2) even the alleged learning from the experiment: "The conclusion of the study is that mutations in the spike protein of the Omicron variant are responsible for the strain’s ability to evade immunity people have built up via vaccination, infections, or both, but they are not responsible for the apparent decrease in severity of the Omicron viruses."
...does not hold up, because this was in mice. Ordinary lab rats were immune to the original strain of covid-19, but not to Omicron, which shows that it is not at all unlikely for there to be significant differences in the resistance of rodents to one strain or the other, compared to humans.
So, they made a hybrid covid-19 strain, that could conceivably have been as contagious as Omicron but as lethal as the original strain. Nice work, folks.
Well the mice the researchers used were genetically modified mice to have human ACE2 receptors which is standard practice in Virology. But! I will say it 100% is not worth the risk, just last year a researcher in Taiwan got infected with the delta variant in the same level lab BSL3, so any dangerous or novel virus they create has a real possibility of escaping.
Also it's not like this type of research helped us predict or even fight the pandemic. Millions have been spent on studying and modifying wild coronaviruses and it not only failed to predict this pandemic, but none of the research helped in anyway combating it. For example the Ecohealth Alliance the main collaborators with the WIV has still to this day refused to share research and data they have collected over the years. So either the research is worthless and thus why are we funding it despite the dangers, or they have something they want to hide.
I think the other part that is appalling is they did this in Biosafety Level 3 labs instead of 4 when COVID has basically brought the entire world to its knees for 3 years. What is wrong with the biosafety review committee?
Also, they completely skirted the NIAID approval process, putting the public at risk, will anyone see jail time for that?
The result of the research is very valuable. It helps predict the attributes of future novel strains.
In reality, infectious success and malignancy are highly anti-correlated, strongly. The combined Virus (which probably has existed in a very similar form in the wild somewhere!!) is actually a lot less dangerous than the two sources.
Also: Both Viruses have become a lot less dangerous to the world population because of immunity.
This alone has convinced me, these scientists need to be investigated and punished for biological terrorism.
This represents an insane lack of ethics.
Did they forget, we've been in a multi-year pandemic lockdown.
Establishing the efficacy of a non-existent and artificial pathogen is useless on it's own. Like I bred this dog, and i know for a fact because of it's brown snout its lethality went down 20%. no you don't. it's a whole chimeric dna operation. not a binary tree.
Looks like there needs to be a criminal line drawn somewhere.
The people most upset in the room are the same people who have been screaming that Covid was not a lab accident. I wonder why they would be upset at someone showing how easy it is to weaponize a coronavirus?
Around a decade ago, when Boston University was trying (successfully) to have its campus be the site of a BSL-4 lab, there were protests (articles, even outdoor demonstrations) -- over the risks of a lab leak of the world's nastiest pathogens, in an dense urban area.
In that dialogue, the public heard a lot about histories of safety incidents at other BSL-4 labs, which generally seemed due to negligence.
Today, given all the presumed awareness of lab leak risks, from the BU BSL-4 protests, and from the subsequent Covid pandemic-- I don't know why anyone at BU would risk modifying Covid without the utmost precautions, including at least using BSL-4 rather than BSL-3.
> I don't know why anyone at BU would risk modifying Covid without the utmost precautions
My wife was a laboratory inspector for a while. She'd come home with the craziest stories about how such-and-such lab tried to get away with this or that. I'd have the same question every time. "Why?!" Protocols only work if they're followed. We have such a long history of disasters, major or minor, because of negligence[0]. Cutting corners, operating outside the envelope, etc.
She'd always just shrug and say, "familiarity breeds contempt".[1]
[0] My favorite is Chernobyl.
[1] Also, a lot of scientists have this, "I know what I'm doing" attitude and see safety precautions as holding them back. It doesn't help that most of them see grad students as expendable.
It seems stupid to have these sites in urban areas. If we want to do this sort of stuff, build the facility in the desert, with little population, little wildlife population, and environmental factors inhospitable to long lifetime if there is escape.
But I guess safety measures like that are too inconvenient.
