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> with its self-rewrite immune escape functionality.

Interesting! Could you elaborate on this or provide a link?

> but also because the spike protein was already "solved" ahead of the pandemic.

I would also be interested in further information on that?

Thanks

For the first you can just Google for "hiv rapid mutation", example: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5414815/. The OP article contains a lot of details too.

For the second see something like "covid spike sequence modification", for example this seems like an accessible article: https://cen.acs.org/pharmaceuticals/vaccines/tiny-tweak-behi...

It was all thanks to the research on previous coronaviruses, MERS specifically. The Pfizer/Moderna vaccines have just copied it (of course that simple modification is not all it took, but that was definitely required for success).

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