Thank Karen for your double mutant coronavirus?

by philg

After seeing “‘Double Mutant’ Coronavirus Variant Detected in San Francisco” (US News) and similar headlines, I called up a medical school professor friend to ask a variant of my September question: When we wear masks, does the coronavirus thank us for our service?

In that September article, I pointed out that a non-evolving virus is better off if masks don’t work:

Coronavirus is thankful when we wear masks because our misplaced faith in masks leads us to delay taking effective action against the virus, e.g., building shade structures and holding school outdoors (changing the calendar in northern states so that the school year is during the warm months), decluttering retail stores, etc.

[Update: my new example of why faith in masks spreads coronavirus… the government having told them that a bandana (which, in fact, is not worn) is highly effective PPE, people are happy to pack themselves cheek-to-cheek in a 100% full airliner. If “scientists” hadn’t sold the public on masks, it wouldn’t be legal for airlines to operate 100% full flights (flown by non-white-males) and consumers wouldn’t want to get on such a flight. Without faith in masks, the coronanxious would stay home, which is where they can actually be safe.]

and also that coronavirus might be better off if masks do work and people wear them correctly and consistently:

Consider what happens in an unmasked “give the finger to the virus” population, such as Sweden. The virus flourishes for about three months and then fails. Compare to the slow burn of the mostly-masked U.S. and the not-fade-away of completely-masked France…

Maybe the masks protect enough people that the virus can sustain itself at a low-to-medium boil. Especially in a geographically large area in which epidemics have been on different schedules, the virus keeps finding mask-protected populations to infect. The virus stays topmost in our minds, our hearts, and our media. Shouldn’t coronavirus then thank us for our service to it?

What about an evolving coronavirus, which is what we plainly have now? If we’d let the virus rage in the spring of 2020, at this point there wouldn’t be any humans left without antibodies to the not-Chinese Wuhan edition of the virus. If we assume that shutdowns and masks work, the result is that there are always going to be pockets of humans with no resistance and among whom a mini- or maxi-plague can rage. Isn’t that situation more conducive to mutations than if we’d gotten it all over with in spring 2020 and swept up?

I ran this question by my medical school professor friend. “Your thinking would have been conventional in epidemiology through 2019,” he responded, “but is unacceptable today. Another way to look at this is that humans and the virus, without these interventions into the ecosystem, would have coevolved. Think about what happens when people try to manage forests, putting out fires as best they can. Mostly what they accomplish is preserving a tremendous amount of fuel for a fire that will far exceed their ability to control.“

So… if you get infected with one of these double- or triple-mutant viruses after your vaccination, thank your nearest Shutdown Karen?

(Speaking of vaccinations, is the above irrelevant now that vaccines exist against the pre-mutation virus? I don’t think so. There are a lot of countries that are unlikely to achieve high vaccination rates. Even if the vaccines were guaranteed risk-free in a letter from God, why would people who live in countries with low COVID death rates, e.g., in Sub-Saharan Africa (map), want to go to the effort, inconvenience, and expense of getting it? Due to travel restrictions, folks from these countries have been mostly excluded from Europe and the U.S. so they wouldn’t have gotten exposure to the original non-Chinese Wuhan version of the virus. So the mutant coronavirus can always find a naïve population in which to multiply happily and we will have our travel shutdown to thank for that.)

Evidence against the above hypothesis… Brazil. The country did have a raging plague, unmitigated by orders from the president, and now is home to variants. On the third hand, Brazil was not, in fact, unmasked and open like Sweden. The president didn’t lock down the country, but the legislature and state governors were free to order masks, close schools, and generally lock things down. (example) In fact, lockdowns were so severe that researchers trying to obtain blood samples in May and June 2020 for antibody tests often couldn’t get them. (Lancet article: “By contrast with the federal government, most state governors and city mayors enforced closure of schools, shops, and non-essential services, and recommended the use of face masks.”)