Yes, but if we can't attract the world's foremost virologists to programs that we have some degree of control over in the middle of international cities where they can engage in serial passaging of airborne HIV in the morning, and then get lunch at places that are trending, authentic and cutting-edge, then they'll just go to a program in another country that doesn't have these restrictions.
No-one wants to live in an underground facility for weeks or months at a time when they could be making the most of living in a major city, not even virologists working on pathogens that are being modified to see what would happen if there was a pathogen whose evolution was guided in a particularly interesting direction and compressed from decades to weeks or even days.
Anyway, if we were to ask the world's foremost experts in the virological community whether we should restrict such research to carefully-controlled remote locations subject to stringent controls, long quarantines and strict oversight, then we might find that the answer was similar to when we asked "is if likely or even within the realm of possibility that SARS-CoV-2 originated from a lab in Wuhan as result of Gain-of-Function research". And they might insist that we listen to them because they were the experts, and they would probably find a lot of support in the government and the media.
That page offers "only" dozens of examples in recent times, but that is certainly going to be non-exhaustive and the potential magnitude of impact of a single of these incidents is difficult to overstate. Notably while the biosafety levels for each leak are not stated, at least two came from BSL-4 labs - the highest safety standard there is.
Covid has killed something like 20 million people (taken from Wikipedia, estimated based on excess deaths). It's plausible that it came from a lab leak. How bloody fucking valuable do you have to think "making viruses more deadly and studying them" is for this to be worthwhile?
Oh, actually you can calculate this, assuming you're utilitarian and think risking innocent lives is OK as long as it saves that many lives in expectation. If you think there's a 10% chance that Covid came from a lab leak, then the "making viruses more deadly" research that we've done so far ought to have saved more than 10% * 20 million = 2 million people. Did it? From what I've heard it's done fuck-all.
I stand by my pissed off voice here. I think it's appropriate to be pissed off about risking millions of lives for hypothetical benefits.
(To be clear, I'm only talking about research that studies deadly extinct viruses and deadly lab-created viruses. We should absolutely continue to study viruses in general.)
The spike protein of an Omicron version of SARS-2 was fused to a virus of the Wuhan strain, the original version that emerged from China in 2020. The goal was to determine if the mutations in the Omicron spike protein were responsible for this variant’s increased ability to evade the immunity to SARS-2 that humans have built up, and whether the changes led to Omicron’s lower rate of severity. The testing actually showed, though, that the chimeric virus was more lethal to a type of lab mice than Omicron itself, killing 80% of the mice infected. Importantly, the original Wuhan strain killed 100% of mice it was tested in. The conclusion is that mutations in the spike protein of the Omicron variant are responsible for the strain’s ability to evade immunity people have built up via vaccination, infections, or both, but they are not responsible for the apparent decrease in severity of the Omicron viruses.
If it went from 100% IFR (original strain) to 80% IFR (Original + Omicron spike) how did it not reduce the severity? Sure it's more severe than Omicron by itself so there were other factors as well, but it does seem like a decrease in severity to me.
This involves testing the Omicron spike on a Wuhan-Hu-1 backbone.
Damn near every single person in this comment thread has antibodies and T-cells to Omicron spike and everyone naturally infected has T-cells for the original strain as well because T-cell epitopes aren't immune escape targets.
Chances of this "escaping" the lab and producing another coronavirus wave are zero because that already happened.
Like Derek Lowe pointed out nature already did a similar experiment with an Omicron spike and a Delta backbone because coronaviruses undergo recombination naturally:
> Damn near every single person in this comment thread has antibodies and T-cells to Omicron spike and everyone naturally infected has T-cells for the original strain as well because T-cell epitopes aren't immune escape targets.
Checking my layperson understanding by trying to make a dumbed-down version:
"The outside of the new virus is stuff almost everybody's immune system should already be primed to seek and destroy, preferably before it hits a human cell. Even if it does hit a human cell, the inside stuff is old/simple enough that your immune system should easily recognize that the cell is infected and swollen, and kill it quickly too, there are no false everything-is-fine-here tricks."
