The Market Ticker
Rss Icon RSS available
Fact: There is no immunity or protection against The Law of Scoreboards.
Did you know: What the media does NOT want you to read is at https://market-ticker.org/nad.
You are not signed on; if you are a visitor please register for a free account!
The Market Ticker Single Post Display (Show in context)
Top Login FAQ Register Clear Cookie
User Info The West's Obituary; entered at 2021-02-16 14:03:03
Tickerguy
Posts: 203306
Registered: 2007-06-26
The natural course of mutation @Glassmaker is for a virus to become more-transmissible and less-virulent.

Why? Simple math. A virus can't think but it only gets one crack at you among associated mutated types that your immune system still recognizes as "one". The more virulent the more and earlier other humans will shun you; this is a negative pressure on spreading. The more-transmissible the easier it spreads. The more-transmissible and less-virulent serotypes thus "win" the natural selection battle simply on the math.

Even smallpox, the scourge of the world, was of this type. Further, there was pre-existing immunity and thus partial resistance in most Europeans -- and almost ZERO in those living on the North and South American continents. Thus the first "bioweapons" (blankets.)

If you engineer a virus to "key" on a given antibody and nail anyone who has it with ADE then if you don't have that antibody you don't get sick -- or at least not very sick. Over time as it shifts its targeting will become less-precise and less virulent at the same time.

If the distinction in the antibody targeted and those in your population is significant enough the odds of said mutations shifting to that which will materially harm those with your antibody titers is very close to zero and if it happens by the time it gets there it will not be virulent enough to kill you since the laws of natural selection still apply.

On the other hand if you try to vaccinate your population against an "evil" strain you then unleash on someone else you're taking a terrible risk because if your vaccination does not RELIABLY produce sterilizing immunity you REVERSE the natural mutation chain and potentiate MORE virulent strains. This has a VERY high risk of screwing your population, which is why thus far that sort of research has been a dead end.

We have NEVER IN HUMAN HISTORY found a reliable genotype or antibody "keying" mechanism that we could target a bioweapon against. Our guys (and I assume everyone else too for obvious reasons) has been looking for that on a "forever" basis and simply never found it.

Now we've literally GIVEN it away to the world and are madly tagging our population with it.

IF an adversary figures out how to exploit that we're fucked.
2021-02-16 14:03:03