Boston University Doctors Create New COVID Variant that Has 80% Kill Rate

[LevelUP]

Sounds great until some knucklehead brings it home with them.

That already happened with COVID research less than 1 year ago and that person infected over 100 people. 

Why do labs keep making dangerous viruses?

https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2022/...-biosafety

Here are quote highlights from the Vox article. (Far Left Leaning)

Gain of function research - when viruses are purposefully manipulated to be more infectious or deadly.

They likely invented a virus with omicron’s infectivity and a lethality somewhere between that of omicron and that of earlier strains of Covid. That’s worrying, to say the least.

And it’s worth noting that “as contagious as omicron, only slightly less deadly than original Covid” is overall a virus that, if it were released into the world, could kill more people than either omicron or original Covid.

Mistakes can be made

The researchers behind this work were doubtlessly trying to help the world, but you don’t have to look very far back in history to imagine what could have gone wrong here. Last November, in Taiwan, a lab assistant working with Covid-infected mice was bitten by the mice, caught Covid — almost certainly from the lab, as it wasn’t circulating in Taiwan at the time — and exposed 110 people.

As with the new omicron research, the Taiwan work took place at a BSL-3 (biological safety level 3) lab.

Doing biology better

There is genuine scientific value to studying and altering viruses in a lab, whether to trace the origins of an outbreak, to figure out how a pathogen spreads, or to develop potential medical countermeasures. But you can get most of the scientific value far more safely while refraining from research that creates new deadly pathogens with pandemic potential or artificially enhances existing pandemic-potential pathogens.

Playing viral Russian roulette

Under the Obama administration, the National Institutes of Health — which funds most bio research — imposed a moratorium on so-called gain of function research.

But in 2017, the moratorium was lifted and replaced with the P3CO framework for evaluating the risks and benefits of research with pandemic potential.

Summary

If we don’t do better, then someday, we’ll get unlucky like Taiwan did less than a year ago, and our efforts to engineer more dangerous and contagious variants of Covid will succeed beyond our wildest dreams.

(Again the text in this post was all direct quotes from Vox, not my words)