Iecs via Wikimedia Commons

The WIV Has Been Engineering “Chimeric Viruses” Like Covid

David Martin Davies via Flickr

The Zhengli led Center for Emerging Infectious Diseases has been conducting risky gain-of-function experiments on bat coronaviruses like RaTG13 to determine how the virus could be modified to spread to humans. RaTG13 is 96.2% similar to SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19 in humans. Zhengli has been studying the bat virus since a SARS-like virus killed several miners in the cave it was sampled from.



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