Scientists Created 80% Kill Rate Covid Strain Without Authorization, Top Health Official Admits

A top federal health official has admitted that scientists in a Boston lab created a deadly strain of COVID-19 with an 80 percent kill rate without authorization.

Dr. Emily Erbelding, a director at Dr. Anthony Fauci’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), claims she was unaware of the research.

However, the lab is still funded with taxpayer money.

As Slay News previously reported, researchers at Boston University created the deadly new Covid strain by modifying previous variants of the virus.

Scientists then found that their lethal new hybrid strain killed most of the mice infected with it in lab testing.

The team made the hybrid virus by combining Omicron and the original Wuhan strain.

In the new research, which has not been peer-reviewed, a team of researchers from Boston and Florida extracted Omicron’s spike protein.

The spike protein is the unique structure that binds to and invades human cells.

Public records indicate it was partly paid for using a grant awarded by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), one of the federal government’s main research agencies.

As part of any Government-funded research grants, teams have to explain what the money is being used for and how it will benefit the public.

In response to the outrage over the research, Erbelding, director of NIAID’s division of microbiology and infectious diseases, is now saying that the Boston team did not clear the work with the agency.

She claims she only found out the experiments might have involved enhancing a pathogen of pandemic potential after reading reports in the media this week.

Dr. Erbelding 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.

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Boston University’s biosafety level 3 National Emerging Infectious Diseases Laboratory extracted the spike protein from Omicron and attached it to the original Wuhan strain that first emerged in China.

The team then exposed it to human cells in a petri dish and to live mice.

The mutant virus killed 80 percent of the rodents.

The researchers quickly came under fire from many scientists and politicians alike who said they were “playing with fire.”

Many have accused the scientists of conducting dangerous “gain-of-function” research.

This type of research has become a hot topic during the pandemic because of theories suggesting it is how Covid emerged.

These types of experiments involve modifying a disease to make it more lethal or infectious for the sake of studying it and trying to get ahead of future outbreaks.

Boston University insisted it was not technically gain-of-function research because its chimeric virus only killed 80 percent of mice.

The original Wuhan strain, for comparison, killed 100 percent of the rodents.

“In fact, this research made the virus less dangerous,” a spokesperson for the university argued in a statement.

But independent researchers have already challenged that claim, pointing out that the currently dominant Omicron virus was far milder than the new hybrid variant.

Dr. Richard Ebright, a microbiologist at Rutgers University in New Jersey, said it was “demonstrably false” and “deeply embarrassing” to suggest the research is no gain-of-function.

He pointed out that the edited virus was more dangerous than BA.1 — the Omicron sub-variant the spike proteins were taken from that is currently dominant in the United States.

No rodents infected with BA.1 during the experiment died, but 80 percent of those infected with the edited virus did.

He told the Daily Mail: “The claims in BU’s public statement that: ‘this research is not gain-of-function research,’ ‘it did not… make it more dangerous,’ and ‘this research made the virus replicate less dangerous [sic]’ are demonstrably false and should be deeply embarrassing.

“The novel lab-generated coronavirus exhibits the high immune escape of Omicron BA.1 and higher lethality than Omicron BA.1 — albeit lower lethality than original Wuhan-1 SARS-CoV-2 — in mice engineered to display human receptors for SARS-like coronaviruses.

“It is concerning that this research — like the research in Wuhan that may have caused the pandemic — was not identified as gain-of-function and reviewed appropriately.”

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By Frank Bergman

Frank Bergman is a political/economic journalist living on the east coast. Aside from news reporting, Bergman also conducts interviews with researchers and material experts and investigates influential individuals and organizations in the sociopolitical world.

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