Report: Wuhan Bio Lab Carried Out Gain Of Function Research On Monkeypox Virus

[Manuel Tavares]

Report: Wuhan Bio Lab Carried Out Gain Of Function Research On Monkeypox Virus
By Steve Watson
+https://rayviolet.blogspot.com/2022/05/report-wuhan-bio-lab-carried...

The Wuhan bio lab that was the centre of controversy surrounding gain of function research on coronaviruses appears to have been carrying out the same kind of research on monkeypox, to make it more lethal to humans, according to a report citing the peer reviewed journal Virologica Sinica which published the lab’s findings in February.

The National Pulse reports:

The Wuhan Institute of Virology assembled a monkeypox virus genome, allowing the virus to be identified through PCR tests, using a method researchers flagged for potentially creating a “contagious pathogen.”

The report continues:

The study was first published in February 2022, just months before the latest international outbreak of monkeypox cases which appear to have now reached the United States.

Researchers appeared to identify a portion of the monkeypox virus genome, enabling PCR tests to identify the virus, in the paper: “Efficient Assembly of a Large Fragment of Monkeypox Virus Genome as a qPCR Template Using Dual-Selection Based Transformation-Associated Recombination“.

The paper acknowledged that this Transformation-Associated Recombination (TAR) “applied in virological research could also raise potential security concerns, especially when the assembled product contains a full set of genetic material that can be recovered into a contagious pathogen.”+++https://rayviolet.blogspot.com/2022/05/report-wuhan-bio-lab-carried...