It seems like you misunderstood something here: the “virus with 100% lethality in mice” was the original wild-type (“Wuhan”) sars-cov-2 virus. It was the mice that were engineered for their susceptibility to it. That’s why the 80% headline number is meaningless and alarmist to report in isolation: The new strain is 80% fatal in mice which were genetically engineered to be susceptible to original-flavor COVID, which is 100% fatal to them.
Are you somehow asserting that the original sars-cov-2 virus is not in the reference class of “very dangerous virus” and that I fail to understand that the original sars-cov-2 is not dangerous?
I just responded to Zac’s assertion that we should look at the fact that it reduces lethality from 100% to 80%. He made the argument that this commission is a problem and I said why it doesn’t.
You can also make an argument that it’s important to talk about the fact that we are talking about the original strain but that’s not an argument that Zac made.
But let’s think about whether “it was the original COVID strain” should make us think that this wasn’t a risky idea and see what their paper has to say about that.
We generated chimeric recombinant SARS-CoV-2 encoding the S45 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-48 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.
The virus they created is more lethal than Omicron (in the mouse model) and more potentially more transmissible than the original COVID strain.
Here, we characterized the K18-hACE2 mouse model expressing human (h)ACE2 in mice, controlled by the human keratin 18 (K18) promoter, in the epithelia, including airway epithelial cells where SARS-CoV-2 infections typically start.
Given that those mice are more like humans than normal mice, I do think that a virus that’s more lethal to them than Omicron also has a good chance of being more harmful to humans than Omicron.
While I think that you could excuse researchers who produce a modified virus with lower lethality and lower transmissible than an already existing virus, the idea that you don’t want to do a virus that’s either more lethal or more transmissible than existing viruses is a bad idea. Especially, the idea that not do those experiments under the best conditions for safety that’s possible which would be biosafety level 4.
It seems like you misunderstood something here: the “virus with 100% lethality in mice” was the original wild-type (“Wuhan”) sars-cov-2 virus. It was the mice that were engineered for their susceptibility to it. That’s why the 80% headline number is meaningless and alarmist to report in isolation: The new strain is 80% fatal in mice which were genetically engineered to be susceptible to original-flavor COVID, which is 100% fatal to them.
Are you somehow asserting that the original sars-cov-2 virus is not in the reference class of “very dangerous virus” and that I fail to understand that the original sars-cov-2 is not dangerous?
I just responded to Zac’s assertion that we should look at the fact that it reduces lethality from 100% to 80%. He made the argument that this commission is a problem and I said why it doesn’t.
You can also make an argument that it’s important to talk about the fact that we are talking about the original strain but that’s not an argument that Zac made.
But let’s think about whether “it was the original COVID strain” should make us think that this wasn’t a risky idea and see what their paper has to say about that.
From the actual paper:
The virus they created is more lethal than Omicron (in the mouse model) and more potentially more transmissible than the original COVID strain.
The mouse model in question is described in The K18-Human ACE2 Transgenic Mouse Model Recapitulates Non-severe and Severe COVID-19 in Response to an Infectious Dose of the SARS-CoV-2 Virus:
Given that those mice are more like humans than normal mice, I do think that a virus that’s more lethal to them than Omicron also has a good chance of being more harmful to humans than Omicron.
While I think that you could excuse researchers who produce a modified virus with lower lethality and lower transmissible than an already existing virus, the idea that you don’t want to do a virus that’s either more lethal or more transmissible than existing viruses is a bad idea. Especially, the idea that not do those experiments under the best conditions for safety that’s possible which would be biosafety level 4.