Hey, #MedMastodon #HistoryMastodon #MedHistory, got a question for you!

So my med students seem to enjoy my end-of-class babbling on medical history/oddities to the point that they are now demanding it (I have made it clear they wont get any extra credit because of this and still they insist so I assume their interest is sincere 😂 ).
I usually say ok and ask for a subject. This week they suggested the #BlackDeath (don't ask why).
So I mushed together a few ideas. I concluded with the interaction of #Yersinia pestis and #FMF, bringing the subject back on track (#ClinicalImmunology).

Now I was reviewing some facts and I saw this paper (10.1136/pgmj.2004.024075) by Duncan and Smith on the #PostgraduateMedicalJournal #PMJ. They make quite a case for the underlying cause of the #Plague being some sort of virus, possibly a haemorrhagic fever.
One of the arguments is the selection of yet another variant that might protect against disease - in their proposed model its CCR5-delta32 which protects against HIV-1 and seems to have had a substancial boost in prevalence during the same period of the Bubonic Plague.

I had never heard of this. I found a lot of news reports from the early 2000s on this but seems to have faded away since then as a theory.

I still found it very interesting. Does anyone have any new information on this?
I am aware of the recent isolation of Y pestis and the 2022 Nature paper, but could these two agents not have coexisted, for instance?