In a study released in preprint at the beginning of January1, researchers at the Beijing Advanced Innovation Center for Soft Matter Science and Engineering, College of Life Science and Technology, Beijing University of Chemical Technology, reported their findings from playing around with a pangolin coronavirus closely related to SARS-CoV-2.
SARS-CoV-2-related pangolin coronavirus GX_P2V(short_3UTR) can cause 100% mortality in human ACE2-transgenic mice, potentially attributable to late-stage brain infection. This underscores a spillover risk of GX_P2V into humans and provides a unique model for understanding the pathogenic mechanisms of SARS-CoV-2-related viruses.
The most damning aspect of this research is the explicit admission that the pathogen studied, GX_P2V(short_3UTR) was cultivated in a laboratory setting.
We previously reported that the early passaged GX_P2V isolate was actually a cell culture-adapted mutant, named GX_P2V(short_3UTR), which possesses a 104-nucleotide deletion at the 3’-UTR.
“Cell culture-adapted mutant”—these researchers in Beijing “grew” their very own SARS-CoV-2-related virus and then infected “humanized” mice with it.
They created a dangerous and lethal virus simply for the purpose of “studying” it, and without apparent regard for the risks of what could happen if that virus escapes the lab and in spread around the world. This research is the epitome of playing God with viruses.
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This latest bit of viral research playing God with viruses began with a pair of pangolin coronaviruses, GD/2019 and GX/2017, which were actually identified prior to the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 in late 2019. Drs. Wei, et al, tinkered with the GX/2017 coronavirus through “serial passage”, a research technique often used in gain-of-function research2.
The long‐standing practice of serial passage is a form of gain‐of‐function research that forces zoonosis between species, and requires the same molecular adaptations necessary for a natural zoonotic jump to occur within a laboratory, leaving the same genetic signatures behind as a natural jump but occurring in a much shorter period of time.
SARS-CoV-2 related coronaviruses (SARS-CoV-2r) from Guangdong and Guangxi pangolins have been implicated in the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 and future pandemics. We previously reported the culture of a SARS-CoV-2r GX_P2V from Guangxi pangolins. Here we report the GX_P2V isolate rapidly adapted to Vero cells by acquiring two genomic mutations: an alanine to valine substitution in the nucleoprotein and a 104-nucleotide deletion in the hypervariable region (HVR) of the 3′-terminus untranslated region (3′-UTR). We further report the characterization of the GX_P2V variant (renamed GX_P2V(short_3UTR)) in in vitro and in vivo infection models.
This time around, they decided to take that lab-cultured virus (which does not exist in nature) and infect “humanized” mice with it.
In this study, we cloned this mutant, considering the propensity of coronaviruses to undergo rapid adaptive mutation in cell culture, and assessed its pathogenicity in hACE2 mice. We found that the GX_P2V(short_3UTR) clone can infect hACE2 mice, with high viral loads detected in both lung and brain tissues. This infection resulted in 100% mortality in the hACE2 mice. We surmise that the cause of death may be linked to the occurrence of late brain infection.
Judging by that finding of “100% mortality”, this lab-grown virus is pretty damn lethal!
Additionally, this particular coronavirus produced a rather significant decrease in body weight among the infected mice.
We initially assessed whether GX_P2V C7 could cause disease in hACE2 mice by monitoring daily weight and clinical symptoms. A total of four 6 to 8-week-old hACE2 mice were intranasally infected with a dosage of 5×105 plaque-forming units (pfu) of the virus. Four mice inoculated with inactivated virus and four mock-infected mice were used as controls. Surprisingly, all the mice that were infected with the live virus succumbed to the infection within 7-8 days post-inoculation, rendering a mortality rate of 100% (Figure 1B). The mice began to exhibit a decrease in body weight starting from day 5 post-infection, reaching a 10% decrease from the initial weight by day 6 (Figure 1C). By the seventh day following infection, the mice displayed symptoms such as piloerection, hunched posture, and sluggish movements, and their eyes turned white. The criteria for clinical scoring of the mice and the daily clinical scores post-infection with GX_P2V C7 are provided in the Supporting Information, Figure S1.
