WEF-backed scientists at Brazil’s Butantan Institute have developed a terrifying new bird flu strain with a “100% kill rate,” engineering chimeric H5N1 viruses through reverse genetics, according to a peer-reviewed study. These lab-created pathogens, unprecedented in nature, raise chilling concerns about the risks of such experiments under the guise of pandemic preparedness.
The study reveals that the creation of these deadly viruses was justified as a means to develop vaccines, effectively crafting both the threat and its supposed solution. Critics argue this dual role fuels suspicions of orchestrated crises, as the generation of such lethal pathogens in a lab heightens global fears of accidental release or deliberate misuse, demanding urgent scrutiny.
Modernity.news reports: Brazil’s efforts mirror NIH-funded gain-of-function work in the U.S. and Japan that reconstructs pandemic-capable bird flu viruses and drives mammalian adaptation and drug resistance.
It also mirrors recent work in South Korea, where scientists combined three separate bird flu viruses into a single lab-built chimera using reverse genetics, engineering heat resistance, altered host targeting, and enhanced human cell entry.
The new Brazil study, titled “Production and Immune Response Against Pandemic Influenza Candidate Vaccines as Preparedness Against the Circulating H5N1 Influenza Viruses,” was published June 8 in the journal Vaccines.
It outlines how scientists combined genetic material from multiple bird flu strains with a lab-adapted influenza backbone to create three novel virus constructs intended for vaccine development.
“All of them were produced in a PR8 influenza strain backbone by reverse genetics,” the authors explained.
This technique—reverse genetics—is widely recognized as a powerful gain-of-function–style method that allows researchers to build new viruses from plasmids, reassembling them in host cells to generate live, replication-competent viruses with custom properties.
What They Did: Novel H5Nx Viruses Built from Scratch
The study’s authors engineered three recombinant “candidate vaccine viruses” (CVVs):
- A/Astrakhan/3212/2020 (H5N8), Clade 2.3.4.4b
- A/duck/Vietnam/NCVD-1584/2012 (H5N1), Clade 2.3.2.1c
- A/Anhui/1/2005 (H5N1), Clade 2.3.4
Each virus was artificially constructed by inserting surface protein genes (HA and NA) from known H5 strains into a 1934 lab-adapted virus backbone (A/Puerto Rico/8/1934, or PR8), creating entirely new viral entities.
These combinations do not exist in nature and were generated solely through laboratory manipulation.
The chimeric viruses were then mass-produced in over 1 million embryonated eggs under industrial conditions and tested in live rats for immunogenicity.
Why It Matters: Gain-of-Function by Another Name
Although the term “gain-of-function” is not used in the paper in reference to the authors’ own work, the study involves constructing novel viruses with pandemic potential using the same tools and techniques that have fueled global controversy over high-risk pathogen research.
According to U.S. biosecurity definitions, a lab-created virus qualifies as an enhanced potential pandemic pathogen (ePPP) if it is likely highly transmissible and highly virulent in humans, and is genetically manipulated or selected to confer such properties.
This study’s authors acknowledge the dangers explicitly, writing:
“Events observed in gain-of-function experiments… may occur through natural evolution processes… Four mutations… increased transmissibility to ferrets.”
They also note that circulating H5N1 strains are showing natural mutations identical to those previously introduced in controversial 2012 ferret GOF experiments, raising concerns that both nature and the lab may be converging on high-risk outcomes.
Hemorrhaging Embryos & Clade-Specific Immunity
The study also reports that chicken embryos inoculated with these lab-created viruses developed hemorrhagic lesions, an abnormal result not seen with seasonal influenza viruses.
“The recovered embryos displayed hemorrhagic lesions… These features were not observed with seasonal influenza strains. The reasons… are unknown.” (p. 8)
Meanwhile, vaccine effectiveness was poor unless paired with a squalene-based adjuvant (IB160) and administered in two doses.
Even then, immune responses were clade-specific, meaning the vaccine only worked against the exact virus it was built from, offering no protection against other circulating H5 variants.
Lab-Made Viruses with Pandemic Potential
In the name of preparedness, the Butantan Institute has built entirely new influenza viruses in the lab, then scaled up their production and tested them against real-world bird flu threats using gain-of-function–style reverse genetics.
While described as a vaccine development study, the methodology and implications suggest these experiments are functionally identical to high-risk pathogen research, with no indication of outside oversight and no safety assurances for the populations potentially affected by intentional or accidental release.
The viruses tested in this study did not exist until scientists built them—raising serious questions about what exactly is being prepared for, and at what cost.
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