Human Genome Scientist says COVID-19 is Nothing New
Kevin McKernan is an accomplished geneticist that has worked on the Human Genome project at MIT and now he works in the world of cannabis genomics because it was the last bastion of free research. He claims that the virus was undetected in the past because it was far less virulent and that it only appears novel because we never tested something that wasn’t harming us. View the full interview here.
KM: Now that we have this cheap and affordable sequencing capacity, it can be deployed. There’s even tools that can do it on USB sticks now so you can really you can actually take a sequencer into the jungle in the sequence of Ebola. You can sequence if bats have coronavirus, you can sequence environmental DNA, you can do all of this work that means that we’re now seeing all of this microbial and viral flux through the ecosystem that we’ve never been able to see before and it’s scaring the daylights out of people. However, if you take a little bit more of an evolutionary perspective here, nothing is new Under the Sun genetically.
We have seen these viruses all have ancestors and I think that’s what’s getting missed in the in the news media — is that everyone’s talking about this coronavirus like it evolved out of Wuhan, like it came through some Rick and Morty portal and suddenly appeared and now that it’s new and scary everyone needs to run for the hills.
The reality is everything on earth has ancestors. The burden of proof that your virus doesn’t have an ancestor falls on the people making those crazy claims, so if there is in fact an ancestor before Wuhan which I’m very convinced there is, we just haven’t found it, yet we likely have some antibodies to that. We’ve likely seen it before. The human inflammatory system and immune system probably has some memory of one of this thing’s ancestors which is why not as many people are getting as sick as we expected and I think it’s also why we see the antibodies in the population are higher than we ever expected and now everyone’s marching the date back of introduction. We heard that it got into the states in Seattle as the first case. Now they’re going through some of the morgue records and digging up older samples and I think you just saw this week that they’re inching that date back. You’re going to find them inch that date back continually because they’re going to start to find cases that predated the December discovery of this in Wuhan. It was probably out in the depths of China where there are no sequencers for a fair amount of time circulating their population. We just didn’t have the tools there to find it.
VC: You’ve just blown my mind — no one has said anything like that at all as far as I’ve heard. I would have no way to push back on that but it dawns on me that it seems like it might be correct; that this virus had ancestors that wiped out a bunch of people but then there were those that had the antibodies and that they could protect themselves.
KM: And it may not have been as virulent. This is the thing — we don’t sequence things that don’t get you sick, so it’s ancestor may have been a common cold that just went through the population, didn’t affect a whole lot of people and only until it mutated maybe very recently did it start to take out the very weak in the population, the comorbid. 99% to 97% of the people that are getting sick are comorbid. They have either diabetes COPD or hypertension, maybe cancer. So, this is the tip of the iceberg of the most sick people in a population that are now getting affected. I think if you go back to this ancestor staying it probably was attenuated and didn’t really appear in our radar because it was barely making people sick. It was less virulent than maybe what’s emerged out of Wuhan but if it was an ancestor it may still have similar proteins that our immune system has found. Virus can mutate in a way that doesn’t change its epitopes. The epitopes are the proteins on the surface of the virus that your immune system builds antibodies for. You can get a mutation in this virus, there’s only 30,000 letters long but only a few of those letters really code for epitope proteins — which are proteins your immune system recognizes. Other mutations, let’s say you get a mutation in the gene that encodes the RNA polymerase, that’s in there. There’s an RNA dependent, RNA polymerase that are encoded in this genome, that’s the thing that copies the RNA. Let’s say that thing gets mutated so it’s faster and it makes copies of RNA faster and maybe it spreads a little faster but it doesn’t change the surface proteins so your immune system could still see it but it might spread faster, might replicate faster, it might hurt the older population a little bit more. When you’re thinking about the variation that we’re already recording on this virus, a good site to go to is called nextstrain.org. This is the team up in Washington and Seattle doing a great job tracking all these viruses. I encourage everyone to go look at next strain. This is where all the epidemiology is being done on this and they’ll have a phylogenetic tree there that shows you all of the viruses they’ve sequenced in there up to today. They’ve sequenced the entire genome with 3,500 of these. That’s not a lot when you consider the number infections around the world, we’re only getting a really tiny sliver of all the viruses that are out there through the sequencing programs but they’re incredibly valuable. If you look at all 3,000 or 3500 of those sequences, you’ll find on average there’s about one variant per virus, maybe a little bit less than that. There’s probably a thousand to 1,500 variants in that database right now so there’s a lot of different versions of COVID circulating; not all of those changes actually impact the virility of the of the virus so don’t get scared when people say it’s mutating.
Mutation is natural, usually when viruses mutate, they mutate in a way that they’re less harmful to the hosts so they can spread faster. A virus that kills its host very quickly doesn’t go very far.
They try to find this balance of spread. How do they spread as far as possible? To do that, you really want to have a symptomatic spread because if you’re a virus that’s asymptomatic, you go really far really fast. Now this thing may have mutated in such a way that it goes really far and really fast but it happens to be a little bit more virulent so it takes off the top edge of the population that’s already immunocompromised. It’s ancestors however may not have done that. It’s ancestors may, in fact, have been less virulent and spread very quickly but our immune system may have some record of that and so I think what’s going on in the news media is clickbait in fear cells. Everyone is saying it’s this new virus, we’ve never seen it before, everyone be afraid, be very afraid when there’s just no evolutionary basis for that. Unless you subscribe to the concept that it came out of a lab, then maybe it has a different origin but everything else — that’s natural and has ancestors and the burden of proof is on those people who claim it doesn’t to say that it’s somehow emerged magically out of a bat.
Let’s keep the conversation going,
Vance
For more conversations, ideas, and videos, follow me here or subscribe to the podcast.
