Thank You SARS, May I Have Another

RE the MSM embrace of chronic SARS-CoV-2

With the advent of BA.4 and BA.5, the MSM embraces the “Chronic Covid” narrative despite having very little evidence to back it up. But is this all an attempt to distract from the question of the Omicron siblings’ likely lab origin?

(Note: Unexpectedly still limited to working on mobile, some citations will be appended Friday.)

Life Imitates etc.

The media, and select governments in the coastal US, appear to be ramping up the Virus Fear Machine again.

In the second case of “(MSM-declared) life echoing Igor Chudov” in as many months, the new angle the Fear Machine seems to be taking is “endless reinfections” (the previous imprint-crossover was with Paxlovid rebound, naturally).

March 27:

UK: Covid Becoming CHRONIC, like AIDS, and Will Take us Down

May 16:

source: The New York Times. Mirrored at web.archive.org

May 17:

source: yahoo.com

Though in this instance, Chudov was not the first to make or imply the claim, as “multiple infections a year” at least partially follows from the warnings issued by vanden Bossche since the spring of 2021 (as highlighted by Sage Hana), and from my “Forever Spike” theory in September of the same year. Me, September 17:

Could [vaccine-induced tolerance of spike] lead to a novel form of infection enhancement - where the immune system, essentially, becomes “selectively immunocompromised” against SARS-CoV-2? Who can say?

But the idea this theory sparked in my head was: If all seasonality is removed, and exposure to SARS-CoV-2 becomes essentially a near-daily event all year round…

But Chudov’s work, which emphasizes reinfection, and vanden Bossche’s work, which emphasizes immune escape, are more spot-on templates for the new MSM party line: “Looks like the Virus is done playing nice! Get ready, [triple- and quadruple-injected] readers, you’re going to get this virus eight days a week if you don’t keep juicing up as often and as promptly as we tell you to!”

Of course, the Yahoo! News and NYT articles do not credit any “recent, repeated mass injections of genes coding the Wuhan model spike protein” for the state of doom it declares humanity to be consigned to. No, nothing the host has done to its immune system recently - no, you know, “unnatural upgrades” or anything like that - could be responsible for the evaporation of durable immunity declared to have arrived. Instead “Omicron,” a parade of experts assert, is “evolving faster.”

With this omission, the MSM manages to appropriate the counter-narrative’s morally-tinged prophecies of doom but sanitize them for the modern, medically faithful Pandemic™ audience. The negative space still seems to affirm the logic of the original material: What is it the virus is “done playing nice” with? Per the paraded experts, anti-spike immunity - exactly as vanden Bossche predicted would result from the Covid vaccines.

And so even if the MSM is only plagiarizing the chronic infection meme to shop out yet one more Read and Obey, or Die narrative in a line of dozens of them, the choice to not mention the same injections that the MSM promoted as the causative agent for this new state of affairs feels like an affirmation. Just like with last autumn’s warnings of “Global Warming Heart Attacks,” absence of blame appears to be confession of guilt.

The other possibility that all of these narratives and counter-narratives and anti-counter-narratives are completely off the mark.

Immunity Gonna Immune?

The case for “multiple Omicron sibling infections” remains weak: As an example, the NYT piece, by Apoorva Mandavilli, relies heavily on the updated version of Pulliam, et al.’s ostentatiously mathematicized South Africa reinfections study.¹ This study was rather suspiciously and prematurely updated in early November to provide the fodder for the original “Omicron reinfections” headlines, only for the conclusion to be vindicated by later results.² But it remains a study describing BA.1 vs pre-Omicron immunity. Old news, in other words. It has nothing to say about the durability of immunity against one Omicron sibling vs another.

Mandavilli’s mentions of double-Omicron infections, on the other hand, are unsubstantiated either in anecdote or research form. “Already, those infected with the first Omicron variant are reporting second infections with the newer versions of the variant — BA.2 or BA2.12 in the United States, or BA.4 and BA.5 in South Africa.” Which people? How many? No source for this claim is offered. “‘This is actually for me a bit of a surprise,’ said Alex Sigal, a virologist at the Africa Health Research Institute. ‘I thought we’ll need a kind of brand-new variant to escape from this one. But in fact, it seems like you don’t.’” Based on what? If Sigal had specific study in mind, it isn’t mentioned.

The evidence turns an iota more concrete, though not more accurate, when Mandavilli addresses the actual biology of Omicron:

Although the newer versions of the variant are closely related, they vary enough from an immune perspective that infection with one [theoretically] doesn’t leave [here rather idiotically hyperlinking to another study not comparing cross-Omicron immunity, thus not supporting the claim³] much protection against the others [here hyperlinking to an on-topic study that supports the claim in theory⁴]— and certainly not after three or four months [zero support offered for this clause].

