American Scientist Creates Dangerous New Strain of the Swine Flu Potentially Capable of Killing a Billion

American Scientist Creates Dangerous New Strain of the Swine Flu Potentially Capable of Killing a Billion

We as a society don’t fear disease the way we used to, thanks to the miracle of modern vaccines. But that could all change, thanks to the work of one mad scientist who decided to create a virus so deadly, that it’s potentially capable of killing a billion people.

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Professor Yoshihiro Kawaoka of the University of Wisconsin-Madison has created a deadly new strain of the 2009 swine flu virus – for which there is no known vaccine.

If the virus escaped from Professor Kawaoka’s laboratory it could kill hundreds of millions – perhaps even a billion. Worryingly, scientists seem as alarmed as the general public.

Professor Kawaoka revealed what he had done at a secret meeting held earlier this year, and his fellow virologists appear to have reacted with despair.

‘He’s basically got a known pandemic strain that is now resistant to vaccination,’ said one scientist who did not wish to be named. ‘Everything he did before was dangerous, but this is even madder.’

Only last month Kawaoka revealed in a scientific paper that he had also synthesised a bird flu virus – called ‘1918-like Avian’.

He had created, through a process called ‘reverse genetics’, a flu virus extremely similar to that which caused the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic.

Kawaoka and his team declared that they had made the virus to assess whether variants of the 1918 flu were as deadly to humans as the original virus.

… The idea that scientists blithely create deadly flu viruses, essentially to see how deadly they are, caused outrage in the scientific community and the world at large.

… ‘If society understood what was going on,’ thundered Professor Simon Wain-Hobson, of the Virology Department at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, ‘they would say “What the F are you doing?” ’

Most worryingly, this virus, while created under secure conditions, was created at Professor Kawaoka’s Department of Pathobiological Sciences at the University of Wisconsin, which is not rated at the most secure level. And while Kawaoka insists that his work is necessary for the future, to study how the viruses spread and function, is the level of risk that comes with his work acceptable? If this virus were to escape his lab, millions — if not billions — of people could die… and that blood would be on his hands.

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