Immunology minus 101

The human immune system is a marvellous thing. Marvellous and insanely complex. Even bacteria have an immune ‘system’ - they can mount defences against infection.

Here’s an electron micrograph of a bacterium under attack by a bacteriophage

This particular bacteriophage, this virus, looks like a lunar landing module. It clamps on to the surface of the bacterium with its ‘landing’ legs. I’m not sure what happens next. Either a ruddy great spike comes out of the body and drills through the bacterial surface, or it ‘squats’ on the surface and the body spike gets pushed through that way. Dunno - but either way the viral genetic material gets in and tries to take over the bacterium’s own molecular machinery. It repurposes the bacterial protein ‘factories’ to manufacture more virus.

It’s a freaky little bugger and more than a little scary. This virus isn’t ‘alive’ - it’s just a nanomachine.

My understanding of the human immune system (HIS) is almost non-existent, but I think there are some broad-brush principles that can be gleaned. Perhaps.

If anyone has any recommendations for some good books or other resources where I can learn a bit more, I’d appreciate that. Much of what I think I know about the HIS has been gained from listening to various experts try to explain what’s going on in simple terms. Whilst this is great, and I’m thankful for their insights, I also know that the simple models can only take you so far.

I can do a half decent job of ‘explaining’ quantum mechanics to an interested non-technical person, but that ‘explanation’ will fall apart when challenged too closely by an expert.

With these cautionary words firmly in mind, let’s see what we might be able to figure out. Well, maybe not ‘figure out’ but at least arrive at speculative positions that might be correct, or pertinent questions to ask.

Whilst there are still lots of things we don’t know in precise detail, it is possible that complex multicellular life evolved because of an ‘infection’. The mitochondria so essential for providing the energy for the processes of complex life share several traits that are bacterial in origin. For some reason, somehow, a single-celled organism subsumed a bacterium into itself (either by infection or some other process) and entered into a symbiotic relationship with it one and a half billion years ago (estimates vary), and the rest, as they say, is history.

Our DNA also clearly contains stretches of viral DNA and it’s not clear what role, if any, this might have had to play in the subsequent development of complex life, or the development of life itself.

So, even at that early stage in the development of complex life there was a battle to fight off ‘infection’. Immune systems have been in play for a very long time.

The important thing to note, then, is that evolution has fine-tuned and developed ever more complex responses to infection in this never-ending battle. It has ‘engineered’ in humans an incredible, and adaptive, system for defence against all the little buggers, alive or just nanomachines, that might harm us.

Vaccination seems like a great idea when expressed in simple terms. You expose your body to a ‘safe’ version of a pathogen so that it learns how to mount a defence against it. When the real thing comes along your body is already primed to respond and can do so quickly, thus preventing an infection taking hold and running out of control.

It probably is a great idea, but it also means we’re frigging about with a system that has been exquisitely honed over billions of years and that’s risky. It’s why any new vaccine needs to go through extensive, and lengthy, trials. Or they ought to. The empirical data gained, if successful, gives us some confidence that we haven’t frigged things up too much. It ‘fills in the gaps’ of our theoretical understanding, in a sense.

It’s one of the reasons I was very hesitant to get the covid ‘vaccines’. Whilst some testing was done, there’s simply no way that it was sufficient given the short time scale. Corners had to be cut. The vaccine proponents will try to tell you otherwise, but they are lying or being disingenuous. And we know they fucked things up (where were the studies showing how the mRNA and subsequent spike distributed itself around the body, for example?).

The point here is that when you’re buggering about with our finely-honed defence mechanisms you need more caution, not less. But the US has just given the green light for new covid vaccines to be deployed without any clinical trials at all. If you know any words stronger than ‘batshit insane’ I’d appreciate them - because it’s hard to express my sense of disbelief at this decision in an adequate way.

The hubris of the medical profession knows no bounds, it seems. Doctors speak with unctuous certainty about a complex system that is many, many orders of magnitude more complex than the weather - and we know just how well all of the ‘climate change’ models work don’t we?

In physics and maths, the differential equation x'(t) = x(t) is important. The equation is asking the question : what function stays the same when I differentiate it? I do the mathematical operation known as ‘differentiation’ on something, and that something stays the same. What is that something?

The answer, up to an irrelevant multiplicative constant, is the exponential function exp(t). We say that the solution can be expressed in closed form, which is just a fancy way of saying we can write a nice easily understood function as our answer.

