Convergent evolution is bad news

As I mentioned a few days ago, the genetic signatures in primate populations are clear: We’re survivors of those who survived repeated episodes of mass culling by corona viruses. With that knowledge in the back of your head, any attempt at mass vaccination risks exacerbating what is inherently already an existential threat. But people are stupid, so they went ahead and injected everyone with this stuff.

The Japanese authors of this paper don’t dance around the issue: The Omicron waves are being enhanced by vaccination. They developed a method to test both the enhancing potential and the neutralizing potential of vaccinated serum. They report that “serum collected on day 98 after the second vaccination exhibited no neutralizing activity at all under the serum dilutions examined, but maintained clear ADE activity”.

They conclude their study by writing: “These results suggest that the rapid spread of Omicron around the world may in part result from the lack of cross-neutralization against Omicron and some ADE activity of sera after vaccination.” This isn’t exactly subtle anymore, is it?

None of this will come as a shock to those of you who have been reading my posts on Omicron since we first heard of it. There was a lot of delusional optimism that this would now mean the end of the pandemic, but as I warned at the time, this was the point where we would witness the successive birth of new iterations of SARS-COV-2 with growing enhancement of disease by mass vaccination.

I’ve also warned a few times now that as you approach complete antibody evasion the speed of mutation would increase, as it would rapidly begin to pile on more spike mutations. And guess what’s happening:

With every new infection, a shrinking subset of antibodies are recalled:

The effect this has is that with increasingly fewer antibodies dominating the immune response, you also need fewer mutations to completely evade it. Here you can see what percentage of antibodies after BA.2 also react with the original strain:

You can see there’s far more cross-reactivity after vaccination, because you get a subset of antibodies that are recalled and will dominate the response.

Here you can see where mutations will need to show up to escape the immune response induced by a breakthrough infection:


You can see there’s really just one spot for BA.5 to obliterate the antibodies. As the antibody repertoire narrows, they find we’re reaching the end stage: Convergent evolution of multiple strains towards complete evasion. Different Omicron variants are now rapidly piling on mutations at the same hotspots, because the immune profile of the general population now looks not just extremely similar, but extremely narrowly focused on a handful of RBD residues.

The main reason Omicron has been relatively mild so far, is because almost anyone infected has pre-existing immunity. BA.1 was intrinsically less virulent, but with BA.2 and BA.5 you’re riding almost entirely on pre-existing immunity that is rapidly recalled. And so if you reach the point of total antibody evasion, except for those antibodies that help it out, you would expect the infection fatality ratio in a highly vaccinated population to look at least the same as pre-Omicron variants, unless you think there’s a very strong role for non-Spike antibody mediated forms of immunity.

Why would a variant that completely evades most of the population’s antibody response need to have an IFR below the first pre-Omicron variants? I can’t think of a reason. In fact, take a look at what the Chinese authors write:

The newly emerged escaping mutations furtherly narrow down the effective antibody repertoire, which will in turn affects how the mutation occurs under concentrated immune pressure. The interaction between convergent evolution of escaping variants and less diversified antibody repertoire would ultimately lead to a highly escapable variants, posing a great challenge to current vaccines and antibody drugs. It could even be worse that infection with the predicted final convergent evolution variants may lead to increased disease severity due to the limited number of neutralizing antibodies elicited immediately after infection. Therefore, the disease severity caused by new variants needs to be closely monitored and measured in the future.

If people start getting infected with variants perfectly tuned to their antibody repertoire, severity may be higher than anything we’ve seen so far. Infections are almost certainly going to be more common than anything seen so far.

Take a look at this graph, to see the accelerating convergent march towards complete antibody evasion:

It’s arriving at the optimal solution to your antibody repertoire, which now looks very similar in most people due to mass vaccination.

So what should we expect now? To start with, you can expect the typical Omicron sized waves. Pre-Omicron variants had lower ACE2 affinity and only affected a minority of the population, it was particularly rare for children to get infected, as their ACE2 expression is lower and they have strong innate immunity. With Omicron that has all come to an end, we’re now all getting infected. Look at this picture to see the point illustrated:

You have the pre-Omicron waves here that failed to infect most of the population during a wave, then you have the Omicron variants that manage to infect just about anyone who hasn’t recently been infected.

