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Jun 9, 2022Liked by Peter Nayland Kust

Is Canada done....just asking for a friend.....https://thecountersignal.com/canada-to-introduce-mandatory-monkeypox-quarantine/

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Very nice — learned a lot here, and in that I now know less ;)

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In my post I mentioned that a sequence taken from a resident of MD who visited Nigeria in late 2021 showed a high degree of mutations:

https://virological.org/t/update-to-observations-about-putative-apobec3-deaminase-editing-in-the-light-of-new-genomes-from-usa/847

So that may have suggested a possible high degree of mutation has been taking place at that time. As to why it is happening, I'm not sure. It could be lack of surveillance did not catch this, in which case it would mean that there's a lot about the mutation rate of monkeypox we clearly don't know about. It could be due to artifacts from sequencing, although having that occur across many different samples may narrow the scope of that issue.

What's interesting is that a few of the samples show microevolution via small SNPs in between samples, which again may suggest that the virus is mutating much more quickly than it should.

Also interestingly, as I mentioned in my post, there doesn't appear to be any egregious insertions at this moment similar to the 12 nucleotide insertion for the furin cleavage site of SARS-COV2. That was one of the biggest red flags. So if anything was done with this virus it may have been done through serial passage to accrue the mutations it has. A big caveat to this is that the virus itself is not any more virulent (as far as I am aware), although it may be more pathogenic.

Maybe this is monkeypox's version of Omicron where it maybe has mutated quite extensively to disregard prior immunity? I think we'd have to wait to see how the mutations translate into proteins and their activities.

Also, thanks for mentioning my post! I think that article was strange, but at the same time I believe a lot of people may have been extracting too much from it.

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