Remember how we were all told that COVID-19 was never created in a Chinese lab?
That thesis seems to be clearly out the window as researchers at Boston University have successfully created a variant of COVID with an 80% kill rate by removing just one protein spike from the milder Omicron variant and inserting it into the original COVID-19 virus.
From the UK Daily Mail:
In the new research , which has not been peer-reviewed, a team of researchers from Boston and Florida extracted Omicron’s spike protein — the unique structure that binds to and invades human cells. It has always been present but it has become more evolved over time. Omicron has dozens of mutations in its spike protein that made it so infectious. Researchers attached Omicron’s spike protein to the original wildtype strain that first emerged in Wuhan at the start of the pandemic. The researchers looked at how mice fared under the new hybrid strain compared to the original Omicron variant.
Scientists use a specific type of mouse for this sort of testing that is more susceptible to lung diseases.
So while humans may not suffer an 80% kill rate as mice do, the problem that this new lab-created variant presents is not just a viral load that is five times greater than Omicron, but rather that the hypothesis that COVID-19 was indeed lab-created is now given further credence.