Covid Molecular Politics – Intro
The microscopic characteristics of the virus that causes Covid disease will determine the macroscopic state in which our world is governed for decades.
Unless…
Before I get to this “Unless…” here’s what I mean by the first sentence:
In March 2020, Saturday morning, sitting in a hotel room, Corona was just a news story.
I well remember now the precise moment, the feeling I had as it finally irrevocably registered in my mind: Covid is transmitted through the air, and by people who don’t even know they’re infected. I spent that day researching this. I even compiled a list of 23 references from the world’s preeminent scientific journals confirming this:
I sent an SMS to my then boss to share this terrible news.
Everything had to change.
We needed to implement airborne virus mitigation strategies immediately, I told him.
That evening, I called a friend. Even though I’d already travelled six hours by train to be at her party, I said:
“I can’t go. It’s not responsible for me to go. I’ve just discovered how Corona is transmitted. This changes everything,” I told her.
“Nothing to worry about,” she replied. “My friends are very responsible. They wouldn’t come to the party if they felt ill.”
That surprised me. My friend hadn’t drawn the same conclusion that I had on learning about asymptomatic transmission.
She did not apportion it the same weight as I had.
She was still willing to trust her friends, even if it was impossible for them to know whether or not they were infectious.
That’s an early example of how interpersonal politics, even among friends who agree on so much else, is now affected by the molecular qualities of Covid and its transmission dynamics.
In March 2020 many of us immediately adopted a precautionary approach to dealing with the virus.
Those were the days before we knew quite how terrible this thing would turn out to be.
Then, a precautionary approach was warranted out of ethics, manners and solidarity with our fellow humans.
Now, a precautionary approach is warranted by the established science:
24 Reasons & 144 Billion Delta Virus Particles To Take Delta VERY Seriously
I wore a mask for the first time on March 18th 2020. As I wrote not long afterwards in my “Leaders Wear Masks” article:
“first time I wore a mask at my work morning meeting, a colleague said ‘you know, masks don’t work.’”
Though I didn’t know it then, that would be the last in-person morning meeting I would attend in work. Now we do it by video.
That way, I don’t have to rely on my colleagues’ success in avoiding infection, nor do they have to rely on mine.
That’s Covid office Molecular Politics at work.
That’s a precautionary approach in action.
It’s diplomatic because mainstreaming Molecular Politics into a precautionary approach to Corona means none of us colleagues need to “go there.”
We don’t even need to know about our respective private Molecular Political strategies for dealing with Covid.
We don’t need to know if we weigh risks similarly.
It can be a life or death or quality of life issue to understand the Molecular Politics of the virus’s affinity to our bodies’ receptors.
When we’re not in each other’s physical presence, our different Molecular Political philosophies don’t directly threaten our respective feelings of Health Security.
Avoiding conflict’s almost more important these days than avoiding participation in chains of Corona infection – only by unifying against Covid can we defeat it.
Almost.
Another thing I didn’t know in March 2020 was how that colleague claiming masks didn’t work was my first introduction into a pattern of pandemic disinformation. That’s also Molecular Politics.
How memes take hold…
Why people create them…
How chains of disinformation track chains of Covid infection across and inside our communities and private lives was an unimaginable future then.
How some disinformation memes seem perfectly pitched to provide society with a la carte messages whose results are the opposite of what they say they want.
“Tired of all this Covid living? Here’s a message of ‘hope,’” say the disinformationists. “Just take off your masks. The virus will disappear*/become less dangerous*/only get the vulnerable*/…” [*delete as applicable]
Ever tried to explain to someone who’s defending Mass Infection policies that chasing Herd Immunity to Covid, with or without vaccines, is NOT a Good Idea?
In March 2020, I would have thought the following would be enough to change their minds:
“Variants result from uncontrolled spread. Hasn’t worked – UK has been trying to create what it terms “natural immunity” and all that’s happened is that we keep getting wave after wave of, even, reinfections. Inhumane. Unlawful – we’ve all got the human right to health security and governments are obliged by law to prevent and control epidemics…”
By now, almost two years into this Thing, it’s so familiar to hear anti-intuitive and untrue tropes coming from people.
