"And, indeed, do we KNOW that "kill, lockdown and quarantine to control" is ACTUALLY what our immune systems are doing?"
I didn't mean to suggest that there was a choice, or that the immune system works this way.
What I meant to convey, without using enough words, is that staying alive in a world of predators and damaging forces is like a dance, and sometimes the dance moves look like control and attack and kill and sometimes the moves look like bending with the wind and allowing viruses to replicate.
He suggests, for example, that antibody levels against respiratory viruses waning over time is more of a feature than a bug, since it allows the viruses to get what they want (survival and replication) without needing to evolve to defeat adaptive immunity thereby becoming more dangerous.
What I meant to convey by "striking a balance" is that vaccination is a dance move. One side might believe it is always the best choice and another side might believe that any human attempts to train and tweak our immune systems are hubristic and wrong, but in reality it is a tool that will in all likelihood prove to be beneficial in some cases and harmful in others, and our task is to discern this for each virus and each person using the tools available to us, of which science done properly is one of many.
I suspect that so long as it is possible to vaccinate following rabies exposure to prevent fatal infection, we will choose to do so. I also suspect that vaccination by way of mRNA injection will prove to be a terrible idea that will never again be attempted once this episode of insanity is over. As for everything in between - smallpox, measles, polio, flu - time will tell, and the results may take centuries to be fully apparent. An intervention that is good from the perspective of patient survival may not be so good from the perspective of the ongoing coevolutionary dance between viruses and the human immune system.
Re: Vaccines as a class
I didn't mean to suggest that there was a choice, or that the immune system works this way.
What I meant to convey, without using enough words, is that staying alive in a world of predators and damaging forces is like a dance, and sometimes the dance moves look like control and attack and kill and sometimes the moves look like bending with the wind and allowing viruses to replicate.
Brian Mowrey's "immune equilibrium" theory is one way of envisioning this dance with regard to the human immune system. (https://unglossed.substack.com/p/burned-all-my-notebooks)
He suggests, for example, that antibody levels against respiratory viruses waning over time is more of a feature than a bug, since it allows the viruses to get what they want (survival and replication) without needing to evolve to defeat adaptive immunity thereby becoming more dangerous.
What I meant to convey by "striking a balance" is that vaccination is a dance move. One side might believe it is always the best choice and another side might believe that any human attempts to train and tweak our immune systems are hubristic and wrong, but in reality it is a tool that will in all likelihood prove to be beneficial in some cases and harmful in others, and our task is to discern this for each virus and each person using the tools available to us, of which science done properly is one of many.
I suspect that so long as it is possible to vaccinate following rabies exposure to prevent fatal infection, we will choose to do so. I also suspect that vaccination by way of mRNA injection will prove to be a terrible idea that will never again be attempted once this episode of insanity is over. As for everything in between - smallpox, measles, polio, flu - time will tell, and the results may take centuries to be fully apparent. An intervention that is good from the perspective of patient survival may not be so good from the perspective of the ongoing coevolutionary dance between viruses and the human immune system.