The SEB superantigen specifically must be quite consistent in its effects or it wouldn’t have been produced as a bioweapon, and there wouldn’t be 50% of population incapacitation / death concentrations for it. I think it unlikely that the US stockpiled a bioweapon that killed predominantly the elderly. So presumably, either SARS-CoV-2 consistently causes production of something similar but not identical to SEB, or it only causes production of SEB in a minority of infections. It’d be very nasty should a mutation produce a strain that produced SEB more consistently.
Are there any other viruses that produce, specifically, SEB, or was SEB hitherto only a bacterial product? And did you notice this bit? –
– “What is even more interesting is that SARS-Cov-2 motif showed a palindromic behavior with respect to this superantigenic SEB sequence, in the sense that a broader stretch, from E661 to R685, could be aligned to the SAg peptide in the reverse direction as well (Fig. 3A, right). This brings to our attention the versatility and high propensity of the SARS-CoV-2 S TCRVβ-binding site residues to potentially elicit an SAg-like response.”
Maybe I’m being unduly suspicious, but does that happen often?