Israel: Chronic Covid Persists in Guts and Immune CD8 Cells, like AIDS
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Israel: Chronic Covid Persists in Guts and Immune CD8 Cells, like AIDS
Delta Variant seen Massively in Wastewater long after Omicron took over!
A new article from Israel discusses Covid variants in Israeli wastewater — and also shows that Israelis have chronic Covid, infecting their immune cells and persisting for lengths of time, similar to AIDS. Hat tip to Geert Vanden Bossche who mentions this article in his great post, where he argues that predicting the future on the basis of wastewater is futile.
I agree with Geert’s point completely. In this article, I wanted to attempt a different take on the Israeli wastewater study and show that highly vaccinated Israel is beset with Chronic Covid, and that people who seem to have recovered from Covid, are still sick and have ongoing active Covid infections that they picked a long time ago.
Here’s the study:
Authors looked at wastewater surveillance data from Israel. This surveillance analyzes wastewater and looks at viruses found in human excrements, coming from thousands of households and mixed together in the municipal wastewater stream. Wastewater surveillance is a great way to look at masses of people, as many persons’ excrements are mixed together and can be analyzed for the presence and amount of viral particles, at the population level.
Authors show that
Omicron completely took over and was found in the vast majority of Israel’s positive nasal swabs
The Delta variant practically disappeared from nasal swab results
Despite that, Delta variant RNA was massively present in Israel’s wastewater long after it disappeared from nasal swabs.
Here’s the wastewater prevalence data.
This is extremely surprising! Why would Delta virions be massively excreted by Israelis, long after Delta practically disappeared from nasal swabs? Why would the amount of Delta virions remain almost a constant, despite continuing disappearance of Delta from Israeli’s national statistics?
There is only one answer to these questions: many Israelis remained infected with Delta and have the virus replicating in their guts long after they supposedly “recovered”. The virus, instead of truly being expelled from the body by a functional immune system, persisted in Israelis. This is the only way the viral RNA would remain in wastewater.
The people, despite appearing long recovered, are not recovered and have ongoing COVID-19 infections.
Viral Persistence in Guts and CD8 Immune Cells
A very important study that we need to know about is called Post-acute COVID-19 is characterized by gut viral antigen persistence in inflammatory bowel diseases.
They looked at patients who had COVID. The authors made two extremely interesting findings. First, they confirmed that Sars-Cov-2 is expressed in guts. But most importantly, they found Sars-Cov-2 RNA in CD8 immune cells!
We report expression of SARS-CoV-2 RNA in the gut mucosa ∼7 months after mild acute COVID-19 in 32 of 46 patients with IBD. Viral nucleocapsid protein persisted in 24 of 46 patients in gut epithelium and CD8+ T cells.
Infecting CD8 immune cells makes Sars-Cov-2 similar to HIV, which destroys CD4 cells. The similarity is striking and I reported on it before.
Overall, we see an ominous picture of people persistently infected by an obsolete variant of Sars-Cov-2 (Delta), that is no longer circulating but is still fully present in wastewater.
That was not supposed to happen in Israel, which is highly vaccinated with a “safe and effective” vaccine, that was supposed to stop the virus. Instead of stopping, Israelis now have “Chronic Covid” that seemingly never clears.
Is Israel unique? It is in many cultural ways, but probably not in the way how Covid persists in guts and immune cells. That should make you worried.
Chronic Covid Patients Breed New Variants
Having a part of the population chronically infected with SARS-Cov-2 is a very bad development. This means that Sars-Cov-2 carriers are, in effect, permanent walking virus variant factories, like HIV patients. They would endlessly produce newer, and fitter, variants.
In the past, viral fitness was determined by contagiousness. When a sizable part of the population is chronically infected, fitness may be determined by the virus’s ability to linger in the body and infect immune cells. The variant that stays in the body longest, wins.
Further, having old variants linger creates a ripe condition for the emergence of “recombinant variants”, such as Ba4 or Ba5. These recombinant variants combine features of Delta and Omicron, and likely appeared in chronic Covid patients.
If so, chronic covid will get worse over time, due to CD8 immune cell destruction as well as variant development. Good luck to the people affected.
Israel: Chronic Covid Persists in Guts and Immune CD8 Cells, like AIDS
I can’t help but wonder how come I keep having these flash backs… remembering Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO 1918–1956:
"And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?… The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If…if…We didn’t love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation…. We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward."
Must be a coincidence. Love your work Igor. You are one of a kind. Thank you.
And Still here in australia they are non stop prodding people to get the latest booster.WTF will it take them to stop.