Malevolent Design - How Creationism's Divine Malevolence Co-opted Red Squirrels To Spread Leprosy in Medieval England

Lepers having magic spells cast over them

Mycobacterium leprae

Ancient Mycobacterium leprae genome reveals medieval English red squirrels as animal leprosy host: Current Biology

Few places in Europe or elsewhere were more pious than Medieval England, but still creationism's pestilential malevolence continued to make people suffer with diseases such as bubonic plague, tuberculosis and the related leprosy. Even the extreme measures taken by believers to atone for imaginary transgressions that had brought about the Black Death had failed to assuage the putative designer god who was believed to be visiting this pestilence upon people.

The superstitious Bible-based belief in evil spirits and 'sin' as the cause of disease led to the social stigma that made the disease so feared and led to the isolation of sufferers in lepper colonies, and often reduced to begging to stay alive. Poor nutrition and poor sanitation led to a worsening of the condition and, although these counter-measures were visibly ineffective, such was the belief in the Bible that it was inconceivable that the disease could be caused by anything other than 'sin' and evil demons being permitted to enter the victim.

The modern equivalent of this victim-blaming superstition can be found in the modern creationist tactic of blaming 'Sin' and 'genetic entropy' for parasites, with demons being replaced by 'entropy' to make it sound sciencey. It is of course, Bible-based superstition without supporting evidence.

And now, if you believe that stuff, there is evidence that creationism's putative designer god designed M. leprae to also infect red squirrels so they would act as a repository to spread leprosy. Red squirrels were common in those days and were often captured in the wild for pets or pelts. Their skins, when used for clothing, would have carried M. leprae and infected anyone who wore them - a brilliant strategy, if you hate people and want them to be sick, suffer and die.

Malevolent Designer News - How Creationism's Favourite Pathogen Is Designed to Cause UTIs

Escherichia coli,
The usual cause of urinary tract infection (UTI)

UTI's will affect 50% of women at some time in their lives

How E. coli get the power to cause urinary tract infections | Michigan Medicine

Despite their protestations that their god doesn't create pathogens - some other creative entity does that, apparently - they have been in love with Escherichia coli, or E. coli ever since their guru and Deception Insitute flunky, Michael J Behe, persuaded them that he had 'proved' their god exists and designs things because he couldn't work out how the E. coli flagellum could have evolved - so God did it!

There problem then, courtesy of Michael J Behe is that they have accepted that, if there was a designer involved in E. coli's design, it is the god that Michael J Behe 'proved' designed it, so their god designs pathogens, and even designs clever way to make them good at making us sick.

With that in mind, which creationist is going to argue against Michael J Behe's clever 'proof' that their god designs things so must exist, and insist that it isn't also behind the newly discovered way it manages to cause urinary tract infections (UTIs)?

The discovery that they can live, reproduce, and do their nasty thing in the otherwise near-sterile urinary tract, was made by researchers at the laboratory of Professor Harry Mobley in the University of Michigan Medical School.

Having been filtered by the kidneys, while urine contains some chemicals such as metabolites, it is about as sterile as it gets, with anything in it entering through the urethral meatus, in women, stupidly placed near the anus and inside the vulva where it can become infected during sexual intercourse by a penis cleverly designed with a foreskin to harbour pathogens under.

It has now been discovered that E. coli is also cleverly 'designed' to grab the nutrients it needs but can't manufacture itself by have a highly efficient transport system for taking them from its victims at a rate of thousands of molecules a second. One of the genes responsible for this, codes for an enzyme known as ATP-binding cassette (ABC).

Typical of creationism's 'intelligent' [sic] designer, if you believe in such a thing, is the Heath-Robinson workaround for the lack of genes for manufacturing these amino acids, where the parasite needs an energy-intensive ATP-based transport system, complete with multi-layered back-up systems to keep them working - the needless waste and needless complexity, so typical of evolved systems and the antithesis of intelligently designed systems. The researchers have published their findings, open access, in the journal PNAS and explained them in a University of Michigan news release:

Antivaxxer Idiot News - How An mRNA Vaccine Is Proving Effective Against A Highly Malignant Brain Cancer

Sadeem Qdaisat, Dr. Hector Mendez-Gomez and Dr. Elias Sayour
discuss their new study.

Photo by Nate Guidry

Dr. Elias Sayour, Chong Zhao and Arnav Barpujari discuss the mRNA cancer vaccine developed at the University of Florida

New mRNA cancer vaccine triggers fierce immune response to fight malignant brain tumor - UF Health

Contrary to the bizarre antivaxxer claims that the mRNA vaccines used against the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19 somehow causes cancer, based on nothing more substantial than the fact that some people who developed cancer had previously been vaccinated, there is now an mRNA vaccine that is proving spectacularly effective against a highly malignant form of brain cancer.

Curiously, the fact that some people who developed cancer will previously have sung Christmas carols or eaten potatoes, is never given as a probable cause, but then few people who believe antivaxxer disinformation will understand statistics or statistical correlations.

The mRNA vaccine against the brain cancer known as Glioblastoma has shown very promising results in a small-scale study of four adults by scientists at Florida University, repeating the results of a trial in 10 dogs and preclinical trials in mice.

The vaccine successfully, and very quickly, reprograms the immune system to produce highly specific antibodies against the tumour. Intelligent design proponents (or 'cdesign proponentcists' as they have been known since the Kitzmiller trial) might like to explain why the immune system, supposedly intelligently designed to protect us, needs to be artificially reprogrammed by human medical science.

The trick has been to create clusters of nanoparticles of lipid-enclosed mRNA wrapped around one another like a miniature onion. These means the mRNA will be released slowly and reprogram the immune system more effectively than a single burst would. The specific mRNA is tailor-made for the patient's tumour and creates antibodies against specific tumor proteins, in the same way the mRNA anti-COVID vaccines target the virus's spike proteins, so is specific to that particular cancer.

The results are reported in the journal Cell and are also explained in a University of Florida Health News release:

In a first-ever human clinical trial of four adult patients, an mRNA cancer vaccine developed at the University of Florida quickly reprogrammed the immune system to attack glioblastoma, the most aggressive and lethal brain tumor.

The results mirror those in 10 pet dog patients suffering from naturally occurring brain tumors whose owners approved of their participation, as they had no other treatment options, as well as results from preclinical mouse models. The breakthrough now will be tested in a Phase 1 pediatric clinical trial for brain cancer.