> Chances of this "escaping" the lab and producing another coronavirus wave are zero because that already happened.
Are you aware of any situation where the omicron spike and Wuhan backbone could have recombined naturally? As far as I know, the latter was extinct in the wild by the time the former emerged.
It's good that the omicron/delta variant didn't blow up in humans. The omicron/Wuhan variant seems like another throw of the dice, though, and even a very small probability times millions of potential deaths is significant.
It may very well be riskier than not to ban research like that on an endemic airborne virus that has shown a proclivity to mutate.
If no humans are running controlled experiments on the virus, there is still an experiment currently being run as a massive, randomized trial in the form of the natural mutative processes the virus undergoes in the infected human population. How much do we want to trust that it won't hit upon an HIV-category combinatoric mutation before we're aware it has the potential to do that?
The risk tradeoff is difficult here, but we should keep in mind that the risk of doing no such research is way, way higher than zero.
These "convergent mutation" variants seem to be arriving at a rapid pace, all by themselves without researchers helping (some hypothesize this is due to virus replication in immunocompromised patients.) [1] Since these mutations seem capable of repeatedly emerging, we should understand what they do, both alone and in combination. The cost here is that yes, researchers could make and release a new deadly variant. On the other hand it's just as likely that something very similar will pop up through natural evolution in the next few months. When that happens we can be clueless or we can be armed with knowledge.
This is an interesting case, making chimeras can always be thought of as "gain-of-function" research because you really only know if you succeeded after you've created and tested the new organism, and there might be failures along the way if indeed creating a more lethal organism is your goal.
In this case there is some handwaving about 80% mortality vs 100% mortality in a mouse host about it technically not being more lethal than the original. But what if the testing revealed 100% mortality plus some other metric of increased transmissibility or something similar after the fact. It would've been unknown to the researchers at the time of synthesis and fit every definition of "gain-of-function" research.
I think in light of this inability to know apriori if a virus is going to be more/less lethal we're splitting hairs when we say this is not technically "gain-of-function" research.
Exactly. Lowe is using a really horrible argument, he is trying to use the results to justify the experiment, but the entire point is it was an experiment and they had no idea how it would turn out. It’s entirely possible it could have been 100% as the result and that somehow this chimera found a spike mutation that provided human immune escape and a lab worker was accidentally infected as patient zero. It’s not what happened obviously but the idea he can use the experiments results to justify the experiment is absurd. He is a dangerous apologist, “it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it”.
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 confidently evaluate the news stories against the preprint. But if journalists misinterpreted scientific research it would certainly not be the first time.
>There is no evidence the work, performed under biosecurity level 3 precautions in BU’s National Emerging Infectious Diseases Laboratories, was conducted improperly or unsafely. In fact, it was approved by an internal biosafety review committee and Boston’s Public Health Commission, the university said Monday night.
Theat doesn't mean it can't be accidentally released, it just means there is less of a chance.
Sweet maybe after this we can go ahead and extract DNA from a mosquito in amber and use that to make dinosaurs and open a theme park with them. Sounds like that is the next Chriton movie on the list now that we are checking of "The Andromeda Strain".
Speaking of The Andromeda Strain, I used to assume the safety measures of real life labs for pathogen research were comparable to what Crichton described in that book. Well, probably not with nuclear bombs rigged to sterilize the facility in case of an accident, but at least built remote and with serious quarantine procedures.
Apparently not. Apparently they build these places in the middle of cities and let workers go home every evening. Insanity.
I live right around the corner from here and pass this place daily. There was a lot of concern when this place was built in the heart of a major city and I understand the concern (though I’m guessing the risk a place like this poses is really in that an individual who works there gets infected with something and goes out into society - which means the location doesn’t matter much.)
On the flipside, I also understand that research like this needs to happen for us to learn and make progress. All that being said, this just comes off as sloppy, which is exactly the feeling I don’t want to have about a BSL-3 lab in my neighborhood.
