4 ms·

The linked article mentions a BU response via email. There’s also one via the web [0]. The preprint is way outside of my field of expertise so I can’t confident

• tripletao 4y ago
  That response is an exercise in obfuscation. For example: > Corley says the line pulled out of context actually had nothing to do with the virus’ effect on humans. The study began in a tissue culture, then moved to an animal model. So they're saying we don't know if their lab-created chimera is actually more dangerous in live humans, because they (fortunately!) haven't tested in live humans. That completely misses the point of those models, though--the reason why tissue cultures and animals are used is that they're often predictive of the effect in humans. By that standard in their mice, their chimera is possibly less deadly than the original Wuhan wild type, but definitely more deadly than omicron. They didn't study the effect on transmissibility, but we know that's determined mostly by the spike. So their chimera may combine most of the deadliness of the Wuhan wild type with the transmissibility of omicron. We can't prove that without experiments in live humans that I hope will never be conducted, but that sure sounds like a gain of function research of concern to me.