Evolution towards increased interferon suppression

I’m still away from home, but I wanted to share with you all this study:

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.01.16.523994v4

Which illustrates what I have been warning about: Evolution towards greater virulence, through improved suppression of Interferon and downstream products of the Interferon signaling cascade.

Evolutionary logic dictates that one of the functions of our immune system is probably not just to keep our bodies healthy, but to keep our kin healthy.

The way you would expect this to be accomplished is mainly by NK cells selectively discriminating against more virulent variants of common respiratory viruses, while turning a blind eye to more benign variants.

Fuck this process up through artificial persistently high antibody concentrations in the population that nonetheless fail to stop transmission and you begin giving a big selective advantage towards virulent variants.

How long this takes is hard to say for me, it could be months, it could be years. What I do know is that you don’t want to interfere in the evolutionary dynamics of a sarbecovirus pandemic.

Our genome suggests our primate ancestors have waged an evolutionary arms race against coronaviruses in the past. Interfering through artificially high antibody concentrations means borrowing from the future. And considering how we went about getting those high concentrations, we’ve borrowed at a stupidly high interest rate.

The mid-term consequences are bad enough: Wave after wave after wave, even in the middle of summer, causing accumulating damage to the population and enabling ongoing evolution and spillover into animal populations.

That has me worried for people’s health, vaccinated or unvaccinated. If everyone was suddenly catching influenza twice a year, which normally just a fraction of the population gets in a given year, I would also be worried. We already know this mess is causing more cases of severe RSV in children.

I don’t think I’m doing anything wrong, in warning about the insanity of this situation. It’s clear the children, who have a life ahead of them, suffer the health impact of the mess we created.

But it’s the long term consequences that worry me more. There is no other virus I can think of where we try to make the severity of the disease manageable through a constantly high wall of antibodies. It’s basically like asking for a Marek’s disease effect.

Antibodies are not meant to make a virus manageable. They’re meant to kick out an unwelcome guest. We’re abusing one of our body’s mechanisms, to try to make a disaster manageable that we created ourselves.

It’s not bad for some people to have antibodies, especially against a handful of virulence associated highly immunogenic epitopes. But the “wall of antibodies” that fails to stop infection(!) has no equivalent in nature I am aware of.

And it seems to me we’re moving towards the worst of all possible scenarios as a result: The Vanishing Act.

The vanishing act is what happens when the virus recedes and thereby allows the wall of antibodies to recede as well. It would become hard to monitor the ongoing evolution of the virus.

And then eventually, you notice the rise of a cocktail of highly immune evasive variants, that can silently spread in our bodies for a long time without recalling the antibody response. They would be intrinsically highly virulent and that would be further enhanced in practice by the waning of the antibodies.

This is not my fault. I’m warning about this, because I hope someone out there will take seriously the concerns I have. I think this is my obligation, to strife in this manner to limit the suffering that will result.

And I know some of you would rather stick your heads in the sand, afraid you will just be locked up in your home again. But the denial strategy merely means you end up with lockdowns once these virulent variants emerge, or you just end up defacto locked up, because everyone gets sick all the time.

I mean, I’m running into young people on a daily basis in the middle of May, who are coughing their lungs out like they are about to die. And everyone wants to pretend this is normal, because muh hayfever. Am I supposed to pretend the emperor has fancy new clothes?

The vaccination rate dropped to near zero. In most countries you couldn’t even be vaccinated now if you wanted to. Everyone now knows it was a mistake. I have no business arguing that point anymore.

My job now is to beat it into your heads that the damage you caused with this stupidity needs to be repaired. You want to get rid of the circulating memory B cells that turn into plasma cells that produce these shitty antibodies that prohibit the NK cells from learning to do their job.

This is not necessarily very hard. But it takes time and is politically and societally unthinkable, just as it is politically and societally unthinkable for governments to admit how this all began.

Everyone now knows we lost precious time in January and February 2020. I don’t care how you think we should have responded, our politicians responded by visiting Chinese restaurants to make a statement against racism. They could have done something useful instead.

What I’m telling you now is that we’re again wasting precious time, that could be used to repair the population’s immune systems.

The clock is ticking.