To get a rough picture of where we’re standing with the convergently evolving variants, you can visit this page, it shows the percentage of samples that have the two main convergent mutations. Currently that’s about 2.6% of all globally sequenced infections.

Because of this, you don’t really expect to see the signal emerge from the noise yet, when it comes to hospitalizations. But take a look at this page of hospitalizations in the Netherlands:

You can see a big spike, as COVID-19 becomes the main cause for hospitalization in people who were hospitalized with it. In England, these convergent strains are also beginning to cause a surge in hospitalizations.

So far, 2022 has been the deadliest year of the pandemic here in Europe. They’re not telling you this, they’re calling the excess mortality “unexplained”, because acknowledging this means acknowledging the vaccines have exacerbated this pandemic, as I warned you was going to happen. If the pandemic was over, you would see negative excess mortality, as so many of the dead are above 85. You don’t see negative excess mortality, so it’s not over.

Now you have the situation where everyone is constantly being reinfected, because the shrinking subset of antibodies recalled by reinfections are progressively easier to avoid again through mutations. No matter which way you cut it, that’s not a good thing. If through some miracle, we manage to overcome the homogenization of the population’s immune response, perhaps through exposure to other pathogens, that still means that during this window of homogenization and unprecedented mass infection we massively increased the genetic diversity of this virus, allowing it to arrive at all sorts of highly fit new variants that won’t just disappear once our immune response improves. In other words, your engine broke down, you fixed it, but you already lost the race.

There is no easy way out of this. It’s stupid to pretend the population will be fine after repeated episodes of infection from this virus. In the BA.5 wave, about 21% of infected people have symptoms that last more than four weeks. Almost all of those infections will have been reinfections, most will have had two or more previous infections, along with cocktails of science-juice that were supposed to prevent this exact scenario. Besides the simple fact that the labor force can’t deal with people constantly being unable to work, our bodies are accumulating damage, faster than they can repair the damage.

And yet, avoiding the early waves is no solution either. The early variants of SARS-COV-2 are like vaccines, that prepare the body for later waves of fitter variants of SARS-COV-2. Take a look at these excess mortality statistics:

If I were wrong, if the lockdowns were a great idea, if the masks were going to help bring this pathogen under control, if we would be better off if we had arrows that tell us where to walk in the department store, I would tell you. But you can look at the excess mortality statistics here and notice that Sweden is doing decidedly better than all its Scandinavian neighbors and even better than places like Hong Kong and South Korea.

The earlier variants deliver the body the experience it needs to survive the later variants. Just as it’s safer to donate half a liter of blood once every three months than to donate two liters once a year, it’s better to suffer a bit of damage from the occasional infection, than to spend two years not getting infected, only to get unlucky and get hit unprepared, by a virus that has learned to reproduce and avoid innate immunity in the bodies of people who have experience with this pathogen.

SARS-COV-2 is getting better and better at surviving in our bodies, by learning how to more effectively suppress our innate immune response. Again, this is why you want people to get infected with the early variants. Their innate immune system gets the training it needs, so that it’s not caught unprepared by the next variant that is even better at avoiding the innate immune response. We know a lot about the adaptive immune system, but the innate immune system is far more diverse and complex than humans care to understand, it’s worthy of a post of its own at some point in the future.

You also have to remember that with the exception of the vaccines, almost anything you do that works to prevent you from getting infected by SARS-COV-2, would also work to prevent you from getting infected by anything else. If wearing masks actually works, then you won’t be infected by influenza, rhinovirus and numerous other respiratory pathogens either. That’s a bad thing.

At the end of the day, SARS-COV-2 is a respiratory pathogen. The other respiratory pathogens help train you body to deal with SARS-COV-2. Without regular exposure to them, you’re also at risk of autoimmune problems. You evolved together with the rest of your holobiont, exterminating the rest of the human holobiont isn’t just disrespectful, it’s a bad idea. Take a look at this idiot, who congratulates everyone on exterminating an Influenza strain:

Black Lives Matter in his bio tells you all you need to know when it comes to which side of the bell curve this dude falls on, but note the question this dude avoids: What characterizes the variants that went extinct? How exactly do I benefit from B/Yamagata being extinct? Aren’t we just going to have more virulent versions take its place?

