A while back, I mentioned a sense that Shapona, the Yoruba smallpox god, was involved in the Covid madness. I've started reading up on why smallpox was so deadly, and have found the general consensus among the scientists who studied the disease is that it was so dangerous because it evolved the extremely nasty trick of infecting immune cells and using them as a means to spread around the body. In addition to letting the disease spread rapidly through every organ system, this also meant smallpox infections inherently caused substantial immune damage; and once the immune system finally got its act together, it brought out the truly big guns and did a ton of further collateral damage. As a general rule, the immune system tends to go into serious overdrive whenever there is a disease that infects immune cells, as a way to keep diseases from evolving in that direction.
The mRNA vaccines shut down a lot of these defense mechanims. In fact, this was a major selling point, because a lot of the issues with a Covid-19 infection was because the immune system reacted strongly to a virus that already had certain adaptations that brought it the ability to infect immune cells; and since most populations now have a mix of vaccinated and unvaccinated, the virus is going to be able to pick up a lot of further nasty tricks in the easier conditions of the vaccinated who have immune systems that tolerate it, while also facing strong selective pressure from the unvaccinated in order to evolve ways to apply these tricks even in healthy immune systems.
If this leads in the direction that seems likely, then the Covid-19 madness has created the ideal circumstances for another virus to evolve in the general direction of smallpox. Covid-19 is already able to cause rashes, which is often described as looking a lot like chickenpox. It would be ironic, in the way that god's curses often are, if a botched mass vaccination campaign turned a flu virus into a smallpox like virus...
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branchandroot
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Date: 2025-04-01 05:22 pm (UTC)The mRNA vaccines shut down a lot of these defense mechanims. In fact, this was a major selling point, because a lot of the issues with a Covid-19 infection was because the immune system reacted strongly to a virus that already had certain adaptations that brought it the ability to infect immune cells; and since most populations now have a mix of vaccinated and unvaccinated, the virus is going to be able to pick up a lot of further nasty tricks in the easier conditions of the vaccinated who have immune systems that tolerate it, while also facing strong selective pressure from the unvaccinated in order to evolve ways to apply these tricks even in healthy immune systems.
If this leads in the direction that seems likely, then the Covid-19 madness has created the ideal circumstances for another virus to evolve in the general direction of smallpox. Covid-19 is already able to cause rashes, which is often described as looking a lot like chickenpox. It would be ironic, in the way that god's curses often are, if a botched mass vaccination campaign turned a flu virus into a smallpox like virus...