"Mad Scientist" creates a disease with no cure - It's the end of the world as we know it

Policemen in Seattle wearing masks made by the Red Cross, during the great influenza
epidemic. December 1918.  The great influenza killed 100,000,000 people.

Retard Alert!

• Scientists express horror over the creation of a virus that could render the human immune system defenseless.
• My theory is the so-called "best and brightest" of our population are simply fucking insane.  I guess 100,000,000 million dead in the Great Influenza Epidemic of 1918 was not enough.  We need to manufacture new and more aggressive diseases.

A controversial scientist who carried out provocative research on making influenza viruses more infectious has completed his most dangerous experiment to date by deliberately creating a pandemic strain of flu that can evade the human immune system.

Yoshihiro Kawaoka of the University of Wisconsin-Madison has genetically manipulated the 2009 strain of pandemic flu in order for it to “escape” the control of the immune system’s neutralizing antibodies, effectively making the human population defenseless against its reemergence.

Most of the world today has developed some level of immunity to the 2009 pandemic flu virus, which means that it can now be treated as less dangerous “seasonal flu”. However, The Independent understands that Professor Kawaoka intentionally set out to see if it was possible to convert it to a pre-pandemic state in order to analyse the genetic changes involved reports The Independent.

A Total Loon
Yoshihiro Kawaoka has genetically manipulated the 2009 strain of
pandemic flu in order for it to “escape” the control of the immune system.

The study is not published, however some scientists who are aware of it are horrified that Dr Kawaoka was allowed to deliberately remove the only defense against a strain of flu virus that has already demonstrated its ability to create a deadly pandemic that killed as many as 500,000 people in the first year of its emergence.

Professor Kawaoka has so far kept details of the research out of the public domain but admitted today that the work is complete and ready for submission to a scientific journal. The experiment was designed to monitor the changes to the 2009 H1N1 strain of virus that would enable it to escape immune protection in order to improve the design of vaccines, he said.

“Through selection of immune escape viruses in the laboratory under appropriate containment conditions, we were able to identify the key regions [that] would enable 2009 H1N1 viruses to escape immunity,” Professor Kawaoka said in an email.

“Viruses in clinical isolates have been identified that have these same changes in the [viral protein]. This shows that escape viruses emerge in nature and laboratory studies like ours have relevance to what occurs in nature,” he said.

Letter carrier in New York wearing mask
for protection against influenza.
New York City, October 16, 1918.
(Archives.gov)

Prior to his statement to The Independent, Professor Kawaoka’s only known public mention of the study was at a closed scientific meeting earlier this year. He declined to release any printed details of his talk or his lecture slides.

Some members of the audience, however, were shocked and astonished at his latest and most audacious work on flu viruses, which follow on from his attempts to re-create the 1918 flu virus and an earlier project to increase the transmissibility of a highly lethal strain of bird flu.

“He took the 2009 pandemic flu virus and selected out strains that were not neutralised by human antibodies. He repeated this several times until he got a real humdinger of a virus,” said one scientist who was present at Professor Kawaoka’s talk.

“He left no doubt in my mind that he had achieved it. He used a flu virus that is known to infect humans and then manipulated it in such a way that it would effectively leave the global population defenceless if it ever escaped from his laboratory,” he said.

“He’s basically got a known pandemic strain that is now resistant to vaccination. Everything he did before was dangerous but this is even madder. This is the virus,” he added.

The work was carried out at Wisconsin University’s $12m (£7.5m) Institute for Influenza Virus Research in Madison which was built specifically to house Professor Kawaoka’s laboratory, which has a level-3-agriculture category of biosafety: one below the top safety level for the most dangerous pathogens, such as Ebola virus.

However, this study was done at the lower level-2 biosafety. The university has said repeatedly that there is little or no risk of an accidental escape from the lab, although a similar US Government lab at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta with a higher level-3 biosafety rating was recently criticised over the accidental exposure of at least 75 lab workers to possible anthrax infection.

Professor Kawaoka’s work had been cleared by Wisconsin’s Institutional Biosafety Committee, but some members of the committee were not informed about details of the antibody study on pandemic H1N1, which began in 2009, and have voiced concerns about the direction, oversight and safety of his overall research on flu viruses.

“I have met Professor Kawaoka in committee and have heard his research presentations and honestly it was not re-assuring,” said Professor Tom Jeffries, a dissenting member of the 17-person biosafety committee who said he was not made aware of Kawaoka’s work on pandemic H1N1, and has reservations about his other work on flu viruses.

Gym full of victims of the 1918 Spanish Flu outbreak.

“What was present in the research protocols was a very brief outline or abstract of what he was actually doing…there were elements to it that bothered me,” Professor Jeffries said.

“I’m a distinct minority on this committee in raising objections. I’m very uneasy when the work involves increasing transmissibility of what we know already to be very virulent strains,” he said.

Asked what he thought about the unpublished study involving the creation of a pandemic strain of flu deliberately designed to escape the control of the human immune system, Professor Jeffries said: “That would be a problem.”

Rebecca Moritz, who is responsible for overseeing Wisconsin’s work on “select agents” such as influenza virus, said that Professor Kawaoka’s work on 2009 H1N1 is looking at the changes to the virus that are needed for existing vaccines to become ineffective.

“With that being said, this work is not to create a new strain of influenza with pandemic potential, but [to] model the immune-pressure the virus is currently facing in our bodies to escape our defences,” Ms Moritz said.

“The work is designed to identify potential circulating strains to guide the process of selecting strains used for the next vaccine…The committee found the biosafety containment procedures to be appropriate for conducting this research. I have no concerns about the biosafety of these experiments,” she said.

Professor Kawaoka said that he has presented preliminary findings of his H1N1 study to the WHO, which were “well received”.

“We are confident our study will contribute to the field, particularly given the number of mutant viruses we generated and the sophisticated analysis applied,” he said.

“There are risks in all research. However, there are ways to mitigate the risks. As for all the research on influenza viruses in my laboratory, this work is performed by experienced researchers under appropriate containment and with full review and prior approval by the [biosafety committee],” he added.

The Motor Corps of St. Louis chapter of the American Red Cross on ambulance duty during the influenza epidemic, October 1918.  (Influenza Archive)
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100,000,000 Dead
The 1918 flu pandemic (January 1918 – December 1920) was an unusually deadly influenza pandemic, the first of the two pandemics involving H1N1 influenza virus.  It infected 500 million people across the world, including remote Pacific islands and the Arctic, and killed up to 100 million of them—three to five percent of the world's population —making it one of the deadliest natural disasters in human history.
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See more 1918 Flu Pandemic.

 

Life Imitates Art
Don't any of the idiots in universities watch movies????  Or, and this is even more scary, they do watch and just don't give a crap.
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Bruce Willis allows scientists to send him on dangerous missions to the past to collect information on the virus, thought to have been released by a terrorist organization known as the Army of the Twelve Monkeys. If possible, he is to obtain a pure sample of the original virus so that a cure can be developed.