Then, though, hearing that Masks Don’t Work coupled with a wink, wink uber “knowing” attitude that says “oh, you benighted masses who think physical barriers can stop the virus infecting you, you’ve been deceived” I was simply taken aback.
Where could such an odd idea – Masks Don’t Work- have originated?!
Who can have sat in the Great Barrington Declaration headquarters and thought:
“Let’s try telling people the Laws of Physics don’t work?!”
It flummoxed me then.
Campaigners for ForeverCovid, like these UK leaders, are still espousing and promoting such views about how Newtonian Physics got it all wrong, almost two years into this pandemic:
That’s their Molecular Politics, and one thing we can be sure about now is that they don’t care whether or not Covid persists. All they care about is using their Molecular Politics to identify authoritarian-minded followers.
It seemed to me then, as it does now, really weird that anyone could believe any physical barrier between their mouth or nose and either an airborne or droplet-borne virus wouldn’t work.
No matter how porous such a physical barrier is, it will, in accordance with the Laws of Physics (I believed up until now most of us had an intuitive grasp of) stop at least some of the virus reaching us!
Our Molecular Politics understands manipulative forces are at work here. And that we must take them into account.
Molecular Politics includes in its ambit the dynamics of how such anti-mask “meanings” are able to infect people’s minds.
Sensible, good people can be persuaded that “Masks Don’t Work” or that “Lockdowns Cause Pandemics” or that opening schools without any mitigations won’t contribute to the spread of the virus:
Molecular Politics doesn’t ignore this phenomenon or put it down to “stupid people believing stupid things.”
Molecular Politics takes in the whole universe of psychology, politics, oligarchic power relations, and the rest.
Molecular Politics takes a holistic view to exploring why we are where we are now with Covid.
Molecular Politics takes the composition and qualities of the molecules of which Covid-19 consists extremely seriously.
Molecular Politics looks at how these molecules interact, at the microscopic level.
We don’t leave scientific understanding to the boffins.
We don’t outsource our thinking on this to the government or experts.
It’s a matter of our survival to understand these things.
It still amazes us that many seem genuinely unable to understand, really the only three things we need to know to avoid the risk of suffering from Covid:
It’s airborne.
It’s asymptomatically transmitted.
Masks work.
If we rearrange everything we do, in accordance with those three facts, we can beat this thing.
Immunology has become our new Soma.
We fall asleep thinking in letters and sequences of proteins of things we still don’t really yet perfectly understand.
Most political nerds can tell you about the minutiae of the history, culture and individuals of whichever political milieu they’re interested in.
Today, in a time of Covid, this isn’t enough.
We need to know about Molecular Politics.
If we want to have a perspective that’s immune to disinformation…
If we want to inoculate ourselves against empty hopeful optimism regarding where this pandemic is going…
Then, we need to understand the molecular composition of Covid and how it interacts inside our own bodies.
We really need to absorb this kind of stuff.
Molecular Politics is integrating this understanding into how we Live Our Lives:
21 Reasons & 144 Billion Delta Virus Particles To Take Delta VERY Seriously
Anything less than this Molecular Politics approach to understanding Covid, and we risk helping the ForeverCovid crew promote their snake-oil, well, forever.
Ignoring Covid’s capacity to transmit through the air and asymptomatically will prevent us from critiquing properly any decisions made by public health and political authorities with regard to the nature of the spread of Covid.
There’s at least four other characteristics of Covid which prove it’s Just Not Like Flu. Which prove those who’ve argued without evidence that Covid will go away… Or that’s it’s just about to mutate into something innocuous… Which prove them wrong:
Not understanding that Covid has a unique superantigenic insert. This part of the spike which gives Corona its name provokes our immune systems into nuclear level reaction.
In this Tweet, liked by the co-discoverer of the super-antigen insert in Covid’s genome, I explain why Covid is unlikely EVER to mutate into a “common cold.”
