Thought of the Day - January 10 2022 - The Origin of Omicron

Today's topic comes from Dr. John Campbell, whose channel I have been watching since before the WHO declared the pandemic ( /covid-19/Things I Follow ). He has provided insight into many aspects of the pandemic. This one I have only seen reported by Dr. Campbell - so far. He digested a peer-reviewed paper concerning the potential origin for the Omicron variant. I found it interesting, so here is a summary.

As you may already know the Omicron variant is significantly different from other variants. Due to its genomic makeup, we are seeing different effects, higher transmissibility and lower pathogenicity, in humans.

Omicron is much more closely related to the original B.1.1 strain (the one that WHO has no name for) than the Alpha, Beta or Delta variants that we have been experiencing over the past year. That said, Omicron does have a significant number of mutations, particularly in the spike protein, when compared to the original. These two features are quite surprising and lead the authors of the paper to an even more surprising conclusion. They believe that this strain has developed in mice rather than in humans.

This hypothesis explains the link back to the original, and the specific mutations seen; it seems that the mutations in the spike protein have a close affinity to ACE2 receptors in mice. Moreover, this would explain the number of mutations and why they do not follow on from common human variants.

So what is being said here is that mankind has either gotten very lucky (lucky that SARS-CoV-2 jumped, probably from humans, into mice, mutated there, at some point in 2021 jumped back into humans), or that a great deal of additional G-O-F development has been conducted (oh no, not another conspiracy theory ( Thought of the Day - November 1 2021 - The Smoking Gun )).

Omicron is out-competing the other human-based strains, with far less collateral damage. John Campbell uses the word "humbled" to describe how lucky we were.

Cheers

Cliff