5 ms·

Assuming it's only as effective as the original two-dose shot and prevents for the same duration, it seems like COVID will never go away. Assuming the current t

Assuming it's only as effective as the original two-dose shot and prevents for the same duration, it seems like COVID will never go away. Assuming the current trend and a 9 month prevention, that pretty much aligns to what happened last year. So we'd need no new significant variants to develop or any outbreaks. Seems unlikely given that there are many countries with vaccination rates under 50% Probably better to focus on the minimum number of vaccinations necessary to make hospitalization/death unlikely and move on from there. Preventing infection might be too high a bar to meet now.

base698 5y ago
That's ok your iPhone will ensure you've had the requisite boosters before allowing you access to public spaces. Everyone can sleep easy!
cm2187 5y ago
[edit] this is in response to the earlier version of your post where you wonder if the virus will ever go away: That I think is a given. Even if we had a bullet proof vaccine, you have such a large reserve of unvaccinated people across the world, plus animals, that the virus is endemic at this stage. Which isn't a problem. If once vaccinated the virus is mostly harmless, then it is just one more of the many endemic diseases we live with without worrying about.
- prox 5y ago
  We might also see the first batch of medicines appear in 2022, if we can successfully prevent ICU visits with effective medicines for starters, that would mean a lot to healthcare professionals worldwide.
  - Griffinsauce 5y ago
    Is there any actual development here? It's definitely not a given that we can do this.
    - Spellman 5y ago
      There actually is! Two studies in Brazil have shown a pretty significant reduction in hospitalizations in a RCT of fluvoxamine. More data obviously required. Plus there has been more work on other treatments, but most are pretty expensive. https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/22619137/fluvoxamine-covid-ivermectin-together-study-mcmaster https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/22619137/fluvoxamine-covi...
    - prox 5y ago
      While obviously complicated, Pfizer is working on a promising medication and I know of a dutch trial using antibodies that’s starting a next phase.
- JackFr 5y ago
  I am not a virologist, but based on my reading, in 100 years COVID will still be with us. At worst it will be the flu, and at best it will be just another strain of a cold. COVID has the very helpful quality of being least impactful on the very young. As new children are born they will be exposed to COVID multiple times over their lives, to the point when they are at ages we now consider vulnerable, they likely will have developed as much resistance as one can have.
- loceng 5y ago
  Which is why top virologists around the world have been trying to sound the alarm to warn that you don't vaccinate during a pandemic because it drives escape mutant variants; this type of response gets downvoted into oblivion by an ideological mob who are fear driven more than critical thinking, who have memorized the mainstream narrative responses to such statements by experts - or attempting character assassination of experts not toeing the line; https://twitter.com/lefarfadet8/status/1427754200398766087 https://twitter.com/lefarfadet8/status/1427754200398766087 Edit to add: Look at the critical conversation people are having instead of downvoting me into oblivion! HN's full of so many ideologues it's crazy.
  - cm2187 5y ago
    Not that I am qualified for such a debate, but it's not clear to me that the risk of creating variants is greater than the risk of letting the virus run through the population unopposed. The variants so far seem to be variations of the same virus with similar risk profiles, and the vaccines seem to be mostly efficient against these variants.
    - loceng 5y ago
      For each variant we've given an alphabet to, like Delta, there are variants occurring from those - they seem to only give them a letter once it's a large enough step in mutation; I'm not sure of the actual labeling practices used. But yes, I'm not qualified for the pinnacle of such a debate either, but those discussions aren't even happening - at least not in public which they need to be. There are mutations that are occurring however just in vaccinated, that aren't occurring in the non-vaccinated, the virus mutating to escape the immunity of the vaccinations - which then makes those variants easier to spread to other vaccinated [and potentially easier to spread to unvaccinated as well]; UCSF recently released study of 1,300+ patients with COVID,78% had specific variants associated with vaccinated vs. 48% of unvaccinated having those same variants - various conclusions of possibilities could be made from that.
      - pionar 5y ago
        (Replying here since your original post is dead) It's not that nobody's talking about it, it's just that people have done the research, and they've proven people like Dr. Montagnier wrong. Why give air to people who keep saying things that are wrong? https://twitter.com/GKangInd/status/1397429770028158978 https://twitter.com/GKangInd/status/1397429770028158978
