And THIS is why and how a vaccine was created so rapidly.
I posited, early on, that it may have “originated” in the Wuhan wet market because it’s not unheard-of for lab workers to sell sacrificed lab animals to said market (not saying where they came from, of course) and continue to believe that it may be a legitimate theory. I realize many of you will disagree with me.
I’ve never heard that.
I’m not sure what you mean. It was principally mRNA vaccine technology that allowed us to produce a vaccine so quickly. Do you mean the fact that we were familiar with the way coronaviruses generally work meant that we knew to use the spike gene for the mRNA?
There are straightforward non-sinister theories that can explain the odd coincidence of the proximity to the lab. Workers associated with the lab would collect field samples to bring back to the lab. The transfer from bat to human may have been to one of those workers in the field who unknowingly was the first human infected, and who then returned to Wuhan and spread it to other people in Wuhan without it ever “escaping” from the lab.
I don’t think we should just dismiss the proximity to the lab as one piece of evidence, since explanations that do not require an unlikely coincidence are more likely to be correct. But there are simple explanations that don’t require any dangerous experiments (for which there is no evidence) or reckless carelessness (for which there is no evidence) to explain the proximity to the lab.
Back to cute bats. These little guys snuggle up in “leaf tents”. Their noses and ears are yellow because they accumulate carotenoids from their diet.
The simplest one is that it’s the same reason why Mauna Kea is so close to a major vulcanology lab. There are a lot of coronaviruses in the wild around there, and so that’s where people who study coronaviruses go.
We’ve been over this. There are a lot of coronaviruses in the wild over a huge area, but the lab is unique. The analogy to a vulcanology lab near Mauna Kea is not apt, unless there were thousands of active volcanoes and only one vulcanology lab.
And it wasn’t really that quickly, either. Work on mRNA vaccines and vaccines for SARS-1 had been happening for a long time. The SARS-1 vaccine work stopped because the disease stopped spreading, so there were no test subjects, and funding dried up, because the disease stopped spreading. All of that work setup a foundation so SARS-CoV-2 vaccine development wasn’t completely from scratch.
It’s sort of like old line about bands who “become an overnight success after 10 years of work.”
And more about bats:
My hypothesis is that this guy was in Wuhan around the time the outbreak started. Probably borrowing the lab to research something confiscated from a local Chinese supervillain.
There’s your origin. Prove me wrong.
There’s also MERS CoV, which is much more lethal than Covid 19, but much rarer. Vaccine research is ‘ongoing’ but, presumably, overlaps with SARS-1 and SARS-2.
Minor hijack, is MERS vaccine development stalled because of technical challenges, or is it just not being pursued aggressively because it’s not much of a threat?
It is nearly impossible to test a vaccine for something as dangerous as MERS unless it is spreading naturally. If you give a MERS vaccine to 10,000 people, none will get MERS. What does that mean? They weren’t going to get MERS anyway. If there were an at risk population, then that could be used, but there isn’t, and MERS isn’t benign enough for a challenge trial.
There are probably other ways to test things, but if the disease is a no longer a risk, then the money and effort is better spent on a disease that is a risk.
I guess that would count as a 3rd option. I was thinking of funding vs something uniquely challenging about this virus’s structure or function. But practical testing within ethical constraints is a valid problem too.
AIUI, mRNA vaccines have the potential to be “designed” to fight many different viruses/other pathogens.
One would think that a possible avenue to huge profits from new vaccines would have kept pharmaceutical companies wide-eyed interest even after SARS-1 was no longer a threat.
This is actually the most concerning part of this whole thread.
Sure, pharmaceutical companies probably do have significant interest in such vaccines, but you can’t fully develop what you can’t test in live human beings. And not just one or two of them. And if sufficiently large numbers of people simply aren’t getting infected in the first place, you’re rather stuck.
I suppose they could go full mustache twirling villain and deliberately infect a wide range of test subjects (from babies to the elderly across a wide range of races and economic backgrounds) with viruses for which there are currently no approved/tested vaccines, but that has its own obvious legal and ethical issues.
Well, what do you think COVID was?
To be fair to the OP, the title of this thread is quite accurate.