Variant Roulette (Evolution and Immunity Escape) Part III

The Chloroquine Wars Part XCVIII

“Speculation is an effort, probably unsuccessful, to turn a little money into a lot. Investment is an effort, which should be successful, to prevent a lot of money from becoming a little.” -Fred Schwed, Jr.

Sometimes you can capture the home run value of speculation and the prudent value of investment all in one go. But that generally means something unnatural is taking place in the "market".

See Part I and Part II for a practical and grounded discussion of the basic forces and research into the association between vaccination and the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 variants.

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Human Media for Serial Passage

I'm just now getting back to thinking and writing on a serious level. Perhaps it's good to suffer some shake-ups in life. Change pushes thinking in creative new directions. I took a walk after dinner tonight, and one of those new directions was a horrifying thought: by starting vaccination with the oldest, then continuing gradually on down the ladder to the youngest, we may be training SARS-CoV-2 to attack the youngest who were previously relatively immune to the virus and thus COVID-19.

Source: COVID-19 vaccine surveillance report Week 36

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Serial passage is the process of guided evolution. It is the use of a chain of different media that puts pressure on organisms, one step at a time, to predetermine the outcome of the survival of the fittest competition. After all, "fittest" can only be defined by context.

Source: Betts et al, 2013

Note that the likely plausible-but-fake pangolin origins story was based on a model of interspecies serial passage.

Source: Segreto et al, 2021

Serial passage isn't just observed in laboratory gain-of-function (GoF) research or promiscuous pangolins. Such step-by-step selection pressure is the reason behind antibiotic-resistant bacterial strains. This smoothness of evolutionary progression is also a reason why the conversation about "signs of cuts" in genetic engineering of SARS-CoV-2 is a red herring. I'm certainly not saying I have proof that SARS-CoV-2 was engineered, but the lack of clear evidence of insertions into the genome does little to test the hypothesis. And really, we have a "Batman villain" in Peter Daszak and also Ralph Baric (who has openly bragged about the ability to engineer viruses without such signs), so we should maybe keep the Overton Window open a little wider?

Back to the point...we have a set of "vaccines" that are oddly not focused on the mucosal pathways (nasopharyngeal/oropharyngeal) where SARS-CoV-2 generally enters the human body before it binds to ACE2 receptors, begins to replicate, then finds its way into the lungs and bloodstream. None of these vaccines provide sterile immunity, so the virus just gets to breed from its common entryway into the body, sending viral troops in like an invasion force. At some point, this viral force meets up with vaccine-induced antibodies.

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The Ultimate Sieve

This is likely where selection takes place---deep in the human body at first. The viral load in the bloodstream may not at first look all that much like the viral load at the mucosal membrane given that it consists of only those virions that survived the antibody attack. But over time, load balancing occurs continually until equilibrium is reached, at which point most all remaining virus is that which avoids the ABs.

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Secondary Sieve Function

The sieve may not be simply an AB sieve. Deep in the body of an N year old, the virions selected are also those that best propagate in the body of an N year old. Such virions are thus nearly optimized for an N-1 year old, or an N-k year old, for some reasonable values of k.

Really, age isn't the perfect measurement as age-health relationships vary from individual to individual. But the process may be more generally a sieve that selects for variants that better invade slightly healthier hosts!

Understand, this is all speculative, and my greatest hope is that somebody will now give me a set of very good reasons why my theory doesn't hold. Please.

Please.