Chinese lab creates mutant Covid-19 strain with 100% rapid kill rate in ‘humanized’ mice

Chinese scientists experimented with a mutant COVID-19 strain that’s 100 percent deadly to “humanized” mice, according to a new study.

When exposed to mice “engineered to reflect similar genetic makeup to people,” the COVID-19 strain GX_PSV attacked the mice’s lungs, bones, eyes, tracheas and brains, the New York Post reported following the study’s publication last week.

All the mice subsequently died within just eight days.

“In the days before their deaths, the mice had quickly lost weight, exhibited a hunched posture and moved extremely sluggishly. Most eerie of all, their eyes turned completely white the day before they died,” the Post notes.

The study is reportedly the first to discover a 100 percent mortality rate in mice for any COVID-19 strain. However, the study doesn’t offer any indication as to how the mutated strain would affect humans. Scientists still worry nonetheless.

“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 study’s authors wrote.

GX_P2V is reportedly a mutated version of GX/2017, a COVID strain discovered in Malaysian pangolins in 2017.

Since the study’s publication, a number of other scientists have cried foul, arguing that this was a pointless and potentially deadly study.

Take Francois Balloux, an epidemiology expert at the University College London’s Genetics Institute.

“I had a look at the preprint. It’s a terrible study, scientifically totally pointless,” he tweeted. “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 …”

In additional tweets, he reportedly added that the preprint he looked at “does not specify the biosafety level and biosafety precautions used for the research.”

“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 potential pandemic pathogens,” he continued.

Next up is Richard H. Ebright, a professor of chemistry and chemical biology at Ruger’s University.

Here’s how he responded to Balloux’s tweet:

Last up is Dr. Gennadi Glinsky, a retired professor of medicine at Stanford.

“This madness must be stopped before too late,” the doctor tweeted.

This sense of terror and disgust is also shared by the public.

Case in point:

Many believe the COVID-19 virus that wreaked havoc across the world in 2020 originated in a Chinese laboratory — one just like the lab where the GX_PSV mutant strain was created.

These same critics justifiably suspect the virus leaked from the laboratory, infected a nearby wet market, and then quickly spread to the rest of the world, causing massive problems.

What’s known is that the Chinese laboratory responsible for the leak had received funding from the U.S. National Institutes of Health.

Moreover, a federal watchdog later criticized the NIH for not properly conducting oversight on the Chinese laboratory.

“[A] report from the Office of Inspector General (OIG) of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) [found] ‘NIH did not effectively monitor or take timely action to address’ compliance problems,” Science magazine reported last year.

Vivek Saxena

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