The Daily Mail revealed that scientists at Boston University created a Covid strain that combined Omicron with the original Wuhan strain and found that it killed 80% of mice.
The lead scientist for the Israeli government has condemned this saying, “This should be totally forbidden, it’s playing with fire.”
This is gain of function research, the type that was so hotly debated around the start of the pandemic. Researchers took the spike proteins of Omicron and merged them with the Wuhan strain because the Omicron virus had so many spike proteins, which is what makes it so contagious. When they gave the merged virus to mice, 80% of the mice died. But when they exposed the mice to standard Omicron, they all lived.
The authors of this study say that more research should be done because they still have questions about mutations and they’d like to move on from mice to primates to get a better sense of how this affects humans. Maybe they should not do that?
