My book Pathogenic Ecology points out in detail how we get into such a mess and why we can’t ignore it:
Re-posting this post because of its prophetic content: The viruses, including SARS-CoV-2, continue to evolve by mutation and selection toward being more efficient at infection and transmission within close, tight social groups but falling off quickly when vaccination and moderate barriers, like masks and good ventilation, and social distancing are implemented.
Vaccination does NOT guarantee protection from infection by Delta variant or transient release of virus from asymptomatic vaccinated individuals. Vaccination is NOT for elimination of all possible virus but to reduce infection level below the point of symptoms of disease in immunized people (varies from person to person somewhat, but is more likely to be overcome with higher circulating viral loads). It is the circulating of more infectious particles over and over so there can be accumulation and increased probability of developing more mutants, therefore, variants, that is problematic. Also, we have no way of screening or asking the vaccine status, health status or contact status of those entering a high density environment. Therefore, I recommend wearing a mask as well, regardless of vaccine status, and for others with any immunocompromizing condition or respiratory illness, especially with fever in the last 10 days, not to attend such event locations. The more people present, knowingly or unknowingly infected, the more virus circulating and the more likely to overcome vaccination,
This post is a summary in lay, non-technical terms, of what we know about COVID and the virus that causes it, amongst its kind. I will couch this description in military terms and as if the virus enemy is a sentient being because of my military background. The analogy is only for illustration and not proof of what I say. Our story, in late 2019, early 2020, began with a foreboding of the consequences of our happy hurried ignorance of larger life and the cost of practicing ignorance of it when confronting it head on : “Violent Delights, Violent Ends: Fire and Powder, Kiss and Consume”, “I fear too early, for my mind misgives some consequence yet hanging in the stars shall bitterly begin this fearful date with this night’s revels, and expire the term of ….. life ….. by some vile forfeit of untimely death….” William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, Act 1, Scene 4”. There is an elegance in design in what we have faced and experienced when we look past the undeniable tragedy, which should never be forgotten as a great battle is remembered, which we must admit we have lost to learn from it, in our ongoing war with microbes, and the missteps that led to it. We started with underestimating our enemy. After all, most physicians’ experience with coronaviruses is the cold-causing, self-limiting, take-an-aspirin-and-call-me-in-morning ones successfully treated by benign neglect. Even the serious ones like SARS 1 (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Virus, from civet cats, originally from bats), which appeared in 2003 and disappeared in 6 months, and MERS (Middle East Respiratory Syndrome Virus, from camels, originally from bats), which has only spread slowly in the Middle East and Northern Africa, were largely ignored as harbingers of something worse to come. In our arrogance and ignorance, we thought they disappeared or were restricted because of expert human interference; we ignored the warning of “some consequence yet hanging in the stars” of something much worse. Not only physicians fed this false security (besides the inevitable politicians at the top), but also veterinarians, who thought coronaviruses were under control. We have seen coronaviruses pervasively in dogs, cats, cattle and birds, but largely of the young, from self-limiting, and diminishing as agents necessitating prevention by vaccination, especially in dogs, to vaccination effective, but not fully optimal control (focusing on the pregnant females or newborns to produce immunity even if transient or against disease but not infection), in preventing large economic losses in intensive bovine, porcine, and poultry production. This requirement makes their use routine and necessary in agriculture, especially in preventing respiratory disease losses in poultry, and losses in calves and pigs from hemorrhagic diarrhea and shipping fever complex in finishing out beef cattle. However, in birds, live attenuated vaccine viruses have been detected circulating in wild bird populations, leading to potential recombination with or mutation to pathogenic strains. Only in the virus that causes Feline Infectious Peritonitis (FIP), which is usually 100% fatal in young cats showing signs but showing few signs, if any, and self-limiting when the kittens are infected with a less lethal strain of the virus (most often), was there evidence of something persistent and on occasion