Dr. Philp McMillan,  John McMillan

“When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”

Arthur Conan Doyle put those words in the mouth of Sherlock Holmes more than a century ago, but they landed with fresh weight on December 22, 2025, when Belgian virologist Geert Vanden Bossche invoked them to frame what he calls the immune escape pandemic, the slow-motion crisis he first warned about nearly five years earlier.

People are tired of COVID. That much is obvious. Scroll through any social media platform and you’ll find the same exhausted refrain: Isn’t it over? Haven’t we moved on? The fatigue is understandable. After years of masks, lockdowns, boosters, and breakthrough infections, the collective desire to close the chapter is overwhelming. The problem is that the virus never got the memo. It hasn’t gone away. It has transformed.

The 2021 Warning

In March 2021, Vanden Bossche formally urged the World Health Organization to reconsider its large-scale COVID-19 vaccination campaign. His concern was specific: mass vaccination of entire populations during an active pandemic, using vaccines that neither provided sterilizing immunity nor matched the circulating viral variants, would drive the virus toward dangerous evolutionary escape. The vaccines, he argued, were designed to reduce severe disease, not to eliminate the virus from infected cells, and not to stop transmission at the mucosal surfaces of the upper airway where respiratory viruses first take hold.

The reception was hostile. Critics dismissed him as a crank, a fearmonger, a “weird guy” peddling fringe science. The debate over immune escape quickly became tribal. As Vanden Bossche himself has observed: “The science surrounding the evolution of the SARS-CoV-2 immune escape pandemic has increasingly been reduced to a matter of belief. You either believe it or you don’t.”

And here lies the crux of the problem. If one rejects the 2021 premise outright, there is no framework to interpret what is happening now.

The Genomic Explosion

For those willing to look, the evidence is striking. Nextstrain.org, a platform that has tracked the genomic epidemiology of SARS-CoV-2 since January 2020, tells the story in branching lines and exploding color. In the beginning, there was the Wuhan variant, a single dot on the phylogenetic tree. Through 2021, the branches multiplied modestly: Alpha, Beta, Lambda, Delta. Concerning, yes, but manageable. Then came Omicron in late 2021, and the tree began to fracture.

By 2025, the fracture had become an explosion. The phylogenetic visualization no longer resembles a tree so much as a detonation, with hundreds upon hundreds of variants radiating outward in every direction. The Greek alphabet ran out long ago; numerical designations replaced it out of sheer necessity. This is not what normal viral evolution looks like. This is something else entirely.

And then, on October 1, 2025, the data went dark. GISAID, the global database that had supplied Nextstrain with genomic sequences since February 2020, abruptly ended its data-sharing arrangement. The stated rationale was limited resources. The practical effect is that one of the world’s most important viral surveillance tools has gone blind precisely when visibility matters most.

The Immunological Failure

Why did herd immunity never arrive? The answer lies in basic immunology. Injectable vaccines stimulate systemic immunity: they train the immune system to recognize and fight the virus once it has entered the bloodstream and tissues. What they do not do, and were never designed to do, is stimulate mucosal immunity in the upper respiratory tract, where airborne viruses first establish infection. Without mucosal protection, the virus can still infect, replicate, and transmit. The vaccines reduce severity; they do not stop the chain of transmission.

This matters because the original public health messaging (the rationale behind mandates and mass campaigns) rested on the assumption that vaccination would halt viral spread. That assumption was flawed. The result has been infection after infection after infection, each event exerting evolutionary pressure on a virus already primed to escape.

Consider an analogy from another familiar pathogen. Varicella-zoster virus causes chickenpox on first exposure, producing a full-body rash, primarily in children. Decades later, the same virus, dormant in nerve ganglia, can reactivate as shingles: a completely different clinical presentation from the same underlying infection. The point is that repeated encounters with a pathogen do not always produce the same disease. What happens when a population faces continuous reinfection with a rapidly mutating coronavirus? What disease does that produce?

The Five Stages of Immune Derailment

Clinicians who have watched this unfold describe a stepwise progression, a kind of slow-motion collapse of immune resilience that presents differently depending on where a patient sits on the spectrum.

The first stage is persistent infection. These are the people you talk to at holiday gatherings who mention they’ve had “another cold,” their third or fourth this year. Their immune systems remain resilient enough to clear the virus each time, but the infections keep coming, wave after wave.

The second stage is immune dysregulation. Symptoms begin to appear that seem unconnected: fatigue here, joint pain there, a rash that comes and goes. The viral pressure is now driving subtle imbalances in immune function, but nothing shows up on standard tests.

The third stage is smoldering inflammation. The patient feels persistently unwell but cannot identify why. Inflammatory markers (CRP, ferritin, IL-6) are mildly elevated, but no specific diagnosis emerges. They are sick, but not sick enough for anyone to name what is wrong.

The fourth stage is metabolic collapse. Weeks after an infection that seemed minor, something breaks. A heart attack. A stroke. An aggressive cancer that appears, as some have grimly termed it, out of nowhere, so-called “turbo” cancer. The system has been compromised, and acute events follow.

The fifth and final stage is end-stage viral sepsis. This is the cohort that troubles clinicians the most: patients who become critically ill and simply cannot be saved. Antibiotics, vasopressors, mechanical ventilation, ECMO. None of it works. “Literally, people get sick,” Dr. Philip McMillan, a researcher and clinician has observed, “and no matter what you do, they just die. You can’t even put your finger on why they have died.”

This progression can unfold over years, and many patients (and many clinicians) do not recognize the connection between stages.

The Hivicron Hypothesis

Vanden Bossche’s most alarming prediction concerns what he calls “Hivicron,” a portmanteau of “highly virulent” and “Omicron.” The hypothesis is that relentless immune pressure will eventually force the virus toward a qualitative evolutionary shift: a variant that combines Omicron’s immune-evasive properties with the capacity to infect immune cells deep in the lungs. Such a variant would not produce the broad, slow-burning disease pattern we see now. It may produce hyper-acute respiratory failure, with patients unable to breathe within hours.

Whether this specific scenario materializes remains uncertain. Disease presentation is messy; it varies by individual, by population, by comorbidity. But the underlying science, the layered stripping of immune defenses under continuous reinfection, is not contested.

Dr. McMillan described the trajectory this way: “It’s going to be more like a storm surge, or the tide coming in. You’re standing out on the beach, half a mile out. The tide seems to be coming in slowly, but suddenly, before you know it, it’s up to your knees, then it’s up to your waist, and you have to rush back in.”

The 1918 Echo

History offers a sobering parallel. The 1918 influenza pandemic killed approximately two million people in its first wave. Eighteen months later, the second wave killed fifty million. In 1918, scientists did not even know viruses existed. They used bacterial vaccines, massive doses of aspirin, and measures we now recognize as misguided or harmful.

We possess tools today that were unimaginable a century ago: genomic sequencing, real-time surveillance, sophisticated immunology. And yet, public health fatigue and the suppression of critical data risk repeating history’s errors in new form.

Preparedness Over Certainty

No one can say with certainty what 2026 will bring. Timelines are difficult to predict, and disease does not move in neat boxes. But the evidence (the genomic explosion, the reinfection cycles, the clinical progression from resilience to collapse) suggests a worsening trajectory.

It is better to err on the side of preparedness and hope to be wrong than to dismiss the warnings and be caught unprepared. That is not the message anyone wants to hear at the start of a new year. But the virus, indifferent to human fatigue, continues to evolve.

The impossible has been eliminated. What remains, however improbable, demands attention.