Why
Everyone was Wrong
The
Coronavirus is Slowly Retreating
by Beda M
Stadler
This is not an
accusation, but a ruthless taking stock [of the current
situation].
I could slap myself, because I looked at Sars-CoV2-
way too long with panic. I am also somewhat annoyed with many of
my immunology colleagues who so far have left the discussion
about
COVID-19
to virologist and epidemiologist.
I feel it is
time to criticise some of the main and completely wrong public
statements about this virus.
Firstly, it was wrong to claim that this virus was novel.
Secondly, It was even more wrong to claim that the population
would not already have some immunity against this virus.
Thirdly, it was the crowning of
stupidity to claim that someone
could have Covid-19 without any symptoms at all or even to pass
the disease along without showing any symptoms whatsoever.
But let's look at this one by one.
1. A new virus?
At the end of 2019 a coronavirus, which was considered novel,
was detected in China.
When the gene sequence, i.e. the
blueprint of this virus, was identified and was given a similar
name to the 2002 identified Sars, i.e. Sars-CoV-2, we should
have already asked ourselves then how far [this virus] is
related to other coronaviruses, which can make human beings
sick.
But no, instead we discussed from which animal as part of
a Chinese menu the virus might have sprung.
In the meantime,
however, many more people believe the Chinese were so stupid as
to release this virus upon themselves in their own country.
Now
that we're talking about developing a vaccine against the virus,
we suddenly see studies which show that this so-called novel
virus is very strongly related to Sars-1 as well as other beta-coronaviruses
which make us suffer every year in the form of colds.
Apart from
the pure homologies in the sequence between the various coronaviruses which can make people sick, [scientists] currently
work on identifying a number of areas on the virus in the same
way as human immune cells identify them.
This is no longer about
the genetic relationship, but about how our immune system sees
this virus, i.e. which parts of other coronaviruses could
potentially be used in a vaccine.
So:
Sars-Cov-2 isn't all that new, but merely
a seasonal cold
virus that mutated and disappears in summer, as all cold viruses
do - which is what we're observing globally right now.
Flu
viruses mutate significantly more, by the way, and nobody would
ever claim that a new flu virus strain was completely novel.
Many veterinary doctors were therefore annoyed by this claim of
novelty, as they have been vaccinating cats, dogs, pigs, and
cows for years against coronaviruses.
2. The fairy tale of no immunity
From the World Health Organization (WHO) to every
Facebook-virologist (sic),
everyone claimed this virus was particularly dangerous, because
there was no immunity against it, because it was a novel virus.
Even
Anthony Fauci, the most important advisor to the
Trump
administration noted at the beginning at every public appearance
that the danger of the virus lay in the fact that there was no
immunity against it.
Tony and I often sat next to each other at
immunology seminars at the National Institute of Health in
Bethesda in the US, because we worked in related fields back
then. So for a while I was pretty uncritical of his statements,
since he was a respectable colleague of mine.
The penny dropped
only when I realized that the first commercially available
antibody test [for Sars-CoV-2] was put together from an old
antibody test that was meant to detect
Sars-1.
This kind of test
evaluates if there are antibodies in someone's blood and if they
came about through an early fight against the virus.
[Scientists] even extracted antibodies from a llama that would
detect Sars-1, Sars-CoV-2, and even the Mers virus. It also
became known that Sars-CoV-2 had a less significant impact in
areas in China where Sars-1 had previously raged.
This is clear
evidence urgently suggesting that our immune system considers
Sars-1 and Sars-Cov-2 at least partially identical and that one
virus could probably protect us from the other.
That's when I realized that the entire world simply claimed that
there was no immunity, but in reality, nobody had a test ready
to prove such a statement. That wasn't science, but pure
speculation based on a gut feeling that was then parroted by
everyone.
To this day there isn't a single antibody test that
can describe all possible immunological situations, such as:
if
someone is immune, since when, what the neutralizing antibodies
are targeting and how many structures exist on other
coronaviruses that can equally lead to immunity.
In mid-April, work was published by the group of
Andreas Thiel
at the Charité Berlin, a paper (Presence
of SARS-CoV-2-reactive T-cells in COVID-19 patients and healthy
donors) with 30 authors, amongst them the
virologist Christian Drosten.
It showed that in 34 % of people
in Berlin who had never been in contact with the Sars-CoV-2
virus showed nonetheless T-cell immunity against it (T-cell
immunity is a different kind of immune reaction, see below).
This means that our T-cells, i.e. white blood cells, detect
common structures appearing on Sars-CoV-2 and regular cold
viruses and therefore combat both of them.