As their charts show, this is a pretty significant and rapid weight loss.
After about a week, the mice all died.
What exactly was the point of this “research”? What knowledge is gained by crafting yet another lab-only strain of coronavirus and then infecting genetically modified mice with it? Neither the virus nor the lab subjects exist in the natural world, making this a wholly artificial and unrealistic examination of viral infection.
Conversely, the Global Virus Network, which bills itself on X/Twitter as “a worldwide, non-profit network of leading virologists strengthening the response, research, information-sharing, and training in viruses threatening humanity” took the publication of the Chinese research on GX_P2V as an opportunity to advocate for its “recommendations” on how viral research should be conducted and governed4.
In microbiology, there are many routine experimental manipulations that alter pathogen phenotypes but do not present heightened risk to humans. A revised oversight policy should acknowledge this by avoiding or building policy around ambiguous terminology, including “gain of function.” Risk should be evaluated based on the pathogen being studied at the outset of the work and iteratively reassessed as new experimental results indicate a change in risk.
It is not clear exactly what is “ambiguous” about the term “gain-of-function”. Such research examines viruses and pathogens by endowing them with new capabilities, such as the capacity to infect different species, increased virulence, increased mortality, et cetera. It very explicitly seeks to create more dangerous versions of existing pathogens as a means of “understanding” them.
The Chinese research team at the Beijing University of Chemical Technology apparently succeeded in this objective: they created a variant of a pangolin coronavirus that killed the entire group of lab mice used for testing.
What did they learn from their research? According to them, they learned that if their lab-created virus ever got out, it might be fairly lethal to humans.
To the best of our knowledge, this is the first report showing that a SARS-CoV-2-related pangolin coronavirus can cause 100% mortality in hACE2 mice, suggesting a risk for GX_P2V to spill over into humans.
They also learned that their research results differed from similar research done by those paragons of ethical viral research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, including China’s “Bat Lady” Shi Zhengli—the same researcher whose work involving collecting bat coronaviruses has been implicated in the emergence of SARS-CoV-2.
Pangolin SARSr-CoV-2 viruses are more distantly related to SARS-CoV-2 than RaTG13 and the cluster of BANAL viruses from bats in Laos. However, studies based on protein interaction and pseudovirus infection have shown that MpCoV-GX and -GD exhibit higher RBD binding affinity to human ACE2 and higher infectivity in SARS-CoV-2-permissive cell lines than RaTG13, which showed almost no infectivity in various cell lines (22, 36). Furthermore, the S proteins of the pangolin coronaviruses can use ACE2 receptors from a broader range of host species than can the S protein of RaTG13 (23, 36). These findings, along with the results in this study, suggest that despite their lower genetic similarity to SARS-CoV-2, the interspecies infection risk of pangolin coronaviruses cannot be underestimated.
However, as even the Wuhan study admits, pangolin coronaviruses are not nearly as related to SARS-CoV-2 as bat coronaviruses, which argues quite damningly against the pangolin as an intermediate host for SARS-CoV-2.
Was anything actually learned from this creating of a new virus and then killing off a number of lab mice with it? The preprint does not articulate any lessons of significance.
Global health experts are warning of a new pandemic, dubbed 'Disease X' by the World Health Organisation, that could be 20 times deadlier than Covid-19 and potentially claim 50 million lives. This looming threat could strike at any moment and is likely to have a far greater impact than Covid, which caught the world off guard in early 2020.
Is China preparing the next coronavirus to be released into the wild, having engineered it to be particularly virulent and even deadly? If the “experts” are to be believed about “Disease X”, that is a distinct possibility.
Kate Bingham, who led the UK's Vaccine Taskforce in 2020, has cautioned against complacency now that Covid-19 is seen as a "largely regarded as a routine illness". In a stark warning, she said: "Let me put it this way: the 191819 flu pandemic killed at least 50 million people worldwide, twice as many as were killed in World War I."
