Immunity may be the wrong model to deal with infectious disease. Domestication is the right one, I suspect.…

Immunity may be the wrong model to deal with infectious disease. Domestication is the right one, I suspect. There are powerful insights in Ewald’s work. Immunity alone strips away the entire ecological context of host and pathogen. /1 https://t.co/30brCwVuZN

Even all immunity is likely just a meta-stable, ecological equilibrium state between our own microbes and pathogenic microbes. The current fashion for ‘exposure’ immunity, the idiot idea that repeated uncontrolled infection creates immunity, again completely ignores…/2

…the ecological context of the host-pathogen relationship. As Ewald describes in this talk and in his writing, you will get entirely different outcomes, depending on the context of that infection. Often making simple and even inexpensive contextual interventions, like…/3

…fly screens for malaria, or clean drinking water for cholera, will not only prevent disease, it can in turn support milder variants, a domestication of the pathogen itself. Because pathogens will always vastly outnumber us, Ewald believes ‘living with’ them…/4

…is not just allowing ourself repeated exposure to them. (It’s hard to find words adequate to describe the stupidity of that idea.) It’s understanding the specific ecological context of the host-pathogen relationship, and designing a fully contextual response that will…/5

…foster an environment more favourable to lower-virulence pathogens. The more nuanced exposure fans will say it’s vaccine-medicated exposure, but a vaccine is just one of many possible ecological interventions. Vaccines are not pharmaceuticals, they’re ecological agents. /6

The push for clean air is vital, with Covid. But we may need to think even more broadly than that, towards an ecological coexistence with SARS-Cov-2 designed to foster a much lower virulence. That will include contextual measures like clean air, better vaccines, better…/7

…building design etc. It’s economic politics that wants this all to be just a sterile dialectic between hosts and pathogen, mediated by immunity. To be something you can throw a pharmaceutical at, to allow economic life to continue as it is. /8

The whole basis of ‘the economy’ is to de-contextualise everything. That’s what ‘globalisation’ means, stripping away all context, to allow the unfettered flow of money, people and resources through a fictitious ‘market’. It’s a biological fairy tale. It not only creates…/9

…lethal pathogens stripped of their previous ecological resistance mechanisms, by destroying habitat, it then fosters the further virulence of these pathogens by blocking any contextual, ecological measures to try to bring them under control. Zoom out even further, and…/10

…this is public health common sense. Communities with cleaner water and air, less crowding, more light etc. are healthier communities. Health is ecological, contextual. The economy crowd, ignoring this, throw it all back on our immune systems, which are under assault. /end