Is Gain of Function Real

And/or Directed Evolution™? No and yes.

Summary (click to expand):

background: Image by Arek Socha from Pixabay

Directed Evolution Will Win™

Rather than finishing my Worry Window series, I have spent the last day and a half observing the Jordon Trishton Walker sensation.

If the reader is somehow behind on the topic, despite 30 million views, here is the overview: A low-level Pfizer contractor and/or employee, who is or was also an employee for the possibly spook-related Boston Consulting Group, and has no actual scientific experience or role, made claims during some dinner-dates that he could not possibly know to be true, and that cannot be true. Namely, that Pfizer is intentionally generating mutant versions of SARS-CoV-2 to sell more mRNA.

CATFISH: Pfizer ultimately is thinking about mutating Covid?

WALKER: Well, that is not what we say to the public. No. Don't tell anyone this by the way. You have to promise you won't tell anyone. You got to promise you won't tell anyone, okay. You know how the virus keeps mutating?

CATFISH: Yeah.

WALKER: Well one of the things we're exploring is like why don't we just mutate it ourselves so we could preemptively develop new vaccines, right?

This cannot be true because:

1. Walker’s formulation of the “scheme” lacks regulatory and marketing executability. There is no system for putting “future” variant mRNA injections on the market. Can you go to Walgreens and ask for the Pfizer Fall 2023 vaccine? No? Oh, that’s weird. Because Jordon Trishton Walker said you could on a date! Robert Malone said he’s a senior emissary! Nobody leaves this Walgreens until the cops get here!

2. Thus, “Pfizer” can only put variant vaccines on the market in a timeline which would make preemptive development (which happens at BioNTech anyway) redundant.

It takes one minute to “develop” a new mRNA vaccine for spike protein. It takes, in the current system, months after public recognition of new variants to market them, and the work is all on paper. There is thus no meaning to Walker’s statement.

3. Walker is not a scientist, and, (in a broadly over-simplified sense) “Pfizer” doesn’t do science.

As Sasha Latypova put it,¹

First, about this person. I don’t know who he is, some people are now trying to verify whether he works at Pfizer. Let’s assume that he does work at Pfizer for now. His title is Director of R&D Operations and Scientific Planning. Everyone should understand that this area is NOT a science area. He does not work in a lab. He pushes paper, makes powerpoints and other documents and talks to vendors. Pfizer OUTSOURCES all scientific and clinical trial work. Nobody inside Pfizer does anything related to product to avoid liability and to have contractors commit fraud on their behalf (so that the executives always have plausible deniability).

OMG! Pfizer is MUTATING COVID!!!

Again, this is an over-simplified way of describing the largest pharmaceutical company in the world; but it basically captures what I “vibe” as the essence of the situation. The core thing Pfizer does is own minds and patents and market them.

Pfizer ultimately is thinking about mutating Covid?

Well, that is not what we say to the public. No. Don't tell anyone this by the way. You have to promise you won't tell anyone. You got to promise you won't tell anyone, okay.² You know how the virus keeps mutating?

Walker, with his misleading and meaningless title of “director,” thus serves as Project Veritas’ very own Nick Sandmann, ambushed in the course of anonymous tribal bravado and converted into a carefully edited Rorschach evoking the era’s psychic demons.

KC NOLAND (youtube.com) The motivation for Sandmann’s infamous “smirk” is likely shyness over his crowded tooth. As now well known, Sandmann was merely standing still as Phillips was serially invading different kids’ spaces.

That’s all that Walker is, I am willing to bet (sure, he could be a Boston Consulting Group crisis actor, though I would feel a little insulted that “The Monster” couldn’t find a grey-haired, real Pfizer executive to sacrifice for such a production). Perhaps it gives viewers some strange form of courage to claim that Walker’s reactions to O’Keefe’s reveal are in some way rehearsed or unnatural; I invite anyone making such a claim to upload a video of themselves being ganged up on by multiple cameras for a catfish reveal. And yet Walker is called sociopathic.

Project Veritas (youtube.com) Here, Walker is using the restaurant security guard’s phone to record the Project Veritas crew, as his own is on call. Borrowing a phone in 2023? No moral compass at all.

Thus, I do not consider the Walker sensation either a bombshell or a distraction. I consider it an abusive deception of subject and audience alike, and fodder for lawsuits and muddied reputations.

This, this [Walker, a contractor with a meaningless marketing role] is a senior executive at the largest pharmaceutical firm in the world.³

I have no appetite.

