Coming to a Fortunate End

It’s only slightly premature to say the pandemic is ending. From the data we have so far, much of it from South Africa, the Omicron variant is more contagious than the Delta variant, or other variants, and is therefore likely to overtake the others and become the dominant strain. That is likely to happen in the UK in the next couple of weeks, and in the US shortly after that, and definitely within the next couple of months.

The good news is that it is very mild. There are very few hospitalized cases. About 90% of those hospitalized were incidental, meaning the patient was in the hospital for some other reason when a standard test for COVID-19 showed up positive. Of patients on ventilators, all were on ventilators for some other reason; the Omicron variant of SARS-COV-2 did not cause the need for oxygen. There have, as of this writing, been zero deaths attributable to the Omicron variant.

The Omicron variant seems to be less transmissible than the Delta variant—around R-2.5, rather than R-5. Yet it does seem to be overtaking Delta in populations. The reason seems to be that it has a greater affinity for binding with the ACE-2 receptor. If Omicron and Delta were in the same body, but Omicron gets into a particular cell before the Delta, the Delta has to look elsewhere—like a game of musical chairs—or it gets killed off by the body’s immune system. Omicron seems to be winning the game.

If Omicron continues to evidence less virulence, that is a good thing.

Dr. Mobeen Syed illustrates Omicron's doing damage to Big Pharma
screenshot from here

Doctors are starting to speculate that this could mean the end of the pandemic. In a similar way to how the Spanish Influenza pandemic of a century ago went, there was a bad first year followed by an even worse second year, followed by much milder forms, eventually moving into the endemic background illness that it continues to be. That could be the trajectory for SARS-COV-2.

Here are some sources:

·       “WHO: No Deaths Reported as a Result of Omicron Variant to Date” Nathan Worcester for The Epoch Times, December 10 (updated December 12), 2021. 

·       “Omicron Could Be Natural Vaccine for Unvaccinated—Prof. Eleanor Riley (University of Edinburgh)” Dr. Mobeen Syed discusses a UK study on his DrBeen Medical Lectures podcast December 11, 2021.  He shows why using a model for Delta looks alarming, but if Omicron is truly less virulent, that fear is unwarranted.

·       “Omicron Helping Wind-down the Pandemic—Netcare Report from South Africa” Dr. Mobeen Syed on his DrBeen Medical Lectures podcast, December 11, 2021.  He states his opinion that the pandemic is winding down, thanks to the Omicron variant.

·       “Good Fortune with Omicron” Dr. John Campbell on his podcast, December 11, 2021.  He talks about current data on the virus in South Africa and the UK. He also goes over the Eleanor Riley piece that Dr. Mobeen covered.

Dr. Campbell says, in that last one,

It’s not because humans have been particularly clever. It’s not because the vaccines have been so successful that it’s eradicated the infection. It’s not because the lockdowns have worked. It’s not because we’ve been so clever. We are just fortunate that this massively communicable variant that is going to bring about huge amounts of herd immunity is doing so at the cost of absolutely minimal disease. Humanity has been indeed fortunate.”

And then he adds, “It’s almost as if there’s corrective systems looking after us. I don’t know how much philosophy or emotion to put into this, but this could have been bad….” And “Palpable relief here.” He stops just short of calling it a miraculous turn of events.

As with many other things about this virus, however, there are unanswered puzzling questions.

Evolutionary biologists Bret Weinstein and wife Heather Heying discuss a great many things on their podcasts. And they typically think of themselves as liberal. But this past couple of years of pandemic, they have commented frequently on the biology of the disease as well as the authoritarian response—in a way that has been getting them labeled as conservative. This past week Weinstein was commenting on the evolution of the Omicron variant. They are asked by a follower this question:

Q: Can you steel man the arguments for the various ways Omicron might have evolved from 2020 without being noticed by the medical community that has been sequencing as many variants as they find? To the naïve, “engineered” seems like a possibility. But I would like to hear other natural evolutionary solutions to the problem.

The answer, in short, is that there are too many strange things about this variant, from an evolutionary biological perspective, specifically from a phylogentic systematics perspective, which they explain. Briefly that has to do with the genetic inheritance tree of a thing, in this case a virus. They show a time-lapse animation of the phylogeny of the different strains, from someone else’s work. Here’s the discussion from that point; I’ve highlighted some key sentences:

Bret Weinstein: So, these are all the variants that are being tracked. And the line—

Heather Heying: What’s the X? I mean the X axis is presumably time, so when does it start? What’s the left most—?