much more lethal. Presently, veterinarians are attempting to treat FIP with the same antiviral drugs as COVID over very protracted times, prolonging life but struggling to get cures. Not even this foreshadowing of the enemy becoming capable of new more insidious and dangerous strategies was heeded. One health appeared to learn nothing from these experiences until the stealthy tragedy of COVID was upon the world. The FIP lesson of a virus that is highly infectious and widespread in close collections of cats, which could largely be ignored and not even worth vaccination, could on occasion, when symptomatic, kill with such lethality, was attributed solely to a rare emergence of a selected highly lethal strain. However, although it appears again and again, it never seems to get an epizootic foot hold, killing only a few or one cat in a close knit group. Where does it go? Why does it keep coming back in such a limited way? No very satisfactory answers. But it surely appears to have an uncanny, but not as well developed, resemblance to the COVID modus operandi—myth of a largely non-symptomatic disease, low overall mortality, until in reality it becomes severely symptomatic and then lethality jumps sky high. These characteristics feed the denial and false claims of inflated lethality for COVID. Unfortunately, this feeds more careless spread of the virus. Could this be its evolutionary “intent” ? The major strategy change of the COVID virus from the others, especially animal ones (although all coronaviruses are zoonotic, the cold ones appearing to have originated in rodents, cattle and some unknown animal eons ago), has been to sparing the young of disease, although still being asymptomatic in most age groups, except the old and infirm. Its infectivity in cats, minks and ferrets, says SARS-CoV-2 (originating in bats) is still very much an animal virus. It still holds in common with all coronaviruses the goal of not burning through a host population so as to prevent herd immunity and always to have susceptible individuals in that population to maintain them indefinitely. Even in the most densely populated and numerous mammals in nature, perhaps only second to humans, bats, coronaviruses only infect about 10% of a given group at a time. Pathogenicity and lethality tend to be held in check except in individuals in a population that do not contribute to maintenance of the virus in the population, like the elderly and infirm who do not reproduce individuals vulnerable to infection and transmission. Why is COVID different from animals in these respects of populations? The answer may lie in that animal viruses establish carriers by preferring gastrointestinal infections that are not easily cleared and chronically shed transmissible virus. In other viruses, like influenza, especially in migratory birds and water fowl, it is predominantly a GI rather than respiratory virus, which most effectively maintains the birds as a reservoir rather than incapacitating or killing the birds, which would limit their ability to spread the viruses. The COVID virus has chosen a more unorthodox method to assure maintenance and transmission in the human population, although with time I believe we will find more and more asymptomatic GI shedders (by monitoring sewage which has begun) https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/jmv.25825 and https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.01.08.21249379v1. It has chosen to enhance anti-parasite immunity like that used by the hosts to control parasitic worm, pathogenic protozoan and fungal infestations and infections. This response often controls the number of parasites to a tolerable, but not immediately lethal, level and prevents further infestation (a process called premunition), but does not totally eliminate the parasite. In children, this form of innate non-specific immunity often rapidly clears an infection without inducing long term immunity. Therefore, they are allowed to survive, grow and reproduce more naive vulnerable individuals after spreading the virus in the population. They are also vulnerable to re-infection as they grow older. Adults can mount this type of immunity but then develop specific adaptive long term immunity, but unfortunately also “memory” of the initial innate response with a vengeance. If this “remembered” non-specific response becomes overt or is activated, as it is highly vulnerable to do, by non-viral stimuli, it can lead to autoimmunity and pro-inflammatory nonspecific disease, which has been observed in “long haulers”. The fatal severe COVID is a continuum of the infection from inapparent widespread tissue infection to a late activation of this parasite immunity to the extreme, death, without a break. This type of incomplete immunity is beneficial for resisting parasites and in tumor immunology because it is highly effective locally, but suppressed systemically to avoid collateral damage to normal self tissues.
