SARS-CoV-2 Thoughts

Disclaimer : This is an opinion and a prediction that includes as many sources and the best logic possible. Do not base your personal health decisions on it. Plain Language Introduction SARS-CoV-2 is a novel virus with its closest relatives in bats, emerging in the human population at some point in late 2019. As a newly introduced pathogen, there was only one variant at first. Now we have thousands of strains that have been identified, with countless individual virus particles with countless mutations. The genetic diversity of SARS-CoV-2 is much greater than scientists thought it would be by this point in time. Recombination and Evolution That's because we failed to notice that SARS-CoV-2 relies heavily on recombination for evolution. With recombination, in a host that is infected with two strains of the virus, the virus can effectively create a child from two parent virions(a virion is a single virus) through a process called strand switching. When creating a new vi...

Vaccinated people infected by Delta are more likely to be hospitalized than unvaccinated people by Alpha. The statistical power of this study isn't great, but it implies that vaccinated people are more likely to need hospitalization. Ware the confounders. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3099(21)00475-8/fulltext Reading the full paper, we find 1.9% of unvaccinated Alpha infectees required hospital admission. 2.2% of unvaccinated versus 2.3% of vaccinated Delta infectees required it, and 3.4% of vaccinated Alpha infectees required it. Thus, strangely, vaccination appears in these findings to increase the risk of hospitalization or emergency treatment required. The statistical power of these findings isn't very great because of too few hospital admissions amongst vaccinated infectees, and bear in mind we vaccinated people at higher underlying risk first and more thoroughly and the propensity of people who have been vaccinated to also be more l...

Original antigenic sin(OAS) has not yet been demonstrated in SARS-CoV-2 . However, I strongly believe that OAS will manifest itself, and it will be a bad and worsening problem over time. If I am correct, it may mean that getting vaccinated will become actively dangerous, depending on antibody-dependent enhancement(ADE) and its degree. OAS occurs when an immune response is produced by the body to a closely related pathogen or vaccine(such as a different strain of a virus) instead of generation of a novel immune response . This is because of homology between the two intruders' epitopes and resulting cross-reactive immune activity. SARS-CoV-2 has clearly demonstrated induction of variably cross-reactive antibodies with strain-variable neutralization potential. It has been demonstrated in many viruses ranging from Dengue Fever to influenza to HIV-1 . The set of viruses is not arbitrary: OAS abuse is a particularly effective strategy in viruses that mutate quickly, like influe...

Why am I COVID-19 vaccine resistant? I believe the current versions of SARS-CoV-2 vaccines are poor, and it was always inevitable that they would become poor because of slow global vaccination rates and a use of a single, highly mutable gene, S, which makes escape easier. https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2021/08/grim-warning-israel-vaccination-blunts-does-not-defeat-delta Further, they will probably only get worse given the rate of evolution in SARS-CoV-2 today. That rate is likely to only accelerate unless we get R below 1 for all strains, which is nearly impossible if we're starting from R0's around 8 . There looms the spectre of antibody-dependent enhancement(ADE), which is a property of other betacoronaviruses. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7943455/ I think other vaccines hold better promise and will not need to be administered nearly as frequently because they target other parts of the immune system or virus, and their safety profi...