As a programmer, I suddenly got an urge to learn how I can program proteins to do the stuff I want to do. From reading material around proteins, it seems they are nothing more than mechanical devices.
The virus hijacks existing cellular mechanisms for its own purposes. Interfering with those mechanisms could halt the replication of the virus, but it could also kill you. As an example, the virus enters cells through the use of the ACE2 protein. That protein plays a part in regulating blood pressure, so you can imagine the danger that could come from doing playing around with that.
However, SARS-CoV-2 is an RNA virus and its genome codes for an RNA polymerase enzyme that copies its RNA genome. Human cells do not use RNA polymerase and so it could be a target for a drug. This is how remdesivir works, but you have to find a compound that can effectively interfere, but that isn't too incidentally toxic to humans.
> I suddenly got an urge to learn how I can program proteins to do the stuff I want to do. From reading material around proteins, it seems they are nothing more than mechanical devices.
Good luck, I'd argue that our ability to design functional, non-trivial proteins de novo is essentially non-existent. The function of a protein is highly dependent of its shape and the process of how a string of amino acids folds into the final shape of the protein is extremely complicated and requires supercomputers to simulate. Not to mention that proteins may require help from another proteins to properly fold. Proteins may also be modified after they have folded and a lot of proteins require things like metal ions or other cofactors to actually be functional.
One of the simplest treatments is convalescent plasma, where you take blood plasma from people who have recovered from a virus (and presumably have antibodies) and give it to an infected patient.
This is not telling the immune system how to react in the way a vaccine does; it is bypassing the immune system to provide anti-bodies directly (of course, after the anti-bodies attach, normal immune system responses take over).
A team of Isreali scientiest have produced artificial anti-bodies that serve the same function without relying on someone else's immune system to produce [0].
There are also a host of anti-viral drugs designed to interfere with with various processes used by virus.
For instance, ribavarin resembles adenoside, which is a one of the building blocks of RNA. It can therefore inject itself into the virus's RNA during replication and cause fatal mutations in the virus.
> it seems they are nothing more than mechanical devices.
Chemical devices would probably be more accurate. Even determining what shape they have is an difficult computation problem (protein folding). Even if you know that, you have to consider how it would interact with every other chemical process in the body that it comes into contact with.
[0] https://www.news-medical.net/news/20200505/Israeli-scientist...
I suspect that the reality is that they do not know much, all the rendering/animation give an impression of sophistication and knowledge. Basically deceit.