Record levels of pneumonia

In a sense, I was born in the best possible time to be me. If I had been born in the 80’s or 70’s, I would have had an easier time in some aspects of life, but I would also feel far more invested in this society. With the way things are currently going, I don’t really feel that sense of investment.

If people were vegan, if they voted for politicians who promise to try to keep our planet habitable, if they sold their cars and started riding bicycles, I would feel an obligation to help work out how to fix things. But in reality, most people don’t really seems to care about anything we’re dealing with, so I don’t really feel invested in this society.

I accept that young people and low IQ people just don’t understand the problems we’re dealing with. But by the time you get into your fifties or your sixties, you must have realized at some point that the Earth does not have infinite oil, that pigs suffer in cages, that fertile soil is flushing into the ocean, that 8 billion humans is a lot, that the rain forests are getting chopped down to make food for the animals that humans eat.

You don’t have to believe your TV, or some scientists. If you are in your fifties or sixties, you must have noticed that the insects are disappearing. Even I notice this stuff. You must have noticed that the landscape has changed, that the farmland turned into giant monocultures, with cows eating one species of grass and every little flower removed with herbicides. You must have noticed that winters just don’t get as cold as they used to get anymore. But they just don’t seem to care.

When I was a teenager, I denied all this stuff too, I refused to accept it. I believed the low status white male narrative I read about online, that it is just a lie peddled by elites. But after a while, you’re supposed to accept that there’s a problem. I don’t comprehend how people can be like Trump and just spend their whole lives, denying there is a problem.

Back when I was around 19 and worried about ecological overshoot, I had this fantasy that I should go study biology and develop a virus that reduces the human population. Well, the world already beat me to it.

I think Democrats in a way feel a sense of relief over having lost the election. If they had won the election, they would have to work out how to try to solve our problems. But since people voted for Trump, now they deserve what they’re going to get. The United States has settled on YOLOing the next pandemic. There is bird flu in the cows, the cats that drink their raw milk die with bleeding brains, but nobody seems to care.

The whole population is starting to show signs of immunodeficiency. Mild immunodeficiency looks different from severe immunodeficiency. Severe immunodeficiency means weird fungi and protists can start growing in your lungs. We call those opportunistic infections. Mild immunodeficiency means you’re just more vulnerable to the stuff that normally infects people. When you extrapolate from the T cell decline seen in long COVID patients, you get this:

It suggests that around 2025, most of the long COVID patients will have abnormal CD4 T cell counts. Around 2028, they will have a T cell count that would normally be seen in untreated AIDS patients. Once you reach 200 CD4 T cells in AIDS, you have about two years left. I’m not entirely convinced of the accuracy of this projection, because there will be a strong reporting bias: The long COVID patients who have their T cell count tested and get normal results won’t report on it.

There’s also an important difference, in that SARS-COV-2 will mostly be killing resident T cells in the lungs, whereas in HIV, the T cells seem to die due to widespread chronic inflammation throughout the body. This would suggest that the problems in the lung may become apparent before you start to see a widespread reduction in T cell counts in the population indicative of systemic immunodeficiency.

You might say, if this is an airborne AIDS virus, wouldn’t we expect to see more deaths by now? Well, it takes HIV around a decade to kill someone after infection on average, in the absence of treatment. And keep in mind, a lot of people simply died from other diseases, related to the same problems that caused them to contract HIV. They could die from heroin addiction for example.

With enough reinfections, most people will fall into the category of long COVID patients. The data we have available so far suggests a naive extrapolation model, in which 14.6% of infections result in long COVID, is accurate. Not all of those people will recognize their symptoms as due to long COVID however.

I suppose there is some stuff you can do. On the other side of my bedroom sleeps my neighbor, he is in his thirties and coughs his lungs out every night. We know this virus easily transmits across short distances, but I’m just not going to sleep in my bed with a mask on and I’m not going to sleep on the couch either. Surveys done after the first Omicron wave also suggest that mask wearing does not reduce risk of infection. Even the N95 only blocks 98% of small particles.

If it’s true that there’s an airborne AIDS going around, then as far as I’m concerned, that’s the end of the human experiment. If we all stopped going to parties and started wearing masks, perhaps you could kick the can down the hall by ten or twenty more years. All that would achieve is that you just ensure the rest of the biosphere dies with us, due to global warming.

