The Mouse That Roared – Why Omicron Infected Mice Are Bad News
So Omicron is much better at infecting mouse ACE2 receptors than previous Covid versions.
That’s a gain of species!
Some other researchers even think a mouse brewed Omicron out of another variant, before transmitting it back to humans:
Collectively, our results suggest that the progenitor of Omicron jumped from humans to mice, rapidly accumulated mutations conducive to infecting that host, then jumped back into humans, indicating an inter-species evolutionary trajectory for the Omicron outbreak (see pre-print: “Evidence for a mouse origin of the SARS-CoV-2 Omicron variant”)
This inter-species trajectory may or may not be proven.
What is sure, is that Omicron has a much higher affinity to murine ACE2 receptors than previous variants.
This is a very ominous sign.
History is littered with memories of rodent-stoked plagues.
Here’s an excerpt from John Maddicott’s “Plague in Seventh-Century England”
“The rat is the main agent in the spread of plague, acting as host for the bacillus Yersinia pestis, whose transmission via the rat flea is the main route to human infection…‘it is likely that rodent infection was the necessary foundation for a major epidemic’…”
This is yet more evidence to undermine the notion that Covid will become “like a cold.”
Many of us are looking at how evolution works through the perspective of hope.
Even scientists have been promoting the idea that Covid is running out of evolutionary space – that it will become weaker!
When Omicron appeared, they shouted:
“This is the variant which will end the pandemic!”
Now, two weeks later, the same UK public health officials who participated in the Mass Infection/Herd Immunity strategy that birthed the Alpha Variant and killed 160,000 people are saying:
None of this is surprising, provided one looks at how evolution works from the perspective of the predator.
Those looking at how Covid impacts on our civilisation, our Christmas party plans or our children’s education need to develop some empathy for the virus.
The problem with these hope inspired analyses is that they look at Covid from the perspective of the host.
We should look at Covid from the perspective of its molecules and the cells it preys on.
At that level, each time Covid replicates inside a cell mutations occur.
These are the molecular changes on just one tiny part of Covid’s genome – its spike protein.
Evolution works at the sub-cellular level.
Yet, those hoping it will become “like a cold” never propose a plausible mechanism through which this might happen that takes account of these molecular-level changes.
This is the spike protein of a variety of variants just one sole person among the hundreds of millions so far infected by Covid have produced inside them:
In fact every one of us who’s infected produces hundreds-of-millions of variants.
Every time Covid replicates little changes occur through several different evolutionary processes.
Here I make a meme out of the Recombination process:
Recombination happens when different strands of RNA get muddled and attached “wrongly.”
Covid at its most basic is caused by a strand of RNA that invades our cells – and it takes 1–3 of these strands to establish an infection.
The Furin Cleavage Site (FCS) on Covid’s spike protein may well have evolved like this – in one sole cell one part of a strand programming for an FCS got muddled with another.
This is how such a change might look like from our perspective:
From Covid’s perspective a whole set of mutations on the spike protein including the mutation on the Furin Cleavage Site confers an extraordinary evolutionary advantage.
That’s how a gain of function can happen.
And that FCS adaptation worked, for the resulting strand of RNA.
Now over two years later, that has helped the RNA infect a good proportion of humanity.
Tell me, why would it ever evolve away that gain in function?
Remember, the burden is not on me to prove that Covid will become like a cold.
The default orthodox position ever since Darwin revealed the mysteries of evolution is that viruses and all organisms evolve towards efficiency.
So the burden is on those proposing that Covid’s evolutionary pathway will match their hope to explain how this would happen?
Which evolutionary mechanism would operate at the molecular level to make Covid different from every other organism that conforms to the laws of evolution?
Covid is a highly efficient pathogen:
Covid infects us via our ACE2 receptors – common cold doesn’t.
We have ACE2 receptors all around our body – mice do too:
Every time a strand of Covid RNA replicates there’s the potential for errors.
At some point three key “errors” occurred as a coronavirus evolved and these “errors” conferred such an evolutionary advantage to the coronavirus that it became Covid.
It developed a Furin Cleavage Site.
Another “error” enabled it to access our ACE2 receptors, which are all over our bodies’ cells.
Covid has a superantigen insert located just beside its Furin Cleavage Site.
The superantigen provokes our immune response into harming us, instead of helping us.
That these two evolutionary advantages – “errors” – are physically located close to one another on Covid’s spike protein is another advantage.
Neither is likely ever to evolve away, without the other evolving away.
Don’t take my word for it.
The co-discoverer of the superantigen insert on Covid’s spike protein Moshe Arditi agrees with my analysis:
And remember:
The Furin Cleavage Site on Covid’s spike protein is the Gain of Function over SARS-CoV-1.
The FCS is why Covid is twenty times more infectious than SARS.
Why would that kind of advantage ever evolve away?
Because it’s so unlikely ever to happen, those proposing to bet the future of our civilisation on Covid evolving into a cold have a very high bar to overcome, if they’re going to prove it’s even theoretically possible.
They’ve been saying this since February 2020.
And our lived experience shows us that what’s theoretically highly unlikely has practically never happened.
Each version of Covid that sweeps the world is worse, from the perspective of humans.
