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Comment by jka | Hacker News Reader

Adding to this:

While you do not recommend ZJ01 due to the potential for it to mutate back into the original strain, isn't it also quite dangerous?

That would likely remain a primary concern for many - we musn't cause large scale harm intentionally. And if we don't know what effects a strain has, it makes it ethically difficult to distribute.

From the ZJ01 Medrxiv[1] page you link to:

"We found, in our 788 confirmed COVID-19 patients, the decreased rate of severe/critical type, increased liver/kidney damage and prolonged period of nuclear acid positivity during virus dissemination, when compared with Wuhan."

[1] - https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.10.20033944v...

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This just rules our using ZJ01. There are other attenuated strains out there that will have deletion mutations that can’t mutate back. We need to go find them.

Sorry if it's a stupid question, but hypothetically, would we be able to engineer rather than find a harmless strain of coronavirus with the spike protein of SARS-CoV-2?

If I understand correctly, antigens identify the virus by its S proteins. Would we be able to use the same methods <a href='https://www.nature.com/articles/nm.3985'>as in this paper</a> to replace the S protein in a harmless cold-like coronavirus with the S protein of SARS-CoV-2, and would then the resulting immunity defend against SARS-CoV-2?

This is not a stupid question. Yes we could engineer such a strain, the problem would be testing it given we would not be able to predict how dangerous it was.

Having identified a harmless strain, and presuming regulatory agencies are too slow to be useful, then what?

Send people infected with the harmless version around, after lockdown ends in a month or two, to crowded places?

Would greater virulence be a desirable quality in our reduced strain?

Well if the regulatory agencies decided that they weren’t going to act then I suspect there would be a grass roots level spread of the strain anyway. This would be the worst way to use such a strain, but I don’t think it would be possible to stop this happening.

I don’t think we will get to that point. If we collect good data from the natural spread of any attenuated strain then I think the regulatory authorities will allow its use on the basis of this data.

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