New developments have triggered widespread alarm throughout the scientific community after gain-of-function researchers announced they have created an untreatable strain of bird flu that has a shocking 100% kill rate in humans.
According to a new study published last week in NPJ Vaccines, Japanese researchers engineered an entirely new strain of bird flu.
They combined the genetic material of two separate wild viruses to create what they call Vac-3: a pathogen that is “a reassortant virus between A/duck/Hokkaido/101/2004 (H5N3) and A/duck/Hokkaido/262/2004 (H6N1).”
This lab-built virus—A/duck/Hokkaido/Vac-3/2007 (H5N1)—was never observed in nature.
Alarmingly, the scientists created the virus to be completely immune to any form of treatment.
It was artificially assembled, grown in eggs, concentrated, and inactivated with formalin to become the whole-particle vaccine used in long-term testing on nonhuman primates.
The new study comes after NIH-funded researchers at the University of Georgia, Mount Sinai, and Texas Biomed were caught engineering lab-made H5N1 bird flu viruses—one of which killed 100% of exposed mammals—using synthetic DNA constructs and then deliberately infecting live dairy cows, all under the same $59 million federal contract that has also been tied to mammal-adapted, drug-resistant strain development.
Japan is also working with U.S. scientists on other projects to build lab-made