Learned nothing from the pandemic?: Chinese researchers experiment with deadly new Covid strain

class=”sc-cffd1e67-0 iQNQmc”>

A Chinese researcher isolated and described Covid-19 at least two weeks before Beijing acknowledged the virus’s existence.

Now published documents show that on December 28, 2019, Chinese virologist Lili Ren of the Institute of Pathogen Biology in Beijing uploaded almost the entire sequence of the Covid-19 structure to a database maintained by the US government. This is confirmed by documents from the US Department of Health, as reported by the Wall Street Journal.

The resulting Covid-19 pandemic would claim more than three million lives worldwide. Lockdowns brought entire economies and global travel and trade to a standstill.

China had already recognized the coronavirus at the end of 2019

According to the newspapers now published, Beijing first recognized the existence of the virus on January 11, 2020. The World Health Organization (WHO) was informed that day, the documents show. At that time, the new coronavirus lung fever was already spreading around the world. At a meeting on January 3, China remained silent on the virus.

“The extra two weeks could have been crucial,” the US newspaper writes, citing experts, “in helping the international medical community figure out how Covid-19 spread, develop medical defense measures and ultimately deal with to begin developing a vaccine.”

“Serious and fatal respiratory diseases in humans”

Dr. Ren had already described in the Chinese Medical Journal in May 2020 how samples were taken from five patients in a hospital in Wuhan, China, between December 18 and 29, 2019. The sequencing has confirmed that there is a new coronavirus that ’causes serious and fatal respiratory diseases in humans’.

The new information does not clarify whether Covid jumped from an infected animal to humans or whether it escaped during experiments in a laboratory in Wuhan. But in a new study similar to what happened in Wuhan five years ago, Chinese scientists are conducting experiments with a mutated strain of the coronavirus. In mice, the mutation is 100 percent fatal.

The deadly virus – known as GX_P2V – attacks the brains of mice that have been genetically modified to have a human-like genetic makeup. This is confirmed by a study published in Beijing last week.

Chinese researchers can’t do anything about it

The authors speak of a risk that GX_P2V “could spread to humans”. The deadly virus is a mutated version of a cousin of the coronavirus reportedly discovered in Malaysian pangolins in 2017.

All of the mice infected with the virus died a painful death within just eight days – a mortality rate that the researchers said was ‘surprisingly’ rapid.

Chinese virologists are working on a new coronavirus that leads to certain death in mice with human-like genes. Experts worldwide fear that Chinese laboratories do not have adequate safety measures.

Learned nothing from the pandemic?

This is not responsible science, the New York Post quotes Francois Balloux, director of the Genetics Institute at University College London and professor of computational biology. “I see nothing of vague importance that can be learned from forcibly infecting an alien race of humanized mice with a random virus,” Balloux said. “Conversely, I can imagine how much could go wrong.”

Richard Ebright, a chemist at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, complains that what is likely the cause of Covid was carried out without the necessary biosecurity measures.”

“Spillover risk”

Even the Chinese authors of the study emphasize the high risk of their work. They “underline” a “risk of spillover from GX_P2V to humans”.

There is no information about minimum security measures in their initial investigation report.

The fact that such research is taking place at all and is being published as if it were regular research shows that China appears to have learned little from the pandemic.

Source: Blick