Predator and Prey: The Omicron Variant

 

In the fall of 1994, I was flying home on a TWA jet and deeply engrossed in my latest book, The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance by Laurie Garrett.  This book is a nonfiction account of mankind’s battle with the microbial world and why we seem to be losing the fight.  Ebola had just reared its head on a world-wide scale and this on the heels of AIDS-HIV becoming a disease that every family seemed to know in a personal way.  Garrett is a meticulous researcher and wrote a compelling narrative on a number of serious diseases that, thanks to modern transportation, circle the globe in a way unheard of a century ago. She talked of the success we had with smallpox (brought on in good part by forced vaccination of the entire world) as well as our apparent failures apropos to AIDS-HIV.

            During the flight a fellow passenger asked about the book. After a brief description of the contents my companion asked if I thought we would ever really face a pandemic that threatened humanity given the resources of modern medicine.  The answer I gave him is one I have repeated several times in the 27 years since.   We have more people on this planet than it can support.  If we don’t thin the herd, nature will do it for us, and when nature does it, it will be in a way none of us want. 

            When I read about COVID and its seemingly endless variants (omicron is the 15th letter of the Greek alphabet, with only nine letters left until we get to omega) I know that there is a killer gunning for all of us.  I do not intend to anthropomorphize nature and the corona virus.  But let me offer this analogy simply to illustrate what is happening:

            First, a recap of scientific truth.  When a foreign entity (bacteria, virus, etc.) enters your body there is an immediate and hostile response.  Your body, wary of all invaders, seeks to isolate and destroy the cells that it knows only as an enemy.  We all see the results of this action with every cold we have had.  Fever, toxins that enter our blood and make us queasy, tired and achy.  The detritus of the battle get sloughed off in nasal discharge, vomit and diarrhea. The body knows its own, dislikes invaders and attacks without mercy—all at the cellular level.  Your body also remembers what the invader looks like and is forever vigilant against anything that resembles the microbes that first caused you harm. It keeps an army of fighters in reserve which is why vaccinations work.

            But just as our cells want to live, so do the cells of the enemy.  There is a constant evolution of (in this case) the corona virus to a form that is more resilient to attack.  Longer lived.  Stronger.  Better.  Faster.  A superman of viruses.

            Now, the analogy.  Your body, when attacked, sends out its antibodies to kill the invader.  We are in preservation mode.  All’s fair in this war.  We attack again and again until we win or die trying.    What if nature, assaulted by mankind’s burden of over population, the depletion of its resources, the taxing of pollution and resultant global alteration, sees us as an invasive species?  What if humankind is seen as the enemy.  Nature could then send out its defenders, its viral agents, to destroy the enemy—us.  These viruses are designed to isolate the most vulnerable and destroy them.  They also use those bodies as hosts to evolve into ever more lethal variants. 

            Nature is at war with an invasion of humans.  It will do everything it can to win.  It has done everything it can to win.  Remember, coronaviruses have been around since at least the 1960’s.  Every time they ripple across the surface of this earth, they are more lethal than the time before.  It wants to kill us.  Can we win this war?  I don’t know.  I hope so.  But I do know that we need to be smarter than a glob of primitively formed RNA. 

              COVID is a predator.  We are the prey.  It has no agenda or ideology.  It has only blind obedience to its urge for survival. 

            Try to be smarter than a virus and keep the faith.

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