- bsaul 5y ago
  "If once vaccinated the virus is mostly harmless" Note that even not vaccinated, the ultra large majority of people either are asymptomatic or don't get anything worst than a flu (which doesn't mean covid = flu in general) We seem to have forgotten that the original concern with the virus was the fact that it saturated intensive care units in hospitals, and thus prevented people from getting proper care.
  - 8ytecoder 5y ago
    Which, unfortunately, is still relevant - as seen in Louisiana and Florida. A frank and honest admission by one of the physicians on Reddit was that most people who stay in ventilator for weeks have no path to recovery but families don’t let them go. Essentially COVID patients hold up the beds for a long time as well.
  - graeme 5y ago
    That’s the original acute concern. Long run we still don’t know if it will have effects on brain function etc. There are some disturbing lines of evidence on this front. For example the UK biobank showing grey matter loss post infection including in mild cases: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.06.11.21258690v1.full.pdf https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.06.11.21258690v...
    - bsaul 5y ago
      i remember this study, but i'm surprised we don't have more papers on the same topic since. It seemed like a pretty big news, and yet i don't hear people recommending mass-vaccination mention it. Any idea why ?
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
      - mafuy 5y ago
        I recommend mass vax and this point is one of the main points I use. But I agree with you that sadly, this danger is not well known.
- p_j_w 5y ago
  >Which isn't a problem. If once vaccinated the virus is mostly harmless, then it is just one more of the many endemic diseases we live with without worrying about. It's a problem if you're one of the many people who, for whatever reason, can't be safely vaccinated.
dv_dt 5y ago
Is there any reason not to increase vaccine production rates so we have the capacity to vaccinate the world population faster than every 9 months?
- endisneigh 5y ago
  nope - as you allude to, ideally we could spit out these vaccines and just give people 6-month boosters until everyone is vaccinated and we're good. I believe the issue is that too many people fail to get vaccinated so it's challenging. Requiring boosters might also convert small numbers of people who got a vaccine one to not get it subsequent times.
  - dv_dt 5y ago
    In the first world there is an issue of take up. But around much of the rest of the world, the issues is they haven’t received nearly enough vaccine. If we don’t significantly vaccinate much of the rest of the world, my expectation is a continued high rate of variant creation as well as continued economic instability due to logistics disruption.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
- SideburnsOfDoom 5y ago
  > Is there any reason not to increase vaccine production rates Intellectual property rights. It's not a "good" reason. But it's a reality that needs to be overcome. https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/safricas-ramaphosa-accuses-big-pharma-selfish-unjust-vaccine-policy-2021-06-21/ https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/... https://www.democracynow.org/2021/6/22/headlines/south_african_president_blasts_big_pharma_for_refusing_to_share_covid_19_vaccine_technology https://www.democracynow.org/2021/6/22/headlines/south_afric... Germany doesn't want the Pfizer vaccine made freely: https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/germany-opposes-us-plan-waive-patents-covid-19-vaccines-2021-05-06/ https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/... and by some co-incidence, this is good for German money: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-germany-economy-biontech-idUSKBN2FB15A https://www.reuters.com/article/us-germany-economy-biontech-...
smorgusofborg 5y ago
A few vaccines are 3 doses at 0,1,6-12 months and offer a decade of protection if you don't miss the last dose..
- endisneigh 5y ago
  wow, wasn't aware of this development. which COVID vaccine is this? is it one of the nasal ones?
  - pradn 5y ago
    I think they're saying that other vaccines, not COVID vaccines, have this property. We can't assess decadal resistance yet for COVID vaccines.
    - endisneigh 5y ago
      If so, I'm not sure how that's relevant to COVID at the present. Per the article we're discussing it's unclear how long a 3rd dose will be effective for, hence my comment to begin with. If we were to pre-suppose you gain a decade of prevention then yeah, that'd be great.
      - aaomidi 5y ago
        We don't know how the protections in the current vaccines are going to play out until we investigate them more.
        endisneigh 5y ago
        Agreed, but we already know how 2-dose plays out with respect to Delta. The article in question is investigating how a 3rd dose fares against delta. There are also delta-specific boosters coming out soon.
      - pradn 5y ago
        I think they're saying that we can hope that three shots gives long term resistance, as it happens for other vaccines. We can only hope, and it's not a totally unrealistic hope given how other vaccines work.