You don’t need to convince me exterminating smallpox was a good idea, but if you’re going to beat yourself on the chest like a gorilla because you exterminated an obscure version of the flu only dorks in academic ivory towers ever heard of, I’d like to hear you explain exactly how humanity benefits from your experiment.

How can you KNOW that we benefit from wiping out a bunch of influenza variants, knowing that we live on a planet surrounded by other species that can easily infect us with THEIR influenza strains? How can you claim this is a good thing, based on no evidence? What if B/Yamagata is a spoiler, triggering an immune response that prevents those other influenza strains from establishing themselves in our population? What if the reduction in genetic diversity of influenza means we have killed off the least fit strains?

This is just the epitome of human arrogance, this guy is the shitlib equivalent of a conservative who thinks it is our divine obligation to turn our atmosphere into a dinosaur atmosphere. When you don’t understand the function that something in nature serves, then you need to avoid changing it.

If you want to hear a solution, which I know you do, then the obvious answer is to look towards the place that’s mysteriously avoiding the global carnage and misery: Sub-Saharan Africa. What are they doing differently? A few things.

To start with, they don’t engage in unprecedented experiment against the human holobiont. The non-human organisms that live around the human body are not being decimated in sub-Saharan Africa. There are no strange genetic experiments to force the human body to develop an immune response against SARS-COV-2 it would never develop on its own from natural infection. In addition, people constantly get infected with a wide variety of other pathogens, so that SARS-COV-2 encounters bodies that are well experienced with a range of different tactics to avoid alerting our immune systems.

In addition to this, the elderly don’t all live together in giant dumping grounds, they live within their communities. In nursing homes, the most vulnerable people are exposed to other vulnerable people, who will generally exhale the largest infectious dose. Clustering of immunocompromised people together increases risks from respiratory pathogens.

Whatever viral particles your body normally exhales, it has a whole system designed to render them weak and vulnerable: The spike proteins will be covered with IgA from your own body, making it much easier for other people to deal with these viral particles when they turn up in THEIR bodies. An elderly person with a high viral load suffering a nasty infection will be much less competent at making sure that whatever leaves their body poses no severe threat to the other people it ends up in.

Why was SARS-COV-2 so deadly for hospital workers early on, only to become boring outside of the hospitals again? Because the hospital workers were constantly exposed to elderly people whose bodies can no longer properly protect people around them from what was infecting them!

Finally, the sub-Saharan African diet is based on staple plant foods, that are cooked at poor fires at relatively low temperatures, preserving the protease inhibitors that neutralize nasty viruses that manage to bypass your first lines of defense to make it into your body. The “mass chemical prophylaxis” campaign that Geert van den Bossche and others encourage already happens when the general population has a decent plant based diet, rather than highly processed junk and excessive animal protein.

And as I have said a few times, you really need to airline industry to shut down. You need to deglobalize the world. Omicron emerged in South Africa, if it had died out there the pandemic would have been over by now. Now we’re dealing with the descendants of BA.2.75, which is doing nothing out of the ordinary in India, but causing the next waves here in the Western world. This is not what people like to hear, but it is the reality we’re dealing with: Any new version that emerges anywhere now takes over the whole world. This is not compatible with human health.

This pandemic is going to continue, until the survivors learn to live in harmony with non-human organisms. The longer that takes, the fewer such survivors there will be.

20 Comments

  1. Regarding the cumulative excess deaths chart:
    Australia/NZ don’t appear to be doing badly, despite their strict lockdowns.
    Does Sweden’s continues success suggest that the science juice isn’t wiping or disrupting natural immunity?

    • The graph kinda ends too early, Aus/NZ have been piling on deaths in recent weeks.

      Sweden here definitely suggests the main concern so far has been vaccination BEFORE any infection.

      For the latest variants, India also suggests the main concern is vaxx before any infection, as we see nothing out of the ordinary happening there, even though they’ve now vaccinated most people.

      Will that pattern persist into the future? I have no good answer right now.

      • I noticed after posting that the chart doesn’t include the recent winter period for Aus/NZ.