Omicron has a 70x replication advantage over Delta on our Bronchial cells.
Omicron doesn’t even need to go into our lungs that much any more (but, of course, it does).
Here, I created a meme to try to wake up those who don’t quite get what this advantage means for those whose lungs have already been ravaged by Delta:
From the standpoint of Covid’s RNA, it’s just getting more and more efficient.
That’s what we would expect.
Each of these mutations performs a role in a system whose only purpose is to prey on further cells.
From the viewpoint of Covid, any mutation can be positive, neutral or negative.
From our perspective, projecting a magical “Good Ending” into Covid’s quest for greater efficiency is misplaced.
We’re the product of how evolution works.
We didn’t turn into a cold!
Sometimes these scientists promising a Disney ending to Covid cite the Spanish Flu pandemic as proof pandemic pathogens necessarily become like colds.
There’s no scientific consensus or evidence, really, about why Spanish Flu appears to have ceased.
Perhaps it just killed all the hosts susceptible to it.
We didn’t have air travel then.
The movement around and through countries was a tiny proportion of what it is now.
The relationship between a common cold and the Spanish Flu pathogen is imagined.
Only three genomes of the second more deadly wave Spanish Flu pathogen have ever been sequenced.
And that was in 2021.
A year after those in charge of UK pandemic policy promoted Mass Infection to forestall a second deadly wave as had happened in the Spanish Flu.
That’s correct: UK went for Mass Infection on an unproven theory that a second wave could be prevented by Letting It Rip.
Yet, now we know the second wave of the Spanish Flu was caused by a pathogen that evolved to become worse.
The UK gave Covid the evolutionary space to evolve into something worse.
And the WildWuhan version of Covid evolved into the Kent Variant – Alpha:
Anyway, the Spanish Flu family of pathogens which killed millions had itself evolved over millions of years into something incredibly deadly.
Yet those scientists who promise us Liberation Through Covid or through Covid becoming “just like flu” choose as their cut-off point at the end of that pandemic.
Why not choose 1910 and say the pathogen then got worse?
Likewise, Covid itself evolved from less deadly or less transmissible pathogens.
Those scientists in early 2020 who said:
We need to front-load cases now. That way we’ll avoid a deadly second wave. Like what happened in the Spanish Flu
Well, they didn’t know what they didn’t know.
Although had they mainstreamed consideration of the impact of such a mad bet on the human right to health security and the right to life, they would never have promoted such a policy.
Our experience proved their bet to have failed.
Their “theory” was wrong.
At huge cost.
The UK by operationalising this theory about front-loading cases brewed the Alpha variant, which ravaged the world.
Alpha infectious people breathed out eighteen times more infectious particles than those infected with the Wild Wuhan version did:
Then those infected with Delta, which evolved out of the underlying genomic pool that included Alpha, breathed out one thousand times more infectious particles than those with Alpha.
“Delta’s transmission advantage is some function of the underlying genomic background Delta emerged in (B.1.1.7 &…).” [https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-637724/v1]
That is how evolution works.
That’s how our system of valuing variants so that we designate certain ones “of concern” works:
We select the variants that become worse because they are choosing us as hosts.
Questioning how evolution works has never been more important.
Understanding why it’s wrong to think we select variants to suit our modern lifestyles.
Variants, if anything, select us out for infection.
Their task is to infect our cells.
And whichever mutations and sets of mutations help them to do this are hardly likely to be magicked away on a carpet of our wishful thinking.
The idea Covid will just become like a cold or like a flu bug is a really powerful meme.
Even people who believe it took more than seven days to “create” the world are falling for this trope.
Its danger is that it persuades us that we’re not in fact walking along a crumbling cliff.
It’s a really consoling myth.
Now that Omicron has adapted to mouse ACE2 receptors, I hope that those who think Covid will disappear, without us having to act carefully will lose faith in their hopium.
Countries like Japan and New Zealand are winning against Covid.
Having Let Covid Rip in March 2020, again in the Autumn of 2020, and yet again as Delta emerged in May 2021, the UK is in a terrible place just as Omicron emerges.
5m people in the UK have been infected by Delta since July 2021, including 1.4m children.
Now, we discover that according to in vitro tests on Omicron, it seems that prior Covid infection confers ZERO immunity to Omicron.
So the stated aim of front-loading infections to forestall a winter surge has predictably and yet again been beaten by evolution.
We know that a mild version of SARS-CoV-1 when passed through a mouse fifteen times became a killer version – this is just not surprising.
SARS-CoV-2's Gain of Function is its genome’s Furin Cleavage Site.
This gives Covid twenty times greater affinity to our ACE2 receptors than SARS.
Evolution works for greater efficiency.
We must respect and understand how evolution works!
Our civilisation depends on it – watch 12 Monkeys.
P.S. That seventh century plague in England, well, how did that go?
And another in Ireland:
Stephen Douglas is a graduate of Dublin, Cambridge and Oxford Universities. Since mid-March 2020 he has written hundreds of scientifically grounded articles (https://lnkd.in/d8JzW95) counselling great care in relation to Covid public policy. Stephen blogs at @DecodingTrolls, where he uses the Positive Trolling® communications’ strategy he invented to debunk hopium at scale.
