Recently, an article from the Daily Mail revealed that Boston University had conducted tests on strains of Covid-19, which would have been crossed to create a new, more lethal one. The English daily claimed that the University had grafted Omicron’s Spike protein (BA.1) onto the original strain of Covid-19, to combine the contagiousness of the first with the dangerousness of the second, i.e. experiments on “the gain of function”. They added thatwith this mixture, 80% of mice infected during the study died. But is that really what happened?
Inevitably, this worries, especially since the mystery still hangs over the origin of this virus, which could have come out of a Chinese laboratory. The idea of making it more contagious and deadlier in the lab is terrifying. That said, that is not the purpose of the study and the data from it, not peer-reviewed and published in the journal Biorxivwould not have been correctly interpreted.
Boston denial
Boston University recalls that his research has been approved by the IBC, Institutional Biosafety Committee. Furthermore, before any study was conducted at NEIDL (University’s National Emerging Infectious Diseases Laboratories), many authorizations are required, especially in terms of security.
She denounces the “sensationalism” of the subject, which dismisses the real objectives of this study. So what exactly were those goals?
According to the researchers, their goal was to study Omicron’s Spike protein (BA.1) to understand if this variant was really less virulent, “simply because it doesn’t infect the same cells as the base strain”, says Ronald B. Corley, a NEIDL scientist. Remember that Omicron infects the lungs less than the original strain.
The interest of this research is also to study which part of the virus impacts the severity of the disease. That’s why, they explain themselves to be “interested in the part of the virus that dictates the severity of a disease a person will contract”, the Spike protein. But, they plead, they never tried to amplify its deadly or infectious action.
Furthermore, the mice on which the study was carried out are part of a very fragile family of rodents, which, infected with the original strain of Covid were already succumbing en masse (between 80% and 100% of deaths). Nothing extraordinary in the fact that they are still this time 80% dead… Moreover, the press release from Boston University still insists: the safety conditions were scrupulously respected. “The virus does not leave the laboratory in which it is studied”.
Sources: Daily Mail, Boston University, Biorxiv
