Last week, my colleague Mary Chastain reviewed an exclusive by the UK Daily Mail about researchers at Boston University creating a Franken-Covid strain using the Omicron spike protein (which makes attaching to lungs easier for the virus) with a “wild type” covid virus.
The Daily Mail is now reporting that a government laboratory in Maryland is planning to create a strain of monkeypox that is more lethal in experiments with mice by swapping the genetics between two different strains of monkeypox.
The team wants to equip the dominant clade – which mostly causes a rash and flu-like symptoms – with genes from another strain that causes severe disease.They hope the experiment will reveal how different genes make monkeypox more deadly, and spur the development of better drugs and vaccines for humans….The latest monkeypox study is being funded by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), a research arm of National Institutes of Health (NIH).But the modified virus ‘poses an exceptionally high risk’ to the public if it accidentally leaks, according to Dr Richard Ebright, a microbiologist at Rutgers University in New Jersey.
Science initially reported this research and set off alarms among scientists familiar with the studies.
If a more potent version of the outbreak strain accidentally escaped the high-containment, high-security lab at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), it could spark an “epidemic with substantially more lethality,” fears epidemiologist Thomas Inglesby, director of the Center for Health Security at the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health. That’s why he and others argue the experiments should undergo a special review required for especially risky U.S.-funded studies that might create a pathogen that could launch a catastrophic pandemic.But it’s not clear that the rules apply to the proposed study. In a 2018, a safety panel determined it was exempt from review. Monkeypox did not meet the definition of a “potential pandemic pathogen” (PPP), the panel decided, because it didn’t spread easily.Now, with monkeypox widespread, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) is planning to reexamine the work, but it still might not qualify as “enhancing” a PPP, the agency says. That’s because the study will swap natural mutations, not create new ones, so it is not expected to create a monkeypox strain more virulent than the two already known.
While the current strain of monkeypox is not virulent, currently, SIX Americans are dead after being infected during the most recent outbreak in this country.
Six people who tested positive for monkeypox – two in New York City, two in Chicago, one in Nevada and one in Maryland – have died, local health departments have confirmed.The New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene said it was “deeply saddened by the two reported deaths, and our hearts go out to the individuals’ loved ones and community.”“Every effort will be made to prevent additional suffering from this virus through continued community engagement, information-sharing and vaccination,” the NYC DOH said.The two Chicagoans who died after testing positive for monkeypox had multiple other health conditions, including weakened immune systems, according to the Chicago Department of Health (CDPH).
And while 6 out of 21,500 people is not a statistically significant number, it is astonishing that any reasonable scientist would intentionally create strains that would increase this number by any fraction.
Our researchers have to start planning their work by asking, “Should I do this experiment? More oversight on this type of research should be a priority for our next Congress and our next President.
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