RNA Pandemic Nihilism

Moving on, I wanted to offer comments on Latypova’s endorsement of the JJ Couey model of “RNA Pandemic Nihilism.” Emphasis and brackets added:⁴

Sure, scientists can experiment with soups of DNA/RNA and grow things in petri dishes. They can design mutations on the computer and try to make concoctions of things. Are those “viruses” that can “leak from the lab” and “infect the world”? No. The proof of this is that while there are 1000 biolabs in the US and Western world playing with viruses. no pandemics or epidemics have resulted from these activities. I assure you, not a single academic lab was ever capable of following basic SOPs, and if there was such a thing as “dangerous virus leak”, we would have them constantly. If there is indeed such a thing and we have had them constantly - that means we are all well adapted to them already! Local clustering of illnesses have been detected, they are likely “deployment tests” vs an actual “leak”. They self extinguish every time.

[Presumably mouse-adapted-virus-infected-] Mice escape from these labs all the time - where is the mouse pandemic?

I, myself, would identify as a Gain of Function Nihilist. I do think that “GOF bad!” is, like zoonotic pandemics, something between scientific groupthink and grant-chasing and a deliberately promoted messaging campaign to distract from the intentional release of SARS-CoV-2. It’s much hype and little substance.

We have to somehow figure this big problem out!

But I don’t think, necessarily, that SARS-CoV-2 has been unsuccessful at stably transmitting from person to person from 2019 to today.

I certainly disagree that RNA viruses cannot stably maintain a functioning genome (as in Couey's formulation⁵). If they couldn’t they wouldn’t exist.⁶ Genetic theory cannot un-create a reality (and anyway, the genetic theory for RNA stability isn't that hard to formulate).

To clarify, I strongly suspect that there have been multiple releases of the virus from the start and in an ongoing fashion related to sustaining dying-out-clades. But, the genetic evidence for repeated artificial “updating” is not conclusive as far as I can make out; and the evidence for perpetual vector-delivery of the virus is much weaker. So, it remains a mere suspicion on my part. Maybe one day it will be proven.

The (2020) Variants: Not Guilty

With that said, my positions on GOF and “directed evolution”:

1. Gain of function, i.e. modifying virus tropism in a lab through serial passage, is real. But it has been taking place in science for over a century, with little apparent consequence.

2. “Directed evolution” is, well, an ambiguous phrase. But genetic modification of viruses is trivial, and seems to be the origin of SARS-CoV-2, and could obviously be the origin of the “variants of concern.” I decline the giddy temptation to use a random contractor’s date banter to throw the Pfizer brand “mask” over this phantasm and make it tangible, but the phantasm is clearly still there. I think it is more likely to be the US government.

3. If I had to choose between not being worried about either, or being worried about both (as opposed to just being worried about 2), I would say, be brave regardless. It is the only choice. Whether it was a virus making people sick or not, people were being made sick. And it may happen again.

i. A Century of GOFers, 1909 - present

MV

In 1909, Simon Flexner of the infamous Rockefeller Institute, then America’s only real biological research center, received hours-old spinal cord samples from two fatal cases of acute poliomyelitis.⁷

Flexner, S. Lewis, PA. (1910.)

Flexner cut a hole in the skull of some monkeys and drizzled some salt-solution emulsions of the infected spinal cord samples. When these monkeys developed paralysis (only the second time paralysis had successfully been reproduced from a polio specimen), he ground up their spines and other organs and put them into more monkeys’ brains (primarily rhesus macaques).

It was, literally, Gain of Function.

The strains of virus, however, in parallel inoculations, retained their activity undiminished and serve, at the present time, to transmit the infection regularly and, we are inclined to believe, even more constantly than at first.

Flexner had inadvertently created two nerve-adapted strains of polio virus which could not reproduce the natural infection cycle. The eventual reference strain, “MV,” ended up bewildering polio research for over three decades, until the advent of cell culture allowed “isolation” of polio virus without nerve tissue.⁸

When virus isolates obtained by Enders’ cell culture method were compared with the MV strain, they were found to differ dramatically in their biologic properties. Multiple intracerebral passages of the MV strain had selected for a virus that was highly neurotropic and did not cause viremia, while fresh wild-type isolates were viremogenic.

What if Flexner’s MV strain had somehow gotten out in the intervening decades of use?

What if it recombined with ubiquitous human polio-virus to donate its super-nerve-ified genes?

Flexner, in 1909, immediately tried passaging his monkey strains to “many guinea-pigs and rabbits, one horse, two calves, three goats, three pigs, three sheep, six rats, six mice, six dogs, and four cats” — what if Flexner had made cow-polio and killed all the cows?! What would we put in burgers?!

Mice flu

Mice are not naturally susceptible to human flu. The earliest recoveries, a.k.a. isolations, of human flu were by putting human throat washes into ferrets’ noses. However, passage to ferret allowed for passage to mice. Both of the first two recoveries thus became adapted to mice and live on to this day as mice-adapted strains.⁹

PR8, from the 1934 flu season, is in particular the “gold standard” for mice flu. It has been used in thousands of experiments for almost a century.

Unlike animals, which are a totally new thing, PR8 existed in the 20th century.

