“There has been an explosion of research involving fully infectious SARS-CoV-2 over the last six months" – Richard Ebright
EXCERPT: This concern over risks and benefits is shared by Edward Hammond. Using FOIA again he has further discovered that researchers at the University of Pittsburgh (whose identity is redacted) plan to make what Hammond calls Corona-thrax. In short, according to its Institutional Biosafety Committee, Pittsburgh researchers intend put the spike protein of SARS-CoV-2 (which allows the virus to gain entry into human cells) into Bacillus anthracis which is the causative agent of anthrax.
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Engineered COVID-19-infected mouse bites researcher amid ‘explosion’ of risky coronavirus research
by Jonathan Latham, PhD
Independent Science News, 13 Aug 2020
https://www.independentsciencenews.org/news/engineered-covid-19-infected-mouse-bites-researcher-amid-explosion-of-risky-coronavirus-research/
[excerpt only; read the full article at this URL]
University researchers genetically engineer a human pandemic virus. They inject the new virus into a laboratory mouse. The infected mouse then bites a researcher.... It is a plot worthy of a Hollywood blockbuster about risky coronavirus research.
But according to newly obtained minutes of the Institutional Biosafety Committee (IBC) of the University of North Carolina (UNC), Chapel Hill, these exact events need not be imagined. They occurred for real between April 1st and May 6th this year.
The identity of the bitten coronavirus researcher has not been revealed except that they were working in a high security BSL-3 virus lab when the accident happened.
According to Richard Ebright, an epidemiologist from Rutgers University, the UNC incident underscores an important development in virus research since the pandemic began:
“There has been an explosion of research involving fully infectious SARS-CoV-2 over the last six months. Research with infectious SARS-CoV-2 now is occurring in every, or almost every, BSL-3 facility in the US and overseas.”
This strong upsurge is affirmed by Edward Hammond of Prickly Research, Austin, TX, former Director of the Sunshine Project, an NGO that tracked the post 9/11 expansion of the US Biodefense program.
“It is evident that swarms of academic researchers with little prior experience with coronaviruses have leapt into the field in recent months.”
For Hammond, this explosion represents a hazard:
“We need to be clear headed about the risk. The first SARS virus was a notorious source of laboratory-acquired infections and there is a very real risk that modified forms of SARS-CoV-2 could infect researchers, especially inexperienced researchers, with unpredictable and potentially quite dangerous results. The biggest risk is the creation and accidental release of a novel form of SARS-CoV-2 — a variant whose altered characteristics might undermine global efforts to stop the pandemic by evading the approaches being taken to find COVID vaccines and treatments.”
And, continues Hammond: “Each additional lab that experiments with CoV-2 amplifies the risk.”
Richard Ebright concurs, telling Independent Science News in an email that this research is:
“in many cases being performed by researchers who have no prior experience in BSL-3 operations and pathogens research, and who therefore pose elevated risk of laboratory accidents with BSL-3 pathogens.”
Ebright is also concerned that some influential experimenters are now calling for reduced oversight :
“The UNC incident also underscores that calls by some, notably Columbia University virologist Vincent Racaniello (Podcast at 01:35mins onwards), to allow virus-culture and virus-production research with fully infectious SARS-CoV-2 at BSL-2 are egregiously irresponsible and absolutely unacceptable.”
Other researchers are also calling for restraint. In a paper titled “Prudently conduct the engineering and synthesis of the SARS-CoV-2 virus”, researchers from China and the US critiqued the synthesis in February of a full length infectious clone (Gao et al., 2020; Thao et al., 2020). And, in concluding, these researchers asked a question that is even more pertinent now than then “Once the risks [of a lab escape] become a reality, who or which organization should take responsibility for them?”
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Read on and view illustrations here:
https://www.independentsciencenews.org/news/engineered-covid-19-infected-mouse-bites-researcher-amid-explosion-of-risky-coronavirus-research/