"Today, we could expect a similar death toll from one of the many viruses that already exist. Today, there are more viruses busily replicating and mutating than all the other life forms on our planet combined. Not all of them pose a threat to humans, of course - but plenty do." She revealed that at the moment, scientists know of 25 virus families, packed with thousands of individual terrible bugs that could become a worldwide sickness.
World leaders gathered at the World Economic Forum's annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, on Wednesday to discuss Disease X, a hypothetical virus 20 times deadlier than COVID-19.
While such a virus isn't known to currently exist, researchers, scientists and experts are hoping to proactively come up with a plan of action to combat such a virus and prepare the health system if it were to emerge as a pandemic — a possibility one expert told CBS News could happen sooner than we think.
"There are strains of viruses that have very high mortality rates that could develop the ability to transmit efficiently from human to human," said Dr. Amesh Adalja of the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security.
Of course, it would be the height of cynicism to suggest that Chinese virologists might be considering helping the eventual discovery of “Disease X” by crafting it in one of their cutting edge virology labs!
We should be appalled at Jordon Walker’s cavalier attitude regarding Pfizer’s efforts to tinker with and manipulate the SARS-CoV-2 virus. We should recognize that, no matter how they relabel and repackage the research, they are still playing God with viruses, and that is still a very BAD idea.
What we should not be is shocked or surprised. This is what passes for “research” in the modern scientific (pseudoscientific) community. This is not a “new normal”, but an “old normal”. What Pfizer is doing very much is the status quo.
Jordon Walker merely said that quiet part out loud. He merely confirmed that this is what Big Pharma does—and you can be sure they are doing it with more than just SARS-CoV-2. This is what university researchers do. This is what Big Government does.
This is not, of course, actual proof that the WHO or the various functionaries at Davos are at this very moment “planning” how to cause contain “Disease X”. The timing, however, is nothing if not alarmingly coincidental.
It is also important to note that the Chinese “research” comes to light just as the Pandemic Panic Narrative once again shows that it is running out of steam with regards to its favorite topic, COVID-19.
While corporate media has great fun spreading the alarmist rhetoric of the Pandemic Panic Narrative, the actual data regarding what the latest variant of the SARS-CoV-2 virus is actually doing is anticlimactic to the point of being uninteresting. Yes, JV.1 has displaced HV.1 as the most prevalent variant of the virus, but it is dominating within a greatly reduced number of infections and cases than was found with earlier variants of SARS-CoV-2.
The lack of significant case numbers, hospitalizations, and particularly deaths has simply bled the Pandemic Panic Narrative of any dramatic force. Even typically vulnerable populations, such as the elderly, are losing their fear of COVID, as evidenced by their declining interest in receiving the mRNA inoculations.
Like younger American adults, seniors haven’t been avoiding all recommended immunizations, just the ones for COVID. Their flu-shot rates have gone down a little in the past few years, but only by a handful of percentage points from a pandemic-driven, all-time high of 75 percent. This season, about 70 percent of people over 65 have received their flu vaccine, in line with average rates that haven’t changed that much for decades. In the meantime, seniors’ uptake of the latest COVID shots has fallen off by more than half since 2022, to just 38 percent. These diverging rates—steady for the flu, plummeting for COVID—are notably at odds with the attendant risks. Seniors seem to understand the value of inoculating themselves against the flu. So why do they forgo the same precaution against something so much worse?
The answer to that final question is the reality that COVID is not “so much worse”. The fear factor that drove not only much of COVID policy in 2020 and 2021 but public acceptance and tolerance of the authoritarian nature of that policy has waned significantly.
COVID has strutted and fretted its hour upon the stage, and soon will be heard no more.
We should not be surprised, therefore, that the notional elites have begun talking about “Disease X”. Nor should we be surprised that the rhetoric is already acquiring that tinge of paranoia inherent in the assessment that such a dangerous pathogen is “already out there.”
