Feb 10, 2023·edited Feb 11, 2023Liked by Brian Mowrey
I think the livestream Kevin & I did last night was a better and more comprehensive overview of the various elements under discussion. Certainly better than the stream discussed here. I continue to appreciate your thoughtful analyses, even if I don't agree with all of your conclusions.
I was watching - I think your decision not to revisit the Couey stream kept the discussion more nuanced, so probably my perception of the previous video was an overreaction.
A very interesting outline Brian! I wasn't sure if the Zoom call was public so I didn't watch it. I hope it was a rather engaging discussion more than a debate.
Nihilism is probably the best way of outlining what's happening, and the purity tests no doubt are increasing in prevalence.
As you mentioned on your Sunday post a week ago it seems as if Team Skeptic, or the freedom movement, or whatever this is has lost sight that the main thing to point out are the adverse reactions from the vaccines, figuring out what is happening, and seeing what can be done about it.
But that doesn't seem to be the case. Rather, many people who seem to speak up about their vaccine injury are shut down in comments with most people asking "why did you even take it? Didn't you know better?" Pardon me, but many people have forgotten that information was actually very limited during the early release of the vaccines. Even I was going to decide to get the vaccines, but it was only after people I worked with started complaining about not feeling well or even taking a day or two off where I just thought that seemed very off. I didn't have much else to go off of but anecdotes, and so it's strange that now the argument has been that we've known all of this information that the vaccines would do X, Y, or Z (something I've called hindsight masquerading as foresight previously).
Take a recent interview where Viva talked with Stephanie de Garay (Maddie's mother) about Maddie's vaccine injury, and see how hostile the comments are against her. It's not like Stephanie doesn't feel absolutely guilty about what happened to her daughter, but the fact that she continues to be attacked while trying to find help for her daughter is aggravating.
I wanted natural immunity from the start, and was pretty sure I had it from being active in the Bay in the months before the lockdowns - but if they had done some kind of early enforcement on the mask exemption here (as opposed to honor system, which I just flaunted) I might have gotten the JJ because I wasn't looking into the false "traditional" halo attached to it and because I am always down for leaping without looking as a general rule.
As for vaccine injuries, I think everyone's realizing there's not going to be any statistical smoking gun at this point, and no magic OAS disaster etc., just sort of a boring "Scott Adams envies the unvaxxed" denouement
That's interesting. Where I live we entered into masking very early on and so I think that caused me to buy into the hysteria. I may have gotten J&J as being one dose (apparently everyone around here was offered Moderna) if I didn't intuit something funky going on.
It was fortunate that my coworkers having these comments about it "immunity hurting so good" that it all just seemed so weird and I noped out.
I see a lot of people talking about the infighting going on right now, and I think a lot of it may just be owed to things seeming to have just suddenly stopped. No one's really talking about COVID or vaccines anymore aside from small groups, so I think many people are frustrated because they think they window for everything has just gone. Rather than figuring things out more people have turned to the nihilism as you pointed out, so now we're dealing with spike shedding and graphene and all of these other things aside from the reality of just vaccine injured and maybe spike-related.
In a darker sense, and I won't deny that I've felt this way, but it just feels like many people have made a ton of money off of COVID on both sides without much coming from it, so I think the frustrations are being felt that most people will just move on without any accountability.
A shame, really. There's still plenty of vaccine injured people who probably aren't receiving any help and likely won't given the current state of affairs. I guess that's how it goes with these sorts of things.
Ok, I just had a brainstorm. You might be wondering, how are these releases accomplished? How about contaminated vape juice? If it can be designed to survive the aerosolization process in an typical vape pen this would be perfect!
Usually, on bigger substacks, when someone proposes vape vector someone else chimes in about the temperatures being too hostile. I haven't looked into it.
So much of "our" economy operates in what is essentially a black box, ie Chinese factories and imports, that vector delivery could be anything. Or it could be sprayed from planes, who knows. In all events it only needs to be marginally effective to trip off waves when you aren't dismissive of the virus-ness of the virus. For all we know this is how lots of viruses actually work (atmospheric distribution of mostly-destroyed virion clouds), for me the only thing that matters is there is no precedent for a novel virus thriving in such a niche without "help."
