We are facing new rules of the game, in the face of which any politician is, in truth, powerless

On 7 September this year, the journal “eLife” published a study on changes in the human immune system as the environment in which they live and work changes.

To put it very simply – livestock farmers face different pathogens than hunter-gatherers.

Consequently, immune systems are forced to adapt, to change. If this were not the case, a “former” Palaeolithic hunter, upon encountering pathogens characteristic of a livestock-farming and agricultural environment, would in most cases die as a result of a so-called cytokine storm, because their immune system would “not understand” what it had encountered and would “go into a frenzy”.

It is clear that such adaptation does not happen quickly or easily. My assumption, on the other hand, is that the environment with which we come into contact in the 21st century has also fundamentally changed (largely thanks to ourselves), and our immune systems are forced to “learn” again. Roughly speaking, if it were not for COVID, there would still have been some other “subject to learn”.