brightball 5y ago
It's why I'm more interested in companies that can treat the symptoms effectively than only the vaccines right now. IMO the only way this ever truly gets better is if the effects can be mitigated quickly. Whoever figures that out is going to make a lot of money.
- Covzire 5y ago
  Good luck with that in 2021, someone is already making a lot of money, and ostensibly weaponizing big tech into preventing anyone from even talking about alternatives.
- omlett 5y ago
  "CBD and its metabolite, 7-OH-CBD, but not congeneric cannabinoids, potently block SARS-CoV-2 replication in lung epithelial cells. CBD induces interferon expression and up-regulates its antiviral signaling pathway. A cohort of human patients previously taking CBD had significantly lower SARSCoV-2 infection incidence of up to an order of magnitude relative to matched pairs or the general population. This study highlights CBD, and its active metabolite, 7-OH-CBD, as potential preventative agents and therapeutic treatments for SARS-CoV-2 at early stages of infection." https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7987002/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7987002/ I am not saying anything, JUST SAYIN'
- yonaguska 5y ago
  It's been figured out, but we're waiting on Pfizer to bring it's protease inhibitor to market before we acknowledge existing, out of patent medications that do the same thing.
JumpCrisscross 5y ago
> as effective as the original two-dose shot and prevents for the same duration We're giving boosters of a vaccine developed against the Beta variant. That's better than nothing. But it's inefficient against Delta. Pfizer/BioNTech are working on a Delta-specific booster [1]. If we can get approvals rolling faster without compromising safety, it might mean being able to release variant-specific boosters earlier in their transmission cycle. [1] https://investors.biontech.de/news-releases/news-release-details/pfizer-and-biontech-provide-update-booster-program-light-delta https://investors.biontech.de/news-releases/news-release-det...
- eganist 5y ago
  > If we can get approvals rolling faster without compromising safety, it might mean being able to release variant-specific boosters earlier in their transmission cycle. This is basically it. We'd need an approval process similar to what exists for flu shots today. I'm not versed on what that process is, but if that can happen with covid, it'll be the biggest batch of red tape cut.
  - op00to 5y ago
    pfizer and moderna have essentially filed for rolling submissions. the biggest impediment to vaccines stopping the virus is morons not getting the vaccine.
    - penultimatebro 5y ago
      Yeah, dang morons not getting the not-yet-available booster shot! I mean, those dang morons not getting the available vaccine which does nothing for transmission of the current viral variant! Eesh, well that doesn’t hold water either... Ugh this is too complicated, let’s just blame the unvaccinated anyways mmkay?
- op00to 5y ago
  As to whether the current batch of mRNA vaccines are "inefficient" against delta, the science is far from settled. There are no changes to the mRNA vaccines composition in the booster. Moderna has been testing a lower "dosage" of the booster at 50 mcg vs. 100mcg for the current vaccine, but other than that it's the same stuff it's always been.
Natsu 5y ago
I wonder if this is really the case. It seems like the original vaccines trained everyone's immune system on the spike protein specifically because this is exposed and highly conserved by the virus, such that it's hard to change and still leave an effective virus. Delta, however, found such a mutation that made it more virulent and it escaped. If we vaccinate against the modified spike, it's not clear how many more mutations exist like Delta. Maybe we can still get ahead of it, but I don't think anyone knows yet. I do wonder if we'll see reformulated boosters against Delta's spikes, though.
- datameta 5y ago
  I wonder how accurately we can run mutation simulations updated based on best current data to correct the best guess optimization function(s). It would be a breakthrough if we can predict the likeliest mutation. I'm aware of the enormous number of variables making this tremendously difficult...
  - nradov 5y ago
    We don't have the technology to stimulate that accurately in software. It would have to be done using transgenic animal models and/or human tissue cultures. Essentially it would be a form of gain-of-function research, and there are concerns that a lab accident could result in an even more dangerous variant escaping into the wild.
    - datameta 5y ago
      With ML-assisted drug discovery in, say, kinase inhibitors we search the molecule variation space for test candidates. What stops us from applying this to the protein scale by folding binding sites to discover variant candidates that would be more virulent? I'd like to understand this better.
      - nradov 5y ago
        Sure you can explore the solution space in software to identify candidates but at some point you have to create a live virus and see how it actually performs.

