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The Omicron Variant: COVID or Common Cold?
Omicron variant and other major or previous variants of concern of SARS-CoV-2 depicted in a tree scaled radially by genetic distance, derived from Nextstrain on 1 December 2021 (Wikipedia)
Now that the full sequence of Omicron has become known it’s remarkable to see how different Omicron is from all the other SARS-CoV-2 variants. It did not arise as a simple mutation of the others, it’s different in several ways. It has 60 RNA mutations causing 36 amino acid changes, several in the all-important spike protein. In a radial graph of genetic distance Omicron forms its own group way off to the side of the other variants (see diagram).
This is reflected in the fact that Omicron is very different in the way it affects humans. It grows 70 times faster than Delta and is more infectious than Delta but it is less likely to cause death. Officials have been reluctant to acknowledge that Omicron is milder, but huge increases in infection rates have resulted in very small increases in the death rate in the latest wave. It’s more like the common cold than other SARS-CoV-2 causing a runny nose, sore throat, and a fever. It acts like the common cold, blitzing through an office or classroom just like a cold strain does — causing typical cold-like symptoms.
So it strikes me that Omicron might not be a true SARS-CoV-2 variant at all. Perhaps it arose from one of the many other coronaviruses out there. We know that several coronavirus are recognized as causes of the common cold, of which there are hundreds, most of which are rhinovirus variants. Not to get too deep into the weeds, but some of these cold-producing coronavirus variants bind to ACE receptors like SARS-CoV-2, and some bind to other things. All of these viruses cause the cold syndrome and are only very rarely deadly toward immunocompromised people.
But Omicron still shares some features of the original SARS-CoV-2 strains, so it shows up in the PCR and antigen detection systems — it’s recognized as a cause of COVID and officials are treating it that way even though it’s not causing typical COVID.
The difference is important. We can’t be shutting down and killing the economy every time another coronavirus comes along if it just causes a common cold. Some common sense needs to be employed in implementing public policy.
Published in Healthcare
If the answer is in those articles the good doctor can answer my question based on what he learned from them. If he didn’t learn anything from them, I doubt I am more capable than he at it.
Yes. But honestly, I didn’t need to. This is too neat. Just as things are calming down, a new strain arises of unparalleled infectivity and takes the world by storm. Natural origin. Yeah, right. Someone’s group, likely in Wuhan, engineered a very very infectious virus using covid as a basis. That they effed up on the degree of lethality is our blessing.
Neat? Looked like the usual messiness to me.
If the virus was engineered then it means whoever did it knew just what changes to make in the genetic code of the virus to get the desired effect, knowledge that we didn’t know existed, in which case we have a much bigger problem than we even supposed.
It means that someone out there can precision engineer bespoke viruses and send then out into the world.
Personally, I very much doubt that’s what’s going on.
I am persuaded that the virus arose from a lab-modified strain. However, its release and distribution do not suggest intention and planning. I mean, seriously, why start the pandemic a few blocks from the lab where it was developed? Why not launch with covert agents sent to foreign targeted cities, and only after an already developed vaccine is tready for the Party higher-ups (letting civilians get infected any dying to conceal key details–like the way Churchill let the Luftwaffe bomb Coventry).
I am also persuaded the Great Reset crowd had already thought about how to take advantage of such a situation but I doubt they were co-authors.
The real failure was us. We just assumed that competent, honest leadership at every level would emerge. Crises like Pearl Harbor or natural disasters have always seemed to bring out the best in us. Instead we delegated power to the worst political class in our history, the worst journalism culture possible, and gutless, bribed, and politicized academics while the best of us were largely silent or silenced.
They role-played a scenario. More on this later.
Haven’t they just employed the Rahm Emanuel axiom?
I read that. Those drill are to hone the mindset to wait (hope?) for an event that disrupts the unplanned, free economic and political order and then offer a rescue plan that merely requires the elimination of such freedoms, particularly the freedom to depart from or criticize the nature of the Great Rescue/Reset.
Of note, travel to Wuhan within China was shut down, while air travel out of Wuhan continued. Then there were all those direct flights from Wuhan to Italy, one of the first European countries to really get smacked with the WuFlu. Then there were the Military World Games that were held in Wuhan in October of 2019 which may have kicked off the initial spread. It’s all pretty convenient. As to releasing it only after the vaccine is ready, we also learned that there was already vaccine ready and waiting in January 2020 before anyone in the U.S. was really talking about the Wuhan Coronavirus. Moderna explained this as saying “We developed it in two days!”or . . . is it more likely that they had it developed much earlier? Well, I’ll leave that to speculation. But anyway, everything tracks with your statement above.
That much is plausible.
