Commentary: MTG Sounds Alarm Over Chinese Scientists’ New Creation—‘This Is a Bio-Weapon’

Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia blasted Chinese scientists for creating a mutant strain of COVID-19 that killed 100 percent of “humanized” mice in a disturbing new study.

This from westernjournal.com.

Greene warned in a Tuesday post on X as she shared a news article about the research:

This is a bio-weapon.

This is unethical and dangerous to the entire world.

Further:

We already went through one lab created virus from China and the consequent mandated vaccines.

This must stop and cannot be allowed to happen anymore!

The congresswoman was reacting to a Jan. 4 research report out of Beijing where Chinese scientists cloned a COVID-like pathogen and infected mice that had been engineered to reflect a human-like genetic makeup.

According to the study, every mouse infected with the virus — GX_P2V — died within eight days, which impressed researchers with its rapid lethality.

The abstract of the report said:

This underscores a spillover risk of GX_P2V into humans.

The researchers said:

Surprisingly, all the mice that were infected with the live virus succumbed to the infection within 7-8 days post-inoculation, rendering a mortality rate of 100%.

The mice began to exhibit a decrease in body weight starting from day 5 post-infection, reaching a 10% decrease from the initial weight by day 6.

By the seventh day following infection, the mice displayed symptoms such as piloerection, hunched posture, and sluggish movements, and their eyes turned white.

While weight loss, sluggishness and eyes turning white occurred in the lead-up to death, the grisly experiments:

[S]uggested that severe brain infection during the later stages of infection may be the key cause of death in these mice.

The deadly superbug is a mutated version of a coronavirus-related pathogen that was discovered in pangolins, also called scaly anteaters.

Francois Balloux, the director of the University College London’s Genetics Institute, torched the Chinese research, which he said could unleash disastrous consequences.

Balloux said in a Jan. 9 post on X:

It’s a terrible study, scientifically totally pointless.

Further:

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.

Dr. Gennadi Glinsky, a research scientist at the Institute for Engineering in Medicine at the University of California, Davis, was also astonished that scientists would manufacture a deadly pathogen.

He warned in a Monday post:

This madness must be stopped before too late.

Dr. Marty Makary, a surgeon and public policy researcher at Johns Hopkins University, also questioned the bizarre experiments.

He asked Wednesday:

Why are these risky experiments still taking place?

We’re still struggling with the catastrophic fallout of the coronavirus pandemic, which triggered senseless mask and vaccine mandates, mass business shutdowns, school closures, global economic damage and social unrest.

So why are Chinese researchers deliberately engineering a deadly mutant “super-virus?”

Surely there are far more pressing scientific inquiries to pursue, such as trying to save lives and improve health.