Operation Omicron

This fictional narrative presents a plausible scenario based on a timeline of scientific results that would result in the development and deployment of the Omicron variant, in what I term "Operation Omicron." It is merely meant to show that such an operation is plausible, not that the details are exactly what transpired. It shows above all that the U.S. government had the means, motive, and opportunity to do this, opening a new line of inquiry into the still mysterious but dramatic appearance of Omicron.

After more than a full year of the U.S. backed Israeli genocide in Gaza, it is conclusive that nothing is beyond consideration of the U.S. administration when it comes to protecting the economy and furthering imperial objectives—especially when the scenario lets them walk away feeling like they did something heroic.

In March and April 2020, containment of the novel coronavirus failed and hospitals in New York City in particular were overwhelmed. Thanks to stay-at-home orders, other interventions, and the deployment of a field hospital at the Jacob Javits Center, the most outwardly visible sign of mass mortality was the use of refrigerated trucks to supplement the city's mortuary capacity rather than people dramatically dying in the street. Nonetheless, it was clear that New York City could just be the first of many if we didn't get a handle on things. 

With the stock market having fallen by a third, the richest people in the world were demanding the U.S. President do something to protect them. President Trump would demand all options be put on the table. This was a crisis that could rip apart the country. 

There were a few different ways to go. He could ban travel from other countries (but the virus was already here), shut down hot spots like China was doing, encourage the use of masks and hand sanitizer, ban large groups, et cetera. Alternatively, we could just ignore the virus and let whoever needed to die do so, but given the situation in NYC and the election year, that probably wasn't the way to go quite yet.

The most obvious course of action would be to develop a vaccine as quickly as possible. Many scientists estimated that this would take years, maybe a decade. Nonetheless, Dr. Robert Kadlec proposed using novel mRNA technology combined with an aggressively parallelized development schedule to radically speed things up in Operation Warp Speed. This project was approved at the end of April and would eventually bear fruit. Nonetheless, it was risky, while its boosters were making optimistic claims, it could quite well take years to make a viable vaccine. 

On May 1, 2020 a paper that contained information that could be used to disarm COVID–19 came out in Molecular Cell: "A Multibasic Cleavage Site in the Spike Protein of SARS-CoV-2 Is Essential for Infection of Human Lung Cells." This paper showed that the novel infection pathway used by the virus was necessary for efficiently infecting lung cells and for creating the abnormally fused cells ("syncytia") that were linked to higher clinical severity. It also demonstrated that modifying the spike protein could remove this feature by causing the virus to revert to a more traditional cell entry mechanism called endocytosis. Furthermore, it speculated that optimizing the spike protein, a process that could happen naturally, could lead to more severe variants. 

There were problems with it, for example, it didn't show the exact set of mutations needed to alter the spike protein, but it was interesting. [see Endnote 1] Could the government develop a SARS-CoV-2 variant that would be less virulent and would outcompete circulating strains? While it wasn't yet clear how to make it competitive, it was worth exploring. After all, it was wildly perceived that the 1918 influenza pandemic ended when the virus became milder and outcompeted the highly lethal pandemic strain. [see Endnote 4]

At the end of May, President Trump ordered the Department of Defense to begin experimenting with creating a competitive milder variant of the SARS-CoV-2 virus in a classified setting under the project name TAME DRAGON. Initially, work would proceed computationally, then in cell and organioid model systems, and then if successful, proceeding with animal experimentation. The researchers employed by the Department of Defense are good, but there are some limits on how quickly they can proceed without the help of the rest of the scientific community, which has most of the experts on coronaviruses. They would also be working under strict safety conditions to prevent leaks, which would also slow the work.

Thus, they will initially attempt to replicate changing the cell entry emphasis of the virus and continue to monitor the open literature. It was known at the time that increasing transmission speed might be possible. The spike protein was known to be not fully adapted to humans and the first significant mutation, D614G, had already increased the transmissibility of the virus.

This work would proceed throughout 2020. Within a few months, successful design and experiment work would advance the project to animal testing which would ensure predictions of reduced virulence were accurate. As more severe and transmissible variants appeared in the wild (e.g. Alpha, Beta, and later Delta), lessons and maybe experiments would be conducted to see if anything could be incorporated into this new platform.

When the vaccine was approved in December 2020, the future of TAME DRAGON was in doubt. Maybe the past six months of feverish work were about to be discarded as Kadlec's Operation Warp Speed would put the coronavirus on ice in short order. However, a pair of coronavirus and immunology experts in the program convinced the leadership to continue for the time being. It was quite possible that the vaccine would not be as perfect as it was being sold as—breakthrough infections were a possibility down the road due to waning antibodies and mutations.

