Scientists Resurrect Deadly Spanish Flu Using Gain-of-Function
https://slaynews.com/news/scientists-res...aily-newsletter
Frank Bergman
August 21, 20228 Comments

Scientists have used controversial gain-of-function research to resurrect the deadly Spanish Flu that killed millions of people around the world in the early 20th century.

The team of gain-of-function researchers in Canada and the US reports that they successfully re-created the 1918 influenza virus and used it to infect macaques.

Shortly after World War I, Spanish Flu infected over one-third of the global population and killed an estimated 17 to 100 million people worldwide.

Epidemiologists regard it as the worst plague since the Black Death in the 14th century.

Five hundred million people caught it.

The 1918 flu first became apparent in Kansas City in military camps in April 1918, but the information was kept secret.

When it appeared in Spain in May 1918, the officials talked openly about it, and it became known as the Spanish Flu.

For the past two decades, scientists have been trying to resurrect the deadly virus.

About 20 years ago, a small team of researchers led by Jeffery Taubenberger and Ann Reid figured out how to sequence the genome of the 1918 flu, Forbes reported.

In a series of papers spread over six years, they described how they recovered pieces of the flu virus from human samples frozen for nearly 100 years, including corpses buried in the permafrost of Siberia and Alaska.
Slay the latest News for free!

We don’t spam! Read our privacy policy for more info.

In 2005, they reported the complete sequence in the journal Nature.

Their main discovery was that the 1918 flu had originally been bird flu, which jumped into humans sometime before 1918.

Taubenberger and others, including Adolfo Garcia-Sastre at Mt. Sinai School of Medicine, also re-constructed live viruses and tested them on mice that same year.

Not surprisingly, the mice died.

Two years later, in 2007, researcher Yoshihiro Kawaoka at the University of Tokyo and the University of Wisconsin infected seven macaques.

The macaques became severely ill, and the scientists euthanized all of them.-- excerpt, rest at link above --

Do some research on this one.

Scientists Have Re-Created The Deadly 1918 Flu Virus. Why?
Steven Salzberg
Contributor
Aug 15, 2022,07:30am EDT


Chicago Newspaper Headlines About The 1918 Influenza Pandemic

Collage of various newspaper headlines related to the previous year's influenza pandemic, Chicago, ... [+] Getty Images

With all the controversy about gain-of-function research and all the concerns about how dangerous it is, you might think that scientists have stopped doing that kind of work.

Well, no.

In the latest news, a team of scientists in Canada and the U.S. report that they have re-created the 1918 influenza virus and used it to infect macaques. Let’s be clear here: the 1918 flu vanished from the Earth, long ago. It’s simply not a threat, or it least it wasn’t, until someone figured out a way to bring it back.

Why would anyone do this? I’ll get to that, but first a little background.

The 1918 flu pandemic was the worst plague since the Black Death, which occured in the mid-14th century. During World War I, a new flu virus swept the planet, killing upwards of 50 million people. It probably infected a third of the entire world population at the time.

Since Covid-19 appeared, the 1918 flu pandemic has been cited often (sometimes called the Spanish flu), usually to compare or constrast it with Covid-19. Sure, Covid is bad, but at least it’s not as bad as what the world experienced in 1918.

About 20 years ago, a small team of researchers led by Jeffery Taubenberger and Ann Reid figured out how to sequence the genome of the 1918 flu. In a series of papers spread over six years, they described how they recovered pieces of the flu virus from human samples that had been frozen for nearly 100 years, including corpses buried in the permafrost of Siberia and Alaska. In 2005, they reported the complete sequence in the journal Nature. Their main discovery was that the 1918 flu had originally been a bird flu, which jumped into humans sometime before 1918. Taubenberger and others, including Adolfo Garcia-Sastre at Mt. Sinai School of Medicine, also re-constructed live viruses and tested them on mice, that same year. Not surprisingly, the mice died.

It didn’t take long before gain-of-function researchers said “hey, why don’t we reconstruct the flu virus and see what happens in primates?” The tools of modern genetics make it possible to reconstruct a virus from scratch, using just the sequence.

In 2007, only two years after the 1918 flu sequence was completely decoded, influenza researcher Yoshihiro Kawaoka at the University of Tokyo and the University of Wisconsin described, in a paper in Nature, how he and his colleagues used the sequence to create live, infectious 1918 flu viruses. To test them on more human-like subjects, they infected 7 macaques with them. Not surprisingly, the macaques got severely ill, and the scientists eventually euthanized all of them.

(Insiders may recognize Kawaoka’s name: he and Dutch scientist Ron Fouchier are widely known for their gain-of-function research that aimed to give deadly bird flu the ability to infect mammals. I’ve called them out on this in the past, and I’ve openly asked why NIH was funding this work.)

In the new paper, a team of researchers at the Public Health Agency of Canada, the University of Manitoba, and Oregon Health & Science University re-created the 1918 flu virus again, and infected 15 macaques. This time they used more realistic doses, and the macaques didn’t get so sick, suffering only “mild” or “moderate” disease. Maybe macaques “are not ideal for the development and testing of novel pandemic influenza-specific vaccines and therapies,” they concluded.

So let’s review: flu scientists have been using the sequence of a long-vanished, extremely deadly virus to reconstitute the virus and infect animals, and then observe how sick they get. (Kawaoka did it a second time, in a study published in 2019.)

Why do they do it? All of the papers give essentially the same reason: these experiments, they say, will help us develop animal models in which we can test vaccines. These same justifications have been used for decades, but flu vaccines haven’t improved one whit, as far as I can tell.

But hold on a minute! Even if you accept their argument that infecting macaques and other animals with influenza virus will help develop better vaccines, why use the 1918 influenza virus at all?

They don’t answer that question, because there really is no good answer. The fact is that the experiments will be more relevant if they use currently circulating flu strains–because those are the strains that we need vaccines against.[...]

There’s an easy way to eliminate the risk that a lab leak might release the 1918 influenza virus into the human population: stop re-creating the virus. The 1918 flu disappeared from the natural world long ago–or to be more pre-- excerpt, rest at link above --