Creating COVID Frankensteins

Posted on by Thor

CBS News reported that Boston University has been testing strains of the COVID virus they created by combining the ancestral and Omicron variants. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) partially funded the school research but these funds were not directly used to wards this research. and they were rather miffed to find out about this research through news articles. Federal health authorities say they are looking into whether the scientists should have sought their permission before undertaking the possible “gain of function” research. Such research being done in Wuhan back in 2019 could have potentially started the pandemic to begin with.

Scientist were looking into the Omicron variants spike proteins Mice were infected with combined versions of the virus creating a new variant of the virus. Hey what could go wrong, right? Boston University said it was under no obligations to report this gain of function research to the NIH.

100% of the mice infected with the original Wuhan strain of the virus died. When mice were infected with the recombinant strains created by researchers 80% of the mice died. What joy it must have brought researches to find they had created a strain with an 80% mortality rate.

“It is concerning that this research – like the research in Wuhan that may have caused the pandemic – was not identified by the funding agency as possible enhanced potential pandemic pathogens (ePPP) research,” Rutgers University Professor Richard Ebright wrote on Twitter.

Posthumous Degree

Posted on by Thor

A new policy at Boston University now allows students who die while attending the school to receive posthumous degrees. Juan Garcia, a 21-year-old College of Earth and Mineral Sciences student from Allentown, died June 30 of respiratory failure and COVID-19. His death is the first known Penn State student death related to the COVID-19

A slow moving disaster is happening across the country as millions of college students are returning for on campus classes. Nearly 1,000 academic institutions are welcoming students and staff back to their campuses. With no national strategy on how to handle the situation in a pandemic, universities have to decide what to do on an ad hock basis. Some universities are testing students three times a week while others are welcoming limited numbers of students with a face mask stamped with the university’s mascot, a bottle of hand sanitizer and plans to test only a fraction of people on campus. The students are guinea pigs in a giant health experiment. Having so many students crush together for in person learning is particularly dangerous in the United States which United States, which has seen the largest number of deaths to COVID-19 of any country.

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill announced on August 17, 2020 that, because of outbreaks of COVID-19 among students, it would shift all undergraduate classes online, a week after bringing students back to campus. The University of Notre Dame in Indiana reported that 304 students had tested positive. Notre Dame also turned to online learning.

College parties are pushing the rise in cases. Going off to college for many students is their first taste of freedom so this isn’t surprising. Students will rebel against any notion of isolation. The urge to party is too hard to resist. They have been fed the idea that they are not part of a high risk group. With that in mind, partying hard is not a risk. Some students even want to get sick, holding COVID parties and gambling on who gets sick first.

Each city and state is handling COVID-19 in different ways so it would be hard to get every student to embrace the same safety protocols. Outbreaks continue to spread on open campuses. Hundreds of colleges are having to reverse their re-opening plans. Codes of conduct are being instated at colleges with threats of expulsion but lets face it, they can not be enforced.

Though adults over 65 years of are are most at risk, COVID-19 has killed people in all age groups. People age 20 to 44 account for 20% of COVID-19 hospitalizations and 12% of ICU admissions according to John’s Hopkins School of Public Health. People under age the age of 40 are developing severe breathing problems and blood clots related to Covid-19. The virus is in discriminant and thrives in crowded spaces.