Now consider just three objects interacting gravitationally with one another. Each object is exerting a gravitational pull on the others. This cannot be solved in ‘closed form’ - indeed, the solutions for the more generalized n-body problem are chaotic for most initial conditions. So, we struggle to properly solve the simple problem of just 3 things interacting via a single force, gravity. The best we can do is to chuck a computer at it.

And we think we understand the human immune system well enough, and can predict its response with complete confidence, when it comes to something like a vaccine?

I’m not saying that vaccines are always going to cause more harm than benefit, I’m saying that we do need to be bloody careful before we inject some lab-generated goo into the arms of billions of people. And we need to stop pretending that we know what the fuck is going on in full detail. Because we don’t.

You can tell the ‘experts’ don’t have a clue, or that they are lying, when they make statements to the effect that the unvaccinated are driving the evolution of vaccine-resistant variants. This is such unconscionable nonsense it’s hard to know where to begin.

To understand why it’s nonsense we have to understand how evolution works. Evolution is not a ‘theory’, it’s a consequence of certain conditions being in place. First of all we have to have reproduction that occasionally goes ‘wrong’ (mutation is not the only way evolutionary change can happen as we’ve seen with the endosymbiotic example of mitochondria above). These mutations, or changes, have to (a) be beneficial, to give some subsequent reproductive advantage and (b) be heritable.

Also important is that we have ‘just enough’ error detection and correction mechanisms. Too little and mutations run riot - and most mutations are either neutral or harmful. Too much and the adaptive response to a changing environment is too restricted. Evolution will have shaped the level of error correction and detection to be ‘just right’.

An organism finds itself in an ‘environment’ which is just a shorthand word for anything that can affect reproductive success, and its offspring might have a variation that makes it better-adapted to that particular environment, to give it an edge in its subsequent reproductive success. If that variation then gets passed onto the next generation it is easy to see that this variant organism will out-compete the original and eventually dominate.

When a virus is replicating inside a human host, that host IS the environment for the virus. If little replication is happening, if the body’s defences are working well, then there are fewer chances for successful mutations to take hold. It’s in infected people whose immune systems are not working as effectively that we’re going to see exponentially more virus being produced, and therefore a higher chance of a successful variant being produced.

In these hosts, the hosts with weaker immune defences, the virus has many more chances to ‘figure out’ (through this evolutionary mechanism) a variant that is better at evading the immune response. It’s just a numbers game really. More viral replication equals a greater chance of producing a successful variant.

Let’s consider two island nations; Jabbala and Unjabbala. The island folk of Jabbala hate the residents of Unjabbala and so there’s no interaction between the two islands. One year there is an outbreak of a new(ish) virus and the WHO (Wonky Health Overlords) declares an emergency.

The people of Jabbala get vaxxed up with this rushed-out goo that, they have been told, will protect them. The Unjabbalans are suspicious and decide not to become human porcupines.

If the goo actually does what is supposed to and provide an immune response that is close to the immune response a natural infection generates and is successful at halting the outbreak, then variants will most likely be generated on Unjabbala. These variants will be better at evading natural immunity and vaccinal immunity - because the two are very similar in this instance. In this instance we could legitimately say that the unvaxxed Unjabbalans are driving the evolution of vaccine-resistant variants, but it’s only because there’s not much daylight between vaccine-induced immunity and infection-acquired immunity..

However, this is not at all like what we have with the covid ‘vaccines’. Here we have some goo that is not good at preventing infection at all. It doesn’t really stimulate the front-line defences, the mucosal immune response, all that well. And so the virus can replicate quite nicely in the nose and throat. When things get more serious and the infection spreads further, the body finally realises there’s a ton of spike around and the goo-generated immune response kicks in - which probably accounts for the (temporary) reduction in symptom severity that is seen in those who survived the initial 2-3 weeks where they were more vulnerable to covid. Severe symptoms occur when the virus has progressed beyond the nose and throat stage.

A further difference is that the goo-induced immunity is wholly centred around the protein spike (it’s a bit like thinking that racism is everywhere and in everything and the only thing that’s important). Natural infection acquired immunity takes a more balanced view and builds defences against the whole virus.

So, if we re-examine what happens on Jabbala and Unjabbala with this goo, things are very different now. On Unjabbala we have a virus replication that might be generating variants that are a bit better at evading infection-acquired immunity. On Jabbala, however, the virus is now seeing an entirely different environment. Here the virus is seeing an immunity that has been generated in response to just one part of it, the spike. That wouldn’t be a problem IF, when infected, the Jabbalans also produced the same naturally occurring immune response of the Unjabbalans. We’d have ‘normal’ plus ‘shit ton of spike response’.