Evidence for the above hypothesis… Sweden, yet again! The Swedes let the plague rage in the spring and it disappeared for the summer (i.e., the Swedes weren’t continuously incubating coronavirus) only to reappear in late November, just as the Swedish MD/PhDs said that it would. There is no “Stockholm variant” or “Swedish variant” of the coronavirus. The fearsome variants are all coming from Church of Shutdown countries: UK, South Africa, and Brazil (as noted above, a Church of Shutdown nation despite a heretic being president). From the Wikipedia page on the South Africa lockdown:

… all gatherings except for funerals were prohibited. Restaurants, taverns, bottle stores and all other stores not selling essential goods were to close during the lockdown period. [unlike in Maskachusetts where alcohol and marijuana were “essential”!] Schools, already closed a week before the lockdown period, will not reopen until after the lockdown. Non-exempt people are only allowed to leave their homes during this period to access health services, collect social grants, attend small funerals (no more than 50 people) and shop for essential goods. … South Africans were ordered not to take their dogs for a walk during the lockdown, though they may walk them around their house or apartment building

All borders of the country are closed during the lockdown, except for designated ports of entry for the transportation of fuel, cargo, and goods. International and domestic passenger flights are prohibited, except for flights authorised by the Ministry of Transport, for the evacuation of South African nationals in foreign countries, and for certain repatriations

Enforced by the military, this turned out to be the perfect environment for breeding a variant.

Separately, perhaps because I have so often used my phone from the Harvard Medical School campus, Facebook seems to think that I am a physician. Here’s an ad that the 68,000 folks at the American Medical Student Association wanted me to see:

They will teach me how to turn a “pregnant person” (remember that men can be pregnant) into a not-pregnant person via pills. As Uncle Joe Biden said, “If you don’t love abortion, you ain’t a doctor”? Separately, why does the physician have lighter skin than the patient? Isn’t this ad perpetuating stereotypes? Why not go all-in and show the darker-skinned patient with Medicaid and EBT cards?

Also in recent medical school news… “A Medical Student Questioned Microaggressions. UVA Branded Him a Threat and Banished Him from Campus.” (Reason):

“Thank you for your presentation,” said [Kieran] Bhattacharya, according to an audio recording of the event. “I had a few questions, just to clarify your definition of microaggressions. Is it a requirement, to be a victim of microaggression, that you are a member of a marginalized group?”

Adams replied that it wasn’t a requirement.

Bhattacharya suggested that this was contradictory, since a slide in her presentation had defined microaggressions as negative interactions with members of marginalized groups.

As in the former Soviet Union, at University of Virginia dissent is a sign of mental illness:

Meanwhile, the Academic Standards and Achievement Committee met to to discuss the concern card. This committee voted to send Bhattacharya a written reminder to “show mutual respect” to faculty members and “express yourself appropriately.” The committee also suggested that he get counseling.

On November 26, this suggestion became a mandate: The student was informed that he must be evaluated by psychological services before returning to classes.

The author of Medical School 2020 went through a lot of these, but wisely kept his own counsel!

Related:

14 thoughts on “Thank Karen for your double mutant coronavirus?”

  1. The story about Kieran Bhattacharya’s persecution by the UVA administration is sobering.

    Upon further reflection, Kieran should have admitted Haven Monahan gave him bad advice the day he debated Frau Professor Doctor Adams.

  2. The virus in Sweden didn’t “fail” after 3 months. Nor after the next “3 months”.

  3. Evolve is a big world for virus mutations. It is more applicable to dog breed changes IMHO. Definitely not what theory of evolution means under term evolved. Mutation is the right word, not evolve here. Many people suspect and former CDC head along with Nobel laureate Luc Montagnier of HIV discovery fame are convinced that the virus came from the lab. That could explain easy mutability: some unstable contraption of gene engineering escaped from the lab and started mutate away.

    • https://www.historyofvaccines.org/content/articles/viruses-and-evolution is from 2018 and therefore not potentially subject to wishful thinking regarding coronavirus. Here are some excerpts…

      Though viruses aren’t technically living – they need a host organism in order to reproduce – they are subject to evolutionary pressures.

