As we look around the world today, it feels as if the pandemic is now over.
Hospitals around the world see hardly any COVID patients, RNA in sewage is now also reaching new lows:
In Belgium they see the same thing: Everyone is suffering colds, but SARS2 seems to have disappeared from sewage:
What they see instead is high amounts of the other hCov viruses. This suggests other respiratory viruses are making use of the immune system damage the population has suffered, a problem which has been well documented by now for RSV.
It seems as if the virus is now struggling to survive, as the population’s adaptive immune response throws everything it has at SARS2. And that’s a problem, as those are the exact conditions under which you can expect:
-Evolution towards greater virulence.
-Waning of immunity.
If the vanishing act has now begun, it means there is probably no time left at all to repair the population’s broken immune response. You would simply destroy what protection people do have, before the onslaught of these virulent strains.
Have a look at this. It shows how incomplete immunity developed through exposure to weaker strains encourages the spread of stronger strains, as the incomplete immunity is sufficient to stop the weaker strains but not to stop stronger strains.
You may expect something similar for SARS2. The Omicron strains have now mostly consumed their niche, bumping into the antibody wall.
But the Delta-Omicron hybrids are still around. Delta survived because it replicated so rapidly it could break through the vaccine induced antibody response.
By favoring Delta, the vaccines increased deaths in both vaccinated and especially unvaccinated people in late 2021, simply by promoting a more virulent strain.
As the broad antibody wall now starts to wane, you may see such an Omicron-Delta hybrid strain emerge that can then break through the wall through rapid replication, rather than evading it through mutation, like the Omicron variants do.
We could also be taken by surprise by persistent infection derived strains, or novel strains from animal populations or Molnupiravir derived variants. The mild Omicron strains can apparently no longer spread in the presence of the wall of antibodies, so something else must take their place.
The ultimate problem is that you forced Spike through an evolutionary radiation through narrow antibody pressure. This blew your chance of herd immunity.
For all practical purposes, Dengue is a new virus. Cases exploded in the latter half of the 20th century. And yet, there is no herd immunity. There will be none against SARS2 either.
You’re not going to witness SARS2 go extinct or persist at these low levels forever, because even if it fails to overcome the antibody response, the antibody response will simply wane and be reorientated towards other respiratory viruses.
But as I have amply demonstrated by now, you can expect the virus to respond to the wall of antibodies through multiple routes, that would generally be expected to increase virulence.
The NK cells, through their careful weighing of various damage and pathogen associated patterns have the ability to discriminate against virulent pathogens. This is part of the innate immune system’s task: Favoring the devils we know, over the ones we don’t.
Once the whole population has developed strong NK cell immunity you can expect the virus to be forced into submission, as the NK cells will selectively avoid killing infected cells that show few cellular distress signals and Spike proteins that don’t bind too strongly to their receptors.
In addition, you would expect low concentrations of antibodies against a handful of virulence associated epitopes to contribute to that too.
Our collective immune response has had no chance yet to favor benign strains yet however, as we broke our response. Hence why you see the steadily escalating virulence: Alpha was worse than Wuhan, Delta worse than Alpha. Then Omicron is born from a rodent population, but its intrinsic virulence rises with every new iteration.
We break through that cycle once the whole population has a tissue resident population of well-adjusted NK cells. Unfortunately the antibodies constantly being recalled and the CD8+ T cells prohibit the NK cells from learning to join the fight.
As a result we’re failing to select against virulence. And thus we can expect virulent strains to cause havoc.
Don’t blame me or hold me responsible for this. You have the NK cells for a reason. They are elegant in their abilities for a reason. This whole thing functions in this manner for a reason. It’s not my fault you all decided to YOLO a vaccine.
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