BW: Zach will have to read it. I think it’s like mid-2020, or maybe it’s early 2020. (responds to technician off screen). 2019. Yeah. OK, OK. So it starts right at the beginning of the sort of named pandemic. And what you have are all of the variants and their relationships as deduced by their sequence differences. And what you saw is that Omicron pops up without any history of connection to the rest of the swarm, as if it came about somewhere March through September of 2020.

HH: 2020?

BW: Yes. So it—

HH: Not 2021? Omicron? 2020?

BW: No. It shows up in 2021; but the point is, its relationship is as if it has been frozen in time at a much earlier state and then shows up.

I looked up the chart used in the DarkHorse podcast and found it here.
I added arrows to show the beginning and current day points of the Omicron variant.

Now, the thing is, this has people over in lab leak world fascinated, because this is not the first time in history that this has happened. In fact there’s a very famous example that you may have just barely heard mentioned in the lab leak discussion about the flu of 1977. And the flu of 1977, it has been concluded—this of course could be revised if some better model emerged that was more predictive or assumed less—but, it has been concluded, for now, and with substantial evidence, is actually a lab escapee. And the way we know that is that its closest relative dates back to 1949. So it vanished from the world, and then the clock started again on its evolution in 1977. So that indicated this surely was in a fridge somewhere or isolated from the world. Whatever was happening with it, effectively time was stopped, and that effectively requires a refrigerator.

HH: In an organism or a virus that does not have extraordinarily variable mutation rates, you would not, you could not possibly expect a—whatever that would have been—a 28-year hiatus with no changes.

BW: Right. And so, the other example which we have of this, which isn’t as good, because we don’t really have a good ancestor, right, is SARS-COV-2 itself, where we suddenly have a virus that’s very very good at doing the things a virus needs to do in order to become a human pandemic, with no history of circulating in another animal where it learned those tricks, no history of circulating in some population of humans, as far as we can tell, somewhere. It just— It’s a genius right off— It’s like a child that was born speaking three languages or something, you know.

And so, anyway, this has people who are paying attention to this thinking very carefully about what could even explain this other than its having been somewhere in someone’s lab during the period of time that we would have expected it to emerge and then suddenly popping back up.

And there are other anomalies too, like things like the non-synonymous to synonymous mutation rate is way off of normal. It’s like 25 to 1. So, this is about how many alterations that have no consequence for actual protein sequence you would expect for every one that has an actual consequence, and the number appears impossible through a normal process.

Heather Heying and Bret Weinstein
screenshot from here

Now, what the discord server [person who posed the question] has asked us to answer is the question of, well—

HH: Could it be, you know, what might explain this variant with this many changes appearing so suddenly, given a supposed background rate of so many people checking all the time for variants?

BW: Right. And so, what I think we should do, rather than search the world for crazy explanations, is just identify one— So, you’ve heard things like “immunocompromised person” in which much more evolution took place than normal, because their immunocompromised state effectively created a gain-of-function environment, a serial passage environment between tissues that was extremely favorable to variants. Now this doesn’t make a lot of sense to me, because— And, in fact I think the idea— So, it was originally reported that it had been isolated from somebody with HIV and diagnosed HIV; I believe that that has been debunked—although who even knows what debunked means in 2021.

But, nonetheless, these kinds of explanations have been offered before. In fact, there was one quite good paper—I thought it was dead wrong, but quite good paper—that argued that it could be that SARS-COV-2 experienced extreme evolutionary change in one of the miners who got sick in Yunnan Province, because lungs have such a large surface area.

HH: Back in 2013.

BW: Yeah. It was a very clever argument. Again, I think it’s dead wrong. But, anyway, it’s at least the kind of thought you would want to have. How could you get more evolution than you expect, right? Maybe surface area is the answer.

HH: Well, at least in that case, it— You can track the story evolutionarily. Like, the logic—each logical step is plausible, even if one or more of them may be so unlikely as for it not to have happened. So many of these stories that are charted, these explanations that are thrown out at the masses, and then the guy in effectively the white lab coat steps out to say, “I know you can’t follow this, so let me just tell you, the conclusion is...” actually just don’t even logically hold together. And we’ve sort of stopped, you and I have stopped largely on here even saying, “Oh, this thing, except it doesn’t make sense. And this thing, except it doesn’t make sense,” because it’s just coming so fast and furious. Like this— I don’t, on the face of it, the idea that immunocompromised creates gain-of-function in a body—I don’t know why that would be true. I have yet to hear the explanation for how you get from a to b. That’s just a simple a to b. Spell it out.

BW: Well, the idea, to the extent it is an idea rather than excuse, is, in the immunocompromised body, the defenses that would ordinarily silence lots of evolutionary experiments in the body tolerates them. Right? Something like that. And so you have— It’s like a big population in which processes that wouldn’t make any headway, in a small population gets a chance.

