine shared final week out of Beijing.
“This underscores a spillover risk of GX_P2V into humans and provides a unique model for understanding the pathogenic mechanisms of SARS-CoV-2-related viruses,” the authors wrote.
The lethal virus is a mutated model of GX/2017, a coronavirus cousin that was reportedly found in Malaysian pangolins in 2017 — three years earlier than the pandemic, The NY Post reviews.
All the mice that had been contaminated with the virus died inside simply eight days, which researchers famous was a “surprisingly” fast demise charge.
GX_P2V had contaminated the lungs, bones, eyes, tracheas and brains of the useless mice, the final of which was extreme sufficient to finally trigger the demise of the animals.
In the times earlier than their deaths, the mice had shortly misplaced weight, exhibited a hunched posture and moved extraordinarily sluggishly.
Most eerie of all, their eyes turned fully white the day earlier than they died.
Although terrifying, the examine is the primary of its sort to report a 100% mortality charge in mice contaminated by the COVID-19 associated virus — far surpassing beforehand reported outcomes from one other examine, the researchers wrote.
More importantly, the outcomes of the examine don’t clearly point out how it will influence human beings.
Francois Balloux, an epidemiology skilled on the University College London’s Genetics Institute, slammed the analysis as “terrible” and “scientifically totally pointless.”
“I can see nothing of vague interest that could be learned from force-infecting a weird breed of humanised mice with a random virus. Conversely, I could see how such stuff might go wrong,” the professor wrote on X.
“The preprint does not specify the biosafety level and biosafety precautions used for the research,” he continued.
“The absence of this information raises the concerning possibility that part or all of this research, like the research in Wuhan in 2016-2019 that likely caused the Covid-19 pandemic, recklessly was performed without the minimal biosafety containment and practices essential for research with a potential pandemic pathogens.”
Professor of chemistry and chemical biology at Ruger’s University Richard H. Ebright backed up Balloux’s considerations with a easy: “concur.”
Dr Gennadi Glinsky, a retired professor of drugs at Stanford, wrote: “This madness must be stopped before too late.”
The 2024 examine doesn’t seem to have any ties to China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology, which was the centre of lab leak theories surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic.
US intelligence companies over the summer time discovered no direct proof that the lab leaked the coronavirus, although didn’t rule out the chance that the virus got here from a distinct one.
The origin of COVID-19 continues to be unclear.
This article initially appeared in The NY Post and was reproduced with permission.
Source: www.news.com.au