And that’s what the studies do suggest happens from time to time. From 25,000 years ago onwards, there was an outbreak of a corona virus in East Asian populations, that drove strong genetic adaptation. That requires such a virus to either kill or sterilize huge numbers of people of relatively young age.

For a virus to be a “corona virus” doesn’t mean much. It just means it’s a crown-shaped virus. Such viruses can be mild (the hCovs) or they can be nasty (the SARS viruses). This is the mistake people make, the idea that these viruses inevitably have to behave like the hCovs eventually.

Right now we see strange outbreaks of all sorts of respiratory infections, that suggest the population has some mild immunodeficiency. The “immune debt” hypothesis looked far fetched a year ago. Now a year later, with once again a record spike in all sorts of respiratory pathogens, it looks even less plausible.

What I wonder, is what could avert a doomsday outcome by now. The virus could at least in theory evolve to stop killing T cells. That seems unlikely, because killing T cells is presumably part of its survival strategy. The infections can last longer because the CD4+ T cells that would activate B cells and CD8+ T cells that are thought to kill infected cells are getting killed. Neutralizing antibodies also allow the virus to infect the B cells.

There is also some indirect immune damage seen after infection. Fibrin is deposited in the blood vessels in the brain. This fibrin makes it harder for Natural Killer cells to move around and do their job. With age, the immune system is damaged by fibrosis of the lymphatic system. There is also damage done to the spleen and lymph nodes seen in SARS-COV-2 infections, which makes it harder for the immune system to recover.

The immune system damage represents a form of positive feedback: The virus damages the immune system, which then makes it easier for the virus to reinfect those people and spread further. That’s why we see this pattern in wastewater:

This is just not what you expect to see, when a virus transitions towards endemicity. This is what you expect to see, when damage to the immune system from previous infections, is enabling reinfections. Note in particular how that huge wave in July 2024 has no precedent in previous summers.

The population could theoretically build up such strong immunity that the virus simply can’t continue to reinfect everyone. This looks unlikely to me as well. Herd immunity would require those members of the herd who can’t build up immunity to die, but we continually vaccinate those members of the herd in autumn every year, or give them Paxlovid to stop them from being hospitalized.

Remember: We see less patients in the hospital with SARS-COV-2 than we did in 2020, not because the virus became intrinsically milder, but because doctors can now give the patients treatments like Paxlovid and Molnupiravir, that stop them from being hospitalized. We figured out how to reduce severe outcomes seen in a small minority of the population, but we’ve achieved very little, to reduce the mild damage suffered by most of the population.

When a year ago, the XBB variants ran into a genetic dead-end, with no clear path to further improvement, there was a decline in viral transmission seen in the population. This resulted in a decline in immunity. That decline in immunity then allowed a very new variant, BA.2.86, to spread. It had enough time to develop two further mutations, which then allowed it to restart the party all over again.

Some people seem to think the virus is again bumping into a wall right now. I’m not convinced myself, but if that’s true, they argue that it doesn’t mean the end of the virus, it simply means we get another persistent infection that starts causing new waves of infections. You already know what I think: I think it’s now simply moving towards adding glycans on the NTD and only looks like it ran out of opportunities, because it simply has no incentive to keep changing the RBD anymore.

The human population is less vulnerable to bird flu than most animal populations, because we regularly catch influenza, so there is cross-reactive immunity. But when everyone has a reduction in their CD4+ and CD8+ T cells in their lungs, as a result of SARS-COV-2 infections, that’s going to affect that cross-reactive immunity.

Just as everyone is now more vulnerable to walking pneumonia, people are going to be more vulnerable to bird flu. This is essentially the scenario I explained two years ago: SARS-COV-2 causes mild immunodeficiency, which then allows other pathogens to start spreading through our population. Here’s what the worldwide google searches look like for pneumonia right now:

There is just very clearly something abnormal building up around the world. Normally searches for pneumonia peak in December, January or February, but they’re now already far above where they would normally peak. There are just far more people suffering pneumonia worldwide.