Reported May 1 in the journal Cell, the discovery represents a potential new way to recruit the immune system to fight notoriously treatment-resistant cancers using an iteration of mRNA technology and lipid nanoparticles, similar to COVID-19 vaccines, but with two key differences: use of a patient’s own tumor cells to create a personalized vaccine, and a newly engineered complex delivery mechanism within the vaccine.

“Instead of us injecting single particles, we’re injecting clusters of particles that are wrapping around each other like onions, like a bag full of onions,” said senior author Elias Sayour, M.D., Ph.D., a UF Health pediatric oncologist who pioneered the new vaccine, which like other immunotherapies attempts to “educate” the immune system that a tumor is foreign. “And the reason we’ve done that in the context of cancer is these clusters alert the immune system in a much more profound way than single particles would.”

Among the most impressive findings was how quickly the new method, delivered intravenously, spurred a vigorous immune-system response to reject the tumor, said Sayour, principal investigator of the RNA Engineering Laboratory within UF’s Preston A. Wells Jr. Center for Brain Tumor Therapy and a UF Health Cancer Center and McKnight Brain Institute investigator who led the multi-institution research team.

“In less than 48 hours, we could see these tumors shifting from what we refer to as ‘cold’ — immune cold, very few immune cells, very silenced immune response — to ‘hot,’ very active immune response,” he said. “That was very surprising given how quick this happened, and what that told us is we were able to activate the early part of the immune system very rapidly against these cancers, and that’s critical to unlock the later effects of the immune response.”

Glioblastoma is among the most devastating diagnoses, with median survival around 15 months. Current standard of care involves surgery, radiation and some combination of chemotherapy.

The new publication is the culmination of promising translational results over seven years of studies, starting in preclinical mouse models and then in a clinical trial of 10 pet dogs that had spontaneously developed terminal brain cancer and had no other treatment options. That trial was conducted with owners’ consent in collaboration with the UF College of Veterinary Medicine. Dogs offer a naturally occurring model for malignant glioma because they are the only other species that develops spontaneous brain tumors with some frequency, said Sheila Carrera-Justiz, D.V.M., a veterinary neurologist at the UF College of Veterinary Medicine who is partnering with Sayour on the clinical trials. Gliomas in dogs are universally terminal, she said.

After treating pet dogs that had spontaneously developed brain cancer with personalized mRNA vaccines, Sayour’s team advanced the research to a small Food and Drug Administration-approved clinical trial designed to ensure safety and test feasibility before expanding to a larger trial.

In a cohort of four patients, genetic material called RNA was extracted from each patient’s own surgically removed tumor, and then messenger RNA, or mRNA — the blueprint of what is inside every cell, including tumor cells — was amplified and wrapped in the newly designed high-tech packaging of biocompatible lipid nanoparticles, to make tumor cells “look” like a dangerous virus when reinjected into the bloodstream and prompt an immune-system response. The vaccine was personalized to each patient with a goal of getting the most out of their unique immune system.

“The demonstration that making an mRNA cancer vaccine in this fashion generates similar and strong responses across mice, pet dogs that have developed cancer spontaneously and human patients with brain cancer is a really important finding, because oftentimes we don’t know how well the preclinical studies in animals are going to translate into similar responses in patients,” said Duane Mitchell, M.D., Ph.D., director of the UF Clinical and Translational Science Institute and the UF Brain Tumor Immunotherapy Program and a co-author of the paper. “And while mRNA vaccines and therapeutics are certainly a hot topic since the COVID pandemic, this is a novel and unique way of delivering the mRNA to generate these really significant and rapid immune responses that we’re seeing across animals and humans.”

While too early in the trial to assess the clinical effects of the vaccine, the patients either lived disease-free longer than expected or survived longer than expected.

The 10 pet dogs lived a median of 139 days, compared with a median survival of 30 to 60 days typical for dogs with the condition.

The next step, through support from the Food and Drug Administration and the CureSearch for Children’s Cancer foundation, will be an expanded Phase I clinical trial to include up to 24 adult and pediatric patients to validate the findings. Once an optimal and safe dose is confirmed, an estimated 25 children would participate in Phase 2, said Sayour, an associate professor in the Lillian S. Wells Department of Neurosurgery and the department of pediatrics in the UF College of Medicine, part of UF Health.

For the new clinical trial, Sayour’s lab will partner with a multi-institution consortium, the Pediatric Neuro-Oncology Consortium, to send the immunotherapy treatment to children’s hospitals across the country. They will do this by receiving an individual patient’s tumor, manufacturing the personalized vaccine at UF and sending it back to the patient’s medical team, said Sayour, co-leader of the Immuno-Oncology and Microbiome research program at the UF Health Cancer Center.

Despite the promising results, the authors said one limitation is continued uncertainty about how best to harness the immune system while minimizing the potential for adverse side effects.

“I am hopeful that this could be a new paradigm for how we treat patients, a new platform technology for how we can modulate the immune system,” said Sayour, the Stop Children's Cancer/Bonnie R. Freeman Professor for Pediatric Oncology Research. “I am hopeful for how this could now synergize with other immunotherapies and perhaps unlock those immunotherapies. We showed in this paper that you actually can have synergy with other types of immunotherapies, so maybe now we can have a combination approach of immunotherapy.”

Graphic abstract

Highlights

• RNA-LPAs mimic dangerous emboli for lymphoreticular entrapment and systemic immunity
• Systemic immunity resets both the peripheral and intratumoral milieu via IFNAR1/RIG-I
• RNA-LPAs are safe and effective tumor re-modulators in canines with spontaneous gliomas
• RNA-LPAs reprogram the TME and elicit adaptive immunity in human GBM patients

Summary Cancer immunotherapy remains limited by poor antigenicity and a regulatory tumor microenvironment (TME). Here, we create “onion-like” multi-lamellar RNA lipid particle aggregates (LPAs) to substantially enhance the payload packaging and immunogenicity of tumor mRNA antigens. Unlike current mRNA vaccine designs that rely on payload packaging into nanoparticle cores for Toll-like receptor engagement in immune cells, systemically administered RNA-LPAs activate RIG-I in stromal cells, eliciting massive cytokine/chemokine response and dendritic cell/lymphocyte trafficking that provokes cancer immunogenicity and mediates rejection of both early- and late-stage murine tumor models. In client-owned canines with terminal gliomas, RNA-LPAs improved survivorship and reprogrammed the TME, which became “hot” within days of a single infusion. In a first-in-human trial, RNA-LPAs elicited rapid cytokine/chemokine release, immune activation/trafficking, tissue-confirmed pseudoprogression, and glioma-specific immune responses in glioblastoma patients. These data support RNA-LPAs as a new technology that simultaneously reprograms the TME while eliciting rapid and enduring cancer immunotherapy.

