This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website.

Boston University denies the research qualifies as gain-of-function research as the Alpha strain’s lethality was reduced from 100% to 80% — but the Alpha strain did gain function, namely immune escape, which it didn’t have before.

By Dr. Joseph Mercola

Story at a glance:

  • Less than two months ago, scientists funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and Dr. Anthony Fauci’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) announced they’d resurrected the Spanish flu virus through reverse genetics.
  • Now, scientists at Boston University report they’ve engineered an Omicron strain of SARS-CoV-2 with an 80% lethality in mice. The new hybrid was created by extracting spike protein from the Omicron BA.1 variant of SARS-CoV-2 and attaching it to the original Wuhan Alpha strain.
  • The research was funded by four grants from the NIH/NIAID, but because those funds were supposedly “earmarked” primarily for equipment, they did not clear the viral engineering portion of the experiment with the NIH. The NIH is reviewing the case to determine whether the University violated rules for enhanced potential pandemic pathogen (ePPP) research.
  • Boston University denies the research qualifies as “gain of function” research as the Alpha strain’s lethality was reduced from 100% to 80%. However, the Alpha strain did gain function, namely immune escape, which it didn’t have before. The immune-evading properties came from the Omicron spike.
  • The likelihood of SARS-CoV-2 assembling itself into a Wuhan Alpha strain with Omicron spike protein “in the wild” is just about nil, as the Wuhan strain has mutated out of existence already. Were it not for these madmen, we would never have had to worry about this kind of recombination.

Less than two months ago, we reported scientists funded by the NIH and Dr. Anthony Fauci’s NIAID have resurrected the Spanish flu virus through reverse genetics.

Disturbingly, the scientists appeared frustrated by the fact that the recreated virus failed to kill the macaque species selected for the experiment, even at the highest doses tested.

They argued a more dangerous version of the Spanish flu virus must be created in order to develop better vaccines against it. This despite the fact that, until they resurrected this virus, it no longer existed in nature and posed zero threat to mankind.

It kind of reminds me of a Mary Shelley quote, the author of “Frankenstein,” who in 1818 stated:

“Frightful must it be; for supremely frightful would be the effect of any human endeavor to mock the stupendous mechanism of the Creator of the world.”

Massively lethal Omicron hybrid has now been engineered

Now, we come to learn that mad scientists at Boston University’s biosafety level 4 (BSL4) laboratory have engineered an Alpha/Omicron hybrid strain of SARS-CoV-2 with an 80% lethality in mice.

In the video above, John Campbell reviews this paper. He, like many others, are calling on the U.S. government to immediately close down this kind of research, and to destroy all the Frankenstein viruses already created. If they don’t exist in a lab somewhere, then they cannot escape.

Considering SARS-CoV-2 was most likely concocted in a lab, just like this hybrid, the fact that they continue tinkering with it to make it more lethal is indeed mind-bogglingly reckless.

What’s to prevent this souped-up hybrid from escaping and wiping out mankind? Sure, BSL4 labs have the tightest safety precautions, but that is no guarantee the virus won’t get out (especially if someone intentionally wants it out).

There have been plenty of lab leaks in the past, and as discussed by The Lancet COVID-19 Commission chairman Jeffrey Sachs in the video at the end of this article, evidence suggests SARS-CoV-2 emerged from a U.S.-backed research program in China.

Granted, effects on mice are not directly translatable to humans, but since SARS-CoV-2 appears particularly adapted to infecting humans, these results are certainly cause for concern.

And again, the likelihood of SARS-CoV-2 somehow reassembling itself into a Wuhan strain with Omicron spike protein “in the wild” is just about nil. Why? Because the original Wuhan strain has vanished from the environment.

It has mutated out of existence already and been replaced by a series of new variants. So, the chance of the first, original strain getting mixed with one of the last — in nature, by itself — is beyond remote. Were it not for these madmen, we would never have had to worry about this kind of recombination.

