The Nature of the Problem of Immunity and its Solution
Authors: Ola Paul 
Published: July 2022

Tens of millions of our own kind are killed by diseases in spite of the laudable effort of our healthcare teams every single year that the problem of immunity remains unsolved. But this problem is not longstanding because of the complexity of the nature of immunity but rather because we have been trying to obtain the knowledge we require to solve problems from theories that are logically deduced from observations when such knowledge can only be obtained from theories that are obtained with a method that requires reality to be illustrated and deductions to be made only for the purpose of knowing whether or not we have obtained the knowledge we seek from the results of our illustrations through the agreement or disagreement between facts and the consequences we have deduced from such results. The most influential among the theories of immunity is that which Ilya Mechnikov logically deduced from inflammatory phenomena in which phagocytosing cells that envelope and store foreign entities are brought to sites of cell death even in the absence of pathogens. This theory of immunity aimed to find proof for the logical deduction in which Pasteur and co-workers proposed the mechanism by which pathogens cause diseases to be one through which they attack their hosts as well as the deduction that emerged as its logical consequence, that the mechanism of immunity must necessarily be those that defend such hosts from attack by destroying pathogens. After all, the repeatedly proven germ theory was assumed by its deniers to be proven false by the prosperity of pathogens in organisms that enjoy complete immunity which should not be observed at all if indeed, the attack mechanism and defence theories have any truth in them. And in the same manner, the prosperity of pathogens in completely immune individuals was seen as disagreeing with the repeatedly proven germ theory by its proponents and therefore as an observation that is not capable of disproving the attack mechanism and defence theories which were logically deduced from this verified theory. But immunity is really the reduction in the severity of diseases which occurs differently in different individuals even when exposure to their causes is similar so that while their manifestations are so severe in those who are not immune that they are killed, severity is reduced through different degrees in those who survive because they are sufficiently immune with the completely immune experiencing no symptoms at all in the phenomenon of asymptomatic infection. An illustration of the reality in which these immunological phenomena occur reveals immune mechanisms to be those which do not reduce disease severity by eliminating causes but rather by attenuating their influence on the mechanisms that bring destructive entities such as the phagocytosing cells of Mechnikov to the tissues, not only in response to pathogens but also to sterile causes in the phenomenon of sterile inflammation. The same illustration reveals that such destructive mechanisms are really pathological mechanisms which, at some point in our natural history, began to control our genetic information for a purpose which is not our own good even though they have appeared to be beneficial mechanisms for as long as the evolutionary law was thought in the manner of Charles Darwin to be that according to which the species descended by and for their own good from common ancestors. And according to the illustrated reality, destructive entities such as the phagocytosing cells of Mechnikov are present in humans and other animals because the evolutionary law is that according to which the genetic information can be similarly changed by such pathological mechanisms even in organisms of different species. The problem of germ denialism is solved as soon as the deniers see that the prosperity of pathogens in organisms that enjoy complete immunity is a demonstration of the truthfulness of the result that emerged from this illustrated reality, that when conditions permit immune mechanisms to attenuate the influence of the pathogen on such pathological mechanisms so much that they fail to respond to the presence of the pathogen with destruction of the tissues, the host is as asymptomatic as those in whom the pathogen has been eliminated and the pathogen appears to be a harmless entity in the absence of this knowledge of reality when it is observed prospering in such an asymptomatic host. Our topmost research priority now, therefore, ought to be an illustration of reality which enables us to understand so well as to become capable of stabilizing such protective conditions that give rise to immunity and therefore of being protected from diseases even as pathogens prosper and mutate into the variants and sub variants we presently dread.