We’re hearing that China is back in the lab, with scientists experimenting on a Covid strain (GX_P2V) that has returned a 100 per cent ‘kill rate’ on ‘humanised’ mice.

Humanised mice are their own freak show. These creatures are bred with ‘functioning human genes, cells, tissues, and organs’ to aid in experimentation, particularly for immune system responses in labs around the world. It is another ‘greater good’ abomination that makes my skin crawl.

‘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 much stuff might go wrong. The pre-print does not specify the biosafety level and biosafety precautions used for the research,’ said the rather worried epidemiology expert, Francois Balloux.

He added on Twitter, ‘The absence of this information raises the concerning possibility that part or all of this research, like the research in Wuhan in 2016-2019 that likely caused the Covid pandemic, recklessly was performed without the minimal biosafety containment and practices essential for research with potential pandemic pathogens.’

Other scientists did the rounds, nodding in shared concern, and yet no one is getting the impression that the World Health Organisation has the slightest interest in smacking Xi Jinping over the knuckles with a wooden spoon.

While the WHO pursues its all-powerful Health Treaty to ‘protect the world’ by enslaving it through bureaucratic fine print, they appear to be doing little about dangerous experimentation in the same region that caused the last public health disaster. The WHO doesn’t need a ‘health treaty’, it needs to sit China down for a stern conversation about how to be a good global citizen instead of the protagonist in a Shelley novel.

I had a look at the preprint. It's a terrible study, scientifically totally pointless. 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 …

— Prof Francois Balloux (@BallouxFrancois) January 10, 2024

If you are hunting for a response from the Health Minister, Mark Butler, he is all tied up advertising Covid vaccines. And no, they won’t help you against the zombie mouse virus.

Is Covid no longer a politically viable topic of conversation…?

Somehow we went from a virus that poses next-to-no risk being the doomsday obsession of Parliament to a genuinely serious virus failing to warrant the tiniest footnote on the Prime Minister’s agenda.

Covid carried no consequences for Beijing.

China’s negligence cost the world’s governments trillions of dollars, shifted the balance of power, and may yet spark a global war but as far as the United Nations and the World Health Organisation are concerned … you know, what’s a little bat soup between friends, eh? If anything, China’s mistake has been helpful in normalising expansions of centralised power and the implementation of digital tracking technology in formally privacy-conscious democracies. Even these headlines appear when global leaders are trying to drum up a bit of terror for the Disease X scenario.

While you might be able to argue idiocy, negligence, and cost-cutting for the first Covid outbreak, there is no excuse for new research.

The ‘pangolin coronavirus’ was administered to mice out of curiosity. The scientists, allegedly with links to the Chinese military, were running experiments – for what reason? We’re not told.

They called it the ‘pangolin coronavirus’ because it’s not a derivative of the bat cave phenomena. This one originated in Malaysian pangolins somewhere around 2017.

According to the pre-peer reviewed paper, ‘Four mice inoculated with [the] inactivated virus and four mock-infected mice were used as controls. Surprisingly, all the mice that were infected with the live virus succumbed to the infection within 7-8 days post-inoculation.’

Their little micey deaths did not sound pleasant. They grew thin, lethargic, and hunched over until their eyes turned white as what was thought to be a serious brain infection developed.

Zombie mice? Is this the timeline we’re living in?

‘In the mice infected with live virus, the viral load in the lungs significantly decreased by day 6; both the viral RNA loads and viral titers in the brain samples were relatively low on day 3, but substantially increased by day 6. This finding suggested that severe brain infection during the later stages of the infection may be the key cause of death in these mice.’

In cases such as these, it’s always alarming to read the nonchalant nature of the papers.

‘In this study, we cloned this mutant, considering the propensity of coronaviruses to undergo rapid adaptive mutation in cell structure, and assessed its pathogenicity in hACE2 mice. We found the GX_P2V(short_3UTR) clone can infect hACE3 mice, with high viral loads detected in both lung and brain tissues. This infection resulted in 100 per cent mortality in the hACE3 mice. We surmise that the cause of death may be linked to the occurrence of late brain infection.’

Also known as the plot of every zombie horror film in the last 100 years.

Is it too much to ask for scientists to leave well enough alone? Evolution is perfectly capable of murdering us. It does not need help from curious scientists.