In this snippet from the abstract, S stands for spike protein:
> "We generated chimeric recombinant SARS-CoV-2 encoding the S gene of Omicron in the backbone of an ancestral SARS-CoV-2 isolate and compared this virus with the naturally circulating Omicron variant. The Omicron S-bearing virus robustly escapes vaccine-induced humoral immunity, mainly due to mutations in the receptor-binding motif (RBM), yet unlike naturally occurring Omicron, efficiently replicates in cell lines and primary-like distal lung cells. In K18-hACE2 mice, while Omicron causes mild, non-fatal infection, the Omicron S-carrying virus inflicts severe disease with a mortality rate of 80%. This indicates that while the vaccine escape of Omicron is defined by mutations in S, major determinants of viral pathogenicity reside outside of S."
See russfink comment above for the relative mortality compared to the original Wuhan strain (100% for Wuhan compared to 80% for this hybrid). So this researcher-generated strain appears to be intermediate in mortality between the original Wuhan strain and Omicron, BUT it escapes vaccination relative to the Wuhan strain, making it more dangerous in that regard and more likely to spread through a vaccinated population causing significant mortality. I'd classify this as reckless and irresponsible research.
As far as the original Wuhan strain, we have about four theories of origin. (1) natural wild type with no lab research involvement, (2) natural wild type collected by a lab and accidentally released from that lab, (3) wild type 'heated up' by serial passage through mice and cloned human-type cells without explicit genetic engineering, and (4) deliberate engineering using a CRISPR system to insert a furan cleavage site in a collected wild-type virus, which allowed a bat virus to leap to a human host.
Really (4) has the most evidence at this point, and note that this is not entirely the fault of the Chinese Wuhan Institute of Virology as the research concept was partially developed in the USA and continued (despite an Obama-era ban on gain-of-function research) in China with Ecohealth Alliance funding.
As far as why doing gain-of-function research to predict 'emerging disease outbreaks' is a godawfully stupid idea, it's that it appears that almost any infectious animal virus can be converted to a human pathogen by selective transfer of human-receptor-binding motifs, even though such transfer would never take place under natural conditions. An immediate global ban on this kind of research (under the Biological Warfare Convention) is needed.
> such transfer would never take place under natural conditions
How confident are we that is the case?
HIV resulted from the fusion of, IIRC, three virii in a host animal.
The odds of any single such event are vanishingly small, but that stacks against how many cells per second a virus can infect, worldwide. Life is a frightening goodness-of-fit optimizer at the scale of microorganization.
The BANAL viruses are a couple of mutations away from a workable furin cleavage site, nature can engineer them just as easily as we do, and has done so multiple different times that we know of across beta-coronaviruses.
Whether natural or escaping from a lab, I fully expect a mass casualty disease in my lifetime. We saw what a shitshow covid was, and it wasn't even that bad.
Fast global travel is spreading the endemic ranges of many diseases and make it essentially impossible to stop many diseases depending on the traits of the disease.
A potential lab leak of many types of diseases is more of a threat and will likely kill more people than a limited nuclear deployment. At least with the nuclear issue someone has to push the button. With the lab leak it's almost a certainty that equipment will fail in some unprecedented way, or someone will absent-mindedly violate protocol. It's a lot harder to keep track of a microbe than a warhead.
[+] [-] rossdavidh|3 years ago|reply
2) even the alleged learning from the experiment: "The conclusion of the study is that mutations in the spike protein of the Omicron variant are responsible for the strain’s ability to evade immunity people have built up via vaccination, infections, or both, but they are not responsible for the apparent decrease in severity of the Omicron viruses."
...does not hold up, because this was in mice. Ordinary lab rats were immune to the original strain of covid-19, but not to Omicron, which shows that it is not at all unlikely for there to be significant differences in the resistance of rodents to one strain or the other, compared to humans.
So, they made a hybrid covid-19 strain, that could conceivably have been as contagious as Omicron but as lethal as the original strain. Nice work, folks.
