Thursday, May 28, 2020

Bombshell study: Could half the uninfected population already be partially immune?

That is one implication of a major study conducted by over a dozen researchers from several microbiology and immunology institutions in the U.S. The purveyors of panic are warning of a second wave of the virus and that even if we are correct in asserting that the general fatality rate is extremely low for most people, it will still result in millions of deaths worldwide if we need 70 percent of the population to get the virus in order to achieve herd immunity.

Putting aside the fact that their strategy of lockdown doesn't provide a solution to this hypothetical problem either, even as it kills more people from the collateral damage, there is now promising evidence that more people might already be immune to the virus.

In order to prove the efficacy of these T cells developed in the recovered population, the researchers exposed immune cells from 10 recovered patients to the virus.

A similar T cell study published April 22 by German immunologist Andreas Thiel found that 34% of 68 blood samples from people not infected with SARS-CoV-2 hosted helper T cells that nevertheless recognized the novel coronavirus.

The authors of the newer study posit that the concept of "Crossreactive memory T cell responses might have been one factor contributing to the lesser severity of the H1N1 flu pandemic." There is still no way of proving whether those T cells discovered in non-infected individuals are definitively effective in warding off the virus or blunting its symptoms, but the theory might explain some enigmatic behaviors of this virus.

Why would the virus not continue cutting through the population like butter, as it did the first number of people who contracted the virus? The theory of a more ubiquitous cross-immunity from other coronaviruses would answer those questions and explain that invisible brick wall.

The outcome of prisons as a fully confined and defined population could be a harbinger of what would theoretically happen if the entire world were exposed to the virus after it had already targeted the most vulnerable population.

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