Mendez-Gomez, Hector R.; DeVries, Anna; Castillo, Paul; et al.(2024)
RNA aggregates harness the danger response for potent cancer immunotherapy Cell https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2024.04.003

© 2024 Cell Press.
Reprinted under the terms of s60 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

---

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ID is not a problem for science; rather science is a problem for ID. This book shows why. It exposes the fallacy of Intelligent Design by showing that, when examined in detail, biological systems are anything but intelligently designed. They show no signs of a plan and are quite ludicrously complex for whatever can be described as a purpose. The Intelligent Design movement relies on almost total ignorance of biological science and seemingly limitless credulity in its target marks. Its only real appeal appears to be to those who find science too difficult or too much trouble to learn yet want their opinions to be regarded as at least as important as those of scientists and experts in their fields.

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The Malevolent Designer: Why Nature's God is Not Good

This book presents the reader with multiple examples of why, even if we accept Creationism's putative intelligent designer, any such entity can only be regarded as malevolent, designing ever-more ingenious ways to make life difficult for living things, including humans, for no other reason than the sheer pleasure of doing so. This putative creator has also given other creatures much better things like immune systems, eyesight and ability to regenerate limbs that it could have given to all its creation, including humans, but chose not to. This book will leave creationists with the dilemma of explaining why evolution by natural selection is the only plausible explanation for so many nasty little parasites that doesn't leave their creator looking like an ingenious, sadistic, misanthropic, malevolence finding ever more ways to increase pain and suffering in the world, and not the omnibenevolent, maximally good god that Creationists of all Abrahamic religions believe created everything. As with a previous book by this author, "The Unintelligent Designer: Refuting the Intelligent Design Hoax", this book comprehensively refutes any notion of intelligent design by anything resembling a loving, intelligent and maximally good god. Such evil could not exist in a universe created by such a god. Evil exists, therefore a maximally good, all-knowing, all-loving god does not.

Illustrated by Catherine Webber-Hounslow.

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Malevolent Design News - The Superbug, Clostridium Difficile (C. Diff), May Be Developing Resistance to Vancomycin - Design or Evolution?

Clostridium difficile (C. diff)

Treatment for Deadly Superbug C. diff May Be Weakening - University of Houston

The latest rabbit hole Michael J Behe has driven the creation cult into is the daft notion of 'Genetic Entropy'. This was introduced following the failure of the Discovery Institute to trick the courts in the USA into declaring that 'Intelligent [sic] Design' is real science and so should be foist on impressionable children in science class at taxpayers’ expense.

The notion of 'Genetic Entropy' plays on what used to be presented as an anti-evolution argument - the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which says that a closed system tends to disorder (increased entropy), so evolution can't increase order and complexity. This ignores the fact that Earth is not a closed system, of course, and relies on the scientific illiteracy of its target marks. And it looks nice and sciencey - something that creationists all crave while purporting to reject science.

So, Genetic Entropy starts off with the assumption that every species was created perfect and then, because Adam and Eve allowed 'Sin' to enter the world, these 'perfect' genes have been getting progressively less perfect. Now, this isn't Bible literalism, obviously, because that would make 'Genetic Entropy' religion, not science! Got it!

I posted this in an Evolution Vs Creation Facebook group. Creationists appear to be pretending not to have seen it.

The problem then is, how can increasing 'entropy' lead to greater fitness in a given environment? It can't of course because unlike the random process of mutation, there is no selective element which can produce more descendants from a worse genome, and unless it is getting worse, in what possible sense of the word can it be getting less perfect?

So, faced with something like increasing bacterial resistance to antibiotics, creationists in Michael J Behe's latest rabbit hole have only two ways to go. They can't argue that increased entropy is leading to an improved genome (from the perspective of the bacterium) because that would mean 'genetic entropy' is leading towards greater perfection. That then leaves them with the unenviable choice of design or evolution, and for design, read 'malevolence' because increasing antibiotic resistance increases the ability of the bacterium to make us sick, and any omniscient designer would know that.

IOW, Michael J Behe's attempt to resuscitate the Discovery Institute's flagging 'Wedge Strategy' has resulted in his fundamentalist cult having to choose between the twin 'evils' of blasphemy or evolution!

The latest twist in the evolutionary arms race between bacteria and human medical science is in the increasing weakness of the antibiotic of choice for Clostridium difficile (C. diff), vancomycin, against which C. diff appears to be developing resistance. This was discovered by researchers at the University of Houston College of Pharmacy, Texas, USA, who have just published their findings in the Journal Clinical Infectious Diseases, sadly behind a paywall with only the abstract available. However, their work is described in a University of Houston news release:

Unintelligent Design - Has Creationism's Divine Malevolence Taken Leave Of Its Senses?

An amoeba cell infected by Naegleriavirus. The fluorescence microscopy image shows the viral factory and newly produced virus particles (in blue) within the amoeba cell (pink).

Patrick Arthofer and Florian Panhölzl.

Illustration of Naegleriavirus based on electron microscopy. A section through a virus particle with the star-shaped stargate is shown.

Credit: Stefan Pommer / photopic.at (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)

Giant Viruses Infect Deadly Parasite

Judging by the findings of scientists led by Patrick Arthofer and Matthias Horn from the University of Vienna's Center for Microbiology and Environmental Systems Science (CeMESS), creationism's divine malevolence may have gone entirely round the twist and got carried away with its success with parasites.

Not only has it created parasites, apparently to increase the suffering in the world, but it's now creating parasites for those parasites! Kindly creationists who have realised blaming another creator such as 'Sin' for parasites is a blasphemy, might be tempted to credit their beloved pestilential malevolence with trying to combat the parasites like the single-celled organism, Naegleria fowleri, that are causing such misery by attacking them with another parasite. But that makes no sense in terms of an omniscient, omnipotent creator god who, if such a god existed, could simply destroy Naegleria fowleri and have done with it.

The only thing that makes sense, if you believe the childish notion of intelligent design by a magic invisible man is that it has become obsessed with creating parasites for the sake of creating parasites.