They used to talk about it. It seemed to me they were over-eager to have the next great pandemic come.
After having spent a considerable number of years on planet Earth, I would never have assumed such a thing.
Much of the “delegating” was done back when emergency powers were granted to federal and state administrative systems. You’d think we’d have learned something from three millenia of granting emergency powers to governments and individuals, only to have those powers abused. You’d think that would have taught us to craft some time limits and other limits on those emergency powers, but I guess we’re slow learners. Maybe in another 2-3 millenia we’ll figure it out.
Starting when I was in elementary school, at each level of my schooling I expected that in our history and government classes we would study power and its abuses (and remedies). And at each level I was disappointed.
Yes, please.
The Supreme Court ruling against OSHA having this kind of authority is not good for the Left as they like very much to take advantage of the growing penchant of Congress to delegate to administrative state regulators in lieu of stating what they want in specific terms. We need more rulings like this.
It’s quite doable.
Several scientists now working in Wuhan have excellent RNA synthesis chops, as they have published in many articles. From one of my earlier posts, “Here is a citation from Chinese researchers working in an Australian lab in 2010. It shows how the researchers manipulated and altered the hACE2-binding protein in other coronaviruses, specifically in those of Chinese bats, which are mentioned by species and confirmed by DNA studies. These researchers thus had the scientific chops to create covid19.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs00705-010-0729-6“
https://ricochet.com/921521/a-year-later-its-still-viral-warfare/
One could make multiple mutations to the region of the viral RNA genome which codes for the binding spike proteins and infect mice with them to find the most easily infecting variants. Although I have no citation at hand, I have read that Wuhan scientists have published a method for inducing the ACE2 binding site in murine lungs.
So it’s quite doable. Any competent virology lab could do it. Introducing Ockham’s Razor, as I am wont to do, deliberate alteration of the wild-type virus is the most likely basis of omicron.
Denying the likely origin of this loathsome disease and failing to take all possible measures short of war against China, as we are doing, will not make the problem go away. Indeed, it will encourage them to make more.
You called it, but you draw the wrong conclusions. This is indeed likely what happened. Chinese citizens traveling from greater Wuhan to Milan and Bergamo were infected, or given the materials to release the virus in their destination cities. The release of virus a few blocks from the WIV was an error, an unexpected error as shown by China’s utterly over-the-top response to it.
Remember the Youtube video of February 2020 showing a Chinese dude on a soapbox in Florence with a sign in three languages, come hug a Chinaman (and thus show that you are woke)?
http://www.ecns.cn/video/2020-02-05/detail-ifztewca0597768.shtml
“A Chinese man living in Florence took to the street on Feb. 2, 2020.
He covered his eyes with a sash, put on a mask and stood there in silence.
Beside him was a sign with words “I am not a virus. I’m a human. Eradicate the prejudice.”
He hopes that people will give up their discrimination amid the novel coronavirus outbreak.
Some people passed him by directly, while others stopped to take photos. Some chose to walk up and hug him.
Many people took off his mask and sash and gave him a big hug.”
Remember the maintaining of foreign flights out of Wuhan even while the city had been isolated from other Chinese?
None of this was accidental. Pretending it was does not change that.
But could they engineer a virus that they could be confident was more contagious and yet less virulent in the human population like Omicron is? Make the right 60 RNA base changes to accomplish this? Seems unlikely. The effect of virus structure on disease phenotype is not nearly that well known or else we’d be seeing that show up in other applications.
I’ll say again, it doesn’t matter where the virus came from. The criminal neglect and duplicity with which the Chicoms handled the COVID outbreak is all we need to condemn them as international pariahs.
What about the Chi-Comms’ American partners, like Fauci and Collins?
Lowered virulence (lethality) may not be a feature. Greater contagion has done its work even with a nominally less-lethal variant. Look, if you were Pres Chi, it wouldn’t matter if all those westerners lived or died, so long as their societies melted down and became dependent upon and thus subservient to China. It has worked. We’re there, or getting there quickly.
But this is just the capability of altering the binding protein. Sure, that can be done, and I wouldn’t mind living in a world where it couldn’t be done. But there is a lot more to changing the modus operandi of a virus than that, and far more to changing it to operate the way we would want it to operate.
So, no, based on that citation these researchers didn’t have the scientific chops to create covid-19. Maybe they took a tiny step in that direction, unless this wasn’t new and groundbreaking work, in which case they were walking on a path already trodden.
That is the first time anyone has said anything that makes any sense to me from what I was reading at the time in the Wall Street Journal.
When the CCP cordoned off 6 million people in the Wuhan area, all I could think was, “They think they can keep this from Beijing. They are terrified because they know exactly what it is.”