Thread by @letsthinkdeeply

@EthicalSkeptic @BrendanEich @NickHudsonCT @lalasugarloaf

One hypothesis is that much of Asia/Oceania had been exposed to a previous SARS variant. This being the actual reason that rates of infection were so low, not lockdowns and masks.
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Now we may be seeing turnover where Western countries have had a much more aggressive recent pandemic and have residual resistance to a more recent SARS strain, closer in lineage to Delta.
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If true, we will see vicious outbreaks of the more contagious variants moving through populations naive to current variants(in Asia/Oceania now being exposed). If this pattern is true:
1) The pandemic will become endemic moving in waves between unsynchronized populations.
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2) This will prove that the new mRNA vaccines cannot ever be expected to eradicate the virus unless we find non-mutating epitopes for which antibodies can be developed.
3) Broad spectrum immunity(natural) may confer much broader protection in this pattern.
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The theory would be that variant evolution would partially escape not totally escape broad spectrum resistance meaning cases may be more mild as the variants emerge than with total vaccine breakthrough.
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4) If this endemic wave pattern is established we would suspect that current vaccine strategies would need to be changed:
a) the current narrow spectrum vaccines will induce rapid evolution triggering a rapid never ending series of related pandemics.
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b) rapid escape evolution increases the probability of worse variants and extinguishes variants that may be more mild and currently somewhat protective.
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c) in normal evolution no preference is made between large and small mutations but with vaccines, the mutations that confer survival become much more important and require complete escape.
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As a matter of fact, vaccines never allow the small changes that might promote co-existence with virus, because the vaccines remove these variants from the milieu.
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5) It is time to consider strategy modifications:
-rapid development of antibody treatments as variants develop
-encourage evolution of co-existence with the virus
-concentrate on treating effects of the virus to mitigate damage through therapeutics
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-stop protecting low risk populations to extinguish outbreaks as fast as possible.

We do not normally see these patterns in attenuated virus vaccines, because they are broad spectrum vaccines.
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When we focus on vaccines that narrowly extinguish the current dominant strain, we encourage big mutations and total escape.
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The narrowly focused vaccines have the effect of destroying the virus that could become safe and we are faced with new virus strains with major changes. We need to rethink this current approach, immediately.
/end