In part I, you should have learned that this new variant is startling in just how many freaking mutations it has. On that basis alone I am willing to give it a lot of attention. It stands out like a sore thumb on the clade charts.
But we really don’t know anything scientifically or medically about it. As a means of being very generous to science, in fact we know a lot in very short order about its precise amino acid changes, how those fit or stand out evolutionarily, and what they might mean. In prior decades what we’ve learned in a matter of days would have taken ten years or more, so there’s that.
Again, we don’t know:
- If Omicron will be more or less deadly
- If it will be medically more difficult or easier to deal with
- If prior infection confers meaningful immunity or not
- If prior vaccinations confer meaningful immunity or not
- If ADE will suddenly become a very bad thing or not.
What I do know is that the sheer number of substitutions makes me very suspicious. Was this little beastie also made in a lab, or tweaked to make it have certain gains of function? It’s entirely possible.
While speculation on my part, I will note that by now we should have seen some other comparable “massive burst of mutations” in some other examples. This is the first of which I am aware. All the others have been sequential tinkerings on earlier refrains
by westcoastjan 