A study by
John P.A. Ioannidis
of Stanford University - according
to the Einstein Foundation in Berlin one of the world's ten most
cited scientists - showed that immunity against Sars-Cov-2,
measured in the form of antibodies, is much higher than
previously thought.
Ioannidis is certainly not a
conspiracy
theorist who just wants to swim against the stream; nontheless
he is now being criticized, because the antibody tests used were
not extremely precise.
With that, his critics admit that they do
not have such tests yet.
And aside, John P.A. Ioannidis is such a
scientific heavy-weight that all German virologists combined are
a light-weight in comparison.
3. The failure of modellers
Epidemiologist also fell for the myth that there was no immunity
in the population.
They also didn't want to believe that
coronaviruses were seasonal cold viruses that would disappear in
summer. Otherwise their curve models would have looked
differently.
When the initial worst case scenarios didn't come
true anywhere, some now still cling to models predicting a
second wave.
Let's leave them their hopes:
I've never seen a
scientific branch that manoeuvred itself so much into the
offside.
I have also not yet understood why epidemiologists were
so much more interested in the number of deaths, rather than in
the numbers that could be saved.
4. Immunology of common sense
As an immunologist I trust a biological model, namely that of
the human organism, which has built a tried and tested, adaptive
immune system.
At the end of February, driving home from the
recording of [a Swiss political TV debate show], I mentioned to
Daniel Koch [former head of the Swiss federal section "Communicable Diseases" of the Federal Office of Public Health]
that I suspected,
there was a general immunity in the population
against Sars-Cov-2.
He argued against my view.
I later defended
him anyway, when he said that children were not a driving factor
in the spread of the pandemic.
He suspected that children didn't
have a receptor for the virus, which is of course nonsense.
Still, we had to admit that his observations were correct.
But
the fact that every scientist attacked him afterwards and asked
for studies to prove his point, was somewhat ironic.
Nobody
asked for studies to prove that people in certain at-risk groups
were dying.
When the first statistics from China and later
worldwide data showed the same trend, that is to say that almost
no children under ten years old got sick, everyone should have
made the argument that children clearly have to be immune.
For
every other disease that doesn't afflict a certain group of
people, we would come to the conclusion that that group is
immune.
When people are sadly dying in a retirement home, but in
the same place other pensioners with the same risk factors are
left entirely unharmed, we should also conclude that they were
presumably immune.
But this common sense seems to have eluded many, let's call them
"immunity deniers" just for fun.
This new breed of deniers had
to observe that the majority of people who tested positive for
this virus, i.e. the virus was present in their throats, did not
get sick.
The term "silent carriers" was conjured out of a hat
and it was claimed that one could be sick without having
symptoms. Wouldn't that be something!
If this principle from now
on gets naturalised into the realm of medicine, health insurers
would really have a problem, but also teachers whose students
could now claim to have whatever disease to skip school, if at
the end of the day one didn't need symptoms anymore to be sick.
The next joke that some virologists shared was,
the claim that
those who were sick without symptoms could still spread the
virus to other people.
The "healthy" sick would have so much of
the virus in their throats that a normal conversation between
two people would be enough for the "healthy one" to infect the
other healthy one.
At this point we have to dissect what is
happening here:
If a virus is growing anywhere in the body, also
in the throat, it means that human cells decease.
When [human]
cells decease, the immune system is alerted immediately and an
infection is caused.
One of five cardinal symptoms of an
infection is pain.
It is understandable that those afflicted by
Covid-19 might not remember that initial scratchy throat and
then go on to claim that they didn't have any symptoms just a
few days ago.
But for doctors and virologists to twist this into
a story of "healthy" sick people, which stokes panic and was
often given as a reason for stricter
lockdown measures, just
shows how bad the joke really is.
At least
the WHO didn't accept
the claim of asymptomatic infections and even challenges this
claim on its website.
Here a succinct and brief summary, especially for the immunity
deniers, of how humans are attacked by germs and how we react to
them:
If there are pathogenic viruses in our environment, then
all humans - whether immune or not - are attacked by this virus.
If someone is immune, the battle with the virus begins.
First we
try to prevent the virus from binding to our own cells with the
help of antibodies. This normally works only partially, not all
are blocked and some viruses will attach to the appropriate
cells.
That doesn't need to lead to symptoms, but it's also not
a disease. Because the second guard of the immune system is now
called into action.
That's the above mentioned T-cells, white
blood cells, which can determine from the outside in which other
cells the virus is now hiding to multiply.