base698 5y ago

That's ok your iPhone will ensure you've had the requisite boosters before allowing you access to public spaces. Everyone can sleep easy!

cm2187 5y ago

[edit] this is in response to the earlier version of your post where you wonder if the virus will ever go away: That I think is a given. Even if we had a bullet proof vaccine, you have such a large reserve of unvaccinated people across the world, plus animals, that the virus is endemic at this stage. Which isn't a problem. If once vaccinated the virus is mostly harmless, then it is just one more of the many endemic diseases we live with without worrying about.

prox 5y ago
We might also see the first batch of medicines appear in 2022, if we can successfully prevent ICU visits with effective medicines for starters, that would mean a lot to healthcare professionals worldwide.
- Griffinsauce 5y ago
  Is there any actual development here? It's definitely not a given that we can do this.
  - Spellman 5y ago
    There actually is! Two studies in Brazil have shown a pretty significant reduction in hospitalizations in a RCT of fluvoxamine. More data obviously required. Plus there has been more work on other treatments, but most are pretty expensive. https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/22619137/fluvoxamine-covid-ivermectin-together-study-mcmaster https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/22619137/fluvoxamine-covi...
  - prox 5y ago
    While obviously complicated, Pfizer is working on a promising medication and I know of a dutch trial using antibodies that’s starting a next phase.
JackFr 5y ago
I am not a virologist, but based on my reading, in 100 years COVID will still be with us. At worst it will be the flu, and at best it will be just another strain of a cold. COVID has the very helpful quality of being least impactful on the very young. As new children are born they will be exposed to COVID multiple times over their lives, to the point when they are at ages we now consider vulnerable, they likely will have developed as much resistance as one can have.
loceng 5y ago
Which is why top virologists around the world have been trying to sound the alarm to warn that you don't vaccinate during a pandemic because it drives escape mutant variants; this type of response gets downvoted into oblivion by an ideological mob who are fear driven more than critical thinking, who have memorized the mainstream narrative responses to such statements by experts - or attempting character assassination of experts not toeing the line; https://twitter.com/lefarfadet8/status/1427754200398766087 https://twitter.com/lefarfadet8/status/1427754200398766087 Edit to add: Look at the critical conversation people are having instead of downvoting me into oblivion! HN's full of so many ideologues it's crazy.
- cm2187 5y ago
  Not that I am qualified for such a debate, but it's not clear to me that the risk of creating variants is greater than the risk of letting the virus run through the population unopposed. The variants so far seem to be variations of the same virus with similar risk profiles, and the vaccines seem to be mostly efficient against these variants.
  - loceng 5y ago
    For each variant we've given an alphabet to, like Delta, there are variants occurring from those - they seem to only give them a letter once it's a large enough step in mutation; I'm not sure of the actual labeling practices used. But yes, I'm not qualified for the pinnacle of such a debate either, but those discussions aren't even happening - at least not in public which they need to be. There are mutations that are occurring however just in vaccinated, that aren't occurring in the non-vaccinated, the virus mutating to escape the immunity of the vaccinations - which then makes those variants easier to spread to other vaccinated [and potentially easier to spread to unvaccinated as well]; UCSF recently released study of 1,300+ patients with COVID,78% had specific variants associated with vaccinated vs. 48% of unvaccinated having those same variants - various conclusions of possibilities could be made from that.
    - pionar 5y ago
      (Replying here since your original post is dead) It's not that nobody's talking about it, it's just that people have done the research, and they've proven people like Dr. Montagnier wrong. Why give air to people who keep saying things that are wrong? https://twitter.com/GKangInd/status/1397429770028158978 https://twitter.com/GKangInd/status/1397429770028158978
bsaul 5y ago
"If once vaccinated the virus is mostly harmless" Note that even not vaccinated, the ultra large majority of people either are asymptomatic or don't get anything worst than a flu (which doesn't mean covid = flu in general) We seem to have forgotten that the original concern with the virus was the fact that it saturated intensive care units in hospitals, and thus prevented people from getting proper care.
- 8ytecoder 5y ago
  Which, unfortunately, is still relevant - as seen in Louisiana and Florida. A frank and honest admission by one of the physicians on Reddit was that most people who stay in ventilator for weeks have no path to recovery but families don’t let them go. Essentially COVID patients hold up the beds for a long time as well.
- graeme 5y ago
  That’s the original acute concern. Long run we still don’t know if it will have effects on brain function etc. There are some disturbing lines of evidence on this front. For example the UK biobank showing grey matter loss post infection including in mild cases: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.06.11.21258690v1.full.pdf https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.06.11.21258690v...
  - bsaul 5y ago
    i remember this study, but i'm surprised we don't have more papers on the same topic since. It seemed like a pretty big news, and yet i don't hear people recommending mass-vaccination mention it. Any idea why ?
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - mafuy 5y ago
      I recommend mass vax and this point is one of the main points I use. But I agree with you that sadly, this danger is not well known.
p_j_w 5y ago
>Which isn't a problem. If once vaccinated the virus is mostly harmless, then it is just one more of the many endemic diseases we live with without worrying about. It's a problem if you're one of the many people who, for whatever reason, can't be safely vaccinated.

