Geert: Are Newly Emerging Saltation Variants the Desperate Harbingers of an Imminent Surge in COVID-19 Case Fatalities in Highly C-19 Vaccinated Populations?
Since Nov2022 I have advocated simple, over-the-counter worldwide treatments of the vaxed that would save millions of lives.
Are Newly Emerging Saltation Variants the Desperate Harbingers of an Imminent Surge in COVID-19 Case Fatalities in Highly C-19 Vaccinated Populations?
Geert Vanden Bossche Dec 13, 2024
Mutation trackers[1] are increasingly concluding that the SARS-CoV-2 (SC-2) virus has mutated to a point where it can no longer significantly increase its infectiousness due to the high fitness[2] costs associated with the pleiotropy[3] exhibited by the divergent saltation variants[4] currently co-dominantly circulating.
Pleiotropic effects are tightening the viral transmission bottleneck and increasing population-level transmissibility pressure on viral trans infection in highly Covid-19 (C-19) vaccinated populations.
Pleiotropic effects are now increasingly reported in newly emerging saltation variants as a result of escape mutations (including NTD-glycan-adding mutations) occurring at the N-terminal domain (NTD). As pleiotropic effects may cause unrelated viral properties to have antagonistic effects on viral infectiousness, they are prone to constraining evolutionary changes at the receptor-binding domain (RBD), despite the collective transmissibility pressure on the virus. The counterbalancing effects on viral infectiousness eventually result in a tight viral transmission bottleneck .
As tight transmission bottlenecks make these escape mutations prohibitively costly, mutation analysts predict that new mutations will occur in chronically infected individuals that enable enhanced intra-host viral infection. The Bloom lab, for example, expects that ‘evolution will eventually solve this pleiotropic puzzle through some epistatic combination of mutations’.