White House ‘vigilant’ about risky China research ‘harming Americans’ after COVID variant killed 100% of ‘humanized’ mice

WASHINGTON — The Biden administration now says it is being “vigilant” about risky scientific research from China, following a study that found a coronavirus variant from the country could kill 100% of “humanized” mice.

White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan said Wednesday the increased vigilance is because viruses can “come back and harm Americans”.

“We’ve documented in the past over many years concerns about biosafety, biosecurity practices of a number of countries, China being one of them,” Sullivan said at the regular White House briefing when asked about the controversial study, which was described in a preprint paper released last month.

“That’s something we continue to be vigilant about because biosafety and biosecurity, particularly of hazardous bio-substances anywhere in the world, can ultimately come back and harm Americans,” Sullivan added.

“So it remains a significant focus of multiple agencies of the US government and we’ll keep working on that.”

The new study preprint went viral due to the theory that the COVID-19 pandemic leaked from a lab in Wuhan, China, in late 2019 before going on to kill nearly 1.2 million Americans — about 800,000 of them since President Biden took office.

Prominent scientists said the latest research is concerning after the FBI and the Energy Department’s National Laboratories assessed COVID-19 likely leaked from a lab.

Dr. Francois Balloux of the University College London’s Genetics Institute, wrote on X, “I can see nothing of vague interest that could be learned from force-infecting a weird breed of humanized mice with a random virus. Conversely, I could see how much stuff might go wrong.”

The preprint, uploaded to the platform bioRxiv by a group of researchers from the Beijing University of Chemical Technology, said that their study dealt with the “SARS-CoV-2-related pangolin coronavirus GX_P2V” that was isolated from pangolins in peninsular Malaysia in 2017 and later mutated in apparent adaptation to cell cultures.

The researchers wrote, “To the best of our knowledge, this is the first report showing that a SARS-CoV-2-related pangolin coronavirus can cause 100% mortality in hACE2 mice, suggesting a risk for GX_P2V to spill over into humans.”

They added: “We surmise that the cause of death may be linked to the occurrence of late brain infection.”

Significant information such as security safeguards wasn’t immediately clear and reporting has emphasized the small sample size in the study and possibly significant differences between humans and genetically modified mice that could explain the high lethality.

China has not been transparent about the origins of COVID-19 and President Biden has hardly mentioned the topic in public remarks since declaring in an August 2021 statement that “[t]he world deserves answers, and I will not rest until we get them.”

One of the Wuhan facilities viewed as a possible origin site for the pandemic was doing risky US-funded “gain of function” research that modified the genetics of bat coronaviruses,

Documents published in late 2021 by The Intercept revealed that EcoHealth Alliance used US grants to fund Wuhan Institute of Virology experiments that modified three bat coronaviruses distinct from COVID-19. The research discovered the viruses became much more infectious among “humanized” mice when human-type receptors were added to them.