When SARS-COV-2 first emerged, it was incapable of infecting children and it was killing people who had about eight years of life expectancy left. Now we have a virus that regularly infects children, as a result of the global gain of function experiment through mass vaccination. We also see widespread brain damage in the population now. We also see widespread damage to the immune system, mostly concentrated in the lungs, resulting in far more cases of pneumonia.

Just as there is no easy technofix for climate change, there is no easy technofix for SARS-COV-2. The Trump administration thought they could fix the SARS-COV-2 problem by rushing a vaccine, but it left everyone with a broken immune response. The same people peddling social distancing as an easy solution back then, are now peddling blocking the sky as an easy solution to global warming.

Any sort of real solution to the problems we face would just require radical lifestyle interventions. In the words of the late great Pentti Linkola: “That there are billions of people over 60kg weight on this planet is recklessness.”

If the whole global population became vegan, obesity would cease to be a problem and SARS-COV-2 transmission would be dramatically reduced. The bird flu problem would also be solved. If people stopped flying around the world, something like BA.2.86 would die out locally, before getting a chance to evolve and turn into JN.1.

But here’s what the number of global flights looks like:

By now, everyone knows that air travel is just not sustainable. Everyone knows it has to stop, to address the climate change problem. So why are we continuing to book new records?

In Europe, meat consumption is dropping to record lows. In the United States, meat consumption in 2024 will reach a new record high. Why? Humans can live without eating meat.

Everyone knows Bitcoin is environmentally unsustainable. Right now it uses about 0.5% of all global electricity. Why? We know Bitcoin can’t create wealth, because unlike land, clothing or food, nobody wants a Bitcoin for any reason other than to sell it again at a higher price. So why are we continuing to pollute the atmosphere with it?

When we don’t solve our problems ourselves, what happens is that nature solves them for us. But nature’s ways of solving our problems for us are less humane than the ways that we could use ourselves.

Do you realize, how terrible it is, when your children get sick? If you get sick, you just die and then you don’t experience anything. But it is hell, when your children are sick. We have record breaking levels of pneumonia in children now, around the world.

I wish people would realize, that nature has no friendly and pleasant ways to solve our problems for us.

23 Comments

  1. I looked a couple days ago for the long-term data on Covid-19 in my province in CAN. They’re only reporting the data from within a year. Right now, our city is rated as ‘high’ for virus in the wastewater. We’re a more ‘liberal’ city so the gene therapy uptake was quite high.

    My cubicle neighbour had Covid a couple weeks ago, I presume, and an old coworker in Sept had it too. I mentioned immune dysfunction to him and it’s a quick change of subject… Others in the lunchroom are saying they’re feeling sick for weeks at a time that they just can’t shake. It seems that most are putting their heads in the sand and pretending nothing is going on.

  2. Thanks for posting another update.

    You’ve written at length numerous times about T cell exhaustion in the population, but I wonder about B cell exhaustion and whether that will be a concern. I mean, if large percentages of the population are suffering from persistent COVID infections, and their immune system is constantly churning out these IgM antibodies against the N-Terminal Domain (what Vanden Bossche refers to as “PNNAbs”), I wonder if there is a limit to just how many of these antibodies their B cells can produce.

    Because like you’ve said before, when you compare the antibody titers in the vaccinated vs. the unvaccinated, they are many multiple times higher in the former group, which may not be sustainable in the long term. Especially in the elderly, who have large numbers of senescent immune cells.

    So, even if we weren’t seeing glycosylation of the NTD which will render these PNNAbs useless, we could still be potentially dealing with a big problem in the future.

  3. > But by the time you get into your fifties or your sixties, you must have realized at some point that the Earth does not have infinite oil, that pigs suffer in cages, that fertile soil is flushing into the ocean, that 8 billion humans is a lot, that the rain forests are getting chopped down to make food for the animals that humans eat.

    You overestimate the average person. They’re not taking notice of the world around them, they’re thinking about a few socially approved branches of things to care about, their jobs, ball games, and social status. Then they sedate themselves with greasy animal fat, coffee, and the occasional bit alcohol so they can stay in the same mindspace for thirty plus years. When all the abuse causes their bodies and brains to start to fall apart, they retire and sit around watching the shows and movies they liked in their youth until they die.

    You need their drugs and you need to not be autistic if you want to understand them. Normies might as-well be an alien species. They’re really as one dimensional as they seem to be.

