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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 omic

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

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.