From the website of the United Nations:
COVID-19 infections are surging worldwide – including at the Olympics – and are unlikely to decline anytime soon, the World Health Organization (WHO) warned on Tuesday.
The UN health agency is also concerned that more severe variants of the coronavirus may soon be on the horizon.
They point out something unusual is happening right now:
Such high infection circulation rates in the northern hemisphere’s summer months are atypical for respiratory viruses, which tend to spread mostly in cold temperatures.
And they’re right of course. It’s a consequence of a population that’s stuck with an inappropriate immune response to this virus. It doesn’t happen with other respiratory viruses and it didn’t begin until we started vaccinating, there was no such summer wave in the northern hemisphere in 2020.
New deletions and glycans in the N-Terminal Domain of the Spike protein are going to emerge, that make the remaining antibodies binding there useless for neutralization and make the virus behave more like the original SARS.
People are noticing none of this is really working out. In California they figured out people are just sick all the time now. They reintroduced masks in much of California. At the Olympics, the trick to winning a medal is to not catch the virus.
Well, have a look at this:
Doesn’t look to me like mass vaccination was a good idea.
At least the good news is everyone is gradually abandoning the idea now that this would just turn into another benign respiratory virus. That only happens, when you don’t intervene in the development of immunity.
When you intervene in people’s immune response to this virus, you interfere in the mechanisms that would normally lead the population to spread more benign versions of the virus over time. The previous influenza pandemics got better over time. The new hCov that emerged in the 19th century stopped causing us problems after a few years too.
But we didn’t vaccinate against those viruses. When you vaccinate with inactivated vaccines during a pandemic, you get droves of people who are infected before the antibodies have matured to increase their binding strength, so the virus mutates to escape them while they’re still weak. In a natural infection, the body only begins deploying IgG antibodies once the viral load is mostly eliminated. After all, you don’t want to show your cards to your opponent.
In fact, considering they held vaccine trials in South Africa in 2020, where a large share of the adult population has untreated HIV, the Omicron variant born in Southern Africa that would escape the vaccine was probably already born as a result of the trials, well before the mass vaccination campaign began. So then you get everyone stuck on an antibody response, that’s 1000 times worse at binding the new variant than the old variant, so then you get these endless Omicron waves.
You can logically deduce that if the old antibodies induced by two shots of mRNA are 1000 times worse at binding the Omicron RBD than the Wuhan RBD they were meant for, you’ll need concentrations of those antibodies to rise dramatically, to achieve the same protection. But when people reach such extremely high IgG3 antibody concentrations, you can expect it starts causing awful side-effects, to which the body responds by switching to IgG4, to reduce excess inflammation.
That’s why the Chinese vaccines eventually result in an IgG4 response too. It hasn’t been observed in the unvaccinated yet, because the IgG antibodies don’t get to bind until IgA and IgM have bound in mucus, the innate immune system gets to be properly educated and the IgG antibody response was never fixated on Wuhan to begin with.
This means the body has effectively given up on neutralizing the viral particles by focusing on the Receptor Binding Domain: The IgG4 antibodies can’t form cross-links between different Spike proteins and their neutralizing potency can not be enhanced by complement. That’s where we’re at now, with most of the population. But the Receptor Binding Domain is the only part of the Spike protein where it can be properly neutralized: It needs to have a strong electrical charge here, to strongly bind ACE2. The N-Terminal Domain, where most neutralization now takes place in most people, is under no real obligation to let the antibodies bind.
At the Receptor Binding Domain, any attempt at blocking the antibodies with new glycans (sugar molecules), would also be likely to block the connection to ACE2. But at the N-Terminal Domain, it doesn’t really matter much. So you see a whole bunch of new glycans emerge there now. Those glycans just block the antibodies that still worked.
But the worst outcome may be when it’s forced to start deleting amino acids from the immunogenic loops in the N-Terminal domain because of these antibodies. That’s when it starts giving up the ability to effectively spread from one person to another, to avoid antibodies. It will allow improved spread within the body (by increasing fusogenicity, the ability to fuse cells together without ever coming in reach of the antibodies), at the cost of making it harder to spread from person to person. That’s when you end up with a virus behaving more like the original SARS.
This is already commonly happening in immunodeficient people who can’t clear the virus, who are infected for months, but you may eventually see it happen in variants that spread from person to person too.
So this is what we can expect to happen eventually: Increased systemic dissemination of the virus, including increased spread into the brain. After all, the brain is an ideal place to avoid antibodies: Less than 0.05% of antibodies manage to enter the brain, thanks to the blood-brain barrier. It’s not surprising, that the virus evolves to become more neurovirulent over time.
So how does the brain defend itself against viruses like this, if it can’t really use the antibodies found in blood? And what has the impact been of the vaccination experiment, on the ability of the brain to defend itself? Well, that’s going to be the topic for tomorrow’s post.