I looked up the temperature, and for THC vapes, the heating element is at 278F, which is probably too hot for the virus, but I would expect that not all of the content of the emitted vapor reaches that temperature. I would expect that the rapid physical expansion of the material being rapidly heated carries along a lot of material that does not get heated much at all. I guess to me it's plausible that this could work.
As you say, there are lots of potential vectors, and transmission / method of infection is pretty poorly understood. Vape vector occurred to me in particular because of the 2019 rash of vape-related respiratory disease that AFAIK was never really properly explained.
Has Brian ever covered the possibility that omicron was created as a sort of "transmissible vaccine"? The circumstances of its discovery seem a bit odd. Unnamed diplomats (with the immunity that comes along with being a diplomat) show up in Botswana right before the first case is discovered. It quickly travels to South Africa, where for some reason the corporate media then starts reporting as its country of origin. Then men with microscopes and degrees begin to examine it and report to us that it seems to have done some fancy mutating and doesn't appear to have decended directly from any other known strains. Is this theory pure nonsense, or is it at least within the realm of possibility?
The difficulty in inferring the motive of "Omicron" (if a lab was involved) is the simultaneous emergence of BA.1 and BA.2/5, which have different qualities. So which one was "meant" to be released? It seems (if a lab was involved) that there was an unexpected co-release, and maybe the "real Omicron" never took off or was sequenced at all. But barring that problem, the idea of the Omicron family as an antidote to the ancestral virus seems strong. Even then, it's unclear if this indicates "white hat" intentions or pure, chaotic "hacker lulz" intentions.
Have you done an article on this? Or do you know of anyone who has that is worth reading? I've heard speculation that the Chinese government created it in hopes of obtaining a get-out-of-jail-free card. People pushing that theory tend to ignore the US government's involvement. I've also heard more "fringe" speculation that communicable vaccines were always the plan. Although this theory seems less tinfoil hattish after you look into the research that's been conducted on it.
I proposed a fictional account for Omicron in which the co-infecting problem forced "them" to amplify multiple variants and therefore we will never know that "they" were trying to do, https://unglossed.substack.com/p/omicron-origins-part-2 - I would just note that after researching the earlier VOCs and realizing they share some of the traits that I argued show Omicron was lab-made, I am now more open to the idea that Omicron actually somehow just evolved in human-to-human transmission.
Beautiful presentation Brian. I imagined the transitions and animation that were not present in the pdf. You visualized your thoughts so well. "Ideological purity" is a perfect description of that which muddies the water.
Epiphany.....have we considered quantum mechanics as the mode of virus transmission? I got a whiff of Schrodinger's Cat on slides 14-18.
Thank you! There aren't any animations yet, haha, this being my first presentation and the whole thing having been whipped up in a couple hours.
Wasn't that something Montagnier was flirting with? Water retaining DNA information or something like that. The Waring blender experiment was a lot more brute-force. But the transmission thing is very important as far as "virology" goes. In the mid-20th, even to the 90s, it was still acknowledged and emphasized that transmission is totally mysterious. When discussion of this mystery goes away in the last few decades, you know virology has thrown away skepticism and lapsed into "We know that" modes of thinking.
Another good article. I'm surprised your substack doesn't get much traffic. I guess it's because you're correcting the errors on the anti-vax side rather than posting clickbait.
Seems to be that the shots are killing people that are elderly, not so much the young, just like the virus itself. I've even looked into the mortality rates from different causes by age. Young people are dying more often, but the increase is mostly in drug ODs.
Thank you! - and, well, as the Bloggerman's Creed goes, there are many unpopular blogs, but this one is mine.
Thank you - I'll take a look at the Rancourt data. It is perilous to offer a quick take, but when you talk about excess mortality and doses per day stats, which easily show overlapping spikes because stats/reports about virus deaths drive political booster decisions and public injections, the question is "ok stats wonk, can you show the vaxxed are dying?" Usually, no. So all these graphs are usually showing is a "soldiers wearing helmets causes being shot" effect (but on a population level).
And as far as age patterns in VAERS, the problem here is that most VAERS deaths in absolute counts are breakthrough infections (which doesn't tell you whether the virus death rate is higher or lower than the unvaxxed because you aren't seeing the denominator, all it tells you is reporting bias in that other causes of death are assumed not to be worth entering into VAERS).