    The few boomers who are slightly autistic and pay attention don’t want to admit to themselves they doomed everything by their inaction, so they just fall down the Alex Jones NWO conspiracy rabbit hole and pretend things are getting warmer because George Soros is spraying chemicals into the air and the next Ice Age is just around the corner.

    • >You overestimate the average person. They’re not taking notice of the world around them, they’re thinking about a few socially approved branches of things to care about, their jobs, ball games, and social status. Then they sedate themselves with greasy animal fat, coffee, and the occasional bit alcohol so they can stay in the same mindspace for thirty plus years. When all the abuse causes their bodies and brains to start to fall apart, they retire and sit around watching the shows and movies they liked in their youth until they die.

      Read a thoudand times but this version is existential horror.
      Nice one!

    • Best comment you’ve ever posted TBH.

      Most people just really don’t think about anything beyond what they need to understand for their job and one or two hobbies they happen to have.

      And the job of politicians in their eyes, is to just give them what they want, in exchange for which they work some job.

      If for whatever reason, the politicians can’t give them what they want (example, eggs are too expensive) they lash out in rage.

      There’s never really an attempt to zoom out and understand what’s going on with this world we’re living in.

  4. Your carbon footprint is how many kids you have. Let that sink in. It should be obvious to anyone over 25. White people are about 16% of 8 billion. That’s it. White people are declining because they are the ONLY RACE to have fewer than 2 kids per female.

    I never want to hear about climate change unless the topic is how to get the 7 billion breeders to use birth control or stop fucking. Go to india, or any city in asia, south america or africa — see how crowded and FILTHY it is. If you don’t know and understant that, don’t even waste my time talking about this. You are too ignorant or stupid to have an intelligent conversation. Even if you have a pHd.

    Only the people I see regularly IN PERSON have been able to overcome their dogma. Nobody on this site has, and I’ve written it at least 3x before.

    • Most browns are NPC morons and it’s only through the introduction of technology, industry, and medicine to this world by genius white people that things have gotten as bad as they have. Non-NPC whites are the leaders of this world and it their responsibility for what happens and their obligation to fix things when they fuck up. That’s how leaders are supposed to act.

      Be racist all you want, but you only have the right to be racist through actually being superior rather than being rhetorically superior because your great-great grandad was a king or whatever.

      If you keep using subhumans as your scapegoat you’re ultimately just as pathetic as them

      • I have been to most shit-holes on this planet (work related) and I would rather live in for example Somalia than many other third world shit-holes, that is for sure. There are levels of filth and shit and I can tell you that at least Muslims are clean. Muslims have at least some basic hygiene and cleanliness standards.

        The (things) that I have seen would make your eyes water. PNG was the funniest (they simply love using their machetes). India was the filthiest and most disgusting. Flying around in Antonov barely serviceable Slav-shit is the most scariest and Nigerian chicks have the tightest pussies.

        There is no comparison to the white man.

    • >White people are declining because they are the ONLY RACE to have fewer than 2 kids per female.

      Congrats, you’re so dumb you forgot yellow people exist.

      • I think it’s interesting to think about what places like south korea or manchuria, where the birth rates are so low now that every successive generation is going to 3 to 4 times smaller than the last one, will look like 50 to 100 years out. How would people live when there are like 95% fewer people in those areas but the skeletons of these hypermodern cyberpunk cities still remain standing? Setting aside for the moment that reality appears to be disintegrating on a deeper level.

        • 60+ years old socialist cities are very compact. They can absorb at least the last two generations until the city becomes a problem. Not so other parts in the world. Genua e.g. has 20% empty houses, or so I read. Some German small towns have collapsing rents. The triangle in France is even emptier. Imagine living in a street where half living there are very old and each odd house is empty.
          Spooky.

  5. “Herd immunity would require those members of the herd who can’t build up immunity to die, but we continually vaccinate those members of the herd in autumn every year…”

    I’m confused here. If immune systems are collapsing year over year and vaccines have shown negative efficacy (more jabs = worse outcomes), doesn’t that imply a crashing herd at some point?

    • At some point is the key word. Those affected get sicker and sicker and less able to do meaningful work and need more resources to function but most can still reproduce and some of the worst affected are past child bearing age.

