Sometimes people do things where you scratch your head and think, “What was this person thinking? Did somebody take the common sense part of their brain and replace it with Forest Gump’s brain? That is what I was thinking when I read about the “research” that Boston University did in the research of COVID, call it “gain of function research”, or “mad scientist research”, the bottom line is that these scientists are beyond stupid. Forest Gump would be considered a genius compared to these scientists.
And after reading this article about the problem with what these scientists from Boston University were doing, I suggest you go play some Las Vegas casino online games to chill and let the steam release.
Table of Contents
What exactly did Boston University Scientists do with COVID-19?
In a new study, a group of virologists from Boston University did the following. They took the Spike protein from the Omicron BA.1 strain of SARS-CoV-2 (that’s the strain that spread throughout the world in 2021, often slipping past the protection offered by vaccines) and combined it with an early 2020 strain of the Covid-19 virus (the one that first originated in Wuhan, China, and many suspected that it originated in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
The original COVID-19 strain had less transmittable but was more deadly.
The Omicron COVID-19 strain had more transmissibility but was very minor.
The Boston University Scientists thought that it would be a wonderful idea to take the bad part of the original COVID-19 (high death rate), and combine it with the bad part of Omicron COVID-19, high transmissibility in order to create a brand new virus that is both highly transmittable and very deadly. Does anybody else feel like they want to take these scents “outback” and shoot them because I certainly do.
The Boston University Scientists named this variant Omi-S, and 80% of the mice infected with this variant died. But those mice were the equivalent of “everybody over the age of 60” in regular human standards. But it gets even worse, “Omi-S-infected mice produced 30-fold more infectious virus particles compared with Omicron-infected mice.”
As many scientists (and others) have pointed out, research like this carries great risks, foremost among them the chance that an accidental lab leak could create a new pandemic, killing millions of people.
What does the original press release from Boston University say?
The recently identified, globally predominant SARS-CoV-2 Omicron variant (BA.1) is highly transmissible, even in fully vaccinated individuals.
The Omicron spike (S) protein, with an unusually large number of mutations, is considered the major driver of these phenotypes.
Boston University Scientists generated chimeric recombinant SARS-CoV-2 encoding the S gene of Omicron in the backbone of an ancestral SARS-CoV-2 isolate and compared this virus with the naturally circulating Omicron variant.
The Omicron S-bearing virus robustly escapes vaccine-induced humoral immunity, mainly due to mutations in the receptor-binding motif, yet unlike naturally occurring Omicron, efficiently replicates in cell lines and primary-like distal lung cells (like the original COVID-19 virus).
In K18-hACE2 mice (mice specially bread to be equivalent to a whole population of humans over the age of 65 with other medical conditions), while Omicron causes mild, non-fatal infection, the Omicron S-carrying virus inflicts severe disease with a mortality rate of 80%.
Boston University’s Response to the UK article (Daily Mail) about the new COVID strain
BU says that the reporting misrepresents their research, and what the researchers found out.
Boston University’s National Emerging Infectious Diseases Laboratories (NEIDL). The research was reviewed and approved by the Institutional Biosafety Committee (IBC), which consists of scientists as well as local community members, and that the Boston Public Health Commission had approved the research.
The Naitonal Institute of Health says that they did not know about this research and they did not approve this research. The grant given by the NIH was for general research equipment that could be used for any research project (computers, scales, microscopes, gloves, masks, safety equipment, etc.)
This next quote is the one that I find most disturbing:
Source: NEIDL Researchers Refute UK Article about COVID Strain
The study set out to examine the spike proteins on the SARS-CoV-2 Omicron variant (BA.1). Researchers were interested in comparing the variant with the original virus strain, known as the Washington strain. They wanted to find out if the virus was truly less virulent, says Corley, “simply because it wasn’t infecting the same cells as the initial strain.” They were “interested in what part of the virus dictates how serious of a disease a person will get.”
My opinion and commentary:
Since when has the original COVID-19 variant been called “the Washington Strain”? And this research was being done without NIH knowledge and without NIH funds? So who exactly was paying for this research that would call the original COVID-19 strain, “the Washington Strain”? That is the question that I want an answer to, so I am going to do some quick research and find out.
First stop, Wikipedia, nothing. No article titled “Washington Strain”. According to Wikipedia’s article “Variants_of_SARS-CoV-2”, the original strain is officially called “SARS-CoV-2”.
The fact that the scientists were calling it the “Washington Strain” bothers me. Could they be referring to the fact that their samples came from a patient in Washington State, the first place the virus appeared in the United States? Maybe, but I can’t shake my gut feeling that something else is going on.
Who is running this research at Boston University?
Ronald B. Corley, PhD is the Director of Boston University National Emerging Infectious Disease Lab.
Nahid Bhadelia, MD, MA is an Associate Professor Boston University Chobanian & Avedisian School of Medicine and Infectious Diseases. Dr. Bhadelia is a board-certified infectious diseases physician and an internationally recognized leader in highly communicable and emerging infectious diseases (EIDs) with clinical, field, academic, and policy experience in pandemic preparedness. She is the Founding Director of BU’s Center for Emerging Infectious Diseases Policy and Research (CEID).
In addition to her role at CEID, she is the associate director of the National Emerging Infectious Diseases Laboratories (NEIDL), a state-of-the-art maximum containment research facility at BU.
You can read more about her professional career at Boston University’s website: https://profiles.bu.edu/Nahid.Bhadelia
Nahid Bhadelia, July, 2022, White House Advisor for COVID-19
In July 2022, Nahid Bhadelia, MD, MALD, joined the White House COVID-19 Response Team as a senior policy advisor for Global COVID Response. Her area of “expertise” is “vaccine inequality”.
Summary
Regardless of if Boston Univesity calls this “Gain of Function” research, it was “Gain of Function” research. The fact that the NIH is distancing itself from Boston University’s research says something.
But the fact is that the person who was in charge of Boston University’s infectious disease research labs is the person who is now the White House Advisor for COVID-19! And what is the world going to say when there is a new mysterious pandemic right before or right after the 2024 US Presidential Election?
Am I conspiracy theorists or do I just live by the motto “Prepare for the worst and hope for the best”, not to mention “Everything that can go wrong, will go wrong, at the wrong time”. And what could possibly go wrong with making new virus that contains the worst parts of the SARS-COV-2 (death rates) and Omicron (ability to easily spread)?
