COVID-19

How Viruses Outplay Your Immune System With 9000 IQ Imposter Strats

Ever wonder how SARS-CoV-2 (and other viruses) take down your immune system? The secret is Among Us imposter strategies.

Note to subs: Yes, this video was reuploaded! Sorry for spamming y’all’s notifs 🙂

Let me know in the comments below if you want to see more content like this! Other imposters (bacteria, viruses, protists, cancer) also use unique strategies, and your crewmates have developed some pretty cool playstyles to counter them…

(Or if you want more web security videos, let me know too!)

Special thanks to:
Dr. Pat Jones, Fmr. Director of Immunology @Stanford for the relevant COVID papers and answering my questions for the script!
Jessie Chang ( for the awesome cover art!

Background track:

More Llama Explains:

Ok now for the nerds:

Sources/additional info:
Borges, R. C., Hohmann, M. S., & Borghi, S. M. (2020). Dendritic cells in COVID-19 immunopathogenesis: insights for a possible role in determining disease outcome. International Reviews of Immunology, 1-18.

Taefehshokr, N., Taefehshokr, S., Hemmat, N., & Heit, B. (2020). Covid-19: Perspectives on Innate Immune Evasion. Frontiers in immunology, 11.

Kaneko, N., Kuo, H. H., Boucau, J., Farmer, J. R. (2020) The Loss of Bcl-6 Expressing T Follicular Helper Cells and the Absence of Germinal Centers in COVID-19. Massachusetts Consortium on Pathogen Readiness Specimen Working Group. SSRN, 3652322.

Fu, Y., Cheng, Y., & Wu, Y. (2020). Understanding SARS-CoV-2-mediated inflammatory responses: from mechanisms to potential therapeutic tools. Virologica Sinica, 1-6.

Zhang, Y., Zhang, J., Chen, Y., Luo, B., Yuan, Y., Huang, F., … & Song, Z. (2020). The ORF8 Protein of SARS-CoV-2 Mediates Immune Evasion through Potently Downregulating MHC-I. bioRxiv.

Karki, R., Sharma, B. R., Tuladhar, S., Williams, E. P., Zalduondo, L., Samir, P., … & Kanneganti, T. D. (2020). Synergism of TNF-α and IFN-γ triggers inflammatory cell death, tissue damage, and mortality in SARS-CoV-2 infection and cytokine shock syndromes. Cell.