The bad cat
is incensed about the gain-of-COVID-function story:
“hey, what if we could make omicron even more immunity evading and as deadly as ebola?”
asked no sane person.
ever.
this is the biomedical equivalent of jumping up and down on a pogostick while holding the nuclear launch trigger. granted, this was just done in mice, but hey, that was good enough to approve a booster, right?
Eugyppius
took it a little better:
To be clear: Just three years after Wuhan researchers decided it would be cool to insert a codon-optimised furin cleavage site at the S1/S2 junction of this interesting SARS-related bat virus they found, Boston researchers thought maybe it’d be fun to start mixing and matching different SARS-2 proteins to see if a new chimeric virus might be more exciting than boring old Omicron. The payoff is not any vaccine or treatment, but the mere knowledge that it is not just the spike protein that contributes to the pathogenicity of SARS-2. For extra fun, they did not conduct this research in space or at the bottom of the Marianas Trench, but in a BSL-3 facility at the National Emerging Infectious Diseases Laboratories on Albany Street in the Boston South End.
He notes that
while Alex Berenson thinks this is all a nothingburger, its flailing short-order cooks still pose a serious threat to humanity:
But, I’m just not much comforted by this. Beyond broader concerns with the entire enterprise of enhancing viruses in the lab for shits and giggles: The experimenters improved a slower-moving and more lethal wild-type strain by giving it the more infectious Omicron BA.1 spike. I think there are evolutionary reasons why such a combination is unlikely to arise naturally, and why this kind of research amounts to helping viruses achieve otherwise out-of-reach protein combinations for which our natural defences are ill-equipped.
He's also disturbed that the short-order cooks at BU
seem to feel the need to lie about it to boot.
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