What the Vienna team have discovered is that the serious pathogen, Naegleria fowleri, is parasitised by a giant virus, named Naegleriavirus. Giant viruses are unusually large viruses with a complex genome.

Naegleria fowleri is an especially nasty little amoeba that I described in my illustrated book, The Malevolent Designer: Why Nature's God is not Good:

Unintelligent Design - The Brilliant Way Bacteria Evade Our Immune System - Malevolent Design or Incompetent Designer?

Burkholderia thailandensis (purple) uses cellular components (yellow) to form membrane protrusions from one host cell to another (green).

Burkholderia pseudomallei, a Gram-negative rod, straight or slightly curved, with bipolar staining

The enemy within: How pathogens spread unrecognized in the body - Biozentrum

Here's a conundrum for intelligent [sic] design creationists. Scientists working at Biozentrum, University of Basel, Switzerland with colleagues in the Department of Biochemistry, National University of Singapore, have discovered how the bacterium, Burkholderia pseudomallei that causes the serious tropical disease, melioidosis, manages to evade our immune systems to make us sick.

What information do you have on the origins of the bacterium Burkholderia pseudomallei and what it causes in humans? Burkholderia pseudomallei is a Gram-negative bacterium that causes melioidosis, a potentially fatal infectious disease primarily found in Southeast Asia and Northern Australia. The bacterium is commonly found in soil and water in endemic regions. It was first identified by Alfred Whitmore and C.S. Krishnaswami in 1912 in Rangoon, Burma (now Yangon, Myanmar). The name "melioidosis" is derived from the Greek word "melis," meaning "distemper of asses," as the disease was initially identified in horses. B. pseudomallei can infect humans and a wide range of animals through various routes, including inhalation, ingestion, or through breaks in the skin. In humans, it can cause a spectrum of symptoms ranging from localized skin abscesses and fever to more severe forms of pneumonia, septicemia (bloodstream infection), and multiple organ abscesses. Melioidosis can be challenging to diagnose due to its diverse clinical manifestations and can mimic other diseases, making it important for clinicians in endemic areas to consider it when evaluating patients with febrile illnesses. Treatment of melioidosis typically involves prolonged antibiotic therapy with drugs such as ceftazidime, meropenem, or imipenem, followed by oral antibiotics such as trimethoprim-sulfamethoxazole to prevent relapse. However, antibiotic resistance in B. pseudomallei is a growing concern, particularly in regions where the disease is endemic. Prevention strategies include avoiding contact with contaminated soil and water, wearing protective clothing during outdoor activities, and practicing good wound care.

The conundrum is, was this malevolently designed or is it the result if incompetent design?

The problem for creationists is that they believe the human immune system was intelligently designed to protect us from the bacteria and other organisms their putative designer god had designed to make us sick, and yet not only does it not work as intended but many of the harmful parasites from which we suffer seem to have been designed to avoid our immune system, some of them by ingenious ways, like the bacterium in question, B. pseudomallei.

It's hard to reconcile the difference between a designer who can't design a functional immune system and one who is genius enough to design some of the extremely clever and sophisticated mechanisms for evading our immune system. The idea that these could be one and the same entity is almost laughable unless the answer is that the inadequate immune system and the ingeniously designed parasites are all part of the same malevolent plan to make us sick.

What B. pseudomallei does to avoid being detected by the immune system, once it gets inside a cell, is cause the cell to make special tubes connected to other cells, through which it can pass without going outside the cell again, where it would be recognised as a pathogen. In this way it spreads throughout a tissue without the victim's immune system even being aware of it.

The research team have published their findings, in the open access, online Cell Press journal, Cell Host & Microbe and explain it in a press release from The University of Basel, Biozentrum:

Malevolent Designer News - How Creationism's 'Intelligent Designer' COULD Have Designed Us To Survive A Heart Attack - But Chose Not To

Zebra fish, Danio rerio

Source: Encyclopædia Britannica

Why can zebrafish regenerate damaged heart tissue, while other fish species cannot? – @theU

If you're foolish enough to believe the claims of creationist frauds that we were intelligently designed by an omniscient, omnibenevolent god, then the work of four researchers at Utah University, USA, should be a cause for concern.

They have shown how the zebra fish is 'designed' to survive a heart attack by repairing the damaged cardiac muscle unlike humans and other mammals who replace the damaged muscle with non-functional scar tissue, which can cause several life-limiting problems for those who survive the initial attack.

Just to recap; a heart attack is caused when an artery supplying blood to the heart muscle becomes blocked, so depriving the muscle of oxygen. Unless cleared very quickly, the muscle will die and will be replaced with scar tissue which lacks the contractile ability of cardiac muscle. How much this affects the functioning of the heart will depend on how much muscle was damaged.
How the zebra fish heart is able to repair itself is the subject of an open access paper in the journal Biology Open and of a news release from Utah University:

Malevolent Designer News - How The Monkeypox Virus (MPVX) Was Redesigned To Make It More Contagious

Monkeypox virus

Monkeypox virus (MPXV)

New Research Defines Specific Genomic Changes Associated with the Transmissibility of the Monkeypox Virus | Mount Sinai - New York


Why did the monkeypox virus (MPXV) suddenly become much more contagious in 2022 to transform it from a relatively harmless, low-level infection of humans and other animals into a potential pandemic virus?

Scientists from Mount Sinai, New York, USA, in collaboration with researchers from the Carlos III Health Institute (ISCIII) in Madrid, Spain believe they have worked out the answer to this puzzle - a substantive change in the DNA virus' genome.

Creationists will reject the idea that this change was an evolutionary change driven by environmental selectors, despite the obvious explanation of the observed facts that this explanation offers because their cult dogma states that changes in genomes only happen if caused by their putative intelligent [sic] designer, although, to be fair to creationists, some of them will betray the religious nature of creationism by blaming viruses and these sorts of changes in their genomes on another creator, called 'Sin' to make it compliant with fundamentalist beliefs in a literal Bible.

But these apologists are continually undermined by those fundamentalists who generally, in their kind, caring and compassionate way, greet every new epidemic as their god's punishment for something they don't like. This will usually be some far-right political hobbyhorse in the USA, the way HIV was greeted with great jubilation by Christians as a 'Gay Plague', sent to punish homosexuals, and COVID-19 was declared to be God's punishment on New Yorkers for voting for Democrats.

