There is a substantial amount of evidence pointing to SARS-Covid-2 to be a lab creation that, at best, leaked. Given the absolute society destroying reaction that came from this disease you would think that scientists would have second and third thoughts about "gain of function" research. Alas no.
"The recently identified, globally predominant SARS-CoV-2 Omicron variant (BA.1) is41
highly transmissible, even in fully vaccinated individuals, and causes attenuated disease42
compared with other major viral variants recognized to date1-7. The Omicron spike (S)43
protein, with an unusually large number of mutations, is considered the major driver of44
these phenotypes3,8. 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 this46
virus with the naturally circulating Omicron variant."
We did what?
"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 thisvirus with the naturally circulating Omicron variant."
Why?
Because there's nobody stopping us from doing so. That's why.
Continuing:
n K18-hACE2 mice, while Omicron causes mild,5080 what?
non-fatal infection, the Omicron S-carrying virus inflicts severe disease with a mortality51
rate of 80%.
So lets get this straight. Having most likely gone through a lab leaked "gain of function" product, these scientists went and created another version of this thing that, in mice, has an 80% kill rate?
Just so we know who did it should we find this thing in the wild:
How about we stop putting artificial selection pressure on this virus?