What we should worry about
What we should worry about
"On reading," by Simon Wain-Hobson, is a weekly discussion of scientific papers and news articles around gain of function research in virology.
Since January 2024, Dr. Wain-Hobson has written weekly essays for Biosafety Now discussing risky research in virology. You can read this entire series here.
The opening paragraphs cover Marvel Comics, The Andromeda Strain and The Hot Zone along with a sprinkling of words like freakish, trepidation and doomsday. Yet it’s published in Nature Microbiology, one of the top journals for basic infectious disease research. Quite a disconnect.
Topicality is the explanation. It was published online Feb 18, 2020, just a few weeks after the first cases of what was to become known as COVID-19 were described. The first genome sequence of the virus had just been released with the help of the last author. For the afficionados, the present paper was published two days after the notorious Proximal Origins paper was posted online, and later showed up in Nature Medicine on March 17, 2020. With so little data around and the prospect of a pandemic, every journal was clamoring for Phil Space.
On reading will eschew the science fiction - which has its space and readership - and focus on the science to see what’s on offer. As some readers of these essays will have surmised by now, things are not always that clear.
The topic is genetic mutation among coronaviruses. We read that these viruses employ an intrinsically error-prone RNA polymerase for replication, their genomes will accumulate mutations during every copying cycle. To appreciate this a short detour is necessary. SARS-CoV-2 is an example of an RNA virus, that is to say its genome is made of RNA. By contrast, there are viruses with DNA genomes – think of herpesviruses to name just one group. Their genomes are copied by enzymes called RNA or DNA polymerase – basically they make long polymers out of thousands of RNA or DNA building blocks.
RNA viral polymerases are not intrinsically error prone, no more so than DNA polymerases. The big difference is that RNA viruses have not invested in error detection and correction. Well, with one exception and that being coronaviruses. By contrast, DNA viruses have invested in getting DNA copying right or else use the enzymes in the infected cell to do the job for them. Remember viruses are parasites.
We then read that most mutations adversely impact some aspect of virus function and are removed by natural selection. This isn’t quite right. There is something called the nearly neutral theory of mutation. Most mutations hardly impact survival. Obviously, some are lethal, some are deleterious and are quickly purged by natural selection. Most importantly, the stuff of evolution represents a small fraction of total mutations. The remainder are mutations that have very little to no impact yet get retained.
Moreover, the role of natural selection in virus evolution is not easily predicted, rendering rampant speculation around the evolutionary trajectory of a virus during a nascent outbreak investigation especially problematic. Exactly, hence the hazardous endeavor of predicting the next flu pandemic strain, something addressed in numerous essays.
Given the above it is not surprising that Without information on the precise evolutionary forces and selection pressures in operation, predicting how virulence might evolve is an extremely difficult and perhaps futile task. Logical. These thoughts are reformulated just to ram home the message: speculating about the phenotype of any new mutation can be dangerous during fast-moving outbreaks.
The authors then turn related questions on themselves and have the temerity to answer them, despite their warnings. So, could SARS-CoV-2 adapt in the same way? Yes. Will adaptation precipitate more deaths? Unlikely.
At the time of writing – mid-February 2020 - the world knew next to nothing about the COVID-19 virus. Coronavirus evolution wasn’t well known. The Alpha variant was first identified in Great Britain and became dominant in the spring of 2021. Others followed including the nasty Delta variant by summer 2021, which caused severe pneumonia. And while the world was reeling from Delta, the much milder Omicron variant displaced it starting November 2021 because it had changed to an upper respiratory tract infection which made it much more transmissible. These viruses all had characteristic mutations.
Being a more transmissible virus, Omicron killed more people than Delta. We’ve been over this argument for flu (Chilled virology). In the absence of widespread immunity, the virus would adapt and as transmission increased more deaths were to be expected even if new deaths represented a smaller fraction of those infected. It’s not rocket virology.
Towards the end the article serves up another disconnect, notably Rather than fearing mutation, perhaps it is now time to embrace it, whatever that means. Probably there are two underlying threads starting with the prosaic Mutation is an inevitable consequence of being a virus, which of course it is, especially for RNA viruses. You could go one better and say that as no machine is perfect, mutation is an inevitable part of existence of any life form. The other is that mutation is the authors bread and butter. They study them using computers.
They could have made the parallel with cancer genomes where there are mutations agogo – up to 300,000 per genome and occasionally more. They can be divided up into passenger mutations, the vast majority, are hitchhiking on the backs of driver mutations which may number around 6-20. They are the stuff of cancer evolution, that transforms a team player working in concert into a narcissistic cancer cell.
