Well, there really wasn’t much to the “scientific findings” of the paper. Dr. Lyons-Weiller just did a search for potentially homologous regions of COVID and important areas coding for proteins needed by the immune system which then might relate to ADE related autoimmune disease concerns (ADE = Antibody Dependent Enhancement - the preferred name to the biased “pathopgenic priming”). Since the degree of homology required to get into his list was quite low, that type of result would be true for just about any virus you can name so there’s not much new in the paper - and the rest of the article was just the author’s view of the scientific implications of that.
I object to the idea that people should avoid any of the main COVID19 vaccines because of this type of result. ADE is a real and important phenomena to track and watch out for. When @zed raised this topic last year I found a good unbiased review of the topic at ~https://www.nature.com/articles/s41564-020-00789-5 - it’s a bit dense but does a nice job of breaking down the real issues in case you are interested. The anti vaccine folks seem to pretend that the vaccine producers did not take this into account in their formulations (not true) and indeed they and multiple labs continue to study the topic and there have been all kinds of experiments in animals (and in conjunction with COVID19 and the new vaccines - not just those old ones on the failed SARS and MERS vaccines that are pretty irrelevant at this point). In fact, the FDA is requiring information relevant to ADE from the vaccine makers and the Pfizer report on the topic is due in May so we’ll have to keep a lookout for that.
As far as I can tell, this problem is at least as likely to happen in the bodies of the unvaccinated as in the vaccinated (obviously papers that focus on the problem wrt vaccines need to demonstrate the opposite for the issue to dissuade anyone from being vaccinated) and certainly coronavirus variants that may cause autoimmune responses could also happen by the evolution of the virus in an animal that crosses over to humans in the future.
(Disclosure: 15 years ago I served on an NIH grant review committee and evaluated cancer related bioinformatics work of Dr. Lyons-Weiler. I read several of his bioinformatics publications at the time and still have a favorable view of his bioinformatics work based on the excellent work he was doing in the cancer domain at that time).
