Lay summary on recent Substack article: "A Pandemic Panic for Two Mutations, but None for Fifty!"

For those who find it too challenging to read my recent Substack article (“A Pandemic Panic for Two Mutations, but None for Fifty!”), here follows a two-page lay summary:
Here’s something that genuinely baffles me.
When scientists detect one or two mutations in a seasonal or avian flu virus, often in just a handful of people and with no sustained spread, alarm bells go off. Headlines scream ‘potential pandemic!’ Emergency meetings are held. Models are built around what might happen if those mutations ever pile up.
But at the same time, SARS-CoV-2 (SC-2) is quietly evolving right in front of us, accumulating dozens of mutations, reshaping its spike (S) protein, recombining, and showing clear signs that it is adapting under strong immune pressure- and almost nobody seems worried.

Let’s look at what’s actually happening.

What the virus is doing right now

Global sequencing (what little of it remains) shows several SC-2 lineages circulating at the same time. Among them is a group derived from a variant called BA.3.2, nicknamed ‘Cicada.’
These Cicada variants are not exploding in cases. They’re not grabbing headlines. Instead, they’re doing something more subtle, and more interesting:

→ They are slowly but steadily spreading in places like Australia, parts of Europe, and the US

→ They carry more than 50 S mutations compared to earlier Omicron variants

→ They have over 70 mutations compared to the original Wuhan virus

→ Many of these mutations affect how the virus enters cells and how the immune system recognizes it.

Despite all these changes, they’re not causing obvious new waves of severe disease.

Why that matters

In normal viral evolution, you’d expect one of two things:

· Either all those mutations give the virus a big competitive advantage, and it takes over fast

· Or they weaken the virus, and the lineage dies out

But that’s not what we’re seeing! Instead, these heavily mutated variants are persisting without taking over. That’s a classic sign of constraint, not success. It suggests the virus is running into limits-trying many changes but getting very little payoff.

In simple terms:
The virus is working very hard for very little gain. It behaves like a virus running out of evolutionary room. That usually means it’s being pushed, not drifting naturally.

What’s pushing it?

The pressure doesn’t seem to be about a single mutation or antibody target. It looks broader. The virus appears to be under population-level immune pressure on transmission itself, more particularly in highly C-19-vaccinated populations.
That kind of pressure doesn’t select for viruses that improve their fitness in the usual evolutionary way, such as spreading faster or outcompeting other variants. On the contrary, it corners it as it narrows the evolutionary options. Many paths are blocked. Only a few narrow routes remain. And when that happens, biology often doesn’t respond with small tweaks but rather with major qualitative shifts.

Why this isn’t “benign evolution”

Because despite all these mutations:

• There’s no clear growth advantage

• No clear attenuation

• No clear stabilization of the viral evolutionary dynamics

Instead, we see:

• Slow spread

• Repeated convergence on similar mutations

• Lots of genetic effort for minimal benefit

That’s not what a virus looks like when it’s peacefully settling into endemic life!
It’s what a system looks like when it’s approaching a bottleneck!

Instead of making the virus ‘better’ at spreading in the usual way, the mounting population-level immune pressure on its transmissibility may push it to change how its surface is coated with sugars (a process called glycosylation). These sugar coatings can act like camouflage, helping the virus evade immunity and spread through alternative pathways in the body. While this may help the virus survive immune pressure exerted by highly C-19-vaccinated populations, this kind of escape doesn’t lead to a milder virus but carries a real risk of increased virulence.

The double standard

And here’s the part that really blows me away.

• Influenza is feared for what it might become with a few mutations

• SC-2 is dismissed despite what it is already doing-right now, at global scale

One virus triggers panic based on theory. The other is ignored, or at most ‘normalized’ despite unprecedented real-world evolution. That’s not reasonable risk assessment. That’s selective blindness. Once again, those who follow this shortsighted narrative risk being caught off guard.