BU researchers create hybrid COVID virus, causing friction with the government

The “new” version is deadlier (at least to mice). Now, I can see value in such work… create a nasty variant so you can *cure* or create a vaccine against said nasty variant before it pops up naturally or is created and weaponized by an antagonistic nation. Still: you might wanna kinda be careful about that sort of thing. If for no other reason than it makes for bad PR. Numerous news stories point out that this hybrid killed 80% of the mice infected with it. That’s bad. Fewer news stories point out that the original natural virus killed 100% of the mice infected with it. So it’s the kind of story that can be turned scary by dropping a bit of context. And science stories *always* lose context, because journalists seem to be a rather dim bunch, resistant to understanding the subjects they report on. So if you are a scientist working on something as touchy as this… maybe take a moment to reflect “Is this the sort of thing I should be doing, and if so, maybe I should have a really clear layman-level explanation ready to go.”