        You explain Sweden well. What about the far East, which I have seen held up as an example by some (I’m not sure if that includes you) of a region that gained immunity very early only to have that immunity ‘wiped’ by vaccination? I’m thinking of Japan, Singapore, etc. They should be doing as well as Sweden.

  2. “The “mass chemical prophylaxis” campaign that Geert van den Bossche and others encourage already happens when the general population has a decent plant based diet, rather than highly processed junk and excessive animal protein.”

    The problem with said “plant based diet” is the malnutrition that vegans often suffer from.

    Its better to avoid processed food to be sure. And Simple carbs and sugar. But avoiding animal protein isn’t the solution.

    I suppose the happy medium is the Mount Athos diet. There are days of a plant based diet mixed with moderation days and a feast day where animal protein and fats are allowed.

    No health problems and cancer so far.

  3. >The problem with said “plant based diet” is the malnutrition that vegans often suffer from.

    Find me some study that says vegans suffer malnutrition more often than non-vegans.

    And I don’t mean some study that says “hey they have more b12 and zinc deficiency”, because in reverse you’d find they have less vitamin C deficiency.

  4. I think we can all agree that vaccinated individuals will have more frequent infections culminating in a chronic infection and then demise from a variety of opportunistic mechanisms. Has anyone an idea of biochemical markers during this transition? total lymphocyte count, CD4, 8 numbers or other such markers which were helpful with HIV progression.

    • CD4, CD8, CD56 for “quantity” of defense
      Interferon-Gamma for “quality” of defense

      It was discussed in detail in Corona Investigative Committee
      Session 118: The Truth Pact August 19th, 2022
      about 2h:45m

      Can be found on Odysee, DLive and some other platforms

  5. >we can all agree that vaccinated individuals will have more frequent infections culminating in a chronic infection and then demise from a variety of opportunistic mechanisms.

    Perhaps.

    But if that happens, it’s the end of civilization.

    If we assume it’s the fate of anyone who was vaxxed before natural infection, it means the end of:

    -Japan
    -South Korea
    -Taiwan
    -Singapore
    -New Zealand
    -Australia
    -Canada
    -Probably much of the US
    -Most of Western Europe
    -Chile
    -Argentine

    If these nations all end up dealing with this scenario, the living will come to envy the dead.

    • Chile and Argentina started off with the Chinese whole virus vaccines. Almost every country in Latin America did the same thing. So they have a mixed response, not a complete monoculture like Europe. And besides being whole inactive virus, the Chinese vaccines produce a spike antibody response only 10% of the level of Fizzer, to the point they are accused of being useless (which should also mean harmless).
      Hungary, Turkey, Republic of Georgia also stated with Chinese vaccines…about 50/50 in the end…so they should end up with a lower impact.
      New Zealand could be the worst affected on the planet…95% uptake and it is all Fizzer.
      Here in Romania only 40% took the vax and I think a full quarter of those faked it so it is only really 30%, like Bulgaria. Only 10% in each country took the booster.
      I’m not Romanian, by the way. Moved here in part because of the non-compliant population that tends to listen to “conspiracy theories”. I left NZ because I considered it too risky…which is a very different perspective on risk from most people, I know.

      • Nice one mate. “the non compliant population that tends to listen to “conspiracy theories” “.
        I have read that the Turks are one of the most conspiracy theory loving people around. But it is understandable if you consider their history, their being ruled by Ottoman Tsars with ever decreasing amounts of Turkish blood. Because the concubines were from anywhere but Anatolia. I read a book about it not long ago. Then they had the war of Independence. The Greeks penetrated right into Anatolia. The French, English, Italians occupied various part of the Turkish heartland. The English fomented dissent and rebellion amongst the Arabs to the south. There was operation Gladio. The deep state.
        Right now there are 10 million immigrants in Turkey, some of them with weird unpalatable customs, like Afghan boy prostitution.
        Discontent is brewing in many places.
        Politically correct “right on” English love immigrants. You can never have enough immigrants. The more the merrier. It shows “absence of racism”.