However, those few creationists intelligent enough to realise they should be supporting the Discovery Institutes efforts to disguise creationism as science, will avoid these excuse, but they are then left with either evolution by natural selection, or intelligent [sic] design, so let's go with those who claim to see their god's hand in these viruses, so at least have managed to avoid the blasphemy of believing in two or more creators, while presenting their allegedly loving god as a pestilential malevolence.

Malevolent Designer News - How Creationism's Divine Malevolence Creates Genetic Defects

UC Irvine-led research team builds first tandem repeat expansions genetic reference maps – UCI News

Creationists assure us that creating new genetic information is impossible without magic performed by the magic creator because they have been sold some half-baked notion that genetic information follows the same laws of physics as energy, so can't be created according to the Third Law of Thermodynamics.

The fact that this is demonstrably wrong since gene duplication is readily observable doesn't stop them trotting out the same refuted claims time after time, but then to a creationist, having a claim refuted is not seen as a reason not to try to get away with it again later. You'll see this repeatedly as an apologist fraud such as William Lane Craig, Ken Ham or Michael J Behe will be comprehensively refuted in a public debate one day, only to try the self-same argument a day or two later on a different opponent in front of a different audience.

Sadly for creationists, however, this tactic leads them down a cul-de-sac where they are left arguing that DNA duplication must have been intelligently designed and, so they will also claim, evidence of intelligent design is evidence that their favourite god (and no other!) exists.

Malevolent Designer News - New Discovery Unravels Malaria Invasion Mechanism

Malaria-infected red blood cells

Photo: AdobeStock

Plasmodium falciparum in a blood smear.

New Discovery Unravels Malaria Invasion Mechanism

Medical science just took a step forward in the continuing arms race between it and creationism's divine malevolence to try to prevent its parasite, Plasmodium falciparum from killing 600,000 people, mostly children, a year, mostly in Africa.

Creationists who use the traditional excuse that it's not their god who designs parasites but another intelligent designer - Sin - should refresh their memories of Michael J Beh's 'proof' that their god exists by falsely claiming that anti-malarial drug resistance in P. falciparum must have been intelligently designed because the (wrong) mathematical model he used gave the infinitesimally small probability it was intelligently designed to give, so could not have evolved.

So, they can't have it both ways: if evidence of design in parasites, no matter how spurious, is evidence for their god then their god is responsible for the design of those parasites. If not, then Michael J Behe's carefully concocted 'proof' is nothing of the sort.

The alternative is the blasphemous claim that there is another supernatural deity with powers to create living things, over whom their god has no power or authority.

So, while creationists are struggling with trying to hold two mutually exclusive views simultaneously, biomedical scientists are trying to unravel the devilishly clever way this parasite overcomes our defences to do what creationists must believe it was designed to do - make us sick and increase the suffering in the world.

This is the latest breakthrough medical science has just announced.

It was made by researchers from by the Swiss Tropical and Public Health Institute (Swiss TPH) and Griffith University’s Institute for Glycomics, led by Professor Gerd Pluschke of Swiss TPH. Their discovery concerns the way the parasite gains access to the red blood cells to begin their destruction. It is published, open access, in Cell Reports and is explained in a Swiss PTH news release:

Malevolent Designer News - How Creationism's Divine Malevolence Designed The CCHF Virus To Kill Us

CCHF Virus

New study shows how the Crimean-Congo haemorrhagic fever virus enters our cells | Karolinska Institutet

Creationists traditionally have a schizophrenic attitude towards viruses. On the one hand, they blame them all on the biblical myth of 'The Fall', so betraying the fact that creationism is not a science like they claim it to be, but fundamentalist Christianity.

On the other hand, as we saw in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, they declared it to be their god's divine punishment for whatever their hobbyhorse was at the time - abortion, same-sex marriage, New Yorkers electing a Democrat, etc., etc., as though their god would inflict a punishment on the whole world for the actions of politicians in America or the way Americans in New York voted. Creationism is nothing if not parochial and ignorant!

Creationism's Heath-Robinson Designer - Muddling Through With Even More Ramshackle Complexity

Bacteria abundant in the newborn gut may supply the neurotransmitter needed to shape the immune system and prevent food allergies.

Shutterstock

Gut Bacteria Make Neurotransmitters to Shape the Newborn Immune System | Newsroom | Weill Cornell Medicine

The story so far, according to the Creationists Gospel:

Once upon a time, just a few thousand years ago, a magic man in the sky magicked a small flat planet with a dome over it in the Middle East, and then made some people to live on it.

It also made lots of harmful bacteria and other parasites to live in them and make them sick, but luckily, it also gave the humans an immune system to stop the parasites it made to make them sick, from doing what it designed them to do.

The only problem was that the ramshackle immune system it designed, which often doesn't do what it was designed to do, is also a little hypersensitive and prone to treating other things like the body it should be protecting as a parasite and mounting an attack on it so we suffer from all sorts of 'autoimmune' diseases that require another layer of complexity to keep in check. The other thing about it is that it needs training and until that's complete, it will treat all manner of things as parasites, including the food babies eat - and that could result in food allergies that would make life miserable!

But rather than do the simple thing and design the immune system to be able to tell the difference between food and harmful parasites, creationism's version of William Heath-Robinson went for one of the most bizarre solutions you can imagine. Rather like William Heath-Robinson's solution to an every-day problem, it co-opted things in the baby's environment to perform functions they were never intended to perform, like an upright piano being used to stand a step-ladder on to give it enough height, or a stick and some string being used to mend a broken spoke in a wheel, creationism's designer co-opted some of the bacteria that live in a baby's gut.

How it did this is explained in a free access paper in Science Immunology by a team of researchers from the Department of Pediatrics at Weill Cornell Medicine, led by Assistant Professor Dr. Melody Zeng of the Gale and Ira Drukier Institute for Children's Research. Their work is described in a Weill Cornel Medicine news item:

Malevolent Design - How The Malaria Parasite is 'Designed' To Evolve And Outwit Medical Science

The Malaria parasite generates genetic diversity using an evolutionary ‘copy-paste’ tactic.

Credit: Karen Arnott/EMBL-EBI,
Isabel Romero Calvo/EMBL

The malaria parasite generates genetic diversity using an evolutionary ‘copy-paste’ tactic | EMBL

Devotees of creationism’s divine malevolence would be conflicted by this news if they understood it, because it shows the creative genius of any intelligent designer who could come up with this system, but, it looks like it did so (if you believe it couldn't happen naturally) by setting up an evolutionary process that creationists are obliged by dogma to believe doesn't work.

