The synthetic origin paper; out of office notice

Also, reminder on "vaccine causing variants": (still) probably an op.

Office position status: Out

I wanted to finish one more full post before an upcoming week-and-a-half of distractions, especially regarding the Marc Girardot “spike is harmless” theory. This did not occur.

Instead, two brief commentaries will have to suffice.

Regular posting will resume in November; and hopefully I can fit in something before then as well.

The Synthetic Origin Paper

This bombshell of a paper has already been covered elsewhere:

Bruttel, V. Washburne, A. VanDongen, A.

It is an admirable piece of work. At the same time, now that it has been done, I am astonished that no one thought to do it two and a half years ago. I even wonder why I didn’t think of it myself.

Background:

Build-your-own-coronavirus techniques are not secret. Essentially, researchers like Baric and co., or even the Boston University team responsible for this week’s “chimeric Omicron” construction, chop the coronavirus gene into parts and these parts function as a set of DNA “files” that can be loaded into cells to make the virus.

They use bacterial cut-paste proteins (endonucleases) to chop and reassemble the virus’s gene by putting the proteins’ favored sequences into the existing code. If the coronavirus is thought of as a page in a novel, then researchers who want to turn it into a file need to edit the text of that page to put in the matching four-letter-strings that will result in the desired cut-paste recognition and action.¹

There is a limit to the size of individual segments (obviously, otherwise the whole 30kb gene could just be a DNA “file”). At the same time, accurate reassembly is easier if there are fewer segments; so if there are cut sites already in the virus’s “page” that aren’t needed, these should be removed.

The two requirements:

Thus, for quality assurance purposes the best DNA<>virus platform has a low number of cut sites* and no big segments between cut sites* (*matching the most reliable-to-use endonucleases).

Bruttel, V. Washburne, A. VanDongen, A. Fig. 3.

Bruttel, V. Washburne, A. VanDongen, A. Fig. 3. Grey are natural / wild coronavirus genomes. Usually, coronaviruses have some number of endonuclease cut-paste sequences by random chance (they just wanted to “spell” those letters anyway; they aren’t actually encountering these endonucleases in the wild). The spans (fragments) between these randomly generated sequences will be different sizes; but unless there are lots of randomly-generated sequences in the genome, leading to more than 10 fragments, it is unlikely that there won’t be any large (bigger than .25) fragments. SARS-CoV-2 has no large fragments despite having only 6 fragments.

It’s a really obvious human fingerprint. In a way, given what we know already, it’s completely unsurprising that SARS-CoV-2 clearly meets the two requirements.

Note: The nuances of whether the authors’ choice of restriction sites to analyze is reasonable or an instance of “P-hacking” are further discussed here:

(Refining the) "Deep State Origin" case

What I would like to point out

Others have already covered this paper, as said. All I would like to emphasize is that this is not just a refutation of natural origin, but of the entire, limited hangout “Gain of function lab leak” trope.

This is not “more evidence that SARS-CoV-2 came from a lab.”

It is more evidence that SARS-CoV-2 is a proprietary product. It exists in file form; it was released and probably continues to be updated and released from this “master copy.” (Paradoxically, this already became true after the fact; numerous researchers in the US, Japan, and China especially have published their own DNA<>virus SARS-CoV-2 builds since 2020.² All that this paper points out is that the “wild” / Wuhan sequence was already from a DNA<>virus kit).

*Update, December 15, 2022. After this post, I embarked on a from-the-drawing-board analysis of the 2020 VOCs, and eventually declared my attempt to prove they were lab-edited updates unsuccessful:

The (2020) Variants: Not Guilty

Before the synthetic version

“BANAL,” as a final note, is a coronavirus plucked out of some bats in Thailand in 2021.³ While it may still be the case that “RaTG13” is a fictional genome created to forge a false, natural origin for SARS-CoV-2, BANAL may actually be related to the natural backbone used for the final DNA<>virus product we have since grown to know and love.

The vaccine is not causing variants, it never has caused variants

The synthetic origin paper nicely complements my recent review of the “convergent evolution” paper. The “convergent evolution” paper purports (with almost zero actual evidence) to suggest that the vaccine is causing convergent evolution.

The "Convergent Evolution Escape" Study

The synthetic origin paper shows what a farce it is to even care about the question. All the greek letter variants, from Alpha to the Omicron family (and a few suspicious sequences that never caught off the ground, from Central America and the US) should be considered lab-designed updates to the original DNA<>virus SARS-CoV-2 platform.⁴

In May of this year, I strongly hinted that the entire information campaign to blame the vaccine for causing variants smells like an op; one that at first only applied to the vaccine-skeptic camp but since this summer has been expanded to the mainstream:

But let us imagine, purely for the sake of thought-experiment, that both the MSM and counter-narrative explanations for BA.4 and BA.5 are scripted ops. In this thought experiment, there is a credentialed expert warning the “awake” few that the Covid vaccines will accelerate immune escape, while the orthodox news assures the “asleep” masses that this faster mutation is something natural and accidental.

This scripted pretend-oppositional framing, much like the debate between a “lab leak” and zoonotic cross-over, would seem to have one simple and obvious purpose: To suck oxygen away from any discussion about intentional global bioterrorism.

So the war over truth becomes a fight over Fauci’s duplicitous funding decisions, or the evolutionary recklessness of medicalizing the immune system. But what if the reason we keep having simultaneous emergences of new threats toward the end of three separate years, is because the evolution of SARS-CoV-2 has been artificially perpetuated according to design all along?

—“Thank You SARS, May I Have Another”

And yet the farcical argument that the vaccine is causing variants rages as loudly and illogically as ever.

At this point, skeptics of the mainstream narrative, here in substack and elsewhere, have a choice:

• Keep buying into these fraudulent, nonsense claims about “leaky vaccines” influencing the evolution of SARS-CoV-2 in pseudo-magical fashion, totally remaining marks of a likely op to deflect attention from the continued lab-release of the virus.

• Demand that perpetuators of the Leaky Vaccine Evolution umbrella theories, whether based on OAS or vaccine escape models, explain why they don’t think or even apparently care that this virus is just being edited in labs.

With that:

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1. Endonucleases that discriminate for a particular nucleotide sequence are thus called “restriction enzymes.” Among other uses they are a big part of the bacterial “immune system” — viral DNA that contains the target sequence will be destroyed by the enzyme. Of course, viruses that evolve to remove those sequences then gain tropism for that same bacteria.

2. For the US, there’s

The Baric “If I did it” model:

Dinnon III, K. et al. “A mouse-adapted model of SARS-CoV-2 to test COVID-19 countermeasures.” (the creation of MA) Nature. 2020 Oct; 586(7830): 560–566.

Another lab (which actually uses a BAC construct from Spain):

Wong, L. et al. “Eicosanoid signaling as a therapeutic target in middle-aged mice with severe COVID-19.” biorxiv.org

And of course the Boston University chimera:

Chen, DY. et al. “Role of spike in the pathogenic and antigenic behavior of SARS-CoV-2 BA.1 Omicron.” biorxiv.org

and many more classic hits!

3. Temmam, S. et al. “Bat coronaviruses related to SARS-CoV-2 and infectious for human cells.” Nature. 2022 Apr;604(7905):330-336.

4. For more, see “Omicron Origins.”