dv_dt 5y ago

Is there any reason not to increase vaccine production rates so we have the capacity to vaccinate the world population faster than every 9 months?

endisneigh 5y ago
nope - as you allude to, ideally we could spit out these vaccines and just give people 6-month boosters until everyone is vaccinated and we're good. I believe the issue is that too many people fail to get vaccinated so it's challenging. Requiring boosters might also convert small numbers of people who got a vaccine one to not get it subsequent times.
- dv_dt 5y ago
  In the first world there is an issue of take up. But around much of the rest of the world, the issues is they haven’t received nearly enough vaccine. If we don’t significantly vaccinate much of the rest of the world, my expectation is a continued high rate of variant creation as well as continued economic instability due to logistics disruption.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
SideburnsOfDoom 5y ago
> Is there any reason not to increase vaccine production rates Intellectual property rights. It's not a "good" reason. But it's a reality that needs to be overcome. https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/safricas-ramaphosa-accuses-big-pharma-selfish-unjust-vaccine-policy-2021-06-21/ https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/... https://www.democracynow.org/2021/6/22/headlines/south_african_president_blasts_big_pharma_for_refusing_to_share_covid_19_vaccine_technology https://www.democracynow.org/2021/6/22/headlines/south_afric... Germany doesn't want the Pfizer vaccine made freely: https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/germany-opposes-us-plan-waive-patents-covid-19-vaccines-2021-05-06/ https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/... and by some co-incidence, this is good for German money: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-germany-economy-biontech-idUSKBN2FB15A https://www.reuters.com/article/us-germany-economy-biontech-...

smorgusofborg 5y ago

A few vaccines are 3 doses at 0,1,6-12 months and offer a decade of protection if you don't miss the last dose..

endisneigh 5y ago
wow, wasn't aware of this development. which COVID vaccine is this? is it one of the nasal ones?
- pradn 5y ago
  I think they're saying that other vaccines, not COVID vaccines, have this property. We can't assess decadal resistance yet for COVID vaccines.
  - endisneigh 5y ago
    If so, I'm not sure how that's relevant to COVID at the present. Per the article we're discussing it's unclear how long a 3rd dose will be effective for, hence my comment to begin with. If we were to pre-suppose you gain a decade of prevention then yeah, that'd be great.
    - aaomidi 5y ago
      We don't know how the protections in the current vaccines are going to play out until we investigate them more.
      - endisneigh 5y ago
        Agreed, but we already know how 2-dose plays out with respect to Delta. The article in question is investigating how a 3rd dose fares against delta. There are also delta-specific boosters coming out soon.
    - pradn 5y ago
      I think they're saying that we can hope that three shots gives long term resistance, as it happens for other vaccines. We can only hope, and it's not a totally unrealistic hope given how other vaccines work.

brightball 5y ago

It's why I'm more interested in companies that can treat the symptoms effectively than only the vaccines right now. IMO the only way this ever truly gets better is if the effects can be mitigated quickly. Whoever figures that out is going to make a lot of money.

