WASHINGTON – The Biden administration now says it is “vigilant” about China’s risky scientific research, following a study that found a variant of the country’s coronavirus could kill 100% of “humanized” rats.
White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan said on Wednesday that increased vigilance comes because viruses can “come back and hurt Americans.”
“We documented in the past, over many years, concerns about biosafety and biosecurity practices of various countries, China being one of them,” Sullivan said at the regular White House briefing when asked about the controversial study, which was described head. pre-print paper released last month.
“This is something that we are constantly vigilant about because biosafety and biosecurity, especially of dangerous bio-substances anywhere in the world, can come back and hurt Americans,” Sullivan added.
“So it remains a significant focus of various US government agencies and we will continue to work on this.”
The pre-print of the new study went viral due to the theory that the COVID-19 pandemic leaked from a laboratory in Wuhan, China, in late 2019, before killing. nearly 1.2 million Americans – about 800,000 of them since President Biden took office.
Prominent scientists said the latest research is worrying after the FBI and the Department of Energy’s National Laboratories assessed that COVID-19 likely leaked from a laboratory.
Dr. François Balloux, from the Institute of Genetics at University College London, wrote on X, “I can’t see anything of vague interest that can be learned from the forced infection of a strange breed of humanized rats with a random virus. On the other hand, I could see how many things could go wrong.”
The pre-print, posted on the bioRxiv platform by a group of researchers at the Beijing University of Chemical Technology, said their study dealt with the “pangolin coronavirus related to SARS-CoV-2 GX_P2V” that was isolated from pangolins in peninsular Malaysia in 2017 and subsequently mutated to apparent adaptation to cell cultures.
The researchers wrote: “To our knowledge, this is the first report showing that a pangolin coronavirus related to SARS-CoV-2 can cause 100% mortality in hACE2 mice, suggesting a risk of GX_P2V spreading to humans”.
They added: “We assume the cause of death may be linked to the occurrence of late brain infection”.
Significant information, such as security safeguards, were not immediately clear and reports emphasized the small size of the sample in the study and potentially significant differences between genetically modified humans and rats that could explain the high lethality.
China has not been transparent about the origins of COVID-19 and President Biden has hardly mentioned the issue in public comments since he declared in a statement in August 2021 that “One of the Wuhan facilities seen as a possible origin of the pandemic was conducting risky “gain-of-function” funded by the US that modified the genetic of bat coronaviruses.
Documents released in late 2021 by The Intercept revealed that EcoHealth Alliance used US subsidies to fund the Wuhan Institute of Virology experiments that modified three distinct bat coronaviruses from COVID-19. The research found that the viruses became much more infectious among “humanized” rats when human-type receptors were added to them.
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