They’re not living organisms, so what are they? What created them; where did they come from? Why do they infect hosts? Bacterial infections make sense; bacteria use a host’s body to survive and propagate. Viruses aren’t alive, though, so why do they need to infect people at all?
And why do they all affect the body so differently? Why can you only catch some viruses (I.e. chickenpox) once, but you can catch others (Covid, flu) multiple times? Why do some (HPV, EBV) appear to cause cancers and autoimmune disorders while others don’t?
For as far as we’ve come in medicine, it seems like we don’t understand much at all about viruses, or their longterm implications.
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Viruses aren’t alive on the catch that they cannot reproduce autonomously; they require the cells of a living thing to reproduce.
In quite a few ways they resemble a living thing; their origins are presumably extremely similar to those of living cells, they are at least as diverse as living things, and the law of natural selection still applies to them. Natural selection, which applies to *anything* that can reproduce itself (not just living things), is the answer to all your questions.
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