At this point, the proof of concept, TOOTHLESS, had been synthesized and tested in hamsters and monkeys to validate it vastly reduced the incidence of respiratory distress. The development team had been able to somewhat increase the transmissibility, but it wasn't guaranteed to outcompete the currently circulating variants. The modifications they had made to reduce fusogenicity had interfered with their attempts to increase ACE2 binding. Worse, the longer the vaccination campaign went on, the less likely TOOTHLESS would be to get a critical foothold.

On January 20, 2021, President Biden took over from former President Trump in a rough transition. President-elect Biden had been briefed on both the vaccination program and TAME DRAGON soon after December 1st when he had been granted access to the President's Daily Brief and covert action programs.

About a week later, TAME DRAGON's luck changed when a pre-print came out, "SARS-CoV-2 RBD in vitro evolution follows contagious mutation spread, yet generates an able infection inhibitor," showing exactly what mutations would be needed to vastly increase the binding affinity of TOOTHLESS, more than enough to compensate for some of their other changes using Q489R epistatic to N501Y, S477N, E484K and others (note: Omicron contains E484A). Q498R and N501Y not only added increased ACE2 binding, but also some measure of immune evasion as well. These changes were incorporated in February. Experiments validated their work to ensure both high transmission and reduced virulence through March. The new virus was codenamed FLYING TOOTHLESS. Remaining work involved creating a deniable covert deployment.

That month, TAME DRAGON presented their work to President Biden as a fully realized option. Biden was thankful for their work, but the vaccination campaign was taking off. There was no need to deploy it, but given the warning that breakthrough infections might become possible and it was not clear how many people would ultimately take the vaccine, Biden green-lit proceeding with the development of a deniable option as a backup plan.

TAME DRAGON cloaked their work by adding more mutations to FLYING TOOTHLESS. For the most part, they were unable to validate their work in human subjects. It would be far too easy to accidentally create a lab leak of a variant specifically designed to be hugely transmissible. Instead, they created a number of different sub-variants in the hope that at least one of them would remain functional in humans and validated them in animal models and human tissue samples under BSL4 conditions.

At the same time, project managers began coordinating with CIA to develop a covert release plan. The first thing they agreed on was that it should not be released in the United States, and particularly not near the development site. This would create too much speculation, similar to what had been happening around the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China.

The planning team selected South Africa for a number of reasons. First, the moderately mutated Beta variant had been first detected there and had been widely reported in the news. That would provide an easy frame for the public and media to accept. It also showed that South Africa had the capability to rapidly detect variants. The country also had a large immunocompromised population due to HIV/AIDS that could have served as a natural incubator for FLYING TOOTHLESS which would convince epidemiologists that natural emergence was plausible. Such a concept was contained in the UK SAGE report published July 26, 2021 titled "Long term evolution of SARS-CoV-2." Furthermore, there was a key anti-lockdown think tank based in South Africa that would be happy to assist in the media roll-out of the first cases, helping spread the word that this was "mild" and that the need for further mitigation measures globally would soon be over.

The other element the planning team agreed on was that the delivery vehicle should be a human courier. If anyone was caught carrying a dispersal device, test tubes, or other biological warfare paraphernalia, the plot could be exposed and the United States would be exposed to intense scrutiny and blowback, especially when the government so frequently weaponizes the Biological Weapons Convention diplomatically. Thus, the courier would have to be infected at a TAME DRAGON laboratory and then swiftly delivered on-site without infecting anyone until they were in the target community.

Accomplishing this required a tightly coordinated and fast paced operation. After infecting the courier, they would have just a day or two to get them on-site before they potentially became contagious or tested positive on PCR—a negative PCR test was a condition of entry into South Africa. Any spread prior to getting on-site could potentially expose the entire operation. Using fast military aircraft out of Maryland would be too conspicuous. Using a private jet would take 15 hours to get to Johannesburg, making the timing tight while also creating a trail back to the United States.

Fortunately, there was a close U.S. ally more proximal to South Africa with a biological warfare capability—Israel. While reading another country into TAME DRAGON was a big risk, it would also have benefits. The flight time by private jet would be reduced to 6 hours 40 minutes and the operation would be more deniable. All the research and development, meaning experimental animals, laboratory notebooks, intermediate experimental viruses, memoranda, and numerous personnel would be widely separated from the actual deployment. If the program was discovered, one could simply say it was never used.

For the Israelis, the production of a virus from a sequence sent over a secure channel would be much simpler than developing it from scratch, leaving a much smaller developmental footprint in the country that could be cleaned up and information could be kept to a small circle. If someone were to discover the release operation, there would be virtually no R&D work for investigators to uncover, making the claims seem implausible.

By early August, the Biden administration was in a pinch. Vaccination rates were crawling, the new more transmissible, more vaccine evasive, and more severe Delta variant was spreading in the United States. Breakthrough infections were increasing. CDC was leaking to the Washington Post that "...the war has changed." The vaccine had not been the silver bullet to end the pandemic.