  6. You say if everyone was vegan, that obesity wouldn’t be a problem. But consuming meat, eggs, fish, and dairy isn’t what is making people fat. The culprit is processed food and sugar. If you want people to stop eating meat because you’re trying to save animals, I get it. But you hurt your arguments when you throw in false proclamations, such as saying that being vegan will eliminate obesity. People in America are fat from eating highly processed carbs. Very few people who eat meat while avoiding processed carbs and sugar, are fat.

    • What you just argued is what literally every American I see on the Internet believes.

      And yet you’re all fat. Maybe you’re wrong?

    • The problem is mountains of sugars and tons of plant oils IN COMBINATION with voracious amounts of meat and dairy.
      The Polish side of the family eats ONE (!) egg for breakfast. No problem with animal protein here, but only if you eat ONE.
      Try that first.
      Otoh, I found a fool proof diet. Only eat and drink at a table, except water. Every time I see somebody eat on the go it is a fat person.

  7. This is why I continue to heavily invest in my basement goon-cave. I have a new Sony 100 inch gooning monitor and ground-loop cooled ducted air-conditioning now. I edge to lesbian AI porn of Eva and that Autistic Girl – sometimes for days. End of the world is just pure heaven.

  8. I had marijuana gummies delivered yesterday. I mentioned to the delivery driver that they were for my 100 y.o. father in law who lives with us. He got very excited and said he wanted to live to be 100, and asked the reason for my father in law’s longevity (and, as it happens, good physical and perfect cognitive condition). I told him that it was’t genes; that it was mostly caloric restriction, which my FIL has practiced for 70+ years. The driver, who was a nice Asian American kid in his late 20s, was disappointed; he wanted to know if my FIL had made a practice of eating pasture raised beef; that was what he was trying himself. LOL. I told him no, he had eaten whatever counted as “health food” at the time, over the years, and that meant he had never eaten much meat at all. I think you need to correct LSWM to read LSW&AM.

    The sad thing was that the young man did not look well. His complexion was too pale; it looked like his circulation was bad. A couple of days ago I saw a tech person in her 40s at my dentist’s office with the same look; she was white but her skin looked wrong in the same way. The driver told me that his dad was in his early 60s but had already had a heart attack and a stroke and was on a million meds and could barely walk. That shocked me because Americans think of Asian people as being really healthy.

    I told him that he should try to avoid catching covid but he didn’t want to hear that.
    Rintrah, if you take a claritin a day and use Xlear nasal spray you can improve your odds a lot, and it is no cost or effort.

    • I’m not so sure about taking ‘off the shelf’ antihistamines regularly myself. They screwed up my nose earlier this year during hay fever season. What you don’t get told is they thicken up mucus, and that stops things flowing as they should and can block the nose just on their own. Not useful. Absolutely the biggest revelation in all this that Rintrah shared was that strong black or green tea gargled and swished around the mouth kills 99.9% of the virus in saliva. Use it early in an infection and I’m sure it really helps avoid deeper penetration into the circulatory and digestive systems for very little money. This is where you need a healthy nose and healthy gums to prevent the virus sneaking in that way.

      • My husband has been taking loads of antihistamines every day for decades and so yes, I know about their downsides and quite possibly they have made his allergies worse. I’ve tried to get him to go in for some other treatment like testing and desensitization, but he can’t be bothered. I keep him away from the ones that cause dementia, like Benadryl. In the last chess game he played his accuracy score (whatever that is) was 98, so he seems okay, other than being crazy.

        But now that covid is here it is a tradeoff, and for me claritin wins, since I can’t afford to lose IQ points; I am an upper midwit and if I turn into a midwit I will be despondent.. There was the Spanish nursing home study early in the pandemic (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7833340/#!po=34.9057)(credit to Karl Denninger for pointing it out), and by now I have enough personal observations. No-one in my household has had covid yet (and I am still required to test weekly for my volunteer activity since I’m not vaxxed), and the few people who I know who either have taken my claritin advice or who are already on ongoing loads of antihistamines have not caught it (or not caught it again since starting taking a daily claritin).

        I will keep the tea gargle in mind. If this worked I would have thought Asian people would be doing better. It sounds like something that would help, though.

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