[+] [-] baja_blast|3 years ago|reply
Also it's not like this type of research helped us predict or even fight the pandemic. Millions have been spent on studying and modifying wild coronaviruses and it not only failed to predict this pandemic, but none of the research helped in anyway combating it. For example the Ecohealth Alliance the main collaborators with the WIV has still to this day refused to share research and data they have collected over the years. So either the research is worthless and thus why are we funding it despite the dangers, or they have something they want to hide.
[+] [-] alexfromapex|3 years ago|reply
Also, they completely skirted the NIAID approval process, putting the public at risk, will anyone see jail time for that?
[+] [-] bayesian_horse|3 years ago|reply
In reality, infectious success and malignancy are highly anti-correlated, strongly. The combined Virus (which probably has existed in a very similar form in the wild somewhere!!) is actually a lot less dangerous than the two sources.
Also: Both Viruses have become a lot less dangerous to the world population because of immunity.
[+] [-] stuckinhell|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] elif|3 years ago|reply
Looks like there needs to be a criminal line drawn somewhere.
[+] [-] brundolf|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] thrown_22|3 years ago|reply
The people most upset in the room are the same people who have been screaming that Covid was not a lab accident. I wonder why they would be upset at someone showing how easy it is to weaponize a coronavirus?
[+] [-] neilv|3 years ago|reply
In that dialogue, the public heard a lot about histories of safety incidents at other BSL-4 labs, which generally seemed due to negligence.
Today, given all the presumed awareness of lab leak risks, from the BU BSL-4 protests, and from the subsequent Covid pandemic-- I don't know why anyone at BU would risk modifying Covid without the utmost precautions, including at least using BSL-4 rather than BSL-3.
[+] [-] VyseofArcadia|3 years ago|reply
My wife was a laboratory inspector for a while. She'd come home with the craziest stories about how such-and-such lab tried to get away with this or that. I'd have the same question every time. "Why?!" Protocols only work if they're followed. We have such a long history of disasters, major or minor, because of negligence[0]. Cutting corners, operating outside the envelope, etc.
She'd always just shrug and say, "familiarity breeds contempt".[1]
[0] My favorite is Chernobyl.
[1] Also, a lot of scientists have this, "I know what I'm doing" attitude and see safety precautions as holding them back. It doesn't help that most of them see grad students as expendable.
[+] [-] baja_blast|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] giantg2|3 years ago|reply
But I guess safety measures like that are too inconvenient.
[+] [-] neilv|3 years ago|reply
https://web.archive.org/web/20101125034813/https://www.massn...
[+] [-] brippalcharrid|3 years ago|reply
No-one wants to live in an underground facility for weeks or months at a time when they could be making the most of living in a major city, not even virologists working on pathogens that are being modified to see what would happen if there was a pathogen whose evolution was guided in a particularly interesting direction and compressed from decades to weeks or even days.
Anyway, if we were to ask the world's foremost experts in the virological community whether we should restrict such research to carefully-controlled remote locations subject to stringent controls, long quarantines and strict oversight, then we might find that the answer was similar to when we asked "is if likely or even within the realm of possibility that SARS-CoV-2 originated from a lab in Wuhan as result of Gain-of-Function research". And they might insist that we listen to them because they were the experts, and they would probably find a lot of support in the government and the media.
[+] [-] somenameforme|3 years ago|reply
That page offers "only" dozens of examples in recent times, but that is certainly going to be non-exhaustive and the potential magnitude of impact of a single of these incidents is difficult to overstate. Notably while the biosafety levels for each leak are not stated, at least two came from BSL-4 labs - the highest safety standard there is.
[+] [-] justinpombrio|3 years ago|reply
Oh, actually you can calculate this, assuming you're utilitarian and think risking innocent lives is OK as long as it saves that many lives in expectation. If you think there's a 10% chance that Covid came from a lab leak, then the "making viruses more deadly" research that we've done so far ought to have saved more than 10% * 20 million = 2 million people. Did it? From what I've heard it's done fuck-all.
I stand by my pissed off voice here. I think it's appropriate to be pissed off about risking millions of lives for hypothetical benefits.