The news is that the organisms that causes malaria, Plasmodium falciparum, is 'designed' to quickly find a way to overcome the anti-malarial drugs medical science has developed to cure people suffering from it and to prevent others from getting malaria, by evolving very quickly.

The discovery was by researchers at European Molecular Biology Laboratory's (EMBL’s) European Bioinformatics Institute who have identified a mechanism of ‘copy-paste’ genetics that increases the genetic diversity of the parasite at accelerated time scales. This helps solve a long-standing mystery regarding why the parasite displays hotspots of genetic diversity in an otherwise unremarkable genetic landscape. Copy-paste' is a way of doing something creationists insist is impossible without the aid of god-magic of increasing the genetic information in a genome and making it available for evolution by mutation and selection without any loss of function in the original copied genes.

The team have recently published their finding in the open access journal PLOS Biology and describe it in an EMBL news item:

Covidiot News - Just Because You Haven't Had COVID-19 Yet, Doesn't Mean You Won't!

The SARS-CoV-2 virus needs to attach to receptors to gain access to our cells.

Kateryna Kon/Shutterstock

Haven't had COVID yet? It could be more than just luck

There are some scary questions for creationists at the end of this article. They follow on naturally from what's being discussed, so creationists should probably avoid reading too far, unless they have a responsible adult with them.

This article from The Conversation is from May 2022, when we were into the second year of the COVID-19 pandemic and most vulnerable people had had the two-step vaccinations and many would have had the spring booster. At that point neither me nor my partner had had COVID-19, which we put down to rigorously following the recommendations regarding mask-wearing, social distancing, hand washing, etc. and had tried to reduce our vulnerability to the sever forms of it by losing about 3 stone in weight and, in my case, getting my blood pressure under control with medication. We also tried to ensure our immune systems were healthy by taking vitamin D3, vitamin C, zinc and iron supplements.

In the early days of the pandemic, even before the official restrictions on social contact, we had observed the basic rules of hygiene and everyone who came into the house used hand-cleanser at the front door. I had even managed to obtain a supply of face-masks and plastic gloves online, which we wore at all times outside the house. Every package that was delivered to the house was left for several hours before we touched it, and all our weekly shopping was delivered or bought with click and collect. Delivered bags were left for four hours before unpacking. And we took weekly tests just in case we had it asymptomatically. All that might seem a little over the top now, but we were vindicated as events were to prove.

We put the fact that we hadn't caught it by mid-2022 down to our preventative measures, not to luck or genetics - a view that was vindicated last year when we both came back from a two-week vacation in France with a mild form of COVID-19, despite having had all the boosters on offer. We probably picked it up in a crowded airport or on the plane, where all the social distancing measures had been forgotten and even face masks were no longer worn. We both felt like we had a mild case of flu for a couple of days and after a week we were testing negative. Had we contracted it in Spring 2020, the outcome would probably have been very different as we had no immunity, and both had three of the risk-factors - overweight, high BP and over 70. In addition, my partner had had a mastectomy and was receiving treatment for breast cancer.

One reason you can't ever be sure that you won't catch COVID-19 is because the virus keeps mutating to produce new variants so, even if you were fortunate enough to have natural or acquired immunity to the variants so far, it is quite possible that the next or subsequent variants will have evolved a way round it. The following chart from the UK NHS, shows the rise and fall of the main variants over the course of the pandemic:

Source: NHS UKHSA Date Dashboard

But still, a few people managed to stay free from the virus. In the following article, reprinted from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license, Lindsay Broadbent, Research Fellow, School of Medicine, Dentistry and Biomedical Sciences, Queen's University Belfast, explains why. Her article has been reformatted for stylistic consistency:

Anti-Vaxxer Conspiracists News - How Trumpanzee Cult Conspiracists Are Risking People's Lives For Money While Feeding Populist Extremism

Online spaces attract conspiracy theorists. Social media has helped propagate conspiracy theories faster than was possible with more traditional media. This has driven engagement with political parties that focus on conspiracy theories.

Envato/DC_Studio

Anti-vaccine conspiracies fuel divisive political discourse | The University of Tokyo

According to a news item carried today by Agence France-Presse (AFP), US antivaxx conspiracists are deliberately spreading fear and disinformation to sell quack medical kits to gullible fools and in doing so are risking the lives of anyone foolish enough to believe them. And a recent paper published by a Japanese research group has shown how extremist parties are trading on growing antivaxx paranoia, originating in Trump-supporting conspiracists in the USA, by incorporating it into the political platforms.

This team of researchers recall how Donald Trump first of all tried to take credit for developing the mRNA vaccines against Covid-19, as though he had personally directed the research and invented the science behind mRNA vaccines, then switched to curry favour with the antivaxxers by casting doubt on the need for boosters. And of course, antivaxxer conspiracy theories became a central theme of the rabidly pro-Trump QAnon conspiracy theorists.

Firstly, the AFP report:

Unintelligent Design - The Heath-Robinson Workaround For A Design Fault In The Immune System

A dendritic cell, one of the cells of the innate immune system where cGAS plays a major role.

©EPFL/iStock photos (Design Cells)

The “switch” that keeps the immune system from attacking the body - EPFL

A Machine for Testing Golf Drivers - William Heath-Robinson

A characteristic of designs by creationism's putative intelligent designer, is the needless complexity which often arises because earlier solutions were suboptimal and either didn't work very well or tended to cause problems that needed to be mitigated with another layer of (often suboptimal) complexity.

This is also a characteristic of systems 'designed' by a mindless natural process with no power or mechanism for scrapping a suboptimal design and starting again and no ability to predict the future and design for problems which will arise later.

In fact, what creationists think is evidence of a supreme intelligence, more often seems to resemble the designs of the British cartoonist and eccentric designer, William Heath-Robinson, who was famous for his machines designed to solve every-day problem, which were invariably far more complex than they need have been, and which incorporated everyday objects such as umbrellas, full coal-scuttles for counter-weights, lengths of knotted string and stepladders balanced on upright pianos to give them enough height. Take away any of these unlikely components and the whole machine would fail, in an almost perfect metaphor for how evolution can exapt pre-exiting structures from other processes and structures for novel functions, to give the appearance of irreducible complexity.

And yet they work, or at least look as though they would if anyone ever made one.

An example of a Heath-Robinson machine in mammalian 'design' was revealed by a scientists working at the Swiss École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), who have discovered how the body prevents the immune system from attacking itself.