It also wouldn’t be a problem if the ‘shit ton of spike response’ was sterilizing. If it actually worked as a vaccine and not some glorified prophylactic. If it’s not sterilizing then the virus is replicating away in its hosts and potentially generating variants that are better surviving in the Jabbalan environment.

The long and short of it is that the virus on Jabbala is seeing a very different environment than that of the virus on Unjabbala - because goo-acquired immunity is very different from infection-acquired immunity. What would be the reason for evolution to select a variant on Unjabbala that has an advantage in the entirely different environment of Jabbala? It would only do so if that variant ALSO had an advantage on Unjabbala.

The purpose of all of this long-winded broad-brush evolutionary waffle is to arrive at the point where, based on simple evolutionary first principles, we are now armed with some pertinent questions and predictions. If this evolutionary ‘overview’ is broadly correct then we can, for example, infer that because covid goo-immunity is not equivalent to infection-acquired plus shit ton of spike immunity, the vaccine evading variants are not being generated by the Unjabbalans. Because the data is showing that the jabbed are more susceptible to infection, and re-infection, it is clear that the jabbed and unjabbed represent very different environments for the virus. The basic evolutionary picture then tells us that it isn’t the unjabbed driving the generation of goo-resistant variants.

How many words do I actually need to say the equivalent of : people who do not take antibiotics are not responsible for the evolution of antibiotic-resistant bacterial strains?

And here’s another thing we can surmise. Because we’re seeing more susceptibility in the jabbed we can infer that the immunity the goo produces is not simply ‘natural’ plus ‘spike’. The goo is suppressing the natural immune response in some way. Which leads us to the same conclusion; we’re not seeing the evolution of acquired-immunity resistant variants, we’re seeing the evolution of vaccine-resistant variants. This means that the variants are being produced on Jabbala.

There are other serious questions too. Pretty much everything in the human body works because we have an incredibly finely-tuned system of feedback and control mechanisms. It’s a delicate balance that, in healthy people who look after themselves, works beautifully. Evolution has gifted us this extraordinary balance. With a little extra help from better nutrition, the reduction in natural predation, and better hygiene, humans have been living longer and longer, on average. And yes, some medical advances have helped us a lot too.

The problem when it comes to the covid goo is that evolution did not see fit to provide us with an immune mechanism that generates a massive immune response to just one part of a virus. Why not? If this is a ‘better’ response to infection, then why was it not selected for by evolution? Could there be other factors at play here other than simply producing a shit ton of antibodies to one specific part of a virus? What control and feedback mechanisms are we throwing out of whack when we create such an unbalanced and artificial immune response via vaccination?

Well, one thing that seems to going disastrously wrong is the issue of Original Antigenic Sin, or immune imprinting - call it what you will. It’s probably an evolutionary feature also - the body ‘learns’ a particular response that seemed to work well before, and so rather than wasting resources on going through the whole process again when a variation to a previous pathogen comes along - it just does what worked before. This sounds very much like infection-acquired immunity and mostly it works really well - except that it can, occasionally, go horribly wrong. A new variation arises that evades much of the previous immunity and the body gets itself stuck in a rut. It gets fixated on producing the old, now inadequate, response.

Problems with OAS seem to occur, naturally, quite rarely. If it wasn’t rare we would have probably evolved a slightly different immune system and there’d be more mechanisms to detect a dangerous new variation - but it’s a trade off. It would probably mean that our immune response to pathogens where OAS is not a problem would be sub-optimal if we had extra mechanisms in place to detect and deal with OAS.

When you swamp your body with one particular immune response via vaccination do we know whether this is making OAS more likely? Do we understand all of the feedback and control mechanisms well enough to be confident in our predictions?

Obviously not.

There’s (obviously) far too much I don’t understand about the HIS. It’s a wondrous and complex beastie. I’ve tried to read the posts of Geert Vanden Bossche, but he might as well be speaking Klingon. This is not a criticism. It’s a reflection of the state of my own ignorance and the massive complexity of the human immune response.

I’m pretty confident I’ve grasped the essentials of evolution. Whether I’ve applied those essentials correctly here is something I’m less confident about, but trying to address complex problems by looking at overarching principles is a worthwhile thing to do and can, as I hope I’ve been able to demonstrate, lead to useful pointers and questions.

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