(To be clear, I'm only talking about research that studies deadly extinct viruses and deadly lab-created viruses. We should absolutely continue to study viruses in general.)
[+] [-] russfink|3 years ago|reply
The spike protein of an Omicron version of SARS-2 was fused to a virus of the Wuhan strain, the original version that emerged from China in 2020. The goal was to determine if the mutations in the Omicron spike protein were responsible for this variant’s increased ability to evade the immunity to SARS-2 that humans have built up, and whether the changes led to Omicron’s lower rate of severity. The testing actually showed, though, that the chimeric virus was more lethal to a type of lab mice than Omicron itself, killing 80% of the mice infected. Importantly, the original Wuhan strain killed 100% of mice it was tested in. The conclusion is that mutations in the spike protein of the Omicron variant are responsible for the strain’s ability to evade immunity people have built up via vaccination, infections, or both, but they are not responsible for the apparent decrease in severity of the Omicron viruses.
[+] [-] cstejerean|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lamontcg|3 years ago|reply
Damn near every single person in this comment thread has antibodies and T-cells to Omicron spike and everyone naturally infected has T-cells for the original strain as well because T-cell epitopes aren't immune escape targets.
Chances of this "escaping" the lab and producing another coronavirus wave are zero because that already happened.
Like Derek Lowe pointed out nature already did a similar experiment with an Omicron spike and a Delta backbone because coronaviruses undergo recombination naturally:
https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/gain-function-not-...
Nobody has heard of the XD strain because there was so much immunity to it that it never really went anywhere.
[+] [-] Terr_|3 years ago|reply
Checking my layperson understanding by trying to make a dumbed-down version:
"The outside of the new virus is stuff almost everybody's immune system should already be primed to seek and destroy, preferably before it hits a human cell. Even if it does hit a human cell, the inside stuff is old/simple enough that your immune system should easily recognize that the cell is infected and swollen, and kill it quickly too, there are no false everything-is-fine-here tricks."
[+] [-] tripletao|3 years ago|reply
Are you aware of any situation where the omicron spike and Wuhan backbone could have recombined naturally? As far as I know, the latter was extinct in the wild by the time the former emerged.
It's good that the omicron/delta variant didn't blow up in humans. The omicron/Wuhan variant seems like another throw of the dice, though, and even a very small probability times millions of potential deaths is significant.
[+] [-] nsxwolf|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shadowgovt|3 years ago|reply
If no humans are running controlled experiments on the virus, there is still an experiment currently being run as a massive, randomized trial in the form of the natural mutative processes the virus undergoes in the infected human population. How much do we want to trust that it won't hit upon an HIV-category combinatoric mutation before we're aware it has the potential to do that?
The risk tradeoff is difficult here, but we should keep in mind that the risk of doing no such research is way, way higher than zero.
[+] [-] matthewdgreen|3 years ago|reply
[1] https://www.fiercehealthcare.com/payers/preliminary-data-poi...
[+] [-] mgamache|3 years ago|reply
Spreading, yes. Originating no. Note:
This article uses two preprint papers one of which was changed before publication and the other doesn't support zoonotic origin:
https://www.science.org/content/article/do-three-new-studies...
[+] [-] muaytimbo|3 years ago|reply
In this case there is some handwaving about 80% mortality vs 100% mortality in a mouse host about it technically not being more lethal than the original. But what if the testing revealed 100% mortality plus some other metric of increased transmissibility or something similar after the fact. It would've been unknown to the researchers at the time of synthesis and fit every definition of "gain-of-function" research.
I think in light of this inability to know apriori if a virus is going to be more/less lethal we're splitting hairs when we say this is not technically "gain-of-function" research.
[+] [-] alchemist1e9|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AzzieElbab|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] flobosg|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] derstander|3 years ago|reply
[0] https://www.bu.edu/articles/2022/neidl-researchers-refute-uk...
[+] [-] ratsmack|3 years ago|reply
Theat doesn't mean it can't be accidentally released, it just means there is less of a chance.
