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I don’t have any dog in this fight, but one of the points made in this article is that we don’t really understand the Monkeypox genome well enough to know which
by matthewdgreen 4y ago
I don’t have any dog in this fight, but one of the points made in this article is that we don’t really understand the Monkeypox genome well enough to know which mutations might lead to greater spread or virulence. So when a new cluster pops up we can’t tell if it’s spreading due to a mutation or if it will have a greater IFR than we expect from past outbreaks. I’m not saying GoF is the right solution to this, given the risks. But it is probably one way to gather this sort of data.
- photochemsyn 4y agoThe counterpoint to that argument is that there very well could be hundreds of artificially induced mutations that could give rise to extremely virulent or extremely transmissible strains, and yet that's not proof that such mutations would be at all likely to arise under natural conditions in the wild.
- matthewdgreen 4y agoWe have some very solid examples of independently-arising mutations in SARS-CoV-2. In fact quite a few of the Omicron mutations had been seen in other lab variants.