The virus, named GX_P2V, attacked the brains of mice engineered to mirror the genetic makeup of humans, according to a study from China.
The mice in which the study was carried out are so-called “humanised” mice, which are genetically engineered mice with certain human genes. Then the researchers can try to imitate what can happen in the human body.
“This emphasizes the risk of GX_P2V infecting humans, and provides a unique model for understanding the disease-causing mechanisms of SARS-CoV-2-related viruses,” write the authors.
The deadly virus is a mutated version of GX/2017, a coronavirus variant that was reportedly discovered in Malaysian pangolins in 2017, three years before the pandemic.
Watch video: – I’m not crazy!
Dead with white eyes
All the mice infected with the virus died within just eight days, which according to the researchers was a “surprisingly” rapid death rate.
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GX_P2V had infected the lungs, legs, eyes, tracheas and brains of the mice, and the latter infection was severe enough that the animals eventually died.
In the days before they died, the mice had rapidly lost weight, had a hunched posture and moved extremely slowly.
Already eerily enough, the eyes of the mice had turned completely white the day before they died.
The study is to be the first of its kind to report 100 percent mortality in mice infected by the covid-19-related virus, which far exceeds previously reported results from another study, the researchers write.
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– The madness must be stopped
Francois Balloux, epidemiology expert at “University College London’s Genetics Institute”, calls the research “terrible” and “scientifically completely meaningless”, writes New York Post.
– I can’t see that you can learn anything of interest from forcibly infecting a strange breed of humanized mice with a random virus. On the other hand, I can see how something like this could go wrong. It is not clear from the preprint which biosecurity level and which biosecurity measures have been used in the research, he says.
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A preprint is a version of a scientific research article that precedes formal peer review and publication in a peer-reviewed scientific journal.
– The absence of this information raises the worrisome possibility that some or all of this research, like the research in Wuhan in 2016-2019 that likely caused the covid-19 pandemic, was conducted without the minimal biosafety containment and practices essential to research with potential pandemic pathogens, Balloux continues.
Dr. Gennadi Glinsky, retired professor of medicine at Stanford, says:
– This madness must be stopped before it is too late.
The new study does not appear to have any connection to the “Wuhan Institute of Virology” in China, which was at the center of theories about laboratory leaks in connection with the covid-19 pandemic.
During this summer, US intelligence services reported that they found no direct evidence that the laboratory leaked the coronavirus, but did not rule out the possibility that the virus came from another laboratory.
The origin of covid-19 is still not clear.
2024-01-18 19:50:54
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