  6. I’m not smart enough to understand all the details here, but you have me concerned.

    I’m unvaccinated and managed to avoid Covid the whole time until June of this year when I caught what I’m pretty sure was BA5. The first night was rough when I had a 103 fever for a few hours before I got it down to 101 which was manageable. I never had any lung or sinus issurs. The only symptoms I had were a high fever for a few hours the first night, then moderate fever the next day or two. Some fatigue and joint achiness and head pressure those first 2 days. Light fatigue until day 5 when I felt good enough to go back to the gym.

    Should I be worried? What might be in store for me going forward? I thought I was in the best of all worlds (natural immunity by a mild variant) until I read this post.

    • Mehen, the immune system is split into two overall parts – the innate immune system and the adaptive immune system. As you are an unvaccinated individual, if you are in good health, your innate immune system should still be functioning well, which means it broadly provides an important first line of defence against any future variants, even ones that have managed to evolve a resistance to antibodies that are part of the adaptive immune system. This is because the innate immune system, if well trained (being slowly but surely exposed to the virus over time), is better able to recognise patterns that are common to all variants of SARS-CoV-2, and all coronaviruses in general, and then to deal with them more effectively. Your natural infection earlier this year would have helped with the above said training. The adaptive immune system, on the other hand, works through antibodies that are more specific to particular antigens, which can and have changed, rendering such antibodies less and less effective over time. Such antibodies should not be depended on as a first line of defence as they have been. As such, if (when) the SARS-CoV-2 virus evolves towards a complete breakthrough of adaptive immunity, it will be crucial to have a well-functioning innate immune system to protect oneself. Unfortunately, this is not the case with many vaccinated people, particularly those that have been boosted, because their adaptive immune system antibodies are outcompeting the innate immune system, thereby preventing the latter from acting as a first line of defence. If I were you, I would be more worried about those you love who have been vaccinated and also about the chaos that may ensue when a fully vaccine-resistant variant becomes predominant and there are high numbers of infections, severe disease and deaths.

  7. There is something I don’t understand. As I know (may be wrong): if you get vaccinated you will develope antibodies in the bloodstream (IgG, IgM); if you get infected you will develope antibodies in the mucosa (IgA). There are two immune systems, like border guards and police.
    So, why should immunity in the blood stream alterate mucosa immunity? Why should vaccinated people worry about getting infected with this new variants, as long as the virus doesn’t enter the bloodstream?

    • Mucosal antibodies will eventually wane and thereafter offer suboptimal protection.

      Vaccinated people need to worry about getting infected with new variants because their adaptive immune system will probably continue to recall the same antibodies that were originally induced and imprinted into immunological memory by the vaccine. Such antibodies are likely to poorly recognise new circulating dominant variants. Hence there will be a diminished capacity to neutralise them. What is more likely to happen is non-neutralising antibodies binding to the virus instead. It has been shown that when an antibody binds to some viruses but is unable to neutralise them, infectiousness is enhanced (i.e. antibody-dependent enhancement of infection). This is a factor contributing to the high infectiousness of the Omicron variant and this is likely be true for future variants as well.

      Vaccinated people should also worry because when non-replicating vaccines (all current COVID vaccines) are used on them, their cell-based innate immune system, which functions to eliminate a large chunk of the viral load even before antigen-specific antibodies reach their peak, is bypassed and does not get trained. This denies the vaccinated individual a crucial first line of defence. Furthermore, if a future variant becomes fully resistant to our antibodies, it will be a well-functioning, well-trained cell-based innate immune system that provides the best chance of protecting against severe disease and death.

      • SO MODERNA CREATED TWO PROLINE CHAGES TO COMBAT THIS & THEN EVERYONE ELSE FOLLOWED… DO WE KNOW HOW THATS HOLDING UP?

        *sorry for capitals, I’m loosing the plot!

  8. I am not sure if you quoted this already, but Nakedcapitalism recently re-posted this: SARS-CoV-2 Secondary Attack Rates in Vaccinated and Unvaccinated Household Contacts during Replacement of Delta with Omicron Variant, Spain

    https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/28/10/22-0494_article

    “Our data suggest vaccine evasion might be a cause of rapid spread of the Omicron variant. We recommend a focus on developing vaccines with long-lasting protection against severe disease, rather than only against infectivity.”

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