Highly mutated COVID strain “Pirola” BA.2.86 may not be a “black swan” event after all, introducing a viral plot twist in the pandemic like Delta and Omicron did nearly two years ago.
But it’s not your garden-variety variant either. That’s according to experimental data released Thursday by Yulong Richard Cao, an assistant professor at Peking University’s Biomedical Pioneering Innovation Center in China, and a top variant researcher. His lab performed experiments using a pseudovirus, a version of the variant created in a lab.
