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If that's your argument, then what do you even need the XD strain for? You could simply assert that because natural omicron has spread widely, any lab chimera w

If that's your argument, then what do you even need the XD strain for? You could simply assert that because natural omicron has spread widely, any lab chimera with the omicron spike must be safe. That seems remarkably cavalier though, considering that (a) natural omicron continues to spread, and kill people every day; and (b) while China's reported case counts are probably inaccurate, they probably do still have a large population that's completely omicron-naive.

lamontcg 4y ago
I clearly didn't need the XD strain, I thought that would be read as supplementary. I routinely forget that no matter how clear your argument sounds to you that someone on the Internet will always misunderstand it (and pick apart a detail that has no central relevance).
- tripletao 4y ago
  Except that natural omicron continues to kill people now? So it's empirically true that at least one backbone (i.e., the natural omicron backbone) plus the omicron spike remains able to cause significant sickness and death, despite the immunity we've built up, even outside China. So what's your argument that the risk from a different backbone is "zero"?
  - lamontcg 4y ago
    Yet more misunderstanding. First of all they used BA.1 and that spike is nearly extinct and isn't causing much sickness and death, it has been out-competed by BA.5. BA.1 is literally "last years news" and BA.5 is immune evasive against BA.1. Any BA.1 spike is going to be recognized by the same neutralizing antibodies which has suppressed BA.1 circulation in the larger population. And I should have written something like the additional risk over the existing circulating pandemic strains is zero. It could cause infections and deaths, but just like XD it would be outcompeted quickly by BA.5 and wouldn't go anywhere, and the infected people would run exactly the same risk as they would have against the existing global pandemic. There is no way you get from this lab experiment to "COVID-22", it is still all the same virus, same pandemic, and a variant of the virus which will be substantially less fit against population immunity than BA.5 or whatever new variant winds up circulating this winter.
    - tripletao 4y ago
      So you're acknowledging now that the lab chimera might infect some people if it escaped, but you're saying that's okay because those people would otherwise have gotten infected with a natural variant anyways? But if the IFR for the lab chimera is higher than the IFR for natural omicron (which it was, at least in their mice), then those people are paying a higher price in mortality for the same immunity--that's the gain of function of concern. And really, is there anything in biology that we know with sufficient confidence to risk millions of lives in exchange for no immediate practical benefit? Like I guess whoever did the 1977 flu vaccine trials also assumed that if their virus escaped, it would get outcompeted by the existing natural viruses; but we know what happened there.

lamontcg 4y ago

I clearly didn't need the XD strain, I thought that would be read as supplementary. I routinely forget that no matter how clear your argument sounds to you that someone on the Internet will always misunderstand it (and pick apart a detail that has no central relevance).

tripletao 4y ago
Except that natural omicron continues to kill people now? So it's empirically true that at least one backbone (i.e., the natural omicron backbone) plus the omicron spike remains able to cause significant sickness and death, despite the immunity we've built up, even outside China. So what's your argument that the risk from a different backbone is "zero"?
- lamontcg 4y ago
  Yet more misunderstanding. First of all they used BA.1 and that spike is nearly extinct and isn't causing much sickness and death, it has been out-competed by BA.5. BA.1 is literally "last years news" and BA.5 is immune evasive against BA.1. Any BA.1 spike is going to be recognized by the same neutralizing antibodies which has suppressed BA.1 circulation in the larger population. And I should have written something like the additional risk over the existing circulating pandemic strains is zero. It could cause infections and deaths, but just like XD it would be outcompeted quickly by BA.5 and wouldn't go anywhere, and the infected people would run exactly the same risk as they would have against the existing global pandemic. There is no way you get from this lab experiment to "COVID-22", it is still all the same virus, same pandemic, and a variant of the virus which will be substantially less fit against population immunity than BA.5 or whatever new variant winds up circulating this winter.
  - tripletao 4y ago
    So you're acknowledging now that the lab chimera might infect some people if it escaped, but you're saying that's okay because those people would otherwise have gotten infected with a natural variant anyways? But if the IFR for the lab chimera is higher than the IFR for natural omicron (which it was, at least in their mice), then those people are paying a higher price in mortality for the same immunity--that's the gain of function of concern. And really, is there anything in biology that we know with sufficient confidence to risk millions of lives in exchange for no immediate practical benefit? Like I guess whoever did the 1977 flu vaccine trials also assumed that if their virus escaped, it would get outcompeted by the existing natural viruses; but we know what happened there.