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The surprising link between conspiracies, mutations and corona vaccines
If you too are afraid of the appearance of the various mutations and are afraid that it means that this epidemic will never go away - you should read this.
Prof. Johnny Gershuni from Tel Aviv University explains why and how corona mutations were formed, and provides another good reason to run to get vaccinated
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mutation
Corona mutation
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Prof. Johnny Gershuni
Monday, 15 February 2021, 06:49
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Since the outbreak of the corona crisis, we have been bombarded with countless conspiracy theories, one of the most notable of which is that the virus originated in human engineering - that a violent virus "escaped" from a secret research facility in Wuhan, China.
If this theory is indeed true, and it is of course not, then what prevented those malicious scientists who invented and assembled the virus from preparing it so that it would be contagiously effective in advance?
Why invent a "mutilated" virus that depends on mutations to improve its performance?
Reality proves, and to this a special committee of the World Health Organization recently gave an official stamp, that this is not at all an engineered virus.
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Therefore, the question arises - where did the virus come from and why do we have so many mutations?
The conclusion of the expert committee that investigated the issue is unequivocal: the virus came from bats, possibly directly to humans, but probably most likely it is done by infecting another animal, a "mediator", which in this case is a pangolin (a scaly mammal, somewhat similar to an armadillo ).
In this context it is necessary to mention the unflattering history of the other corona diseases spread by bats.
First in 2002, the SARS, was spread by bats that infested gills (a mammal that looks like a spotted mongoose) as mediators for humans, and then in 2012 the "March", which began infecting camels by bats.
Why does Corona have so many mutations?
The information about the source of the virus in bats is not only interesting general knowledge, it is also relevant to the development of the mutations that concern us all.
The virus originally spent years, and perhaps generations, in the bat world, during which time it underwent all possible changes in order to infect the bats most effectively.
Among the bat viruses, variants of the virus may have appeared, causing such a change that created in them the ability to infect other animals.
Presumably in these new infectious agents, the viruses underwent changes again that allowed them to become effective infectious agents in the new surrogate.
This is a natural process.
There is a dynamic of viruses that are constantly being passed from one surrogate to another and in each such transition, changes are being made that adapt the virus to be more effective in its infectivity.
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In light of this, as soon as the virus, in late 2019, overcame the species barrier and moved to infect humans, it did so with low efficiency since it was in the animal-adapted version of the virus.
Therefore, only in December 2019 did the virus have the opportunity to embark on an adaptation campaign of its structure to upgrade in such variants that will be able to infect human cells with high efficiency.
This virus, which infected humans in China in December 2019, is a virus adapted to the animal kingdom and "disabled" to some extent in its ability to infect humans.
It does so, however with moderate efficiency.
The mutations are created randomly, not because of the vaccines.
Corona virus (Photo: Giphy)
In those days and since then two significant things have happened in the world, things that have affected the lives of billions around the world.
First, the genetic sequence of this medium virus was released by the Chinese in January 2020, and already a month later, all the leading drug companies in the world, including Modern and Pfizer, began developing their vaccines based on the genetic pattern of the primary virus, which could infect humans. So the virus is completely mediocre.
The second thing that happened was that this mediocre virus began its journey by global infection of humans.
Mutations are randomly generated in each infection, in each person and at any time.
Mutations are a natural phenomenon, a kind of "pattern errors" that occur in the process of gene replication of the virus.
It is done randomly, without any strategic horizon, and without any agenda.
If and when a mutation happens to improve the virus' ability to infect human cells, it will have a relative advantage over other mediocre viruses, and it may capture a larger share of the human infectious virus population and become more common.
For such a spread of mutations - need a lot of patients.
Corona test (Photo: GettyImages)
Such a thing can not happen overnight.
Such a proliferation of different mutations requires that many people become infected, and this requires that mutations be created in a large variety and in sufficient time to examine the nature of the mutations and those that become dominant.
Therefore, at the beginning of the epidemic when few people became infected, the conditions did not mature in order to establish effective mutations, and as the number of infected in the world increased, so did the opportunity for the virus to select effective mutations.
And so it happened, until in September 2020 a mutation appeared in the south of England for the envelope protein of the virus that made the virus particularly effective in infecting humans.
Recall again - this mutation was created randomly and has nothing to do with vaccines.
It is a natural, random process and the motive for establishing this mutation in the world of viruses is just the virus' preferred ability to bind to its receptor and make the virus more effective.
And so did the other mutations that appeared after it - the South African and the Brazilian, which are upgrades and improvements of the British mutations that give these variant viruses a very effective infectivity.
Do the mutations make the virus resistant to vaccines?
No. All the studies that have explicitly examined this have shown that modern and Pfizer vaccines protect very well against the South African mutation, and even better against the original British mutation. Bottom line, the mutations we face today, the ones that highly infect humans, are not resistant to existing vaccines in Israel and do not imply that new mutations may be evasive from the vaccine.
Still, it is important to exercise extreme caution here and say: since mutations occur randomly all the time, the possibility of an elusive mutation in the future cannot be completely ruled out. At the same time, the more we are vaccinated, the lower the rate of infection in Israel - this is a fact. This reality further obliges anyone who has not yet been vaccinated to go do so as soon as possible. It is important to remember that as we as a society become more immune, together we will reduce the chance of new mutations appearing, and accordingly, we will ensure a faster exit of all of us from the epidemic.
Prof. Johnny Gershuni is a researcher in viruses and vaccines, the Shmonis School of Biomedicine and Cancer at the Faculty of Life Sciences, Tel Aviv University
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