[Mvandenbergh]

I disagree that this is being done for optics. Conspiracy theories rely on people being much better at keeping secrets than we know they are.

There does seem to be some evidence that other Coronaviruses may exhibit ADE but it's important to note that ADE is not well understood and that many viruses seem to display it in-vitro but non in-vivo.

In particular, vaccines and monoclonal antibodies targeted at SARS spike proteins seemed to cause ADE in some experiments but not in others.

There has also been at least one paper that speculated that the virus was deadlier in China than South Korea due to pre-existing exposure of the population so similar Coronaviruses and ADE cross-over from them. This was before the big spikes in mortality in Iran and Italy which would be pretty strong counter-evidence to this hypothesis.

I think it is best for us to treat our both our species-level understanding and our personal understanding of immunology and epidemiology (assuming that like me, you are reading papers but have not spent significant pre-existing time studying this field) with an appropriate level of epistemic skepticism. I would be careful of making statements like "a vaccine is unlikely to work" unless you have a high degree of confidence in your own understanding of the state-of-the-art.

(I haven't downvoted you and would encourage others not to do so as that mechanism is intended to remove noise and not to signal disagreement)

[nnq]

> Conspiracy theories rely on people being much better at keeping secrets than we know they are.

Most people have no idea WHY they are doing what they are doing! Like the actual true long-term business objective of a task etc. Successful task completion usually requires only technical details and immediate organizational ones. Fake goals are easy to sell to investors and board members by expert manipulator sociopaths (the kind of people explicitly hired and selected for top executive roles).

You can make immense progress towards a goal you know nothing about. You can't leak a secret you don't know.

That's kind of how human societal evolution works, only the bigger goals are evolved/emergent instead of envisioned by some dark conspiratorial cabal. But you can't rule out the latter.

As a society we need to maintain some "immune reaction potential" against nefarious manipulation by entertaining unlikely conspiracy theories too!