Mercola: Less Deadly BA.5 COVID Strain as Infectious as Measles

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The Covid-19 virus has been regularly mutating into new and more virulent strains. The current dominant strain, BA.5, is, according to Dr. Joseph Mercola on his blog, Mercola.com, less deadly than the original strain, but more virulent than nearly any other virus known to man. It’s as infectious as measles writes Mercola. He continues:

As suspected, SARS-CoV-2 continues to mutate. This was entirely expected and predicted, as vaccinating against any highly mutable virus, such as the coronavirus, pressures the virus to adapt.

One of the latest variants, BA.5 — now believed to be the cause of nearly all COVID infections — is tied with measles in terms of its infectiousness and transmissibility.¹ That makes it the most infectious of all SARS-CoV-2 variants,² and one of the most infectious viruses known to man. Fortunately, it’s also considerably less deadly than the original Wuhan strain. According to a July 5, 2022, Deadline report:³

“BA.5 was first identified in South Africa on February 26. Less than a month ago, on June 4, it only accounted for 9.6% of cases in the U.S., while predecessor BA.2.12.1 sat atop the heap at 62%.

Today, the CDC [U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] estimates the subvarient is responsible for about 54% of new cases here. That’s double BA.2.12.1, which now accounts for 27% of infections. BA.5’s rise also leaves sister subvariant BA.4 in the dust at 16%. It’s a faster ascension than that of any other variant over the course of the pandemic …

One reason BA.5 is so dominant is that it seems to be more transmissible than even BA.2.12.1 … ‘The Omicron sub-variant BA.5 is the worst version of the virus that we’ve seen,’ said Eric Topal, who is Founder and Director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute, Professor of Molecular Medicine and Executive Vice-President of Scripps Research, in a substack post⁴ last week.

‘It takes immune escape, already extensive, to the next level, and, as a function of that, enhanced transmissibility, well beyond Omicron (BA.1) and other Omicron family variants that we’ve seen.’

In other words, BA.5 is much better at evading the immunity provided by vaccines and especially good at dodging the immunity conferred by previous infection.⁵“

BA.5 Circumvents Previous Defenses

Even if you’ve had COVID before, got the jab and all your boosters, and even if you have hybrid immunity (meaning you’ve had both past infection and the COVID jab), chances are you’ll probably catch BA.5, as it seems particularly adept at circumventing all previous defenses.

This immune-evading ability is likely an outgrowth of mass injection, as vaccinating a population during an acute outbreak pressures the virus to mutate more rapidly. The image below, from Topol’s Substack article,⁶ illustrates the genetic distance between BA.5 and previous strains.

This scenario was predicted even before the mass injection campaign began, but no one in a position to make decisions paid any attention to reason. So, here we are.

What remains to be seen is whether BA.5 will cause worse or milder infection than Omicron, which was on par with the common cold. The problem we have is that governments around the world have done a spectacularly good job of undermining good data collection and reporting, so it’s extremely difficult at this point to tease out what’s really going on in the real world.

For example, in the U.S., COVID cases are at an “all-time low,” Dr. Michael Mina, an epidemiologist and chief science officer at telehealth company eMed told CNN, July 11, 2022.⁷ However, that same day, NPR reported⁸ that BA.5 was “driving up cases and reinfections” in the U.S. So, which is it?

Europe, meanwhile, is reporting a sharp rise in both cases and hospitalizations.⁹ Keep in mind that “cases” simply refer to positive PCR tests, which are unreliable at best, as they cannot identify active infections, and COVID hospitalizations are frequently patients who are hospitalized for other conditions and just happen to test positive for COVID.

The only experimental study¹⁰ we have for BA.5 so far suggests the virus replicates more efficiently in human lung cell cultures than the Omicron subvariant BA.2, and infection experiments on hamsters suggest it may cause more severe infection than BA.2. That said, there’s really no evidence to suggest BA.5 is deadlier than any previous version.¹¹