      Below we look at two special cases in viral evolution: how evolution occurs in influenza viruses and in the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV, the virus that causes AIDS). Both of these viruses are RNA viruses, meaning that their genetic material is encoded in RNA, not DNA. DNA is a more stable molecule than RNA, and DNA viruses have a proofreading check as part of their reproductive process. They manage to use the host cell to verify viral DNA replication. If the virus makes a mistake in copying the DNA, the host cell can often correct the mistake. DNA viruses, therefore, do not change, or mutate, much. RNA, however, is an unstable molecule, and RNA viruses don’t have a built-in proofreading step in their replication. Mistakes in copying RNA happen frequently, and the host cell does not correct these mistakes. RNA virus mutations are frequent and can have important consequences for their hosts.

      The rapid rate of HIV evolution has important consequences. HIV can quickly develop resistance to anti-HIV drugs. Additionally, targeting a vaccine to a rapidly changing virus is challenging. To date, researchers have developed several candidate HIV vaccines, but none has performed well enough in clinical trials to warrant licensure.

    • Looks like here “evolve” is used in place of word “mutate” in a sense of evolutionary biology word usage. This info at https://www.historyofvaccines.org/content/articles/viruses-and-evolution is about what I remember from my high school biology class from pre – IBM PC era. I would be lucky to get C- with this back on my HS biology test. I recall I could calculate chromosomal inheritance and other staff that I forgot long time ago for A. Hope that more detailed info on coronavirus is available.
      I would guess that when Luc Montagnier finds that COVID-19 causing coronavirus had HIV part attached in the lab we should examine his claim in detail and transparently.
      One of the comments on this blog said that Russian Sputnik vaccine is a DNA vaccine. I guess it was wrong to assert that Sputnik is DNA vaccine. Is it traditional vaccine made of weakened virus? If yes we should allow it there in the USA as several rich countries already bought it.

    • https://www.ibtimes.sg/nobel-winning-scientist-who-co-discovered-hiv-claims-novel-coronavirus-was-made-wuhans-lab-43277
      “Luc Montagnier, a Nobel winning French professor who co-discovered HIV (Human Immunodeficiency Virus) thinks that the novel coronavirus came from a lab even though there is a major science-backed narrative that it was not made in a lab.

      His claim received criticism from various quarters, including colleagues. According to the Nobel laureate, the new ‘SARS-CoV-2’ virus came as a resultant in attempting to manufacture a vaccine for the AIDS virus, which got accidentally released, he said in a podcast by Pourquoi Docteur and also in a TV interview on Friday.

      Prof. Montagnier says there were some elements of HIV present in the genome of the novel coronavirus that includes suspect of elements of malaria germ too, reported Agence France Presse. This may fall into the category of another conspiracy theory, to which he replied, “Conspirators are the opposite camp, hiding the truth”

      Wuhan lab leaked it
      Wuhan National Biosafety Laboratory, he said, was specialized in coronaviruses since the 2000s and have expertise in the area. To insert HIV genetic sequence into coronavirus genome requires molecular tools and can be done in a laboratory.

      However Montagnier said, “Nature does not accept any molecular tinkering.” Nature would eliminate any unnatural changes made even if nothing [like a vaccine] is done and he added that things would get better after many deaths. Also, the Nobel laureate said that the elements added to the virus could be removes with “waves,” that is based on a theory which got mocked in the past.

      Criticism
      Étienne Simon-Lorière, a virologist from Institut Pasteur in Paris, said to AFP that the claim didn’t make sense as there were very small elements found in other coronaviruses too. Some genome pieces looked like genetic material of plants and bacteria too! He explained a logic, “If we take a word from a book and it looks like another word, can we say that one has copied from the other? This is absurd!”

      Just in case you don’t know. Dr Montagnier has been rolling downhill incredibly fast in the last few years. From baselessly defending homeopathy to becoming an antivaxxer. Whatever he says, just don’t believe him. https://t.co/omqZucsz8b

      — Juan Carlos Gabaldon (@JuanCGabaldon) April 18, 2020

      He also rubbished the claim that nature would get rid of foreign elements as false.

      However, Simon Lorière, did not comment on Montagnier’s “waves” theory. Prof Montagnier received the 2008 Nobel Prize in Medicine for co-identifying HIV that causes AIDS. Nature reports that Wuhan’s virology lab got assistance from France, a part of 2004 agreement of co-operation to prevent and control infectious diseases which emerged. The lab’s construction was finished in 2014.”