The critical inaccuracy here is that newer Omicron siblings cannot be “closely related” to both BA.1 and BA.2, since those two are so far apart from each other. And yet Mandavilli links a paper that reports on simulated cross-protection against BA.4 and BA.5 after BA.1 infection. Again, this just dresses up old news as new: It was already something of a question mark whether BA.2 would evade post-BA.1 immunity. So far, the evidence doesn’t support rapid-reinfection with BA.2.⁵

And yet it’s entirely plausible that BA.4 and 5, or BA.2.12, have better BA.1 immune evasion than BA.2, explaining why they may soon rise to the top in a landscape that now rewards evasion of immunity from the winter waves. And I concede that this may lead to more rapid reinfection, even if the data isn’t there yet.

There’s still one problem with both the MSM and counter-narrative account for this situation: I don’t think BA.4 and BA.5 result from either the Covid-vaccines promoting immune escape (how could anti-Wuhan antibodies accelerate anti-BA.1 immune escape?), or the virus “evolving faster” for no particular given reason.

It’s the result of Omicron probably being a lab-grown self-chimera. BA.4 and BA.5 are too highly mutated to be traced phylogenically to transmitting strains of BA.2. Instead, they were sequenced in January and February, implying an origin that, like BA.2 itself, precedes the official discovery of BA.1. And despite a closer resemblance to BA.2 than BA.1, they appear to have partially recombined with the latter (don’t quote me on this until I am back on wifi to double-check the mutation list, please; or please send corrections in comments if you have them).

And so everything about the rise of BA.4 and BA.5 so far is consistent with the original Omicron “swarm” being contaminated with putative coinfector-strains or recombination variants, genetic outliers that are gradually able to rise to the top when the immune landscape changes. In other words, my account for the origin of the Omicron siblings remains the most plausible theory around:

Omicron Origins, Part 2

Double Time

But let us imagine, purely for the sake of thought-experiment, that both the MSM and counter-narrative explanations for BA.4 and BA.5 are scripted ops. In this thought experiment, there is a credentialed expert warning the “awake” few that the Covid vaccines will accelerate immune escape, while the orthodox news assures the “asleep” masses that this faster mutation is something natural and accidental.

This scripted pretend-oppositional framing, much like the debate between a “lab leak” and zoonotic cross-over, would seem to have one simple and obvious purpose: To suck oxygen away from any discussion about intentional global bioterrorism.

So the war over truth becomes a fight over Fauci’s duplicitous funding decisions, or the evolutionary recklessness of medicalizing the immune system. But what if the reason we keep having simultaneous emergences of new threats toward the end of three separate years, is because the evolution of SARS-CoV-2 has been artificially perpetuated according to design all along?

In this case, it won’t matter if BA.1-immunity holds up against the other Omicron siblings or not. There will just be a new hoard of super-mutants six months from now.

Perhaps that is the most gruesome version of the fairy tale of all.

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1. Pulliam, J. et al. “Increased risk of SARS-CoV-2 reinfection associated with emergence of Omicron in South Africa.” Science. 2022 May 6;376(6593).

2. Thus my hyper-critical review at the time (“Oh Nomicron!”) was effectively renounced in January (“Reinfections in Israel”). It remains suspicious that Pulliam, et al. published an update so early, and just after a dump of 18.5 thousand delayed tests.

3. Carazo, S. et al. “Protection against Omicron re-infection conferred by prior heterologous SARS-CoV-2 infection, with and without mRNA vaccination.”

Note the italicized portion. This study merely reprises the findings of Pulliam, et al.

4. Khan, K. et al. “Omicron sub-lineages BA.4/BA.5 escape BA.1 infection elicited neutralizing immunity.”

Notes: This study surprisingly finds that several (severe-outcome-skewed) unvaccinated+BA.1 infected subjects appear to have low anti-BA.1 neutralization, despite allowing plenty of time for seroconversion. And while the overall sample size is low, and skewed toward hospitalization, these results align with Rössler, et al. (see “The Austria Omicron Study”). So it seems that “natural BA.1 infection” doesn’t generate a robust, high-binding antibody response.

Nonetheless, antibodies ≠ immunity. Though it would be nice to time-travel to 2020 to compare Wuhan and BA.1 immune response head to head in a perfectly naive population, it seems safe to say that the BA.1 spike is probably intrinsically a non-immunogenic design.

Meanwhile, Covid-vaccinated + BA.1 infected score well against both BA.1 and 4 and 5. Another refutation of OAS to add to the pile (OAS strictly deals with antibodies).

5. See “The Hot Spot.”