The U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) funded research in China that created a more potent form of a bat coronavirus, according to newly disclosed documents. An experiment conducted at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, situated near where the first cases of COVID-19 were reported, compared mice infected with the original bat coronavirus to mice infected with a modified strain created by researchers, according to the documents. The mice infected with the modified version “became sicker than those infected” with the original version, Lawrence Tabak, the principal deputy director at the NIH, told lawmakers in letters (pdf) on Oct. 20. The “limited experiment” was aimed at seeing if “spike proteins from naturally occurring bat coronaviruses circulating in China were capable of binding to the human ACE2 receptor in a mouse model,” Tabak wrote, adding that the “unexpected result” was not “something that the researchers set out to do.” Whether intended …
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