Quote:
Originally Posted by Sephiroth
What if some clever Chinese boffin thought that messing around with spikes could increase virulence of a coronavirus?
It's unlikely that mass death would be their objective - for economic reasons. But disruption of non-Chinese economies could be calculated as desirable to their political aims.
|
If you wanted to muck around increasing the affinity of the spike protein with human ACE2 receptors, you would probably be better served playing around and improving spike proteins from coronavirus strains already known to infect humans such as SARS or MERS than some random one derived from bats.
I'm not saying it's impossible but if the lads in China did engineer this virus, their abilities in protein engineering are well beyond anything I am aware of. If that were the case, then the same skills would be well used to make an excellent vaccine rather than the 'bog standard' inactivated products from Sinovac and Sinopharm