It is a curious pile-up between two news items which is circulating on the X network. On January 20, the Le Rifain account the news from the front publishes a message claiming, in error, that “a mouse carrying a deadly strain of coronavirus 100% fatal to humans has escaped from a high-security virus screening laboratory in China and is being sought”. The account does not say where this claim came from.
A few hours later, Fabrice di Vizio, Didier Raoult’s former lawyer, worries also of the escape of a mouse “from a Chinese laboratory”, “while it was inoculated with a 100% fatal virus”. These two messages will then be republished by the rapper Booba on his X account, who quips: “I’m thinking of the mouse’s parents who must be worried to death. »
FAKE OFF
No leak of a laboratory mouse carrying a strain of coronavirus deadly to humans has been made public. What then do these three messages allude to? Probably two news stories that appeared last week in the Anglo-Saxon media. British newspapers The Daily Telegraph and the Daily Mail have published the video from a Shanghai laboratory, in which we see a mouse escaped from a box when a technician wanted to weigh it. The technician will eventually find her.
Two days earlier, on January 16, the same Daily Mail has published an article on research by Chinese scientists. “Chinese scientists “create” a mutant strain of coronavirus that attacks the BRAIN and has a 100% mortality rate in mice,” headlines the tabloid.
The newspaper cites a study which appeared on a preprint site, published by researchers from Beijing. These scientists did not “create” a strain of coronavirus, as emphasize our colleagues at Snopes, but they worked on a mutant version of a coronavirus which had been identified in pangolins in 2017.
They worked on a group of twelve mice, four of which were injected with this strain. The four mice, which had been genetically manipulated to be infected with the coronavirus, died. This experiment does not mean that the result would be the same in humans: a result observed in a mouse is not necessarily observed in humans. Additionally, the study was conducted on a small number of mice, and it has not been peer-reviewed or validated.
Its conclusions should therefore be taken with hindsight. François Balloux, director of the Institute of Genetics at University College London, denounced a “terrible study, totally useless from a scientific point of view”. “I don’t see anything vaguely interesting to come from the forced infection of a weird breed of humanized mice with a random virus,” he elaborated on X. “Conversely, I see how this sort of thing could go wrong… »