Covzire 5y ago
Good luck with that in 2021, someone is already making a lot of money, and ostensibly weaponizing big tech into preventing anyone from even talking about alternatives.
omlett 5y ago
"CBD and its metabolite, 7-OH-CBD, but not congeneric cannabinoids, potently block SARS-CoV-2 replication in lung epithelial cells. CBD induces interferon expression and up-regulates its antiviral signaling pathway. A cohort of human patients previously taking CBD had significantly lower SARSCoV-2 infection incidence of up to an order of magnitude relative to matched pairs or the general population. This study highlights CBD, and its active metabolite, 7-OH-CBD, as potential preventative agents and therapeutic treatments for SARS-CoV-2 at early stages of infection." https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7987002/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7987002/ I am not saying anything, JUST SAYIN'
yonaguska 5y ago
It's been figured out, but we're waiting on Pfizer to bring it's protease inhibitor to market before we acknowledge existing, out of patent medications that do the same thing.

JumpCrisscross 5y ago

> as effective as the original two-dose shot and prevents for the same duration We're giving boosters of a vaccine developed against the Beta variant. That's better than nothing. But it's inefficient against Delta. Pfizer/BioNTech are working on a Delta-specific booster [1]. If we can get approvals rolling faster without compromising safety, it might mean being able to release variant-specific boosters earlier in their transmission cycle. [1] https://investors.biontech.de/news-releases/news-release-details/pfizer-and-biontech-provide-update-booster-program-light-delta https://investors.biontech.de/news-releases/news-release-det...

eganist 5y ago
> If we can get approvals rolling faster without compromising safety, it might mean being able to release variant-specific boosters earlier in their transmission cycle. This is basically it. We'd need an approval process similar to what exists for flu shots today. I'm not versed on what that process is, but if that can happen with covid, it'll be the biggest batch of red tape cut.
- op00to 5y ago
  pfizer and moderna have essentially filed for rolling submissions. the biggest impediment to vaccines stopping the virus is morons not getting the vaccine.
  - penultimatebro 5y ago
    Yeah, dang morons not getting the not-yet-available booster shot! I mean, those dang morons not getting the available vaccine which does nothing for transmission of the current viral variant! Eesh, well that doesn’t hold water either... Ugh this is too complicated, let’s just blame the unvaccinated anyways mmkay?
op00to 5y ago
As to whether the current batch of mRNA vaccines are "inefficient" against delta, the science is far from settled. There are no changes to the mRNA vaccines composition in the booster. Moderna has been testing a lower "dosage" of the booster at 50 mcg vs. 100mcg for the current vaccine, but other than that it's the same stuff it's always been.

Natsu 5y ago

I wonder if this is really the case. It seems like the original vaccines trained everyone's immune system on the spike protein specifically because this is exposed and highly conserved by the virus, such that it's hard to change and still leave an effective virus. Delta, however, found such a mutation that made it more virulent and it escaped. If we vaccinate against the modified spike, it's not clear how many more mutations exist like Delta. Maybe we can still get ahead of it, but I don't think anyone knows yet. I do wonder if we'll see reformulated boosters against Delta's spikes, though.

datameta 5y ago
I wonder how accurately we can run mutation simulations updated based on best current data to correct the best guess optimization function(s). It would be a breakthrough if we can predict the likeliest mutation. I'm aware of the enormous number of variables making this tremendously difficult...
- nradov 5y ago
  We don't have the technology to stimulate that accurately in software. It would have to be done using transgenic animal models and/or human tissue cultures. Essentially it would be a form of gain-of-function research, and there are concerns that a lab accident could result in an even more dangerous variant escaping into the wild.
  - datameta 5y ago
    With ML-assisted drug discovery in, say, kinase inhibitors we search the molecule variation space for test candidates. What stops us from applying this to the protein scale by folding binding sites to discover variant candidates that would be more virulent? I'd like to understand this better.
    - nradov 5y ago
      Sure you can explore the solution space in software to identify candidates but at some point you have to create a live virus and see how it actually performs.