But, as the very many auto-immune diseases show, this system is far from perfect and frequently fails, sometime with serious, even fatal, consequences.

But the whole immune system is only needed because something designed pathogens such as bacteria, viruses and other parasites, apparently to attack us and make us sick in the first place. Parasites are a source of conflict for creationists who have to believe both that the putative designer god is the only entity capable of designing living things, and that something else created parasites because their god wouldn't do such a thing, and both that their god is omnipotent, but powerless against that other designer.

So, what is this mechanism the EPFL researchers have discovered?

Their findings are the subject of an open access paper in Nature and is explained in an EPFL news release:

Malevolent Designer News - How Creationism's Divine Malevolence Is Adapting The Avian Flu Virus to Kill Marine Mammals

Dead elephant seals line a beach in Argentina in fall 2023.

Photo: Ralph Vanstreels/UC Davis

Avian Influenza Virus Is Adapting to Spread to Marine Mammals | UC Davis

Elephant seals lie dead on a beach in Argentina following an outbreak of avian influenza in the region.

Photo: Maxi Jonas.

As an example of creationist double-think and intellectual bankruptcy, their attitude toward parasites like viruses is a classic:

• "Only God is capable of designing organisms, so "Look at the trees!" and "What about irreducible complexity?"
• "Something else created parasites like bacteria, worms and viruses, because God wouldn't do something like that!"

Simultaneously committing blasphemy and refuting their own argument from teleology!

I wonder then how that rarest of animals, the intellectually honest creationist copes with the news that the creator of the avian flu virus, H5N1, is in the process of adapting it to kill marine mammals such as elephant seals, just as it adapted the SARS-CoV-2 virus from a bat virus to one that could kill humans and cause economic collapse.

Evidence that it is doing so, if you believe viruses are created and don't evolve naturally, which dogma forbids a creationist from believing, comes in the form of a study by scientists from University of California, Davis, and the National Institute of Agricultural Technology (INTA) in Argentina. The study, the first genomic characterization of H5N1 in marine wildlife on the Atlantic shore of South America, is published in the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases and is described in a UC Davis news release:

Covidiot News - How the mRNA Vaccines Give Long-Term Protection Against COVID-19

Long-Term Data Reveals SARS-CoV-2 Infection and Vaccine-Induced Antibody Responses Are Long-Lasting | Mount Sinai - New York

If you listen to antivaxxer covidiots you would believe:

• COVID-19 is no worse than the common cold.
• The SARS-CoV-2 virus which causes COVID-19, is a deadly organism developed by the Chinese for biological warfare.
• COVID-19 was a hoax (which even normally hostile nations had signed up to, apparently).
• God sent the virus to punish America for legalising same-sex marriage (and the rest of the world was collateral damage)
• The vaccines developed against it don't work (regardless of what the clinic trials showed).
• The vaccines contain microchips and special genes to make you become gay and/or subject to satellite control.
• The vaccines contain deadly viruses that can be activated via the 5G phone network.
• Millions of people have died or will die soon because they've been vaccinated.
• [Fill in your own crackpot theory because someone will already have claimed it to be true].

The truth is, however, that millions of people died of COVID-19 in the first year of the pandemic, before a vaccine was generally available and this death rate fell to low levels following the roll out of the first vaccines and subsequent boosters to allow for new variants. Although the virus is still very much with us, people have been able to resume normal activities and the economic and health impact of the virus is now no more than that of seasonal flu, but there were concerns that antibody levels produced in response to the mRNA vaccines were short-lived, giving only temporary protection.

Now a large-scale analysis conducted by leading microbiologists at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai has shown that antibody responses induced by COVId-19 vaccines are long-lasting. The results of this analysis are published, open access, in the Cell Press journal, Immunity, and are discussed in a Mount Sinai press release:

The emergence of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, in late 2019 sparked the global pandemic that is now in its fifth year. Vaccines that were developed at record speed have saved millions of lives. However, the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 variants and waning immunity have decreased the effectiveness of the vaccines against symptomatic disease. The common perception now is that mRNA-based vaccine-induced immunity wanes quickly. However, this assumption is largely based on data from short-term studies that include a very limited number of data points following peak responses.

The Mount Sinai research team’s analysis of more than 8,000 samples collected over a three-year period in New York City examined how antibody responses to the virus’s spike protein changed after infections, during the primary immunization series, during monovalent and bivalent booster vaccination, and during breakthrough infections.

They found that upon primary immunization, participants with pre-existing immunity (those who had previously been infected with the virus) mounted higher antibody responses faster and achieved higher steady-state antibody titers than individuals who had not been previously infected. The waning of antibody response was characterized by two phases: an initial rapid decay from the strong peak after vaccination, followed by a stabilization phase with very slow decay, suggesting that antibody levels were very long-lasting. Booster vaccination equalized the differences in antibody concentration between participants with and without pre-existing immunity. Breakthrough infections increased antibodies to similar levels as an additional vaccine dose in individuals who had not previously been infected.

This investigation represents one of the most extensive and in-depth assessments of the longevity of SARS-CoV-2 immune responses to date. Its major conclusion is that changes in the virus that allow it to evade immunity, rather than waning immunity, are the major reason for breakthrough infections.

Ours is one of the longest-running COVID-19 studies out there. Following the same group of people monthly over time is rare and powerful because you can compare immune responses on an individual level. SARS-CoV-2 continues to evolve, so this research is important to provide an understanding about the impact of new variants and new vaccine doses on a healthy immune system, and to guide all of us to make the best choices to maintain protection against the virus that continues to circulate in our communities.

Professor Viviana Simon, MD, PhD, lead author
Professor of Microbiology, Medicine and Pathology, Molecular and Cell-Based Medicine
Department of Microbiology
Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York, NY, USA.

This in-depth analysis was made possible through the Protection Associated with Rapid Immunity to SARS-CoV-2 (PARIS) study, an observational, longitudinal cohort of health care workers of the Mount Sinai Health System that was initiated in April 2020. At that time, the densely populated New York metropolitan area was hit with an exponential increase in severe SARS-CoV-2 infections, and essential workers in the health care system were at high risk for infection. In response to the crisis, a team of leading virologists, physician-scientists, and pathologists at Mount Sinai established a specific and sensitive SARS-CoV-2 binding enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay to accurately measure the SARS-CoV-2 antibody titers. This test was used to measure immune responses in the PARIS cohort in order to determine how quickly the antibody defenses were mounted and much these changed over the months and years of follow up.