I have observed an artificial reproduction, perhaps enhancement, or at least a mimic, of this type of reactive oxygen species innate immunity early in my research career. I described it in my first book . “Even though weaker, nonspecific cytotoxicity was expected with glucose oxidase and horseradish peroxidase, they were used. Very malignant Novikoff hepatocarcinoma (including metastases) in rats, spontaneous mammary adenocarcinomas in rats, L1210 leukemia in mice, B16 melanomas in mice, and carcinogen-induced squamous cell carcinomas in hamster cheek pouches all responded to regional or local injections of the cross-linked enzymes in saline and glucose solution. The Novikoff hepatocarcinoma responses were 50 to 100% cures in animals treated. Lactoperoxidase could be substituted for horseradish peroxidase, and similar results were obtained. However, galactose oxidase substitution or the absence of either the glucose oxidase or the respective peroxidase in the preparation failed to bring about tumor regression. L1210 leukemia in outbred white mice showed 50% cures. Treatment of B16 melanoma prolonged life from 23 days postinoculation of controls to 37 days with treatment. However, no simple dose-response curve was demonstrated..Also, smaller squamous cell carcinoma tumors responded better (some with cures) than did larger cheek pouch tumors, which did not respond at all..No direct injury to normal tissue was observed in histopathological sections of treated animals. However, some animals with heavy tumor loads (P388 lymphoma, L1210 leukemia, some with Novikoff hepatocarcinoma) died more quickly when treated than did untreated controls due to an apparent “necrotic crisis” from dying tumor tissue.”— Type-B Cytochromes: Sensors and Switches by J.L. Kiel. https://a.co/aJEAVsl. I was acutely aware of the relationship between oxidase/peroxidase innate non-specific immunity and resistance to parasites and cancer because I entered Texas Tech University Health Science Center, School of Medicine, Graduate School, in the Departments of Biochemistry and Microbiology, as one of their first PhD students, in the summer of 1977 at Lubbock, Texas, with the intent to study this anti-parasitic mechanism. My dissertation research was on the cytotoxic mechanisms of peroxidases, a principle antimicrobial and anti-parasitic enzyme in granulocytes and macrophages of animals and humans. I wanted to study the effects of eosinophilic peroxidase on blood flukes (an animal counterpart of Schistosoma called Heterobilharzia americana) but my graduate committee and the safety officer would not approve of my keeping my infected snails in an aquarium in the laboratory. Therefore, I turned to peroxidase killing of cancer cells.
This highly localized approach is necessary because parasites and cancers disguise themselves as normal host tissue and this type of immunity must attack them without confusing them with normal tissue, which could be fatal or at least highly damaging to normal tissues and organs. It is a very delicate balance that could go either way. Therefore, any treatments or vaccines must direct a response that limits early replication of the virus and do not trigger an overt systemic parasite immune response. Hopefully, the current vaccines and treatments currently being evaluated will do this.
As a final personal note, I dealt, in my professional lifetime, with trying to address these mechanisms in other infectious zoonotic diseases and where infectious agents come from, go to between outbreaks, and how to stop them from re-emerging and spreading. By my measure, what has happened with COVID-19 would have been a total failure if it had been in my purview of investigative and applied functions and responsibilities. I spent the first third of my career investigating the non-specific responses to chemical, biological, and radiation insults, especially non-ionizing electromagnetic radiation, microwaves and radiowaves, and the second two thirds investigating means to detect hidden infectious agents and to stop re-emergence of infectious agents from between outbreaks. You may question my authority and knowledge in this area and assume I should have some honored and respected position in academia or industry after my retirement from serving the military and nation. I do not. It appears the arts and sciences of attribution and Counterproliferation of biological agents, natural or nefarious, are so specialized that there is no venerable honored academic or industrial positions or no longer governmental positions that meet with my qualifications. Since my retirement in 2011 and being turned down many times for academic positions, I have only been called on by the federal government when emergency situations required my services and was summarily dismissed when the crisis passed. However, when the crisis occurs, as with COVID, is when my talents are least but albeit still critically effective if heeded. I thought that even at 71, I might be valuable in sharing my experience, knowledge and insights with those who need to follow me in these pursuits, which I did in the military, but am not allowed to do now except by my books, past publications and currently this blog. I will continue as long as one person reads this blog and am able to continue.
Global Biosurveillance 