Scientists are not too bothered by the silent or passenger mutations even though they can be informative sometimes. What counts are the driver mutations. That a cancer cell can progress or metastasize by way of mutation is a fear that haunts many a cancer patient. And as we saw with the Alpha, Beta, Delta, Omicron variant sequel for SARS-CoV-2, each resulted in more deaths, so they got the answer to their question wrong. Adaptive mutations (driver mutations in oncology parlance) are what we should worry about.
And the authors ask us to embrace mutation? No way for viruses and cancer. Absolutely when contemplating the marvel of evolution from the RNA world to vertebrates to Sapiens with piano virtuosi such as Martha Angerish…
…or Khatia Buniatishvili.
Once again words matter and in this case context is huge.
Back to reality. This was a missed chance when pedagogy was needed, when scientists should have shared what they knew about coronaviruses. And while we were told just how difficult predicting viruses can be and saw how easy it is to get it wrong, and they got it wrong, a number of specialists knew this a few decades ago.
Aside
On reading will be taking a break, picking up with these essays in mid-September.
Thanks for reading them to here.
“What they did is, they said, ‘We’re going to inject into the arms of billions of people the instructions to turn each individual into a bioweapons factory’ … Every single person that took the shot became the manufacturer of a synthetic spike protein associated with the coronavirus model.
There are TWO elements to this Bio Weapon because the "Not natural mRNA - but ModRNA DNA synthetic, created in a laboratory and patented" has nothing to do with the "injected trillions of LNP viral vectors (or Carbon Oxide particles), does it"?
1) Biological Weapons: “The difference between this and everything that’s been done before is really simple.
Not natural mRNA - but ModRNA DNA synthetic, created in a laboratory and patented: there are two distinctions that are absolutely unique to the covid pandemic.
Number 1, we are actually creating the mechanism to instruct the body to manufacture a toxin …
Number 2, the response is actually a ‘hopeful’ response that failed to consider two very critical things: the lipid nanoparticle in which the shot is delivered actually is also a toxin … and then the worst part about it is that we introduced a thing called pseudouridine.”
Pseudouridine was published in 2018 to be a pro-cancer agent. What this means is that “it shuts down the body’s response to how we recognise tumours and suppress tumours,” Dr. Martin explained. Pseudouridine has been included in mRNA injections to stabilise the mRNA so it stays in the human body longer to achieve its effect, he said = MS40?
Dr. Masanori Fukushima, pointed out that “turbo cancers,” a kind “previously unseen by doctors” that progress extremely quickly and are typically in stage four by the time they are diagnosed, have started to appear after the jab rollouts. These “turbo cancers” are emerging along with excess mortality due to cancer in general, which Dr. Fukushima says cannot be explained only by lost opportunities for screenings or treatment during the COVID outbreak.
2) Weapons of Mass Destruction: Secondly there is the US Army Weapon which they are not telling anyone about, because it is a MILITARY SECRET. You don't want your enemy to know you can kill them with a 5G transmission, do you?
From Marc Giradots Substack post, those equate to:
50 billion viral vectors for AstraZeneca
40 billion LNPs for Moderna
and likely 10 to 12 billion for Pfizer
Due to a lack of good manufacturing process checks, there maybe a variable amount of intact messenger RNA in each LNP , “… but even if we agree to only 1 (modRNA strand), and that each one produces 1000 spike protein (due to the persistence of N1-methyl pseudouridine), we are talking your body having to deal with a minimum 30 trillion pathogenic spike proteins2 in a few months time”
When you say: 50 billion viral vectors for AstraZeneca 40 billion LNPs for Moderna and likely 10 to 12 billion for Pfizer I think there is a mistake by a factor of 1,000.
The Moderna contains 40*10^12 LNPs, to the best of my knowledge (Pfizer 12*10^12). This equates to 40/12 trillion in short scale. At first I thought you were using long scale (10^12=1 billion); however, that would not fit with the AZ numbers. AZ has 50*10^9, which would be 1 milliard in long scale. I believe these numbers to be correct (https://evolutionaryhealthplan.info/#_Ref83404023 )
"It is my thought" that the carbon particles are inert and that only by 5G transmission can they be activated, when the Trillions of inert Carbon Particles are changed into Carbon Hydroxide, which are minature razors, too small to see without an Electron Microscope, which in turn chop up your insides and inside your Organs shutting them down and killing you, possibly over 4 days and the reason for your new MAC address:
Find your MAC address with Apple: BT Explorer. Android: Inpersona - or both with Bluetooth.
SO - those behind these vaccines can implement them whenever they like and there is nothing we can do to stop them, except publish these bio weapons, their intention and hold those behind them to ransom - if you do this, we will do that to you, because we know who you are and where you live.