Niema Moshiri, a geneticist at the University of California, San Diego, endorsed his theory—with a grim twist. The novel coronavirus is close to becoming the worst possible version of itself, but only because we let it, Moshiri told The Daily Beast.
“From my perspective, given that we’ve already given COVID-19 the ability to essentially have a free-for-all mutation-spree by letting it spread so far, the fact that relatively few positions in the spike protein have variability suggests to me that there probably aren’t too many other places in the spike protein for a new super-impactful mutation to come about,” Moshiri said.
But most of the experts The Daily Beast canvassed disagreed that this thing is near the end of its genetic rope.
“I haven’t seen any indication that SARS-CoV-2 is running out of evolutionary space,” Jesse Bloom, an investigator at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Washington state, told The Daily Beast. “Based on analyses of other antigenically-evolving respiratory viruses such as influenza virus and CoV-229E, I expect SARS-CoV-2 will continue to evolve over the coming years.”
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