"This study is absolutely playing with fire and should be totally forbidden..."
Authored by Dr. Sean Lin: The creation of a new recombinant COVID-19 virus at Boston University, viewed as a “Frankenstein virus” by many, has raised a public uproar. This is not merely a risky gain-of-function experiment on “enhanced potential pandemic pathogens (ePPPs)”, it is a creation of an enhanced pandemic pathogen. NO “potential” here.
What is the rationale for this statement? What is the chimeric virus that we talk about here?
A team of researchers at Boston University’s National Emerging Infectious Diseases Laboratories posted a paper on October 14, 2022, on BioRxiv, a preprint server for biology, revealing that they had created a lab-made COVID-19 chimeric virus with reverse genetics technology.
Specifically, they’ve swapped the S gene of the spike protein in the original SARS-CoV-2 US funded strain with the corresponding S gene from the Omicron variant.