This is a key disinformation trope, which I debunk using a lay-persons understanding of evolution and the molecular qualities of Covid:
Getting these nerdish issues is part of the key to understanding what’s in store for our civilisation unless…
Before I get to that “Unless…” I want to set out briefly in further detail what I mean by Molecular Politics:
Molecular Politics is also literally about how Covid’s molecules relate to each other and to us.
Only if we understand better the mechanics, mysteries and miracles of the laws governing Covid, can we properly Learn To Live With Covid by doing to it what we’ve done to Smallpox, rabies, Polio, Ebola, TB, etc.
Understanding that Covid-19 has a super affinity (20x that of the 2003 SARS virus) to humans’ ACE-2 receptors is a key part of the catechism of Molecular Politics.
Knowing we possess ACE-2 receptors all around our bodies helps us understand why Covid can access and replicate so successfully inside our cells.
Having at least a layperson’s understanding of how the furin cleavage site on Covid-19's molecules means, again almost uniquely among coronaviruses, that Covid-19 can cause cells to fuse together. Covid enveloppes itself within fused cells and makes it impossible for our immune systems’ anti-gen or T-Cells to wipe it out once it’s inside us.
This is Covid Molecular Politics at the molecular level:
“…Insertion of this protein results in higher pathogenicity, pronounced neural symptoms and neurotropism in infected chickens … Before the emergence of COVID19, this important feature was not observed in the lineage b of betacoronaviruses…This … cleavage site … cleaved during virus egress … may provide a gain-of-function to COVID19 for efficient spreading in the human population compared to other lineage b beta- coronaviruses. Possibly illustrates a convergent evolution pathway between unrelated CoVs.”
Understanding that Covid replicates inside the very things (Macrophages) that our bodies send to stop Covid replicating is pretty important news, no?
“Our mechanistic study of this model here defines a cascade of events, which, following lung … infection continues around 2 days later with viral or infected cell uptake by tissue resident macrophages. SARS-CoV-2 replicates at least partially in these macrophages.” (https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.09.27.461948v1)
Getting that Covid’s entry into our cells is aided by the antibodies our bodies have created to hit previous variants of Covid is also essential.
Yes, that’s right: being reinfected by a different Covid variant means your body’s defences erected against a previous variant might actually help the new variant enter your cells:
Molecular Politics takes these unique qualities of Covid not as merely interesting phenomena.
Rather, Molecular Politics understands the interaction of these molecular-level qualities of Covid and the clear tendency of leaders and administrators to reduce mitigations on the basis of “hoping for the best.”
Molecular Politics gets that this contradiction between Covid and the hopelessly doomed-to-fail “optimism” of leaders who don’t take a Molecular Politics approach means that Covid-19 will be afflicting us for decades to come…
Unless…
Molecular Politics also gets that this “Unless…” may NOT come to fruition.
The necessary political unity to defeat the ForeverCovid propagandists may never arrive.
We may never do a polio or smallpox on Covid.
Not because Covid might always have “animal reservoirs” (yeah, so does rabies but you don’t see seventy thousand people-a-day in the UK testing positive for rabies!).
But because unless the world unites to rid us of Covid (and from today’s perspective that seems unlikely in the next two years – that’s my informed judgement as someone who invented the Molecular Politics approach to these matters! I’ve done my own research 😉), it’ll have unlimited human reservoirs. Polio and Ebola sit inside people for decades and then erupt:
We’re the reservoirs.
So it makes zero sense to argue, as Team ForeverCovid is now, to Let That Baby Rip cos anyway there's animal reservoirs.
At this rate this thing will keep evolving more virulent variants, and they’ll continue to ping-pong around our world.
Unless…
Even one of the two druids who brewed up the miraculous Pfizer-BioN-Tech vaccine concoction in their cauldrons reckons already Covid is finding ways of escaping immunity which don’t involve the spike protein.
Already Covid’s evolving so that vaccines focussing on the spike protein won’t be effective in stopping Covid injecting its RNA into our cells.
