[desine]

Too late to edit, but I'm getting mixed votes (which I usually don't pay much attention to), so I will explain:

There's a few different frameworks people are working within. From my experience, linking or forwarding to any "outside the box" ideas in this sphere will only invite more downvotes, argumentation over the details, and flamewars. Any linking of these ideas would be interpreted by some to be an endorsement of them. In my parent comment I made sure to mention that none of them were worthy of my endosement at this time, though I do find them interesting. Anyone reading this comment, buried deep in "hacker news" is capable of finding alternative ideas outside the norm. You can do your own research, if you like.

I mentioned them because the idea of people disagreeing on this was actually more foreign to me than "flat earth" which I find "pretty far out there", when I first stumbled upon it. It's very uncommonly discussed, and I don't have the clout to either endorse or properly antagonize these ideas. It's intriguing to me that something as preposterous as "the earth is flat" can be much more widely known and discussed than "maybe the way we frame viruses is incorrect".

[dnautics]

I mean I suspect that the flu pangenome was evolving "meta-capabilities" to evade the way that our flu vaccines are selected by the authorities, you can see, vaguely, a declining efficacy of the flu vaccine in the last 5 years pre-pandemic (admittedly this could also be noise, or it could also be a measurement artefact due to better tracking). However, we'll probably never know since the flu patterns totally got rekt these past two years, which means any large-scale evolutionary trends, if they existed, probably, got the reset button pushed on them.

[desine]

That's rather interesting, and I haven't heard anyone else talk about this. A bit frightening too.