What the heck is happening at Boston University?
If you believe the initial media reports—like in the Daily Mail—the Terriers have been running their own little Jurassic Park lab on Commonwealth Avenue, experimenting with the Wuhan flu, altering its deadliness.
BU denies accusations, and Dr. Fauci’s Beltway acolytes say they knew nothing about these experiments that were outlined in the British tabloid.
It’s quite confusing. Might even make you nostalgic for the days of the late BU president John Silber. Herr Doktor only wanted automatic weapons for his campus cops—seems like a simpler time, doesn’t it?
Whether it’s true or not, BU’s research has the public in hysterics, and for good reason. Mutating the COVID virus to study pathogenicity eerily parallels the highly controversial gain-of-function work performed (and indirectly subsidized by U.S. taxpayers) at the Wuhan Institute of Virology prior to The Panic of 2020.
Sure, there’ve been the usual jokes, like, Who knew Boston had a wet market?
But the parsing by BU about what “research” was and wasn’t being done is not exactly reassuring. This is, after all, the school that not so long ago awarded a degree in economics (check please) to AOC.
Much like Dr. Fauci, BU is hanging their hat on the definition of “gain-of-function” research. Given the current revisionist tour by “The Science” before his impending retirement, that is not quite as comforting as the flacks may think it is.
After all, as chemist Derek Lowe explained in October 2021:
“The difference between gain-of-function research and research that would be expected to yield results showing gain-of-function in some cases is a subtle one.”
That’s like saying the difference between baking a cake and combining flour, butter, sugar, and eggs to yield a cake in some cases is a subtle one.
Let the record show: SARS-COV-2 can be and has been altered in a lab.
Awfully close to home, scientists at BU’s National Emerging Infectious Diseases Laboratories have engineered a new mutation of coronavirus by sticking the Omicron variant’s spike protein to the original Wuhan strain. BU has been infecting mice with their Frankenstein variant. The result? Eighty percent of mice perish.
I patiently await an official denunciation of the study from PETA, as well as perhaps a few candlelight vigils in Kenmore Square for the deceased rodents.
Meanwhile, The Science is making swift moves to keep the peace, graying the definition of “gain-of-function” before our very eyes, brushing off headlines about the experiment as “sensational” and “misleading,” and assuring the public of the benefit of disease cocktails. The same experts who came close to wrecking the entire society two years ago are now reassuring us that since the study decreased the mortality rate of the virus among mice, it was not “gain-of-function” but rather “loss-of-function” work.
One year ago, Lowe was claiming that gain-of-function work “attempts to modify a biological pathway in a cell line or an organism in order to enhance or broaden the scope of some particular process…to understand how a particular virus might be able to mutate in the future under different conditions.”
Is that not what Boston University is doing?
No, The Science says, because the original COVID strain killed 100 percent of mice studied. This one only killed 80 percent. This man-made hybrid may be deadlier than the Omicron variant, but since it effected only four of every five primary strain deaths, it’s not gain-of-function and therefore totally cool.
But hasn’t the narrative said the opposite for years now? That even if the mutation killed 10 or 20 percent of the mice compared to the “natural” strain, deadliness no longer matters; what matters is that it’s new. Close the schools, cancel your wedding, and schedule two more boosters! This variant is different.
Inside Boston University there is a human-engineered coronavirus variant 80% as deadly as the one used to keep California in a perpetual state of emergency for three years.
What could possibly go wrong?