HH: So if that is true, you would expect that immunocompromised people would tend to be incubators of lots of variations in colds, other coronaviruses, or flus, or, you know any of the other things—

BW: It makes other predictions. And frankly, I don’t know whether any of those predictions are manifest.

HH: Right. That’s how you would actually follow this up with a scientific approach.

BW: The other thing would be—OK, so let’s say that this is true in the immunocompromised person and you get lots of evolution of little—you know, there are lots of foothills in the immunocompromised person that don’t exist in people with a fully competent immune system. But then, when the variant gets out into people who do have a fully competent immune system, you wouldn’t expect those variations to function very well, unless—

HH: If they only got a foothold because of immune suppression—

BW: Right. So then you would need another step to the process. And the point is, this is where you start running afoul of Occam’s razor. You’re not just hypothesizing an immunocompromised person, which provides a unique environment; you’ve got another black box that you need to fill. And at some point, it’s too many epicycles to be sustained.

So, I just want to point out, the other thing that we talked about last week that fits this category is, why did COVID-19 collapse in Japan, oh yes, after they allowed doctors to prescribe Ivermectin? And the answer was, “Oh, it became mutationally aggressive and lost its coherence.”

HH: It just did so well that it failed.

BW: Right. Something. And so the answer is, No, you need at least one more factor. You know what one factor could do it? Ivermectin could drive a virus to make some sort of a deal that it couldn’t sustain. But you can’t do it with just spontaneous mutational idiocy.

Bret Weinstein Twitter Thread
December 12, 2021

The summary of this is,

·       The Omicron variant’s history traces back to mid-2020, but it didn’t appear until November 2021. It’s as though it was kept in a lab refrigerator for a year and some months.

·       Also, it has a mutation rate that is impossible under normal processes.

·       The explanation about it being naturally developed in an immunocompromised person doesn’t hold up.

So, if you ask these evolutionary biologists, who have looked at the data and charted the history of the disease, this variant didn’t just happen naturally.

I’ve wondered about deus ex machina. Are we at a point where God has intervened and purposely altered the genetics of a worldwide plague? I’m not ruling that out; I tend to see His hand, whatever is happening.

But I am asking this additional question: If someone had a variant in mid-2020 that would be both mild and highly communicable—so that it would quickly end the pandemic through herd immunity and giTwitve people natural immunity for the future—why would such a person hold back, allowing another year’s worth of deaths to occur, before bringing it out?

And another question: Why, if the data shows this variant is likely to end the pandemic, is there so much panic and continued push to take a vaccine not designed to help against this variant, even pushing the vaccine onto children, who have always been at extremely low risk of serious illness from any variant of SARS-COV-2?

All versions of this illness have been highly treatable when dealt with early, using typically low-cost medicines and supplements. It looks like ease of treatment—or lowered need for any treatment—is nigh. As those who claim to be science keep saying while not showing any evidence of science, “Follow the science.” When you actually do that, you’ll notice that there was never any need for the vaccines, or mandates of any kind, or lockdowns. This has been a plague of authoritarians. Let us hope someone who has the power to hold off solutions for well over a year does not also have the power to spring an even more lethal virus upon the oh-too-trusting world.

Here are a few more interesting references: 

• “Live Q&A: WHO Says No Deaths from Omicron; Was Jussie Smollett ‘a Hate Crime in Reverse’?” Joshua Philipp on Crossroads, December 12, 2021.  After mentioning that there are no deaths or other worrisome data associated with the Omicron variant, he asks, then why are countries taking even harsher measures? 

• “Covid: The Path not Taken—DarkHorse Podcast with Dr. Peter McCullough” Bret Weinstein The DarkHorse podcast, December 6, 2021.  This is mostly talking about SARS-COV-2 in general, including treatments and possible vaccine dangers, rather than about Omicron. 

• “Omicron on the Move” Dr. Peter McCullough on The McCullough Report podcast of December 6, 2021. 

• “Ivermectin in Japan” Dr. John Campbell on his podcast, November 23, 2021. He shows the data that seems to show cases plummeting in Japan 12 days after Ivermectin was allowed openly as a treatment. News outlets seem to be assuming this is mere coincidence. 

• “UK, 50% Omicron Now” Dr. John Campbell on his podcast, December 13, 2021. https://youtu.be/XzrG3Odgf28 While noting the sharp rise in cases in the UK (and where the UK is today, the US is likely to be in January), he offers update from South Africa, where they have passed three weeks, showing only mild cases, recovery in 3-5 days, regardless of age or vaccine status; there isn’t a later cytokine storm, as some feared might come.