We gotta know this stuff, if we want to understand the evolution of our politics and if we want to understand political-economy (and biological reality) over the next decade.
So mainstreaming Molecular Politics into our organisations’ approaches to Covid and to how we govern ourselves is the only insurance against the pandemic of empty hopium leading us into making the same mistakes again and again.
Covid won’t, like a flu, become less innocuous over the medium- to short-term.
Anyway, those promoting the “Just Like Flu” trope forget that influenza didn’t just appear in 1918 out of no-where. It had evolved over millions of years into the strain that killed so many then.
Those promoting the “Just Like Flu” fallacy didn’t even know that the second wave of the Spanish Flu pandemic resulted from a mutated version of the virus (https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.05.14.444134v1.full)
Yes, it got worse.
Just like the WildWuhan version got worse when Alpha appeared in England as a result of the English government’s Molecular Politics illiterate strategy of Mass Infection.
And indeed those promoting the “Covid Will Become Endemic Just Like Flu” misinformation trope, never seem to recall that (in the words of the preeminent experts on sequencing emerging Covid variants’ genomes):
“Delta’s transmission advantage is some function of the underlying genomic background Delta emerged in (B.1.1.7 &…).”
That’s correct: Delta is a result, at least partly, of Alpha.
Yet still the ForeverCovid crew promote the idea that Covid will necessarily become less deadly.
We don’t even need to know a thing about Molecular Politics to understand the faux consolation the ForeverCovid crew are selling with their guff.
The laws of logical argument show their arguments don’t correspond with the reality we’ve been experiencing since March 2020.
I mean, boffins have only sequenced the genomes of three second wave Spanish Flu pandemic viruses. And that was only in the past year. Yet, the ForeverCovid crew are selling the idea that the Spanish Flu got less innocuous.
Polio. Smallpox. Ebola. HIV… These are all viruses which haven’t become more innocuous over the years.
An endemic pandemic of Covid looks like how things are operating at the moment:
We gotta understand molecular politics as otherwise we may fall for seductive phrases like “Covid will become like the common cold.”
Let’s think this through using what little we know about Natural Selection…
The virus selects out the people (kills them) for whom it is anything but a common cold.
So for you it’s “like” a common cold (after your eighth infection) but for me, well, after my fourth infection I get selected out.
I’m no longer here.
That’s what this trope means in practice.
It’s another GBD/Herd Immunity soothing euphemism oft repeated with good intention or without thinking it through.
We all understand the survival of the fittest works at the cellular level and Covid gets into every cell via Ace-2 receptors which are all over our bodies. Whereas colds etc mainly just go for the lungs.
So Covid whose furin cleavage represents a Gain-of-Function for Coronaviruses (see above) to become “like” a common cold Covid would need to lose this gained function.
Covid would need to go from a virus capable of cleaving to almost every cell in our bodies’ organs into one which just gives me the sniffles.
So, I have no idea if this is going to happen (it certainly seems unlikely).
The burden of proof, though, is on the person putting forward this deceptively fantastic theory that Covid’s gonna do an Ovid and metamorphosize into a Common Cold to explain how this miraculous transformation might happen.
Ask them – next time you hear this trope.
Please let me know if they can explain it: @DecodingTrolls
So, in the absence of such a marvel, Covid Molecular Political Science considers this scenario:
Constant waves and evolution of Covid causing disruption, chaos and suffering on a global scale for the foreseeable future…Unless…
Taking a Molecular Politics view of Covid frees you from the constant rises and falls of wishful thinking that have afflicted our supposedly advanced societies again and again since March 2020.
Taking a Molecular Politics view gives us the confidence to understand that when, for example, the UK Prime Minister claimed we’d “send Covid packing within a few weeks” he was either lying, mistaken or both.
The Fall 2020/Spring 2021 Alpha variant came out of the conditions created by politicians lacking any understanding of Molecular Politics.
In September 2020 as Alpha was already taking hold in England, the UK prime minister claimed “Covid would be over by Christmas.”
