Malevolent Designer News - What on Earth is Creationism's Magic Designer Up To?

Alarming COVID variants show vital role of genomic surveillance

This is one for those Creationists who subscribe to the Intelligent [sic] Design Hoax but who still believe their putative designer is one and the same as the supposedly all-loving, caring and compassionate deity described in the Christian Bible.

Does the evidence of an increasing number of variant forms of the SARS-CoV-2 virus show us that your god is deliberately trying to find ways to get around the vaccines that human medical science has developed or is it just a result of the operation of the natural process of evolution?

In an article in Nature, by David Cyranoski, he says:

In the past two months, scientists have identified several fast-spreading variants that have prompted government restrictions in many countries — and new variants are being detected more frequently.

Variant of Concern - the 'South African' 501Y.V2

---

Variant of Concern - the 'UK (Kent)' B.1.1.1.7

Two Variants are of particular concern because they appear to be spreading rapidly and displacing the earlier versions. One of these is probably already responsible for the quite sudden increase in the number of new cases in the UK, most of which are of the 'Kent' variant, called B.1.1.1.7; the other is the 'South African variant, 501Y.V2. This shows that there is something about these two variants that is enabling them to be more infectious and there are two main ways in which this could be happening:

1. Gaining access to cells of the respiratory tract more quickly and so replicating more quickly to produce a large number of new virus particles to be shed into the environment.
2. Delaying the onset of symptoms so an infected person could be unwittingly infecting others before he/she even knows he/she has they virus.

Of course, these are not mutually exclusive and both could occur together.

So far, the important mutations appear to be in the part of the viral genome that codes for the 'spike' proteins on the surface of the virus. These enable the virus to bind to the ACE2 proteins on the host's cells and open up a portal through which it then empties its RNA into the cell where it sets up the mechanism to use the cell's own replicating mechanism to make new versions of itself and to destroy the cell, liberating these new virus particles to infect more cells or to be shed into the environment. The evidence is that the mutations enable the variants to do this binding and breaking and entering process more quickly.

On the face of it, this might seem more worrying than it really is. Certainly, with more people being infected more quickly and easily, more people are going to become seriously ill and die than would otherwise be the case, but there is no evidence so far that the variants could themselves be more pathological.

The slight concern is that it is these spike proteins that the vaccines developed so far, and many of those still undergoing testing, are produced against. So any change in the virus spike protein as the potential to reduce the effectiveness of the vaccines if the antibodies the vaccines produce can't recognise it any more. However, the reality is a little more complicated.

Of greater concern is a third variant from Brazil, known as P.1 or VOC202101/02. In addition to the N501Y mutation seen in the 'Kent' variant, it also has the E484K mutation seen in the 'South African' variant which is thought to make the antibodies less effective. So this one might be both able to spread more quickly and easily and to evade our acquired antibodies!

The good news is that the vaccines contain the mRNA for making the whole spike protein, not just a small part of it. This means that the immune system produces a range of antibodies that recognise several different parts of the protein, so a change in just one, or a few parts of the spike protein doesn't mean the protein won't be recognised by other antibodies, although they might be slightly less effective against it, or it may need more antibodies to have the same effect.

On the other hand, the South African variant is thought to have multiple mutations affecting the spike protein!

The other piece of good news is that, thanks to the brilliance of medical science, sequencing the new variants and creating the mRNA for them if we need to is a relatively simple task and can be completed in a matter of days or a few weeks at most. All the heavy lifting in the manufacture of these vaccines has been done and won't need to be changed. This means that, if we need to, we can produce an annually-updated version to be given yearly, like the annual flu jab.

So what is driving this apparent proliferation of new variants?

Intelligent [sic] Design Creationists, of course, are compelled by dogma to attribute it to their supposedly all-loving deity. Biologists however have a much more logical explanation.

As the number of virus particles in the global gene pool of the SARS-CoV-2 virus increases so the probability of a, say, 1 in 10 billion, chance mutation occurring somewhere also increases in direct proportion. With, say, 100 trillion new viruses being made each day at the rate of a trillion per hour, a 1 in 10 billion chance mutation should occur 100 times an hour! The larger the gene pool, the more the variance within it. If one of those gives the virus the ability to infect twice as many people as before, or to overcome to some extent the social distancing and other measure taken to minimise spread, by, for example, surviving longer on surfaces, the number of that version now being created in the world will increase very rapidly compared to the number of the 'old' variant. The 'Kent' variant which was increasing rapidly in the UK before the current lockdown is believed to have a 50%-80% increase in infectivity.

So, what will happen as we build up the 'herd immunity' in the population with the vaccines?

What this will create are the conditions for any variant that overcomes the vaccine to gain an advantage. The good news again is that with a high enough level of herd immunity the size of the virus gene pool will be greatly reduced so the probability of a chance mutation coming up with enough changes to create the ability to do just that is very, very small, though not zero!

The other thing that would be to the virus' advantage would be if it didn't make people ill enough to stay at home and avoid contact with others, at least until it had had a chance to infect more people, so any mutations which made it a less serious infection would tend to increase in the virus gene pool. This is the way previous pandemic organisms such as Yersinia pestis, the bacterium that caused bubonic plague, is believed to have attenuated. It's also the probable mechanism whereby the myxoma virus that caused myxomatosis in rabbits, and the rabbit population, came to reach a stable accomodation that allowed the rabbit population to bounce back.

The threat from the virus will not go away and may be with us for a considerable time yet, but the probability is that we will eventually reach a dynamic accommodation with one another.

Now, all that is a very simple explanation for the proliferating number of varieties of SARS-CoV-2 we are currently seeing and a realistic prediction for the course of the pandemic, with the aid of medical science.

What Creationists appear to be unable to explain though is why they prefer an explanation that leaves their supposedly all-lovign god look like the complete antithesis of anything that could possibly qualify for the epithet, all-loving.

Further reading:

Epidemiological update: Occurrence of variants of SARS-CoV-2 in the Americas (20 January 2021)
Covid-19: What new variants are emerging and how are they being investigated?
Genomic characterisation of an emergent SARS-CoV-2 lineage in Manaus: preliminary findings

---

Tweet Link