Keith D Johnson on Nostr: 3/ "Except this isn’t even close to the whole story. For one thing, the snapshot ...
3/
"Except this isn’t even close to the whole story. For one thing, the snapshot stored in your immune memory is just a physical piece of the pathogen, & viruses evolve very quickly. As the virus changes, the real thing starts to resemble the record being kept by your immune system less & less, and it becomes easier & easier for new variants to evade adaptive immunity. The more people that get infected, the more times the virus randomly mutates — & the more likely it is that a particular combination of those mutations makes a virus that is unrecognizable to your immune system."
"Except this isn’t even close to the whole story. For one thing, the snapshot stored in your immune memory is just a physical piece of the pathogen, & viruses evolve very quickly. As the virus changes, the real thing starts to resemble the record being kept by your immune system less & less, and it becomes easier & easier for new variants to evade adaptive immunity. The more people that get infected, the more times the virus randomly mutates — & the more likely it is that a particular combination of those mutations makes a virus that is unrecognizable to your immune system."