Yet here we are, facing the possibility of an unimaginably deadly coronavirus — thanks to scientists who continue to act without moral compass. Just because something can be done doesn’t mean it should be done. As noted by Steve Kirsch:

  • “Presumably there is some benefit to creating a new strain of SARS-CoV-2 that has a case fatality rate (CFR) of 80% (up from the average 0.2% CFR for the current variants) and is highly contagious. I’m baffled as to what it is. …
  • “Here’s an idea how fast it could spread. Look at the slope of the purple curve … that’s Omicron. This is from a CDC paper. So expect the virus to spread everywhere in about a month. How fast will it wipe out the entire US population if released? It depends on how quickly the virus kills humans.”
Credit: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

How this souped-up hybrid was created

To create this new bioweapon, the scientists extracted spike protein from the Omicron BA.1 variant of SARS-CoV-2 and attached it to the original Wuhan Alpha strain. Of the lab mice infected with this reengineered virus, 80% died.

Mice infected with the regular Omicron strain experienced only mild symptoms and none died, while lethality from the original Alpha strain was 100%.

Mutations in the Omicron spike protein is what makes it so much more infectious than previous variants, while mutations in other parts of the virus have rendered it far milder than the original, which caused unique problems such as blood clots. Mutations in the Omicron spike protein have also given it significant immune-evading capabilities — which were carried over to the new hybrid in this experiment.

By combining the more infectious spike protein from Omicron with the far more dangerous Alpha virus, they’ve created what can easily be described as a biological superweapon. As reported by the Daily Mail:

Scientists call for end to gain of function insanity

The Daily Mail goes on to quote a number of scientists and experts who recognize the absolute folly of engaging in this kind of research:

  • “Professor Shmuel Shapira, a leading scientist in the Israeli Government, said: ‘This should be totally forbidden, it’s playing with fire.’ …
  • “Dr. Richard Ebright, a chemist at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, told DailyMail.com: … ‘The research is a clear example of gain of function research of concern and enhanced potential pandemic pathogen (ePPP) research.
  • “‘It is especially concerning that this new US-government ePPP research — like the previous US-government ePPP research on chimeric SARS-related coronaviruses at Wuhan Institute of Virology that may have caused the pandemic — appears not to have undergone the prior risk-benefit review mandated under US-government policies.
  • “‘If we are to avoid a next lab-generated pandemic, it is imperative that oversight of ePPP research be strengthened.
  • “‘It is imperative that the existing polices mandating prior risk-benefit assessment of ePPP research be followed, and it is imperative that officials at US-government agencies who repeatedly have placed the public at risk by repeatedly violating the existing policies be held accountable.’ …
  • “Prof David Livermore, a professor of microbiology at the UK’s University of East Anglia told DailyMail.com: ‘given the strong likelihood that the COVID pandemic originated from the escape of a lab-manipulated coronavirus in Wuhan, these experiments seem profoundly unwise.’”

The Daily Caller also published scathing rebukes of the research. For example, Justin Goodman, senior vice president of advocacy and public policy at White Coat Waste Project told them:

  • “[Dr. Anthony] Fauci and other mad scientists need to be stopped before they cause another pandemic by recklessly supercharging deadly viruses in wasteful taxpayer-funded animal experiments … Stop the madness.”

‘The dumbest possible thing’

In an Oct. 17 article, Jeff Childers, an attorney and the president and founder of Childers Law firm, offers the following review of Boston University’s latest experimentation:

  • “Try to imagine the dumbest thing the public health experts could do at this point. Allow that the PHE [public health emergency] folks do stupid stuff all the time, so you have to think big. No, BIGGER. Think even dumber than whatever you’re thinking right now. The DUMBEST POSSIBLE thing.
  • “On Friday [Oct. 14], BioRxIV naively published a blandly-named study titled ‘Role of spike in the pathogenic and antigenic behavior of SARS-CoV-2 BA.1 Omicron.’
  • “There are 23 scientists credited with helping create the study, and the acknowledgements identify it was funded by a major grant from the NIH/NIAID.
  • “The study provides a detailed, step-by-step recipe for how to genetically enhance the Omicron virus to make it vaccine-resistant, lung-penetrable, and 80% lethal.
  • “They didn’t even wait till the first pandemic was over! They’re so excited for a doomsday virus, and so impatient with Mother Nature, that they are going to just manufacture it themselves, through gain-of-function research that should be so toxic it gets you hounded out of your career and driven into a life of humiliating obscurity. …
  • “These mad scientists and generous government grant-approvers know better than anyone that we JUST went through a global pandemic almost certainly caused by a virus that was produced by gain of function research to ‘enhance’ its transmissibility and pathogenicity, which LEAKED OUT OF A LAB.
  • “And they know it’s been illegal to conduct gain of function research in the U.S. since the Obama Administration. Why, oh why, are these criminals, I mean scientists, still allowed to tinker around with this kind of explosive material?
  • “Why haven’t we ALREADY passed laws criminalizing ALL gain of function research? … And WHY is the government still PAYING FOR gain of function research, or whatever obtuse euphemism they are using these days to disguise the fact that it’s ‘gain of function research’?
  • “Have we learned NOTHING from the Wuhan lab leak? Hey, lawmakers: LABS LEAK!! This is the kind of lesson we really, really don’t need to learn again. … But … thanks to our witless ‘health agencies,’ we — taxpayers! — are funding our own destruction.”

