Just a couple days after news broke that Boston University had created a deadly strain of SARS-CoV-2 in its labs, the institution is trying to back peddle its announcement, saying news media not only got it wrong, but are are misconstruing what the institution really did.
But is that true? According to infectious disease epidemiologist and microbiologist Marc Lipsitch, the university can twist the reports of their findings in any way they want, but what they did is still gain-of-function research.” In other words, the procedure made the Omicron strain more dangerous.
“The wild ‘backbone’ virus gains immune escape from the insertion of the Omicron spike in ways that the paper describes in detail.” Lipsitch says. “That is gain of function.”
A reporter at U.S. Right to Know, Emily Kopp, adds that an EcoHealth collaborator works at the Boston U lab. EcoHealth, working with funding from Dr. Anthony Fauci, also worked with the Wuhan Lab on dangerous gain-of-function experiments on the SARS virus.
SOURCES:
MedPage Today October 18, 2022
Twitter Marc Lipsitch October 18, 2022
Twitter Emily Kopp October 18, 2022