Any thoughts on the speculation that Omicron may be the result of a new lab leak from a lab in SA experimenting on immune escape?
(I have not read the paper cited in that tweet in depth, and I don’t know anything about the tweet author. But superficially, their thesis sounded plausible.)
The paper seems to describe the Delta variant and classify its properties compared to older strains. I’m not an expert so I might well be misunderstanding it, but that paper seems to classify and compare two wild strains, not modify them? Maybe I’m missing something, but what is the relation with omicron?
I thought the fact that South Africa does far more sequencing than other countries in that part of the world (for example, check the reported Delta sequences by country, where South Africa is listed as 25th globally with 11,004 sequenced samples, and the next sub-Saharan country seems to be Nigeria, 49th, 2,075 sequenced Delta samples) is more than sufficient to explain away the surprise that they noticed it first. The fact that they also have a laboratory for virus research is hardly a coincidence.
As far as I know there is insufficient evidence to assume omicron is lab-created, as opposed to, for example, reverse zoonosis or long development time inside a person with a compromised immune response. But even conditional on omicron being lab-created, what reason is there to assume it originates from a lab in South Africa? The twitter threat does not seem to provide an answer.
I’m not an expert so I might well be misunderstanding it, but that paper seems to classify and compare two wild strains, not modify them? Maybe I’m missing something, but what is the relation with omicron?
I think the conjecture is that the virus would have mutated on its own, in the presence of antibodies. But on second thought, maybe that’s relatively unrealistic (as a possible explanation for Omicron), because we’d expect much more mutation in the wild where there are much higher quantities of the virus?
Any thoughts on the speculation that Omicron may be the result of a new lab leak from a lab in SA experimenting on immune escape?
(I have not read the paper cited in that tweet in depth, and I don’t know anything about the tweet author. But superficially, their thesis sounded plausible.)
The paper seems to describe the Delta variant and classify its properties compared to older strains. I’m not an expert so I might well be misunderstanding it, but that paper seems to classify and compare two wild strains, not modify them? Maybe I’m missing something, but what is the relation with omicron?
I thought the fact that South Africa does far more sequencing than other countries in that part of the world (for example, check the reported Delta sequences by country, where South Africa is listed as 25th globally with 11,004 sequenced samples, and the next sub-Saharan country seems to be Nigeria, 49th, 2,075 sequenced Delta samples) is more than sufficient to explain away the surprise that they noticed it first. The fact that they also have a laboratory for virus research is hardly a coincidence.
As far as I know there is insufficient evidence to assume omicron is lab-created, as opposed to, for example, reverse zoonosis or long development time inside a person with a compromised immune response. But even conditional on omicron being lab-created, what reason is there to assume it originates from a lab in South Africa? The twitter threat does not seem to provide an answer.
I think the conjecture is that the virus would have mutated on its own, in the presence of antibodies. But on second thought, maybe that’s relatively unrealistic (as a possible explanation for Omicron), because we’d expect much more mutation in the wild where there are much higher quantities of the virus?