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| Tissue sections of mouse lungs, after infection with influenza. The image on the left is the control and the image on the right is from mice without receptors for interferon lambda. The lungs where interferon lambda signalling is blocked (right) shows improved epithelial cell growth and differentiation (in red). |
More evidence of just how malevolent and exquisitely nasty or grossly incompetent any intelligent designer who designed both the mammalian immune system and Covid-19 would need to be to design this most nasty of viruses.
A team of researchers at the Francis Crick Institute have discovered that the proteins, type I and III interferons, our immune systems produce to combat the virus, make it more difficult for your body to repair the damage to your lungs later on. This in turn means the virus can do even more damage.
Mind you, this is not the only virus that induces the body's immune system to turn against itself in this way. Influenza viruses do the same thing, but what makes this an especial problem for Covid-19 infections is that the illness lasts so long and the longer the immune response, the more of these long-term harmful proteins are produced.
Abstract
Excessive cytokine signaling frequently exacerbates lung tissue damage during respiratory viral infection. Type I (IFN-α/β) and III (IFN-λ) interferons are host-produced antiviral cytokines. Prolonged IFN-α/β responses can lead to harmful proinflammatory effects, whereas IFN-λ mainly signals in epithelia, inducing localized antiviral immunity. Here we show that IFN signaling interferes with lung repair during influenza recovery, with IFN-λ driving these effects most potently. IFN-induced p53 directly reduces epithelial proliferation and differentiation, increasing disease severity, and susceptibility to bacterial superinfections. Thus, excessive or prolonged IFN-production aggravates viral infection by impairing lung epithelial regeneration. Therefore, timing and duration are critical parameters of endogenous IFN action and should be considered carefully for IFN therapeutic strategies against viral infections like influenza and coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19).
Jack Major, Stefania Crotta, Miriam Llorian, Teresa M. McCabe, Hans Henrik Gad, Simon L. Priestnall, Rune Hartmann, Andreas Wack.
Type I and III interferons disrupt lung epithelial repair during recovery from viral infection.
Science, 2020; eabc2061 DOI: 10.1126/science.abc2061
Copyright: © 2020 The authors
Published by American Association for the Advancement of Science, Open access
Reprinted under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0)
So, according to creationists, a intelligent designer designed an immune system to keep us safe from infections; only it doesn't work very well and can end up doing us even more harm than an infection would. Then it designed the Covid-19 virus in such a way that it can exploit this design weakness in our immune system to make us even more sick than it could do on its own.
The only logical conclusion are:
- This designer is incompetent in the extreme.
- It is intentionally malevolent, giving us an inadequate and potentially hostile immune system then designing organisms like Covid-19 to exploit the inadequacy of our immune system and use it against us.
- Covid-19 arose by an uncaring process that chanced upon an imperfect immune system that had evolved by a utilitarian, near-enough-is-good-enough process that left its carriers better off then having none at all, but not protected against all possible organisms.
Unfortunately for creationists, they are forbidden from accepting the third of these possibilities without giving up their creationist dogmas, so they are left with only the extreme incompetence or intentionally malevolent explanations.
Maintaining a belief in intelligent [sic] design creationism, despite Covid-19, must take mental gymnastics that would make a circus acrobat wince. Tweet
Noah must have had a special place on his ark for all these viruses, killer bacteria and fungi. And fleas and mosquitoes that spread many of these. Good thing god decided to save them while he killed tens of thousands of men, women and children through drowning.
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