If you hear anyone claim “we know the virus didn’t come from a lab”, don’t buy it — it may well have. Labs around the globe have been creating synthetic viruses for years:
Another rabbit hole on the topic of SARS2 as a potential pan-coronavirus vaccine candidate. This time it was prompted by @gdemaneuf pointing out several papers that say SARS2 spike might bind not just to ACE2 but also to the MERS receptor, DPP4.
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There have been several papers just after the outbreak of SARS2 that hypothesized that it could also invade immune system cells via DPP4 receptor, mostly based on in silico modeling. Then a couple papers reported that in actual experiments it doesn’t and this topic died down
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But even if it doesn’t bind to the MERS receptor, the presence of those residues in its spike is intriguing, as they could come from someone trying to make it bind and/or trying to generate neutralizing antibodies against those key residues with a goal of neutralizing MERS.
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Just so that we’re clear — I am not saying we should dismiss any COVID vaccine concerns. Absolutely not! We should debate any potential issues and closely monitor any actual ones. So far there do seem some rare minor issues and ultra-rare major ones (deaths, clots).
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Not all vaccines are equal. Some are better than others. I am a huge fan of mRNA ones, I fully admit. I’ve been a fan of mRNA technology for many years (back when it was just invented/considered for use in Yamanaka factors delivery which are my main passion).
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Vaccines seem like a perfect fit for the mRNA technology, especially in a pandemic where you need very quickly adapt to novel strains. I actually hope we can squeak by without new boosters, but for that we need a coordinated world-wide effort to eradicate SARS2 ASAP.
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So some COVID vaccine alarmist have been quoting the study by @manorlaboratory out of Salk that SARS2 spike alone can cause cell damage. But that’s not what the study has shown!
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Those were not lone spike proteins, those were HIV-like virions encoding SARS2 spike. I.e. entered the cells expressing ACE2 and once inside expressed their proteins and maybe even integrated into cell genome (not sure if they used integrase-deficient retroviruses or not).
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Maybe the confusion is due to the lax wording by the popular science article describing the study:
AAA SNAKES ON A PLANE, I mean
SPIKES IN MY BRAIN AAA!!!
The latest Covid vaccine fear is that spike proteins produced by the vaccine will get out of the cells, get into the bloodstream, and travel to the brain causing prion-like pathology.
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While there are some data that free-floating spike proteins (or just their fragments) seem to be detected in the blood the first couple of days after vaccination, the amounts detected are minuscule, around 70 pg/mL. A picogram is 1e-12 gram.
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Moreover, free-floating spikes cannot get inside cells on their own, and even if they could, any potential prion-like effects of spikes are pure conjecture at this point: nothing of sort has yet been observed — neither in vitro or in vivo.
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