Researchers unearth PR8 over and over; they subject it to immune escape passage to make new mutants; they re-assort it to have the FM1 spike (HA) protein, the 1977 Russia spike, the 80s spike, the 90s spike, the 00s spike, the 1918 spike; they do everything they can think of to “gain of function” it. So, as Latypova says, where is the PR8 escape mouse flu pandemic?

Obviously, malevolent GOF is not the same as random GOF

But the teleology of the “GOF bad!” religion is that GOF is all and always one endless bite at the apple of the Tree of Knowledge, rather than the club waiting for Cain to wield it against Abel.

Naturally, yes, GOF, like any technology, can be weaponized. But the conflation of the danger of scientific tinkering and overt bioweapon development is, at best, without documented precedent on a global “pandemic” scale. Yes, viruses “leak” from labs; but what does it come to, besides mysterious but self-limited Ebola outbreaks (which themselves might be biowarfare, not random leaks)?

Yes, the precedent of a global GOF virus outbreak may one day arrive (I maintain that SARS-CoV-2 is not that precedent¹⁰). It is one of many theoretical technological disasters that humanity is inviting on a daily basis.

But I am personally more worried about the open, widespread experiment on viral evolution that is human vaccination of all kinds.

This experiment is essentially a billion times the scale of all Gain of Function exercises put together; it also hasn’t created disaster yet, but is almost certain to (potentially, any day now, via a return of Measles or Polio in a population that abolished mucosal immunity for vain convenience).

ii. “Directed Evolution.”

As said elsewhere in this post, I think the evidence is strong that, on balance, SARS-CoV-2 is a self-sustaining, transmissible virus. Maybe it has had “a little help from its friends” along the way, in the form of multiple and continual releases. However, especially since the emergence of BA.2 and BA.5, the genetic evidence suggests continual transmission with authentic lineages.

Thus, if SARS-CoV-2 and possibly BA.2/5 are all products of intentional genetic manipulation, then clearly humans have succeeded in making a global and/or pseudo-global bioweapon virus.

Namely, a humanized receptor binding domain for ACE-2 was modeled via some combination of computer work and brute serial passage, and grafted onto a SARS-related bat coronavirus backbone whose closest relatives seem to reside in Northwest Laos (conspicuously not where Wuhan Institute of Virology was sourcing).

This backbone, by either miraculous coincidence or intentional editing, also differed or was made to differ from SARS by four extra poly-peptide sequences in the spike protein that generated resemblances to HIV proteins. One of these extra sequences (“inserts”) constitutes a furin cleavage site, despite the fact that furin cleavage sites seem extraordinarily negatively-selected in bat coronaviruses (they are common in our own common-cold coronaviruses, and lots of other viruses). The same “insert” improbably matches (in complementary fashion) a sequence uploaded in association with a Moderna patent. All of this is consistent with a deliberate attempt to mark SARS-CoV-2 as man-made for purposes of influencing the human reaction to SARS-CoV-2.

Lastly, the simultaneous emergence of BA.1, BA.2, and BA.5 strongly suggests that these viruses are the product of further “directed evolution,” for unknowable motives.¹¹ (However, I have become more open to the idea that they could somehow have emerged from un-sequenced human to human transmission, simply because the previous VOCs were in a sense smaller examples of the same phenomenon.)

Ergo, “directed evolution,” i.e. virological biowarfare genetic editing leading to a virus that turns some people’s lungs into soup and kills them, seems to be real.

But it’s probably not Pfizer that is doing it. That’s right, you heard it straight from Brian Mowrey, who is a senior executive of Pfizer, US Armed Forces Commander, POTUS, SCOTUS Justice, and moves the Sun through the sky.

If you derived value from this post, please drop a few coins in your fact-barista’s tip jar.

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1. Latypova, Sasha. “OMG! Pfizer is MUTATING COVID!!!” (2023, January 26.) Due Diligence and Art.

2. Pfizer is mutating viruses! My date told me!

3. 22:00 of “VSRF Weekly Update Livestream EP#64: "Defeat the Mandates Anniversary" with Robert Malone, MD.” (rumble.com)

4. (Latypova, Sasha.)

5. Crawford, Mathew. “SARS-CoV-2 Origins, Infectious Clones, Biowarfare, and Robert Malone.” (2022, November 7.) Rounding the Earth.

6. For further discussion of RNA virus stability and examples, see “Should Variants Actually Happen?”

7. Flexner, S. Lewis, PA. (1910.) “Experimental Epidemic Poliomyelitis In Monkeys.” J Exp Med. 1910 Mar 14; 12(2): 227–255.

8. Nathanson, Neal. (2005.) “David Bodian’s Contribution to the Development of Poliovirus Vaccine.” Am J Epidemiol. 2005 Feb 1;161(3):207-12.

9. For more on the early history of flu passaging, see “OAS Lit. Review / Timeline, Pt. 1”

10. See “Lab Leak Op Confirmed.”

11. As argued in “Omicron Origins.”