If you’re already manipulating COVID-19 in a lab with all the difficulties that entails, making a less-severe variant does not add significant difficulty on top of that
That seems wrong. It seems that today we have little evidence that doesn’t come from the clinical history of humans that points towards it being less severe. To know that whatever change you made makes it less severe in humans you actually need to test it in humans. Doing human testing is quite complicated. Even if you do this in some African country where you can take over some remote village to do human experimentation, that’s a lot of work and there’s potential for the NSA/CIA to get wind of such a project.
Furthermore, your thesis doesn’t explain why the spike protein has so much more mutations than the other proteins. It makes sense that the South African gain-of-function experiments that tested whether the virus can evolve around antibodies against the spike protein produce such a result but it doesn’t make sense that you would find that pattern if someone would just want to design it to be less harmful.
I would also highlight this as seemingly by far the most wrong point. Consider how many Omicron cases we now have and we still don’t know for sure it’s significantly less severe. Now consider how many secret cases in humans infected with various novel strains you’re working with you would need to enact in a controlled environment to be confident enough that a given strain is less severe and thus it makes sense to release it.
That seems wrong. It seems that today we have little evidence that doesn’t come from the clinical history of humans that points towards it being less severe. To know that whatever change you made makes it less severe in humans you actually need to test it in humans. Doing human testing is quite complicated. Even if you do this in some African country where you can take over some remote village to do human experimentation, that’s a lot of work and there’s potential for the NSA/CIA to get wind of such a project.
Furthermore, your thesis doesn’t explain why the spike protein has so much more mutations than the other proteins. It makes sense that the South African gain-of-function experiments that tested whether the virus can evolve around antibodies against the spike protein produce such a result but it doesn’t make sense that you would find that pattern if someone would just want to design it to be less harmful.
I would also highlight this as seemingly by far the most wrong point. Consider how many Omicron cases we now have and we still don’t know for sure it’s significantly less severe. Now consider how many secret cases in humans infected with various novel strains you’re working with you would need to enact in a controlled environment to be confident enough that a given strain is less severe and thus it makes sense to release it.