Where do Covid mutants come from? | Hacker News Reader

Where do Covid mutants come from?

microbiologynutsandbolts.co.uk

24 pointsbigbillheck10 comments

The reality has been and remains, isolating and vaccinating the elderly and immunocompromised is the only reasonable thing to do. Trying to wrestle the entire globe into compliance at the expense of mental and, increasingly, physical health has not worked. We are approaching the point of having caused greater damage than we have prevented, the toll of which will never be known

Approaching the point? IMHO, we passed that point long ago, probably as early as May 2020. We're just into super-extra-bonus destruction of social, economic, cultural, and education systems now.

1. I absolutely hate the chatty style when it's used to spread the description of a js API over many tedious pages, let alone when it's used for a scientific subject like this one.

2. >SARS CoV2 has a stable genome, its genetics change very slowly.

Is such a misrepresentation it is basically untrue. Coronaviruses are (+)ssRNA viruses, which are not the very fastest-mutating RNA viruses, but mutate much faster than DNA viruses.

https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Relationship-between-mut...

We don't need to invoke other mechanisms to explain why Covid mutates rapidly. As soon as it was found to be a coronavirus, that fact was already known.

In mid-2020, I read some articles from evolutionary biologists that said the risk of vaccinating a population in the middle of a pandemic, which had never happened before, would cause evolutionary pressures that would cause mutations rendering the vaccine useless.

I don’t think it’s particularly true given the fact variants occurred in places with very low vaccination rate , ex. India and Delta variant, but it’s an interesting thing to think about. I wonder if we can measure the rate of variants in the wild pre-vaccine and post-vaccine to see if we did see an acceleration of mutations. It would certainly help create evidence one way or another if such a pathway exists in evolutionary biology.

That's a silly assumption to make and moreso to assert. The world is global. There's no reason to believe the location of variant prominence is also the primary origin. Many experts made these claims and despite the evidence they were correct, every armchair "scientist" needs a study to declare the obvious

Or answer D) Evolved during lab vaccine testing.

E) Engineered to submit humanity by the cabal of world leaders secretly being ruled by the cabal of reptilians secretly being ruled by the cabal of gray aliens.

Yeah, no.

But D) is not only possible, but omicron genetic features are quite hard to explain otherwise.

I admit is possible, but the evidence so far makes it very unlikely. I think right now the efforts should be centered on controlling the pandemic, placing blames with inconclusive evidence only serves to politicize the issue, and politics can ruin everything they touch.

By all means the investigation should go on until there's concrete evidence, so any wrongdoing can be sanctioned. And I mean ALL wrongdoing, both from hypothetical leaks to domestic mishandling of public health.

The evidence actually shows that a natural evolution is unlikely, or hard to explain.

I agree that there should be a focus on controlling the pandemic, but that does not mean we should punt origins investigations off into the unknown future, to be swept under the carpet.

The evidence is right there in the genetic sequence. We have the capacity to analyze it, and in the case of Omicron, it's quite stark.

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