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| SvennoJ said: @haxxiy Omicron has me wondering. Is it possible to genetically alter a virus on purpose to make it non lethal, more contagious while teaching your body the antibodies to ward off the deadly variant? Basically using a virus to make a self replicating 'vaccine' against that virus. |
Theoretically speaking, sure. There is a natural precedent in alastrim, which is 98 - 99% similar to smallpox but ~ 30 times less lethal. Even without a smallpox vaccine, alastrim would have completely replaced smallpox because its lower lethality meant it could spread much more easily and it generated sterilizing cross-immunity.
In practice, you'd instantly earn a Nobel prize if you figured out a mechanism that reliably predicts how dangerous a virus is based only in its protein structures. The closest I can think of is breeding viruses to become less tolerant of the higher temperatures found in internal organs. This is how some attenuated vaccines were made in the past. The problem is, since this was found to depend on a couple of mutations at most, the virus can randomly "revert", which for instance seldom causes vaccine-induced polio.
Last edited by haxxiy - on 13 December 2021