These cells, which
are now incubating the virus, are searched throughout the entire
body and killed by the T-cells until the last virus is dead.
So if we do a
PCR corona test on an immune person, it is not a
virus that is detected, but a small shattered part of the viral
genome.
The test comes back positive for as long as there are
tiny shattered parts of the virus left.
Correct:
Even if the
infectious viruses are long dead, a corona test can come back
positive, because the PCR method multiplies even a tiny fraction
of the viral genetic material enough [to be detected].
That's
exactly what happened, when there was the global news, even
shared by the WHO, that 200 Koreans who already went through
Covid-19 were infected a second time and that there was
therefore probably no immunity against this virus.
The
explanation of what really happened and an apology came only
later, when it was clear that the immune Koreans were perfectly
healthy and only had a short battle with the virus. The crux was
that the virus debris registered with the overly sensitive test
and therefore came back as "positive".
It is likely that a large
number of the daily reported infection numbers are purely due to
viral debris.
The PCR test with its extreme sensitivity was initially perfect
to find out where the virus could be. But this test can not
identify whether the virus is still alive, i.e. still infectious.
Unfortunately, this also led some virologists to equate the
strength of a test result with viral load, i.e. the amount of
virus someone can breathe out. Luckily, our day care centers
stayed open nonetheless.
Since German virologist missed that
part, because, out of principle, they do not look at what other
countries are doing, even if other countries'
case numbers are
falling more rapidly.
5. The problem with corona immunity
What does this all mean in real life?
The extremely long
incubation time of two to 14 days - and reports of 22 to 27 days
- should wake up any immunologist. As well as the claim that
most patients would no longer secrete the virus after five days.
Both [claims] in turn actually lead to the conclusion that there
is - sort of in the background - a base immunity that contorts
the events, compared to an expected cycle [of a viral infection]
- i.e. leads to a long incubation period and quick immunity.
This immunity also seems to be the problem for patients with a
severe course of the disease.
Our antibody titre, i.e. the
accuracy of our defence system, is reduced the older we get.
But
also people with a bad diet or who are malnourished may have a
weakened immune system, which is why this virus does not only
reveal the medical problems of a country, but also social
issues.
If an infected person does not have enough antibodies, i.e. a
weak immune response, the virus slowly spreads out across the
entire body.
Now that there are not enough antibodies, there is
only the second, supporting leg of our immune response left:
The
T-cells begin to attack the virus-infested cells all over the
body.
This can lead to an exaggerated immune response, basically
to a massive slaughter:
this is called a
Cytokine Storm.
Very
rarely this can also happen in small children, in that case
called
Kawasaki Syndrome.
This very rare occurrence in children
was also used in our country to stoke panic. It's interesting,
however, that this syndrome is very easily cured.
The [affected]
children get antibodies from healthy blood donors, i.e. people
who went through coronavirus colds...
This means that the
hushed-up [supposedly non-existent] immunity in the population
is in fact used therapeutically.
What now?
The virus is gone for now.
It will probably come back in winter,
but it won't be a second wave, but just a cold.
Those young and
healthy people who currently walk around with a
mask on their
faces would be better off wearing a helmet instead, because the
risk of something falling on their head is greater than that of
getting a serious case of Covid-19.
If we observe a significant rise in infections in 14 days [after
the Swiss relaxed the lockdown], we'd at least know that one of
the measures was useful.
Other than that I recommend reading
John P.A. Ioannidis' latest work in which he describes the global
situation based on data on May 1st 2020:
People below 65 years
old make up only 0.6 to 2.6 % of all fatal Covid cases.
To get
on top of the pandemic, we need a strategy merely concentrating
on the protection of at-risk people over 65. If that's the
opinion of a top expert, a second lockdown is simply a no-go.
On our way back to normal, it would be good for us citizens if a
few scaremongers apologized.
Such as doctors who wanted a triage
of over 80 year old Covid patients in order to stop ventilating
them.
Also
media that kept showing alarmist videos of Italian
hospitals to illustrate a situation that as such didn't exist.
All politicians calling for
"testing, testing, testing" without
even knowing what the test actually measures.
And the federal
government for an app they'll never get to work and will warn me
if someone near me is positive, even if they're not infectious.
In winter, when the flu and other colds make the rounds again,
we can then go back to kissing each other a little less, and we
should wash our hands even without a virus present.
And people
who'll get sick nonetheless can then don their masks to show
others what they have learned from this pandemic.
And if we
still haven't learned to protect our at-risk groups, we'll have
to wait for a 'vaccine'
that will hopefully also be effective in
at-risk people.