A deadly pathogen like Disease X, which would likely be a respiratory virus, according to Adalja, could already be circulating in animal species and is just not able to be transmitted to humans yet.
"That could be bats like COVID-19, it could be in birds like bird flu, or it could be some other type of animal species, swine for example," he said. "It's really about that interface between humans and animals, where interactions are occurring, that these types of viruses get a foothold."
Both the public health “experts” rubbing elbows in Davos and the corporate media need a new viral boogeyman if the Pandemic Panic Narrative is to have any chance at a revival within the general public. We see this ongoing need for pathogenic phantoms in the evolution of the argot “biosecurity”6.
Originally, “biosecurity” was mainly used in defence regarding the control of biological weapons. This first definition of biosecurity still appears on some official documents and websites. As an example, the Belgian biosafety server defines biosecurity as “the prevention of misuse through loss, theft, diversion or intentional release of pathogens, toxins and any other biological materials” (https://www.biosafety.be/content/biosecurity, accessed on 15 December 2021). Nevertheless, in the 1980s ‘’biosecurity” started to be used regarding animal health and production systems; it was defined by the U.S. Association of State Departments of Agriculture as “the vital work of strategy, efforts and planning to protect human, animal and environmental health against biological threats”. The first citation of “biosecurity” in PubMed was recorded in 1987. Its general uptake increased slowly with an average of five publications including the term “biosecurity” per year in the 1990s, 127 from 2000 to 2010 and 680 from 2011 to 2020 (Figure 1) [9].
Even before the advent of Nunn-Lugar and “threat reduction”, governments were coming adopting a posture of actively searching for new virological and biological threats to the public health. Fast forward twenty-plus years, and there exists within this notion of “biosecurity” the inherently paranoid presumption that every pathogen is a serious risk to the public health and must be contained and kept as far away from people as possible.
Biosecurity includes all measures to prevent the introduction of pathogens (bio-exclusion) and reduce the spread of pathogens (bio-containment) [17]. As part of the One Health concept, biosecurity is particularly important as it includes the prevention of the spread to humans, animals, plants and the environment. It is therefore a holistic and integrated approach, which considers the interactions among different stakeholders and sectors, as presented in Figure 2. A stringent biosecurity level, therefore, minimises the impact of infectious diseases on public, animal and plant health, as well as the economy, the environment and society in general. The FAO and WHO definition of biosecurity, which includes these aspects, is therefore appropriate and should be considered by the other actors as a reference to emphasise the importance of biosecurity, not only for animal health but also for public and environmental health.
With the constant fear of the natural world as the cognitive backdrop for public health discussions surrounding viruses and other pathogens, the “Disease X” model is very much the natural outgrowth of that fear. “Disease X” is quite demonstrably the articulation and rationalizing of that fear.
Yet it is this fear that not only apparently drives such ludicrous “research” as these latest Chinese gain-of-function experiments with pangolin coronaviruses, but also their widespread acceptance within virology worldwide. While there are voices who decry the sloppy science behind randomly subjecting a pathogen to serial passage and then arbitrarily infecting a group of genetically modified mice, there are a great many more voices who defend and even praise such efforts as a means to “understand” how pathogens come to invade human communities.
Lost in that rationalization is the uncomfortable reality that the public health measures and mitigations developed by such “biosecurity” experts have simply not worked.
This is the type of research being reported by the Chinese team from Beijing University of Chemical Technology. The preprint of their findings, as well as Shi Zhengli’s earlier research using the same serially passaged pangolin coronavirus variant, are outright gain-of-function research involving essentially “chimeric” viruses which have no real correlation to naturally occurring pangolin coronaviruses for the simple reason they are not naturally occurring.
As the 100% mortality result shows, this “research” involved creating a virus that potentially could be quite dangerous should it make its way out of the lab and into the wild, as the SARS-CoV-2 virus very likely did sometime in 2019. We should not forget that regardless of how SARS-CoV-2 emerged from the lab, and from which lab—regardless of whether SARS-CoV-2 is a designed bioweapon developed elsewhere and then introduced into Wuhan, China, as opposed to the results of a search for a coronavirus vaccine and a catastrophic failure of laboratory containment practices—the overwhelming circumstantial evidence says the virus emerged from a lab.