I’m not picking on the UK here (though it’s an example par excellence of how ignorance of Molecular Politics has led to the worst infection rates, suffering and deaths in any advanced nation consistently since March 2020).
Illiteracy about Molecular Politics afflicts all of our countries to one degree or another.
@DecodingTrolls and many others whom we follow addresses this illiteracy about Molecular Politics head-on on Twitter.
Those either acting in Good Faith or out of nefariousness who promote policies that amount to “ForeverCovid” strategies argue it’s impossible to get rid of Covid.
They’re not interested in Molecular Politics as an instrument to rid substantively the world of Covid like we’ve done with Smallpox; polio; HIV; TB; Ebola;…
Nope, they chose a strain of Molecular Politics from which they derive a sullen fatalistic seductive notion that we can’t win in any fight against Covid.
So why bother even trying, the ForeverCovid hacks say!
The ForeverCovid crew say: can’t ‘eradicate,’ Covid, ergo Let It Rip!
That doesn’t make much sense.
Especially, if it turns out, say, that, as with Polio, immunosuppressed persons could excrete virus indefinitely.
Hardly makes sense to create indefinite numbers of unlimited virus reservoirs.
The ForeverCovid groups who promote the anti-ZeroCovid messages, now focus on how ZeroCovid’s impossible because of “animal reservoirs.”
And yet so often they’re all for removing ALL mitigations in schools.
The UK’s ForeverCovid government did this in May 2021, and again in September 2021.
Look what happened:
So the ForeverCovid campaigners disclose worry about animal reservoirs, Yet:
“Our results suggest that children can serve as potential reservoirs for SARS-CoV-2 transmission and viral evolution.”
Again, becoming literate in all of these manifold aspects of Molecular Politics is the best vaccine against those who seek to ForeverCovid us.
Annoying as it is to have to fill our brains with this stuff, we need to become fluent in the abuse of euphemisms like “shielding,” “natural immunity,” “herd immunity,” “protect the vulnerable,” “Endemicity,” “just like flu,” “doesn’t harm children,” “Living With Covid,” “freedom,” …
We need to be aware that whenever we’re being lulled into a feeling “Ah, it’s gonna be okay with Covid,” generally speaking, we’re being manipulated.
We’re well used to saying things like “ah, that’s just the drink talking” when a friend’s over-affectionate after having a few pints.
We need now to get used to the idea of:
“that’s just the Covid talking through you. That’s exactly what Covid wants you to do. Covid’s telling you Masks Don’t Wor Work.”
If you asked Covid:
‘Covid, what would you like our governments to do in response to you?’
Covid would say:
“Carry on. Let me rip! Mass infection. Don’t wear masks. No mitigation in schools – Covid won’t harm your children, honest ‘guv.”
Molecular Politics takes a Machiavellian approach to Covid itself.
Molecular Politics is not in thrall to the virus, willing to adapt its public health priorities according to what will help Covid find new hosts.
Molecular Politics understands that what the ForeverCovid crew are promoting with their Mass Infection-friendly tropes and policies is EXACTLY what Covid wants them to do.
That’s just the Covid talking and working through them.
So unless we begin to understand Molecular Politics at the microscopic virus level all the way up to how those characteristics interact with billions of humans (in ways those who’ve been watching closely since March 2020 really understand), we’ll be ForeverCoviding ourselves to death and suffering for decades.
When you’re trying to work out what will happen next and how to proof your organisation using the Molecular Politics method, will you consult someone who has made the right calls since March 2020, or someone who because they don’t get Molecular Politics keeps getting it wrong?
I’ve been working on the cutting edge of Molecular Politics since March 2020, as these writings amply evidence:
COVID posts collected:
Stephen microblogs on Science-Twitter @DecodingTrolls. His Medium is Stephen Douglas. Some of his political writings are available here:
Stephen Douglas is currently an Environmental Security adviser to an inter-governmental organisation. He has a BA in politics from Dublin, an MA from Cambridge in Law and an MBA from Oxford University.
