To: Tenchusatsu who wrote (1325612 ) 10/21/2021 2:12:22 PM From: Broken_Clock Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 1571808 theintercept.com "Yesterday, the NIH provided that missing report for the period ending May 2019, which was inexplicably dated August 2021. That summary of the group’s work includes a description of an experiment the EcoHealth Alliance conducted involving infectious clones of MERS-CoV, the virus that caused a deadly outbreak of Middle East respiratory syndrome in 2012. MERS has a case-fatality rate as high as 35 percent , much higher than Covid-19’s. The scientists swapped out the virus’s receptor-binding domain, or RBD, a part of the spike protein that enables it to enter a host’s cells, according to the report. “We constructed the full-length infectious clone of MERS-CoV, and replaced the RBD of MERS-CoV with the RBDs of various strains of HKU4 -related coronaviruses previously identified in bats from different provinces in southern China,” the scientists wrote. “Changing the receptor binding site on MERS is sort of crazy,” wrote Jack Nunberg, a virologist and director of the Montana Biotechnology Center at the University of Montana, in an email to The Intercept after reviewing the documents. Nunberg described the experiment as “definitely gain of function,” or experiments that may increase the transmissibility or virulence of pathogens, because it gave the virus “a new receptor, a new host range, and unpredictable properties.” A virus’s host range is the range of species and cell types it is able to infect. The researchers’ intent, which some scientists consider integral to defining gain-of-function, remains unclear." Defending these assholes is a losing position for you.