To clarify my interest in Christian Drosten’s musings about hybrid immunity, that’s not a theory I agree…

To clarify my interest in Christian Drosten’s musings about hybrid immunity, that’s not a theory I agree with. What interests me is his simultaneous belief that we shouldn’t be getting infected. The two don’t go together, but that (to me) is where it gets interesting. /1

I think the hybrid immunity folk never talk about time. There’s this sort of implicit assumption that we can achieve it all in a generation. That if we infect *individuals* multiple times, the *population* will maybe achieve hybrid immunity. That’s suicidal, but it opens…/2

…up the question of how pathogens evolve with populations *across* generations? Like influenza, with us for maybe 1500 years, and our immunity (I assume) reflecting that co-existence across all of the generations. Across infections of millions of people, over thousands…/3

…of years. Again not arguing that we should ever infect people, only reflecting on what happens if we can’t eliminate or eradicate a pathogen in the short to medium term. I wondered yesterday if this is where Covid minimisers and sane public health actually collide. /4

Those arguing for infection, using the influenza example, their logic is forced to the sane public health position if they recognise that immunity is a relationship that evolves over many years, hundreds or thousands. Which leaves the task as controlling spread and infection …/5

…in the present, because otherwise we won’t survive beyond it, to co-evolve with the pathogen. And that’s just the sane public health position anti-minimisers argue for. Minimisers collapse pathogen co-evolution into individuals rather than populations over…/6

…centuries, it’s another example of how their politics collapses everything into individuals, and excises all the collective and historical elements. Everything is present moment, there’s no institutional or immune history to any of it. /7

Of course they’re also bad faith actors and aren’t interested in these niceties anyway. Beating them is a political and industrial issue, not scientific. We need to leverage any remaining institutional power we have that represents collective things. And as I say a lot,…/8

…the only candidate left standing there that I know of, is unions. I’m not a union organiser or particularly fond of them, I just read the history. They are the only way ordinary people have ever achieved anything politically, outside wars and plagues. /end