1. Gatekeeping Mutations:
When the live-attenuated polio vaccine is working its way back towards being the full-strength polio virus (deattenuating, the opposite of “attenuating,” or weakening), something that often happens within communities that have poor sanitation, it goes through a series of coordinated changes. These coordinated changes are referred to as “epistatic” when the coordination is happening inside genomes, and it turns out these epistatic genetic changes are predictable, and unnatural when a live-attenuated vaccine (a weakened but not-quite-dead virus) is trying to work its way back to its original form. These mutations occur in a coordinated fashion in this circumstance, a coordination that does not show up in nature - as if the virus has a memory of being at its full strength, and is able to use epistatic mutations to make its way back to its original form far quicker than would occur naturally.
Not only does COVID-19 also display these coordinated, simultaneous, epistatic mutations across many different regions of the globe within human populations, these exact same mutations are also appearing in lab mice as well as on mink farms. There is absolutely nothing even vaguely approaching a natural parallel to this phenomenon, viruses do not use the same mutations to adapt to three different species simultaneously – different species require different mutations to establish active sustainable infections within a population, which is why diseases don’t just jump instantly and randomly between species, even ones living near each other.
So the fact that the exact same mutations which appeared in the UK and South Africa in humans, also appeared within the laboratory as COVID-19 was passaged through laboratory mice, is entirely unprecedented. And in mice, not only did repeated serial passaging make the same epistatic mutations that were seen in humans in the UK and South Africa appear, these mutations gave COVID-19 the ability to transmit through the air between the mice.
This kind of “gain-of-function” from serial passaging is a very direct sign of laboratory engineering, there is no natural way for the same mutations that cause a virus to become airborne between mice would also show up simultaneously in a human population as well as mink, or the population of any other discrete species. Different species require different mutations for a virus to adapt to it and establish active infections, that is why zoonosis is such a big deal....
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