According to lacesout that counts a science
That's the scenario I had in mind when I said their conclusions were a bit too strong. Lab-directed evolution does exist, but it's quite unlikely for a number reasons I can think of off the top of my head.
The process itself is hit or miss depending on how many mutations are necessary and whether they individually confer a partial advantage or if they need to occur simultaneously.
You would do the work in lung cells growing in a dish, but that would only optimize for how effective the virus is at infecting that line of cells. Cell lines have many mutations that allow them to grow in a lab but make them behave quite differently from normal human cells. I'd expect the failure rate moving to actual humans would be high like it is for other drug development.
You also wouldn't be optimizing for how the immune system responds (which effects incubation time and mortality) or transmissibility. There's probably a fairly narrow acceptable range for these parameters. For example, Ebola's spread is limited by how quickly it acts and how lethal it is.
Ultimately you would need several rounds of human testing to get it right. They'd need to be large tests since you can't measure a 1-3% mortality rate with 10 people. I think South Korea is seeing <1% with more widespread testing, so you're probably talking tens of thousands of people across multiple rounds of tests with multiple virus candidates per round.
On top of all that, there still might be a signature in the genome that differs from natural evolution. I'd expect directed evolution to produce a smaller number of mutations with a relatively larger fraction of them being functional. In a natural environment with evolution occuring on a longer timescale, I'd expect a larger accumulation of "passenger" mutations that either have no effect or have some function specifically in the original host species but not humans.
https://www.theaustralian.com.au/co...a/news-story/a88100c0c0d8c5308d2dafeb0b79f5bd
The worst first date ever unfolded somewhere in Brooklyn, New York, last week. A Pfizer executive, seeking to impress his potential beau, casually boasted that his employer might be mutating dangerous viruses for profit. This was followed by a series of other bombshell claims that, a few hours later, tens of millions of people would be watching on social media.
“Don’t tell anyone, promise you won’t tell anyone,” Jordan Tristan Walker said to his date, who, unbeknown to Walker was an undercover reporter with Project Veritas and had videoed the entire conversation. “Well, that’s not what we say to the public, no,” Walker added, when asked if Pfizer was deliberately mutating viruses that caused Covid-19.
“One of the things we’re exploring is like, why don’t we just mutate it ourselves so we could create – pre-emptively develop new vaccines, right? If we’re gonna do that though, there’s a risk of like, as you could imagine – no one wants to be having a pharma company mutating f..king viruses,” he explains, noting Covid-19 would be a “cash cow for a while yet”