    • LSI: Whether coronaplague started in a lab or in nature, it’s still an RNA virus and will mutate then either do better or worse depending on the mutation, right? If the genetic code changes slightly from generation to generation and some are better fit to circumstances than others, isn’t that evolution?

      (i.e., viruses that are created in laboratories don’t have any special protection from mutation, do they?)

    • Philip, it is not evolution in evolutionary theory sense: i.e. coronavirus does not grow fins or wings as result of genetic mutations. Nothing should stop it to evolve as it multiples often and passes through generations quickly, But it remains coronavirus, just adopts to new mutations. evolutionary theory assumes corornavirus developing into radical new specie, at least some subset of it.

    • @Ivan, I am fine with term of “viral evolution” in sense related to virus mutations but in the past entries in this blog it was confused with evolution of species . This is one of the language things: giving words new meaning distinct from the original and substituting original non provable notion labeled by original meaning of the word with second, which signifies something obvious. Then using new meaning of the world and obviousness of what it describes to support original, non provable hypothesis for which the word was originally appropriated.

  4. > Speaking of vaccinations…

    …something peculiar is going on in that vaccination champion, Israel. An update to “Why is All-Cause Mortality Increasing?” says “The latest data provided by the Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics … confirms a substantial increase in deaths in weeks 9 and 10” (i.e. the first half of March) among those aged 65+.

    The graph under “Comparison: Decrease in covid deaths” is also interesting, showing no apparent benefit from vaccinations in terms of reducing covid-tagged deaths. (I think the covid tag is highly suspect but maybe valid for comparisons over time within the same country.)

  5. @Philg:

    > Think about what happens when people try to manage forests, putting out fires as best they can. Mostly what they accomplish is preserving a tremendous amount of fuel for a fire that will far exceed their ability to control.

    It appears that your MD friend has bought into the Gavin Newsom Theory of Forest Management and abandoned the Native American/Boy Scouts USA wisdom of selective burning and proper forest management to establish firebreaks and reduce the amount of fuel. He is the Governor of California, after all. In a thread from a long time ago, this has become the “accepted wisdom” in large part because it is almost impossible to get a permit to do a selective burn in places like California because of opposition from the Sierra Club, lawyers, and other environmental groups. Now an MD has internalized the shorthand as: “It doesn’t work.”

    Somewhat related: I got my 2nd Pfizer shot two days ago, and from a write up I did elsewhere:

    “It took nearly a half-hour to burn through my section of the line, versus less than 5 minutes on my first visit. None of the workers in the parking lot, including the Town police, were enforcing any kind of social distancing in the line. As a result, people were standing just a couple of feet apart or even less, and although everyone was masked, it seemed mighty strange after all this time of having SD enforced in any official setting I’ve been to. The lack of distancing made it easy to overhear the conversation between Anime Girl and Big Fat Smelly Dude behind me, for instance….

    …There was no hand-sanitization. The dispensers were all empty and nobody was using hand sanitizer. This makes some sense, I guess, due to the recent CDC guidelines ending the sanitization theatre. But as Philip Greenspun has observed many times in the past year, wearing masks by themselves of varying-to-no effectiveness seems to inure and embolden people and convince them of their own imperviousness to the virus, so they slack off the social distancing, at least partially defeating the purpose of wearing the masks. I found it fascinating that a vaccination station serving a lot of what looked like older and frailer people did nothing to to enforce SD.”

    Finally, on “FDA Approved” versus “Emergency Use” and the subject of whether we’re all part of a big experiment in genetics and vaccine #Science:

    “Also, I should note that once again, I was required to sign the “Emergency Use Authorization” consent form prior to receiving the shot. The NP explained the form, and I said:
    Me: “Thank you for doing that. You know, in a lot of online discussions, there is some confusion about these vaccines. They were not “Approved” by the FDA, they’re emergency use.”
    Her: “Yes, that’s right, and a lot of people don’t know.”
    Me: “There’s a lot of bullshit out there online…pardon my French.”
    Her: “Oh, don’t worry, I’m a sailor, and yes there is.”

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