‘Real-time’ infectious disease modelers are finally beginning to acknowledge the true nature of this pandemic.

Geert Vanden Bossche Aug 05, 2025 EST

Some self-proclaimed ‘real-time modelers’ like J.P. Weiland are apparently so enamored with their own modeling wizardry that they feel compelled to block out anything that challenges their mainstream-approved narratives — just to keep their carefully curated flock of followers nodding in agreement and feeding their ego. After merely dropping a few immunology- and virology-based comments, I was swiftly banned from his X account — excommunicated from his digital congregation — even though his public health musings seem oh-so-generously intended for a ‘broad’ audience.

This guy tracks the spread and patterns of COVID-19 by staring at wastewater data and feeding it into a set of cookie-cutter assumptions and toy algorithms — ones that conveniently ignore the extremely complex and ever-shifting dynamics of a virus that is rapidly evolving as a result of collective immune responses that have been catastrophically misdirected ever since mass vaccination efforts began. But sure, let’s all pretend his short-term projections are ‘scientific’ and keep clapping as he pirouettes to the rhythm of the mainstream media narrative! And of course, in true loyalist fashion, Weiland lends passive support to the sacred cow of COVID-19 vaccination — which, according to his gospel, couldn’t possibly have anything to do with the bizarre and unprecedented trajectory this pandemic has taken.

Let’s be honest: the ‘modeling’ the J.P. Weilands of this world produce usually amounts to little more than ‘A new wave is coming… because the last one just ended’ (at least according to wastewater data)! Their forecasts are just glorified trendlines, stretched into the future without even a hint of understanding of what actually drives viral evolution. I call it mis-modeling, since it’s rooted in a complete lack of knowledge about immunology, virology, or vaccinology. Apparently, if it’s not in their spreadsheet, it doesn’t exist.

But nature, as always, has the last laugh — especially when humans attempt to intervene on a large scale in complex biological systems. That’s something these semi-literate soothsayers are now being forced to acknowledge — whether they like it or not. Weiland’s recent posts on X (see below) seem to reflect just that: an awkward recognition that the collective immune system has crumbled, viral spread is now unstoppable, and that even animal populations may now be turning into permanent reservoirs. But does he get why this is happening? Nope. He still writes nonsense like ‘evolution continues despite suppression’ — to which I’d suggest a more accurate version: ‘evolution continues because of (sustained) suboptimal suppression.’

He and his fellow fantasists still cling to their seasonal fairy tales — blaming surges on school calendars, cozy indoor gatherings due to people seeking warmer indoor temperatures in winter and cooler temperatures (air conditioning) in summer, travel during holidays, ‘vaccine fatigue’ or the magical power of boosters. Here’s certainly no lack of imagination — what’s missing is immunological insight and any understanding of the impact of collective immune selection pressure on the circulating variants.

Anyway, I’m genuinely curious whether these imaginative wizards will still be chirping when their fantasy curves start to deviate as wildly from real-world data as their brains do from actual scientific understanding.