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John Kobylt welcomes NewsNation's Brian Entin to discuss the Chinese experiments with a mutant COVID-19 strain that is 100% lethal to "humanized" mice.
Chinese scientists have been experimenting with a mutant COVID-19 strain that is 100% lethal to "humanized" mice.
The virus, known as GX_P2V, attacked the brains of mice that were engineered to reflect genetic makeup similar to humans. 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 mice lost weight, experienced a hunched posture, and moved sluggishly, and their eyes turned completely white before they died within eight days. The study is the first to report a 100% mortality rate in mice infected by the COVID-19-related virus, but it does not indicate how it would affect humans.
According to the New York Post, Francois Balloux, an epidemiology expert at University College London’s Genetics Institute, slammed the study on X as “terrible” and “scientifically totally pointless” and raised concerns over biosafety containment and practices used for the research.
However, the study conducted in 2024 does not seem to be linked to the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China, which was the subject of lab leak theories surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic.
Although US intelligence agencies could not find any direct evidence that the virus leaked from the lab, they did not rule out that it might have originated from another source. Despite ongoing research, the origin of COVID-19 remains uncertain.