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GOF is dangerous, but it's not useless. The Ebola vaccine was developed on top of GOF research on Ebola (including making an airborne variant)
I have not heard of this, but a quick perusal of the literature has not turned up anything that supports your claims.
There's no airborne variant of Ebola, even an artificial one, AFAIK. There were experiments on aerosolizing it, and the VSV vaccine was tested for ability to protect from aerosol exposure in Macaques, as a proxy for protection against bioterrorism.
I do not see a reason to phrase the claim the way you do, there appears to be little to support the claim that GOF helped with the vaccine (beyond the usual need to test the vaccine on the actual pathogen), let alone that GOF was strictly necessary for the purpose of making a vaccine. We make vaccines all the time without GOF, I do not see how it is a requisite. Ebola is not that special as a disease.
I do not want to jump to claiming that you are intentionally lying or being misleading, but I do still think you are factually incorrect, and I must insist on citations.
Edit: To be clear, I am specifically talking about GOF for virulence and lethality.
Out of curiosity, are airborne and droplet borne viruses that structurally similar to contact or food/water borne viruses? Is airborne Ebola like worrying about cars suddenly flying like planes, or are we talking a few base pairs for smaller adaptations?
Roughly, yes, depending how wide your lens is and precisely what you mean by structure. Most airborne viruses are RNA based, but many bloodborne pathogens (Ebola, HIV, HCV, etc) are also RNA viruses. If you meant shape, icosahedral is most common but there's plenty of variety and overlap between bloodborne/airborne (Ebola is long and filamentous).
More than 'structure' (depending what you meant by that), you should pay attention to tropism. Ebola expresses surface proteins that enable it to initially infect immune cells, then various endothelial (blood vessel) and other structural cells which are not accessible in the airways. COVID has a surface protein that binds ACE2, which is expressed on the surfaces of airways, part of the gut, etc. Other viral proteins are also key for proliferating in a given cell type, but you can get a lot of mileage out of just looking at the spike proteins and which receptors they bind.
Could you make turbo airborne Ebola by grafting COVID spike protein onto the surface of the Ebola capsid, and misting some into a volunteers face? Hey, sounds like a Nature paper to me!
...but also probably not, I doubt it would work without a pretty significant engineering effort beyond that simple change. So more akin to cars flying like planes. I'm not aware of any viruses that are known to have drastically changed routes of transmission like that.
I was thinking things like size, envelope, and things like that. IIRC norovirus is physically robust as viruses go: is that a trade off against airborne transmission? But it's been a long time since I took a biology class.
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I am probably not the right person to ask for an authoritative answer here, but since you did:
There is immense selection pressure for any pathogen to become one that spreads through airborne routes. I imagine the typical virus or bacteria would be very happy to not need direct contact or very close proximity.
But the fact that this almost never happens is strongly suggestive of the innate difficulty involved. Millions of people have caught and transmitted HIV for several generations, but it has yet to figure it a way to fly. Fucking is a far poorer alternative, but it's what the virus has. Flying fucks? Can't say.
I suspect that this is mostly because evolution is retarded and doesn't think ahead, and diseases become strongly optimized for whatever mode of transmission they started with. Plus factors like sunlight or heat are not kind to airborne pathogens, UV light reliably kills most of them. The sheer volume of air around dilutes them to the point that they struggle to reach critical mass by the time they reach the respiratory tract of the potential host.
Look at the amount of adaptation that fungal spores require to survive for more than few minutes while floating, it takes a lot of work.
Also, and very importantly, there is a rather artificial distinction made between airborne vs aerosol spread/direct deposition. Aerosol spread disease particles are suspended in air, they just tend to settle or disperse beyond close proximity.
I think the risk of Ebola naturally evolving to the point it spread primarily through air for more than a dozen feet and not very close proximity or contamination is negligible in our lifetime. We'd be so fucking screwed if the average disease could pull that off, so the fact we're still around is insightful in of itself.
(I wrote all of this myself, and later used ChatGPT to check in case I was making some kind of stupid mistake. ChatGPT tells me I'm basically right, though it's scolding me for leaving out some nuance. It can piss off, it's not the boss of me.)
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The Reston variant has been hypothesised, but not confirmed, to be airborne; it is to our great fortune that it is not pathogenic in humans.
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Technically it wasn't airborne Ebola; rather, they transplanted suspected virulence genes from Ebola into a replication-incompetent adenovirus. This adenovirus caused Ebola symptoms, confirming that these genes were the virulence genes.
I see that there's research out there where they did use modified adenoviruses to demonstrate pathology seen in Ebola.
But that is not the technique used to make the only FDA approved vaccine, ERVEBO. That was made through recombinant VSV. I will grant that they did try and make a an adenoviral-derived vaccine, which kinda sorta worked okay in monkeys.
Also, I am not claiming that GOF has zero utility, my core contention is that whatever actual and potential utility it might have is more than canceled out by the risks.
These researchers seem to have tried to produce only a single Ebola protein, they didn't try to make super-Ebola spread through sneezing. They didn't select for virulence or transmissibility, which is what people usually complain about when criticizing GOF. At least I do.
Also, I do not think you have supported your original claim. You said that "the" vaccine was made through GOF, which it was not. I would believe that those specific choice of words strongly implies the only vaccine actually being given to people. And making a modified adenovirus is very, very far from "airborne Ebola". Nothing of that sort seems to exist. I would go so far as to say it's misleading, a very large stretch of the facts as far as I can see them.
It wasn't the technique used to make the vaccine; it was the technique used to identify the virulence genes. I said the vaccine was "developed on top of GOF research on Ebola".
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