Could it be that some researcher gave this variant to mice so that it will be easy to test and spread it later to human to counter more agressive variant and help that way bring up natural immunity?
Omicron is more transmissible. Less pathogenic. It evades immune responses from vaccines, and previous delta infections. But: it creates an immune response that seems to protect against delta, and possibly future variants.
Looks like the spec sheet of a miracle ... and now we find it was optimized through (accelerated?) selection in mice?
I still haven’t seen any study on naive omicron infected cross reactivity to other variants, specially over the RBD.
Yes, that is technically possible. Mice and humans also come into contact fairly often, so natural transmission from humans to mice (and back) wouldn't be that rare an event.
> and spread it later to human to counter more agressive variant
I think you might be giving too much credit to virologists - I don't think anybody could know from observing a virus in mice if it was going to be more or less aggressive in humans.
> and help that way bring up natural immunity?
Natural immunity doesn't seem to be very useful against covid. Or, at least, not more useful than the vaccines we already have. Stories of people getting covid twice, even three times, are getting more and more common. This doesn't seem to be a "get it once and you're set for life" virus.
Do you have any evidence for that? The question has obviously become politicised. Experts figure out what information they think might make people more relaxed or careless about covid, and heavily push the reverse line. It's no wonder people's trust in experts is failing.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/oct/24/which-...
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.08.24.21262415v...
It’s been a couple weeks so maybe there is better, less preliminary analysis available now
On hospitalization risk in the UK: https://www.imperial.ac.uk/mrc-global-infectious-disease-ana...
On reinfection/breakthrough risk: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.12.27.21268278v...
If such an exercise could save TRILLIONS of dollars in the short to mid term, do you still stand by your statement?
This is not even a novel idea. The idea of finding and spreading the least harmful variants was proposed very early in the pandemic (circa June 2020) in an article I read here. Of course that’s slightly different than what GP proposed.
However, I would’ve never thought that mRNA vaccines could be produced so quickly. Given the incentives at play, I bet a surprising amount is possible.
Absolutely I do. You can test for binding affinity to receptors, and make a guess - but you can’t know, and releasing a modified virus without knowing would be reckless beyond comprehension. It’s a good idea, for sure, and one day we may be able to do things like this intentionally, but I’m pretty confidant we’re not there today.