(Herald Sun) Chinese scientists are experimenting with a mutant Covid-19 strain that has a 100 per cent kill streak in “humanised” mice.
The deadly virus — known as GX_P2V — attacked the brains of mice that were engineered to reflect similar genetic makeup to people, according to a study shared last week out of Beijing.
“This underscores a spillover risk of GX_P2V into humans and provides a unique model for understanding the pathogenic mechanisms of SARS-CoV-2-related viruses,” the authors wrote.
The deadly virus is a mutated version of GX/2017, a coronavirus cousin that was reportedly discovered in Malaysian pangolins in 2017 — three years before the pandemic, The NY Post reports.
All the mice that were infected with the virus died within just eight days, which researchers noted was a “surprisingly” rapid death rate.
GX_P2V had infected the lungs, bones, eyes, tracheas and brains of the dead mice, the last of which was severe enough to ultimately cause the death of the animals.
In the days before their deaths, the mice had quickly lost weight, exhibited a hunched posture and moved extremely sluggishly.
Most eerie of all, their eyes turned completely white the day before they died.
Workers next to a cage with mice (R) inside the P4 laboratory in Wuhan, capital of China’s Hubei province. Picture: Johannes Eisele / AFP.
Francois Balloux, an epidemiology expert at the University College London’s Genetics Institute, slammed the research as “terrible” and “scientifically totally pointless.”
“I can see nothing of vague interest that could be learned from force-infecting a weird breed of humanised mice with a random virus. Conversely, I could see how such stuff might go wrong,” the professor wrote on X.
