Sense-Making on Omicron: There are 50 Ways Survivors Can Be Immune - and In Spite of Headline, Nothing Suggests Natural Immunity Won't Protect You

Too many mutations, too soon? What of the role of testing? Has it escaped the vaccine, tests, mAbs and natural immunity? And is it truly milder, or are we just winning against COVID-19?

There’s a flurry of reports on Omicron - that is has a higher rate of spread, that some PCR tests miss it, that monoclonal antibodies are not effective, that vaccine immunity is ineffective, and now this: that it has escaped natural immunity.

If these things are true, should we be worried? And why does Fauci insist that the vaccinated can gather for holidays, when he know they can become infected, that they can get sick and die, and that they can spread the virus? Is Omicron a gift that we can all count on to help us achieve herd immunity? Will COVID-19 go away?

Or is something else going on?

These are big questions and the consequences of the answers are immense.

In the worst case scenario, Omicron, like its predecessors, spreads more easily due to mutations that cause it to evade PCR detection. Also like its predecessors, it is has escaped the vaccines. And, finally, in the worst case scenario, it has escaped natural immunity.

We already know Omicron and its predecessors have partly escaped PCR testing; false negatives were always a problem, but, for example, the UK variant had 1 out of 3 primer pairs drop out (S-gene drop out) - and it had seven mutations in the spike protein coding region, where some genius (cough, sarcasm) put one of the the primers, knowing the spike protein was already the target of our immune system and the vaccines.

We also already know that SARS-CoV-2 variants had escaped the vaccine, almost totally, with efficacy of all three in use in the US against current strains below 50% by September, 2021, and, given how efficacy is miscalculated, likely below 20% against new variants by October 2021.

This report from the Imperial College at London must be taken with skepticism given how horribly bad they are at prediction modeling. One error they made was to use S-gene failure as marker for Omicron; S-gene drop-out has been known since the UK variant.

They also excluded asymptomatic Omicron cases.

I also see evidence of result-peeking where the regression modeling was based on observations of the data distributions to determine which variables to adjust for, and how - a classically sophomoric error. Those decisions should be made on prior data unrelated to the data collected for the analysis. They claim it is important to control for confounders (fair enough), but those should be known prior to data collection, and then, oddly, they say it is important to “control for” interactions… I’m not sure what they did there, maybe loose use of language, but no, no, no. You do not adjust your model for interactions, you express the significance or lack thereof, and you include in making actual predictions or you don’t.

Like I said, grain of skepticism.

This new report from Columbia University and the University of Hong Kong shows immune evasion by Omicron to natural immunity, measured by neutralization of the virus by convalescent patient sera, but measured only against pseudoviruses carrying only the spike protein.

In April, 2020, I published a peer-reviewed study that showed that infection by SARS-CoV-2 could lead to 55 different antibodies: 5 from the spike, 50 from the other viral proteins.

There are 50 ways to be immune that do not involve the spike protein, and studies like the Columbia study that only focus on spike-protein immunity are unethical. They will scare people who already have robust and broad immunity into altering their immunity with a vaccine that does not even target Omicron.

Regarding Fauci, he should tell people that the vaccinated can carry high viremia and spread the virus just as easily as the unvaccinated.

But he won’t.

Here’s a projection on the spike-only protection measured using prior data that had been collected to Sept 2021. The projections are mine; negative predicted efficacy values were converted to zeros. The extrapolations are fairly safe.

This means that those who vaccinated early are are about the same risk of infection as the unvaccinated due to non-neutralization of the spike protein. There is a non-peer-reviewed study that shows that neutralizing antibodies against spike protein-carrying pseudoviruses increases following boosters. Ho-hum, who cares, they are only measuring spike protein That report also suggests that convalescent serum is ineffective at neutralizing spike protein carrying pseudoviruses, but fails to measure the other 50 ways survivors of SARS-CoV-2 infection may be immune.

The other proteins have names you won’t read about in the news, like envelope protein, membrane glycoprotein, helicase, RNA-Cap methyltransferase, nucleocapsid, phosphoprotein, NSPs 1-16, and a variety of Orf’s (open reading frame) proteins. An early (Oct 2020) study showed that nucleocapsid protein had an initial stronger antibody response (which makes sense as there are more epitopes on nucleocapsid)

There is an Austrian study that claims to show using an “focus-forming assay” that measures plaque formation in cells infected with replication-competent SARS-CoV-2 virus that convalescent serum does not neutralize Omicron well. However, their assay is not at all described in their unacceptably brief, non-peer-reviewed pre-print. In the study describing the original assay, cited in their preprint, the replication-competent SARS-CoV-2 virus was isolated from a single patient, and it well known that biological assays using RNA viral proteins can evolve in the lab away from the original protein due to differences in replication efficiencies in laboratory media. Their study also ignored completely long-term B- and T-cell immunity.

Given the 50 ways people with natural immunity can be immune, reports on “natural immunity” that only measure spike protein neutralization need to stop. Until studies are done that show that people who have recovered from SARS-CoV-2 do not mount effective, long-term B- and T-cell immune responses to nucleocapsid and other proteins, we can say with assurance that no scientific evidence exists that Omicron, or any other variant, has escaped natural immunity.

That said, our best first defense against any SARS-CoV-2 viral infection is innate immunity. As Dr. Peter McCollough has pointed out, Bangladesh has made it a cultural norm to gargle and nasal douche before and after gatherings, with great success (some use food-grade hydrogen peroxide, some use a drop or two of povidone iodine or similar, such as Lugol’s). Check out the Brownstein maintenance protocol (basically, keep up on your Vitamin D, C and A) and the therapeutic protocol (another link here).

BTW, the medical community should brace for na “surge” of epic proportions - something like we’ve never seen - as a direct result of Biden’s administration shipping 500M rapid antigen tests. People with all sorts of respiratory conditions that test positive for COVID-19 - many of whom may be defeating the infection themselves - will flood urgent care and emergency rooms.

It will be a good time to stay home and avoid the shit-show. Biden or CDC should, but won’t, hold a press conference telling people to seek early, aggressive treatment (see c19early.com) and get on, and stay on, an immune defense protocol.

Breaking Good news: Convalescent plasma therapy cuts hospitalizations in half. How long before Fauci kills that treatment, too?