Did Molnupiravir Create the Recent "COVID Variant Soup"?

Glad that Merck Made Some Money Though

There are two Covid-specific drugs. One is Paxlovid, developed by Pfizer, which causes “Paxlovid rebounds” and was not tested by Pfizer on vaccinated people. I wrote about a dozen articles on it, exposing it as snake oil, and this one is a good summary.

Dr Fauci's Paxlovid Rebound!

Another is Molnupiravir, which has a very interesting mode of action. It interferes with viral replication, CAUSING AN EXCESSIVE AMOUNT OF MUTATIONS, so much that the mutated viral descendants are essentially defective and cannot replicate.

However, the problem is that SOME mutated copies CAN replicate — and cause excessive generation of “Covid variants” — a so-called “variant soup.”

Ryan Hisner @LongDesertTrain

Approval for molnupiravir (MOV) use should be revoked worldwide. Not only has it proven ineffective, it seems clearly to be creating sequences such as the one below, which in ~2 months acquired 72 mutations, more than its lineage had accumulated in ~3 years of evolution. 1/

Ryan Hisner explains how some variants, such as BM.2, have an unusually high amount of mutations.

Ryan Hisner @LongDesertTrain

I'm pretty sure this lineage was created by molnupiravir (MOV) treatment. It's a BM.2 sublineage, one of the highly immune-evasive BA.2.75 sublineages (with S:R346T + S:F486S). It has >40 additional nucleotide mutations on top of BM.2, which is extraordinary. 1/

Federico Gueli @siamosolocani

@Asinickle1 @LongDesertTrain and me tracked some weird singlet sequences from Australia, now this one is a lineage. It is likely linked to treatment with an authorized Antiviral we are not bioinfo https://t.co/5WwH6mMIwX @EricTopol @K_G_Andersen @mvankerkhove @Baric_Lab @Merck

This is what the current variant soup looks like:

We did discuss how Covid possibly was lab-enhanced to create variants:

Was Sars-Cov-2 DESIGNED to Spawn so Many Variants?

However, in the past, it used to be just a few variants competing and one variant being on top. What has been happening since this fall is that we have a total mess of variants on top of variants chasing each other.

Could this be due to the mutagenic effects of Molnupiravir?

Is Molnupiravir Also Mutagenic for HUMAN DNA?

About a year ago, Brian Mowrey asked this question, and if you are interested in his very technical take, please take a look here:

Doppelgänger

Molnupiravir Rebounds

Modern Discontent analyzes rebounds from Molnupiravir here:

Molnupiravir COVID rebound just as possible as PAXLOVID's

This post is intended to solicit other people’s thoughts, and I hope we will continue this discussion in the comments or other substackers’ posts.

What do you think? Could Molnupiravir enhance the generation of new Covid variants? Is it responsible for the “variant soup” we are observing?