Chinese scientists create mutant Ebola virus to skirt around biosafety rules - and it causes horrific symptoms and kills group of hamsters
DISTURBING THOUGHT: These are the experiments that we know about, that they cheerfully discuss right in the journals…So, what kinds of viral tinkering are they doing in secret?
JEFF CHILDERS:
The UK Daily Mail ran a face-palming story under the wildly suggestive headline, “Chinese scientists create mutant Ebola virus to skirt around biosafety rules - and it causes horrific symptoms and kills group of hamsters. The furry rodents were, obviously, hardest hit. But don’t get so worked up about it; after all, what could go wrong?
Well, according to the Mail’s article, one thing could go wrong. The Mail primly informed readers about appallingly terrific recent lab-leak statistics:
Data released this March revealed that lab leak incidents occur every year and included the release of controlled pathogens like tuberculosis and anthrax. There are anywhere from 70 to 100 releases were recorded every year.
Seventy to a hundred leaks? A year? Well, that’snot exactly reassuring. We are all unwillingly playing a viral version of Russian Roulette.
In contrast to the perhaps-slightly-overheated-headline, the article explained that the experiment was actually intended to come up with a “safer” Ebola variant. Remember, good intentions are the most important thing. Currently, Ebola may only be handled in Biosafety Level 4 (BSL-4) facilities with special high security features like airlocks and space suits. Which can be inconvenient if you want to play with Ebola a lot. So, they tinkered with Ebola’s genes, for convenience and for safety, so that Ebola can be safely handled at lower BLS-2 security settings, which are comparable to a regular dentist’s office.
Specifically, scientists combined a cow stomach virus (vesicular stomatitis virus), with the part of Ebola virus DNA that helps the virus enter and infect host cells. Then they inflicted their new Frankenstein virus on a very unlucky batch of three week-old hamsters. All the female hamsters died horribly. All but two of the male hamsters died.
Success! The researchers concluded their new virus makes hamsters very sick.
The Mail quoted random expert Dr. Richard Ebright, a chemical biologist at Rutgers University in New Jersey totally unconnected to the project, apparently an ‘expert’ since he has a degree in something, who was optimistic. Dr. Ebright, who definitely trusts the science, was skeptical that any lab leak could lead to a widespread mutant Ebola infection in the general public.
He firmly believes that the scientists will do the right thing. Dr. Ebright professorially advised, “It will be imperative to verify that the novel chimeric virus does not pose risk of infectivity, transmissibility, and pathogenicity in humans, before proceeding with studies at biosafety level 2.”
Sure, good point. It would clearly be illegal to experiment on Ebola variants that could infect humans at BSL-2 levels. But … Dr. Ebright elided right over the main point: what about a lab leak from a BSL-4 lab? I realize that the whole covid thing, which probably came from the Wuhan, China BSL-4 lab, is an outlier, but come on. We literally all just lived through this scenario.
Oh well. Covid wasn’t enough of a lesson .I suppose they’ll keep on doing this until it backfires badly somewhere. We are living in an age of biological revolution, among several other types of technological revolutions, and during the revolutionary process you may experience some discomfort, as the doctors like to say.
Finally, I hate to leave you with this question, but if these are the kinds of experiments that we know about, that they cheerfully discuss right in the journals, what kinds of viral tinkering are they doing in secret?
