The Mers coronavirus is 35 times more deadly than Sars-Cov-2, the virus that causes Covid-19. So why would any responsible scientist create a chimeric Mers virus with an unrelated bat coronavirus that could infect and potentially kill millions more people than Covid?
Yet that is precisely what researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology were doing three years before Covid erupted. These inherently dangerous experiments, known as gain-of-function research (GOF), were conducted with the approval and financial support of the US National Institutes of Health.
The experiments aim to discover how pathogens work and what combination of mutations enable animal viruses to develop the ability to infect humans. One objective is to predict future pandemic viruses, but there is zero evidence that this can be