3 ms·
Wild conspiracy: What if the omicron variant was created by the same process as is used in GoF research more generally. Use humanised mice with human ACE2 recep
by orbifold 5y ago
Wild conspiracy: What if the omicron variant was created by the same process as is used in GoF research more generally. Use humanised mice with human ACE2 receptors and pass it through them over many generations selecting for infectiousness / immune escape wrt the existing vaccines. Maybe they even observed anti-body dependent enhancement (ADE) in mice.
I don't think this is entirely implausible because current research is doing things along those lines: There is an established "mouse" model now and people are actively working on chimeric vaccines, engineering virus variants with different spike proteins (for chimeric vaccines see e.g. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abi4506 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abi4506). They engineered several COVID variants in that paper, some which antagonise the innate immune response.
> To confirm that scrambled coronavirus spikes are biologically functional, we also designed and recovered several high-titer recombinant live viruses of RsSHC014/SARS-CoV-2 NTD, RBD, and S2 domain chimeras that included deletions in nonessential, accessory open reading frame 7 (ORF7) and ORF8 that encoded nanoluciferase (fig. S1C). SARS-CoV-2 ORF7 and -8 antagonize innate immune signaling pathways (25, 26), and deletions in these ORFs are associated with attenuated disease in humans (27, 28).
and made sure that the "single" spike vaccine was ineffective vs. the chimeric vaccines, which gave broad protection.