(MENAFN) US drug maker Pfizer announced on Friday that it “engineered” treatment-resistant variants of Covid-19 to test its antiviral medicine. The admission somewhat backs up earlier assertions by an executive with the firm who informed an undercover journalist that Pfizer was deliberately “mutating” the virus to “preemptively develop new vaccines.”
In a declaration shared on its website, Pfizer stated that it “has not conducted gain of function or directed evolution research,” mentioning the practice of amplifying a virus’ ability to infect humans and the process of selecting ‘desirable’ traits of a virus to reproduce, one-to-one.
On the other hand, the pharma giant added that it combined the spike proteins of new coronavirus variants with the original strain to test its inoculations, and that it made changes of the virus to test Paxlovid, its antiviral drug.
“In a limited number of cases…such virus may be engineered to enable the assessment of antiviral activity in cells,” the company said, adding that this work was carried out in a secure laboratory. The work also sought to create “resistant strains of the virus,” it also read, describing a process commonly known as being ‘gain of function’ research.
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