Boston University denies gain of function

For their part, Boston University (BU) denies that the experiment is gain-of-function — a tactic previously employed by Dr. Anthony Fauci, who also funded this study — or that it made the original virus more dangerous, which is true to a point.

The lethality of the Alpha virus went from 100% lethality to 80%, so the lethality, in mice, was reduced. However, the Alpha virus also gained the ability to evade the immune system, which could potentially make it more dangerous in humans, and this is something the researchers have downplayed.

As explained by infectious disease epidemiologist and microbiologist Marc Lipsitch in a lengthy Oct. 18 Twitter thread, the research is “unquestionably gain of function” because:

  • “The wildtype ‘backbone’ virus gains immune escape from the insertion of the Omicron spike, in ways that the paper describes in detail. That is gain of function.”

You could also argue they made Omicron more lethal, although the objection to that argument would be that only the spike protein was used.

Was gain-of-function framework circumvented?

Questions have also arisen about whether the research was properly supervised. While the experiment was reviewed and approved by the institutional biosafety committee of BU’s National Emerging Infectious Diseases Laboratories and the Boston Public Health Commission, it was apparently never cleared with the NIH.

According to BU director Ronald Corley, it wasn’t cleared with the NIH because the agency didn’t fund it. Yet the paper clearly states the work was funded by not just one but four different NIH grants (R01 AI159945, R37 AI087846, NIH SIG grants S10-439 OD026983 and SS10-OD030269).

“He’s lying. Brazenly,” Ebright commented in a tweet, referring to Corley.

As reported by STAT News:

  • “In response to questioning from STAT, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which had awarded two grants to the research group, said … that it should have been informed about the nature of the work beforehand, in order for a review to be conducted.
  • “Emily Erbelding, director of NIAID’s division of microbiology and infectious diseases, said that is the policy set out in what’s known as the P3CO framework, which lays out the rules for work that could lead to enhancement of dangerous pathogens. …
  • “Some funding from NIAID went towards work that might be considered foundational to the questioned research. Corley said the team used some of the federal funds to develop a system for making plasmids it would need to do the later work.
  • “He acknowledged it can be difficult to see where lines are drawn, when research groups are using different pots of money to fund their work. ‘It is a murky world, but in our view because the funding was not supporting the work that was supported in this paper, that it wasn’t necessary to report it to NIH,’ he said.
  • “STAT asked the NIAID if it was satisfied with Boston University’s response. The agency’s response … did not directly answer the question, though it indicated the situation is still being investigated.
  • “‘NIH is examining the matter to determine whether the research conducted was subject to the NIH Grants Policy Statement or met the criteria for review under the HHS Framework for Guiding Funding Decisions about Proposed Research Involving Enhanced Potential Pandemic Pathogens (HHS P3CO framework),’ the statement said.”

Erbelding reportedly only found out about the research after reading about it in the media.

According to the Daily Mail, she “admitted feeling uneasy about the type of research the grants had been used to fund — given the lingering questions about the role of virus manipulation studies and the origins of COVID” and said she “wished” they’d notified the NIAID about their work.

In another interview, Erbelding stated:

  • “What we would have wanted to do is to talk about exactly what they wanted to do in advance … [and then] we could have put a package forward for review.”

Boston University lambasted for ‘demonstrably false’ denials

As noted by Ebright, BU’s claims that the research was not gain-of-function “are demonstrably false and should be deeply embarrassing.” Lipsitch also has concerns about the University’s denials.