In addition to showing the impact on a person’s individual antibody response to vaccines based on the type of vaccine received and whether or not they were infected before receiving the first dose, the PARIS study made possible the development of a mathematical model that can be used to predict and characterize antibody responses of both individual people and populations.

People have pandemic fatigue and vaccine uptake has slowed, especially after the vaccines started to be charged to insurance*. We were pleasantly surprised to see that the booster doses promoted a large antibody response regardless of a person’s personal infection history, so we are hopeful that our study findings will encourage people to get their vaccine boosters when eligible and to stay engaged in research. Our work also showcases the impact of viral evolution over time and why it’s critical to keep studies like this going, despite the pandemic fatigue.

Komal Srivastava, MS, Co-first author
Director of Strategy and Operation
Mount Sinai Center for Vaccine Research and Pandemic Preparedness.

According to the research team, the PARIS model has broad applications for studying the kinetics of antibodies produced to different COVID-19 vaccines in diverse populations. They stress much more work remains to analyze side effects, applications of the antibody model and continued research about new vaccines and viral variants.

This study adds an essential piece of data to understand the intricate immune response elicited by SARS-CoV-2 infection and COVID-19 vaccination. In light of the emerging viral variants, which predominantly induce a cross-reactive antibody response against the spike protein, it will be exciting to characterize in depth the role of these antibodies - in particular the non-neutralizing ones - in protection against the most recent circulating viral variants. Likewise, monitoring the induction of variant-specific antibodies after multiple exposures by breakthrough infections and by administration of updated COVID-19 vaccines, such as the XBB.1.5 monovalent booster, will be key to understand the evolution of the antibody response over time.

Assistant Professor Dr Juan Manuel Carreno Quiroz, PhD, Co-first author.
Department of Microbiology
Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York, NY, USA.

*Note: in the UK, vaccines are provided free by the NHS. Other non-US countries will have their own health-care systems which may or may not include charges for the vaccines.

More technical detail and the background to the research is given in the team's paper in Immunology:

Graphical abstract

Highlights

• COVID-19-vaccine-induced immunity wanes but stabilizes at an individual setpoint
• Pre-existing immunity results in rapid antibody responses upon vaccination
• Boosters equalize antibody titers between individuals with and without hybrid immunity
• Antibody kinetics show two phases: an initial rapid decay followed by a steady state

Summary

It is thought that mRNA-based vaccine-induced immunity to severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) wanes quickly, based mostly on short-term studies. Here, we analyzed the kinetics and durability of the humoral responses to SARS-CoV-2 infection and vaccination using >8,000 longitudinal samples collected over a 3-year period in New York City. Upon primary immunization, participants with pre-existing immunity mounted higher antibody responses faster and achieved higher steady-state antibody titers than naive individuals. Antibody kinetics were characterized by two phases: an initial rapid decay, followed by a stabilization phase with very slow decay. Booster vaccination equalized the differences in antibody concentration between participants with and without hybrid immunity, but the peak antibody titers decreased with each successive antigen exposure. Breakthrough infections increased antibodies to similar titers as an additional vaccine dose in naive individuals. Our study provides strong evidence that SARS-CoV-2 antibody responses are long lasting, with initial waning followed by stabilization.

Introduction

The emergence of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) in late 2019 sparked the global coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic that is now in its 4th year. Vaccines to mitigate the impact of the pandemic were developed at record speed and have saved millions of lives. However, the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 variants¹ and waning immunity² have decreased the effectiveness of the vaccines against symptomatic disease.³ These two issues, the emergence of antigenically distinct SARS-CoV-2 variants and waning immunity, are often conflated and used interchangeably but represent two different phenomena.⁴ Most vaccines used in North America and Europe are based on lipid nanoparticles (LNPs) containing messenger RNA (mRNA) produced by Pfizer/BioNTech (BNT162b2) or Moderna (mRNA-1273), and the common perception now is that mRNA-based vaccine-induced immunity wanes quickly.⁵ However, this assumption is mostly based on data from short-term studies that include a very limited number of data points following peak responses.^2,5

In March of 2020, the densely populated New York metropolitan area was hit with an exponential increase of severe SARS-CoV-2 infections, resulting in a staggering number of fatalities and a severely overburdened healthcare system.^6,7,8 Due to shortages of personal protective equipment, essential workers in the health care system were at high risk for infection. In response to this crisis, we established (1) a specific and sensitive SARS-CoV-2 binding enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) to measure humoral immune responses,⁹ and (2) an observational longitudinal cohort of health care workers of the Mount Sinai Health System to determine the kinetics of these humoral responses. This study, named Protection Associated with Rapid Immunity to SARS-CoV-2 (PARIS),¹⁰ aims to capture the dynamics of SARS-CoV-2 antibody responses to infection as well as vaccinations, to determine re-infection rates, and to assess correlates of protection in the context of individual immune histories.

With over 8,000 longitudinal study visits across a single cohort during the first 3 years of the pandemic, our investigation represents one of the most extensive and in-depth assessments of the longevity of SARS-CoV-2 immune responses to date. Using this longitudinal cohort, we determined the kinetics of antibody responses to spike protein after infections, during the primary immunization series, during monovalent and bivalent booster vaccination, as well as during breakthrough infections. Our findings indicate that, in contrast to common perception, COVID-19 mRNA vaccination induces long-lasting antibody responses in humans. The PARIS Study also provides insights into the effect of booster vaccination and breakthrough infections on the stability of antibody responses.

What is clear from this study is that antibody levels remain at protective levels for very much longer that was previously thought and that they continue to give protection against the severe form of the disease. However, as the virus evolves in an environment in which the vast majority of possible victims have already been vaccinated or have had previous infections so have high antibody levels, the variants that can 'escape' this protection will continue to evolve and become the predominant variant.

This diagram from UK data shows how the different variants have evolved and either replaced earlier variants or have reached an equilibrium with them:

Changes in proportions of SARS-CoV-2 variants in UK over time. This diagram is a good illustration of how the proportions of different alleles of a gene change in a species gene pool over time as the species evolves.

Source: National flu and COVID-19 surveillance report: 22 February 2024 (week 8) Ref: GOV-16232

It is essential then that regular boosters, which provide protection against the latest variants, should continue to be given. We are in a long-term struggle with this virus and vaccines keep us ahead of the game.