[+] [-] jacknews|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] buscoquadnary|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dqpb|3 years ago|reply
I understand that many/most people would oppose this on ethical grounds. I could probably even articulate those positions if I tried.
But, deep down in my inner child, I think the world would be much more interesting if these things existed.
[+] [-] MichaelCollins|3 years ago|reply
Apparently not. Apparently they build these places in the middle of cities and let workers go home every evening. Insanity.
[+] [-] kbos87|3 years ago|reply
On the flipside, I also understand that research like this needs to happen for us to learn and make progress. All that being said, this just comes off as sloppy, which is exactly the feeling I don’t want to have about a BSL-3 lab in my neighborhood.
[+] [-] addingadimensio|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alfiedotwtf|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] photochemsyn|3 years ago|reply
> "We generated chimeric recombinant SARS-CoV-2 encoding the S gene of Omicron in the backbone of an ancestral SARS-CoV-2 isolate and compared this virus with the naturally circulating Omicron variant. The Omicron S-bearing virus robustly escapes vaccine-induced humoral immunity, mainly due to mutations in the receptor-binding motif (RBM), yet unlike naturally occurring Omicron, efficiently replicates in cell lines and primary-like distal lung cells. In K18-hACE2 mice, while Omicron causes mild, non-fatal infection, the Omicron S-carrying virus inflicts severe disease with a mortality rate of 80%. This indicates that while the vaccine escape of Omicron is defined by mutations in S, major determinants of viral pathogenicity reside outside of S."
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.10.13.512134v1....
See russfink comment above for the relative mortality compared to the original Wuhan strain (100% for Wuhan compared to 80% for this hybrid). So this researcher-generated strain appears to be intermediate in mortality between the original Wuhan strain and Omicron, BUT it escapes vaccination relative to the Wuhan strain, making it more dangerous in that regard and more likely to spread through a vaccinated population causing significant mortality. I'd classify this as reckless and irresponsible research.
As far as the original Wuhan strain, we have about four theories of origin. (1) natural wild type with no lab research involvement, (2) natural wild type collected by a lab and accidentally released from that lab, (3) wild type 'heated up' by serial passage through mice and cloned human-type cells without explicit genetic engineering, and (4) deliberate engineering using a CRISPR system to insert a furan cleavage site in a collected wild-type virus, which allowed a bat virus to leap to a human host.
Really (4) has the most evidence at this point, and note that this is not entirely the fault of the Chinese Wuhan Institute of Virology as the research concept was partially developed in the USA and continued (despite an Obama-era ban on gain-of-function research) in China with Ecohealth Alliance funding.
As far as why doing gain-of-function research to predict 'emerging disease outbreaks' is a godawfully stupid idea, it's that it appears that almost any infectious animal virus can be converted to a human pathogen by selective transfer of human-receptor-binding motifs, even though such transfer would never take place under natural conditions. An immediate global ban on this kind of research (under the Biological Warfare Convention) is needed.
[+] [-] shadowgovt|3 years ago|reply
How confident are we that is the case?
HIV resulted from the fusion of, IIRC, three virii in a host animal.
The odds of any single such event are vanishingly small, but that stacks against how many cells per second a virus can infect, worldwide. Life is a frightening goodness-of-fit optimizer at the scale of microorganization.
[+] [-] lamontcg|3 years ago|reply
No, there is literally zero evidence of this.
The BANAL viruses are a couple of mutations away from a workable furin cleavage site, nature can engineer them just as easily as we do, and has done so multiple different times that we know of across beta-coronaviruses.
[+] [-] obert|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] extantproject|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] giantg2|3 years ago|reply
Fast global travel is spreading the endemic ranges of many diseases and make it essentially impossible to stop many diseases depending on the traits of the disease.
A potential lab leak of many types of diseases is more of a threat and will likely kill more people than a limited nuclear deployment. At least with the nuclear issue someone has to push the button. With the lab leak it's almost a certainty that equipment will fail in some unprecedented way, or someone will absent-mindedly violate protocol. It's a lot harder to keep track of a microbe than a warhead.