Lipsitch writes:

  • “The statement from BU is disturbing in several ways. First, it denies that this is GOF [gain of function]. It is GOF. If meant sincerely, this is disturbing from the institution that did the research because it provides prima facie evidence that institutions are not equipped to self-regulate. …
  • “Second, the statement reflects a culture of compliance rather than responsibility: because the NIAID funding was for equipment rather than the specific experiments, BU states it doesn’t need to report the research to NIH. I’m no lawyer but likely they are right. …
  • “In seeming contradiction to that, the BU statement says ‘If at any point there was evidence that the research was gaining function, under both NIAID and our own protocols we would immediately stop and report.’ Is there an obligation to report or no?
  • “Finally, BU seems to be saying in that statement that high lethality is only for mice, not humans, so nothing to worry about. This is misguided and hard to know how one could say it. SARS-CoV-2 has caused havoc in humans with <1% infection-fatality rate.
  • “High lethality in mice is used … as a proxy for severity in humans. … No one cares if Omicron can kill a mouse, except as a marker for severity (>1 order of magnitude lower) in humans. If not a proxy for human phenotype, spare the mice and stop doing those experiments. …
  • “Has BU shown that they are capable of self-regulation, assessing both the real risks that might be created and documenting that they considered them and found them minor compared to benefit: no.
  • “They are in full denial mode from their public statements. Did they consider whether safer experiments could answer some or all of these questions well enough to accomplish what was needed? If so, [there’s] no evidence thereof.”

Fauci’s final splurges before leaving office

As detailed in “Why Is Fauci Continuing to Fund EcoHealth Alliance?” before stepping down from his position as NIAID director and overseer of U.S. bioweapons research in December 2022, Fauci made sure gain-of-function research to create more potent bioweapons would continue for some time after his departure.

Not only was the featured Omicron experiment funded, but he also lined up five years’ worth of additional funding for the most controversial and suspect organization of all — EcoHealth Alliance.

EcoHealth was a key participant in the risky gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses at the WIV, which is now suspected of having played a role in the creation of SARS-CoV-2.

Fauci has spent hours in the Congressional hot seat answering questions about his funding of that research — which, by the way, also bypassed the P3CO framework, on top of skirting an outright federal ban on gain-of-function research, which was in force at the time.

EcoHealth’s role in COVID-19 is so suspect, Iowa Sen. Joni Ernst recently introduced the “Defund EcoHealth Alliance Act,” which specifies that “No funds authorized or appropriated by federal law may be made available for any purpose to EcoHealth Alliance Inc, including any subsidiaries and related organizations that are directly controlled by EcoHealth Alliance Inc.”

Despite all of that, Fauci recently gave EcoHealth another $3.3 million in additional funding to analyze “the potential for future bat coronavirus emergence in Myanmar, Laos and Vietnam” and “rapidly supply viral sequences and isolates for use in vaccine and therapeutic development, including ‘prototype pathogen’ vaccines.”

Loads of gain-of-function research going on

In late October 2021, we also reported that the U.S. Agency for International Development had given a $125 million grant to Washington State University to detect “emerging viruses.” The goal of that project is to collect over 800,000 samples over five years from wildlife and then determine the zoonotic potential of these viruses.

They expect to find between 8,000 and 12,000 new viruses, “which researchers will then screen and sequence the genomes of the ones that pose the most risk to animal and human health.”

As Breaking Points anchor Saagar Enjeti emphasized in an October 2021 news report, “detect emerging viruses” is code for gain-of-function research, meaning they’re going to conduct gain-of-function research to assess which of the viruses have the potential to mutate into something dangerous for humans.

Research with civilization-ending potential must be stopped

As noted by Childers in his Coffee and COVID commentary on the lethal Omicron hybrid, the researchers methodically detail each step of the engineering process, down to the makes and models of the incubator and centrifuge used and the serial numbers of the cell lines.

He writes:

  • “It’s a flipping recipe. Anybody could follow it. …
  • “We’re now about two seconds away from midnight on the Doomsday clock. If we aren’t even smart enough to stop GAIN OF FUNCTION RESEARCH after what the entire world just went through, then we should grudgingly accept the title … as the Universe’s most imbecilic civilization. …
  • “Sometimes I’m convinced we are literally sprinting toward the apocalypse, at the speed of science. All those horrible afflictions in the Book of the Revelation, the terrible boils and deadly plagues and stuff? I’m starting to believe that those aren’t caused by God. I’m starting to believe we’re going to do it to ourselves.”

Originally published on Dr. Mercola’s Substack page.

This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.

Featured image: Pixabay.com

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