Instead of shying away from such demonstrably dangerous “research”, China at a minimum is expanding its gain-of-function research efforts. This preprint alone is proof of that.
China is working to produce what will become “Disease X” should it escape from the lab as SARS-CoV-2 did.
Whether that outcome is the point of the research or merely a risk attendant upon it is simply not relevant. Regardless of intent, China is playing God with viruses. Regardless of intent, China is creating viruses which already have the potential to be highly deadly to people. Regardless of intent, China is creating viruses of unknown infectiousness and virulence.
China is rolling the dice that these created pathogens will not prove highly infections to humans and will not escape from their biolabs into the wild and then around the world.
Given the history of SARS-CoV-2 and the destruction of the Pandemic Panic Narrative, it is already proven and indisputable that China is making a sucker’s bet.
All Facts Matter is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Alternatively, please consider making a donation via Ko-Fi. Thank you always for your support!
Sirotkin, Karl, and Dan Sirotkin. “Might SARS-CoV-2 Have Arisen via Serial Passage through an Animal Host or Cell Culture?: A potential explanation for much of the novel coronavirus' distinctive genome.” BioEssays : news and reviews in molecular, cellular and developmental biology vol. 42,10 (2020): e2000091. doi:10.1002/bies.202000091
Shanshan Lu, Shengdong Luo, Chang Liu, Muli Li, Xiaoping An, Mengzhe Li, Jun Hou, Huahao Fan, Panyong Mao, Yigang Tong & Lihua Song (2023) Induction of significant neutralizing antibodies against SARS-CoV-2 by a highly attenuated pangolin coronavirus variant with a 104nt deletion at the 3'-UTR, Emerging Microbes & Infections, 12:1, DOI: 10.1080/22221751.2022.2151383
Liu, M., et al. “A SARS-CoV-2-Related Virus from Malayan Pangolin Causes Lung Infection without Severe Disease in Human ACE2-Transgenic Mice.” Journal of Virology, vol. 97, no. 2, 2023, https://doi.org/10.1128/jvi.01719-22.
Renault, Véronique et al. “Biosecurity Concept: Origins, Evolution and Perspectives.” Animals : an open access journal from MDPI vol. 12,1 63. 28 Dec. 2021, doi:10.3390/ani12010063
"Beijing Advanced Innovation Center for Soft Matter Science and Engineering, College of Life Science and Technology, Beijing University of Chemical Technology, reported their findings from playing around with a pangolin coronavirus closely related to SARS-CoV-2."
I hate to break it to you, but the labs don't play around with "viruses". They play around with soups they create by mixing subject samples with chemicals and foreign tissues like cancerous monkey kidney tissue. No 'viruses' are ever purified or separated out from these soups. At best, at very best, they are filtered to remove bacteria and density centrifuged. The resultant "isolate" is not an isolated virus. Its still a soup containing billions of particles of every kind.
Global Virus Network. I see one but it isn’t the viruses. It’s the human criminals and sociopaths oozing around us like a burst septic tank. They are the human virus.
"Beijing Advanced Innovation Center for Soft Matter Science and Engineering, College of Life Science and Technology, Beijing University of Chemical Technology, reported their findings from playing around with a pangolin coronavirus closely related to SARS-CoV-2."
I hate to break it to you, but the labs don't play around with "viruses". They play around with soups they create by mixing subject samples with chemicals and foreign tissues like cancerous monkey kidney tissue. No 'viruses' are ever purified or separated out from these soups. At best, at very best, they are filtered to remove bacteria and density centrifuged. The resultant "isolate" is not an isolated virus. Its still a soup containing billions of particles of every kind.
Global Virus Network. I see one but it isn’t the viruses. It’s the human criminals and sociopaths oozing around us like a burst septic tank. They are the human virus.