Since late 2020 during the Trump administration, the business community had been pushing strongly for "herd immunity" and re-opening the economy. The thinking was, give the vaccine a shot and if it didn't work, we'd go for herd. Now with the Delta variant causing chaos and threatening to push back re-opening plans, it was time to consider other options. TAME DRAGON would likely be able to suppress the Delta variant and with the possibility of hybrid immunity being stronger than infection or vaccination, it might even end the pandemic for real. If not, at least it was less virulent than whatever nature was throwing our way; the team had assured the President that it would be difficult for the synthetic variant to regain full fusogenicity as they had used five mutations spaced across the genome to lock in the behavior. In any case, so what if it did? It seemed nature was on a path towards a highly transmissible and highly virulent variant with the progressive emergence of Alpha, Beta, and Delta.

On August 8, 2021 a pre-print was published, "High genetic barrier to escape from human polyclonal SARS-CoV-2 neutralizing antibodies," showing how to recombine existing mutations in circulating variants to create a vaccine evasive variant. [see Endnote 2] TAME DRAGON rapidly incorporated these edits into their work and validated them in petri dishes and in animal models. By mid-September they had formulated and validated a set of Omicron variants.

After some feeling out, the Israelis were read in and agreed to the program in exchange for continued diplomatic support of expanded illegal settlements in the West Bank, which President Joe "I am a Zionist" Biden was happy to agree to. In early October, TAME DRAGON transmitted the genetic sequence for several Omicron variants over a secure military channel to a classified Israeli laboratory. 

The sequences were synthesized, replicated using RT-PCR, and inserted into a viral system under BSL4 conditions. New virions were bred and validated using sequencing. They were tested in human lung cells to ensure they had low fusogenic behavior. 

At the same time, a volunteer, aircraft, pilot, and medical team were recruited. The volunteer, a young libertarian male soldier, believed SARS-CoV-2 was an overblown cold and that lockdowns were the enemy of freedom. The volunteer was informed that he was doing a great service to his country and the world, that this would end the pandemic restrictions for everyone. Furthermore, the Wuhan strain had been used in a human challenge study. What they would be doing here would be similar to that protocol, but with an even less virulent strain. Then, he'd get a free flight to South Africa and simply eat at restaurants and visit tourist attractions on the military's dime. All he'd have to do is get some liquid squirted into his nose and keep his mouth shut. 

In late October, the volunteer entered the Israeli TAME DRAGON laboratory and submitted himself to a PCR test. This test was negative and was transmitted to the South African authorities. He was then infected with a cocktail of numerous Omicron sub-variants, leading to multiple co-infections. After medically monitoring him for an hour, he put on a respirator and was driven to an airport where he boarded a private jet and departed for Johannesburg. On arriving, still feeling well, he left the airport for the suburbs in Gauteng province. He removed his respirator to breathe the fresh air. It was time to party and liberate the world from lockdowns.

On November 8, 2021 South Africa detected a novel variant spreading in Gauteng province. Strangely, they began to detect multiple variants BA.1, BA.2, and BA.3 all at once. On November 26, the WHO would designate it "Omicron," a Variant of Concern. Soon after, a South African doctor would call it "mild," and this would be repeated endlessly in the media. Some would even call it a "natural vaccine." By mid-December, Delta would be suppressed. By the end of 2022, almost the entire world would be infected and pandemic protections ended. Even China's Zero COVID would be cracked, terminating the crime of a good example.

The members of TAME DRAGON would toast each other in a restaurant. Mission accomplished. On December 21, 2021 Bill Gates, the arch-capitalist backing the worldwide privatization of healthcare, particularly in Africa, who undermined the prospect of rapid patent-free vaccine sharing, wrote: 

If there’s good news here, it’s that omicron moves so quickly that once it becomes dominant in a country, the wave there should last less than 3 months. Those few months could be bad, but I still believe if we take the right steps, the pandemic can be over in 2022.

— Bill Gates (@BillGates) December 21, 2021

Omicron would kill almost two million people worldwide and rising with confirmed cases (excess mortality central estimate: twelve million) and create a, to this day, still-unending pandemic worldwide. As of this writing, 7% of U.S. adults have Long COVID and multiple western countries are in or near recession due a worker shortage. Early retirements continue to surge. The number of disabled adults in the United States has increased, reaching about 9.9% of the population in 2024 up from 9.1% in January 2020. [see Endnote 3] Nonetheless, the worker shortage is smoothed over by increased immigration and weakened child labor laws.

References

1. Hoffmann, Markus, Hannah Kleine-Weber, and Stefan Pöhlmann. 2020. “A Multibasic Cleavage Site in the Spike Protein of SARS-CoV-2 Is Essential for Infection of Human Lung Cells.” Molecular Cell 78 (4): 779-784.e5. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.molcel.2020.04.022.
2. Zhou, Bin, Tran Thi Nhu Thao, Donata Hoffmann, Adriano Taddeo, Nadine Ebert, Fabien Labroussaa, Anne Pohlmann, et al. 2021. “SARS-CoV-2 Spike D614G Change Enhances Replication and Transmission.” Nature 592 (7852): 122–27. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-021-03361-1.
3. Rajah, Maaran Michael, Mathieu Hubert, Elodie Bishop, Nell Saunders, Remy Robinot, Ludivine Grzelak, Delphine Planas, et al. 2021. “SARS‐CoV‐2 Alpha, Beta, and Delta Variants Display Enhanced Spike‐mediated Syncytia Formation.” The EMBO Journal 40 (24): e108944. https://doi.org/10.15252/embj.2021108944.
4. [ Preprint ] Zahradník, Jiří, Shir Marciano, Maya Shemesh, Eyal Zoler, Jeanne Chiaravalli, Björn Meyer, Yinon Rudich, Orly Dym, Nadav Elad, and Gideon Schreiber. 2021. “SARS-CoV-2 RBD in Vitro Evolution Follows Contagious Mutation Spread, yet Generates an Able Infection Inhibitor.” bioRxiv. https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.01.06.425392.
5. Zahradník, Jiří, Shir Marciano, Maya Shemesh, Eyal Zoler, Daniel Harari, Jeanne Chiaravalli, Björn Meyer, et al. 2021. “SARS-CoV-2 Variant Prediction and Antiviral Drug Design Are Enabled by RBD in Vitro Evolution.” Nature Microbiology 6 (9): 1188–98. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41564-021-00954-4.
6. Sun, Cong, Yin-Feng Kang, Yuan-Tao Liu, Xiang-Wei Kong, Hui-Qin Xu, Dan Xiong, Chu Xie, et al. 2022. “Parallel Profiling of Antigenicity Alteration and Immune Escape of SARS-CoV-2 Omicron and Other Variants.” Signal Transduction and Targeted Therapy 7 (1): 1–10. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41392-022-00910-6.
7. Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE). 2021. “Can We Predict the Limits of SARS-CoV-2 Variants and Their Phenotypic Consequences?” Scientific Report. United Kingdom: UK Government. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/long-term-evolution-of-sars-cov-2-26-july-2021.
8. Park, Seung Bum, Mohsin Khan, Sai Chaitanya Chiliveri, Xin Hu, Parker Irvin, Madeleine Leek, Ailis Grieshaber, et al. 2023. “SARS-CoV-2 Omicron Variants Harbor Spike Protein Mutations Responsible for Their Attenuated Fusogenic Phenotype.” Communications Biology 6 (1): 1–14. https://doi.org/10.1038/s42003-023-04923-x.
9. [ Preprint ] Schmidt, Fabian, Yiska Weisblum, Magdalena Rutkowska, Daniel Poston, Justin Da Silva, Fengwen Zhang, Eva Bednarski, et al. 2021. “High Genetic Barrier to Escape from Human Polyclonal SARS-CoV-2 Neutralizing Antibodies.” Preprint. Microbiology. https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.08.06.455491.
10. Schmidt, Fabian, Yiska Weisblum, Magdalena Rutkowska, Daniel Poston, Justin DaSilva, Fengwen Zhang, Eva Bednarski, et al. 2021. “High Genetic Barrier to SARS-CoV-2 Polyclonal Neutralizing Antibody Escape.” Nature 600 (7889): 512–16. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-021-04005-0.
11. Killingley, Ben, Alex J. Mann, Mariya Kalinova, Alison Boyers, Niluka Goonawardane, Jie Zhou, Kate Lindsell, et al. 2022. “Safety, Tolerability and Viral Kinetics during SARS-CoV-2 Human Challenge in Young Adults.” Nature Medicine 28 (5): 1031–41. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41591-022-01780-9.
12. MacIntyre, Raina. 2022. Dark Winter: An Insider’s Guide to Pandemics and Biosecurity. 1st ed. Sydney, Australia: NewSouth. https://unsw.press/books/dark-winter/

Endnotes

1. Rather, it did show what mutations were needed near the furin cleavage site, but those were not the ones later used in Omicron. I suspect manipulating the furin cleavage site directly would make edits very obvious or the loss of competitiveness would be too great.
2. Dr. Raina MacIntyre pointed this paper out in her book Dark Winter: An Insider’s Guide to Pandemics and Biosecurity (2022) where she briefly speculated on the possible synthetic origin of Omicron.
3.  This number may have stabilized in the past year or so, but the preceding period of eight months appeared stable before a large increase.
4. 1918 pandemic influenza may simply have run out of victims and been replaced by other less lethal circulating strains. It's not clear that it became "milder" at all.