So we'll see if there's anything actually linking the vaccine to deaths.
Feb 9, 2023·edited Feb 9, 2023Liked by Brian Mowrey
I try to reason things out with a bit of logic. At first a big problem appears to be that almost everything involves a degree of assumption so can't be fully logical. However, logic can at least be used to show that two sets of assumptions can't easily co-exist...
So for example it's impossible to have both zero covid and some degree of endemic covid coexisting, so which is more likely in the long term? But look at the way that some 'zero covid' countries vainly tried to hang onto their status, instead of treating it more of a case of delayed covid, and planning for the inevitable.
As to how to apply this to the above, I'm not so sure. What assumptions can't easily co-exist with the assumption of deliberately released biowarfare variants?
(I have to admit I do lean more away from the global conspiracy type stuff, seems more to me like not letting a crisis go to waste but using it to further agendas. Something not lost on a certain Dr Fauci when he managed to negotiate the highest salary of a federal offical, including the President AFAIK!)
"What assumptions can't easily co-exist with the assumption of deliberately released biowarfare variants?" - truly - hence the big problem with my middle-of-the-road approach is a lack of proof.
As for the not letting a crisis go to waste, again it's a question of precedent. Why was the crisis predicted in the first place? What was that based on? Besides flu which we actually understand now to be a very specialized cross-species co-evolution where different HA species re-emerge from the static avian reservoir, they are not something that truly come out of "nowhere".
A few thoughts on the (im)propriety of Gain-of-Function experimentation.
We must be precise with the definition. It is one thing to look for drug-resistant strains of a particular pathogen in the cellular environment with a particular therapeutic. To replicate within a laboratory context a general process that will occur "in the wild" may uncover more virulent and more dangerous strains of a pathogen, but it can hardly be said that the end product is a pathogen of particular virulence or with particular characteristics that affect its virulence.
This is qualitatively different from the "chimeric" viruses that are being created not only with the SARS-CoV-2 virus but also Influenza and RSV at a minimum. These are pathogens that would arguably NOT emerge outside of the laboratory context.
It is also qualitatively different from the influenza research in 2011 at both the University of Wisconsin and Erasmus University in The Netherlands, where virologists used serial passage through a number of ferrets to force an avian (H5N1) influenza strain to become infectious within ferrets (which tends to also suggest human infectivity as well).
Another concern regarding such research techniques is one of fundamental lab safety. Containment accidents are far more common even at leading BSL3 and BSL4 labs than the corporate media has wanted to acknowledge, and we know both from the 1977 flu pandemic as well as the post-9/11 anthrax attacks that pathogens can get out of the laboratory environment to cause disease and ultimately death. These are not hypothetical scenarios but historical realities.
Thus we are properly concerned when the likes of Jordon Walker casually talks about Pfizer "mutating" the SARS-CoV-2 virus--regardless of the actual research activities in question, Walker asserted that Pfizer was actively studying how to change either the structure or the function of various strains of SARS-CoV-2 virus. The problem is not what they might do deliberately but what might happen accidentally.
It's what we do not know about Pfizer's research activities that is cause for concern.
This is also the inherent corruption of the now global rubric of "threat reduction". The implicit presumption of carrying such research on in a BSL4 lab is that accidental releases of altered pathogens does not happen--only it does. We know from the historical record that it does.
A simple accident is all that is required for biological "threat reduction" to become biological "threat creation", regardless of whether the original intent was to weaponize a pathogen or no.
The concern we should all have over Gain-of-Function research (and really all advanced research into dangerous pathogens) is how much control do researchers have over the created pathogens?
Are they able to guarantee that dangerous pathogens won't slip into the environment somehow?
Is the research leading to genuinely more effective treatments and therapeutics against disease? It is worth noting that the US and Russia teamed up to map the monkeypox genome back in the early 2000s, and yet when there was a global outbreak of monkeypox cases, there was no monkeypox vaccine established and awaiting deployment (which begs the question of why the genome mapping project was funded in the first place).
What we have seen with the many revelations surrounding coronavirus research in China, in the US, and around the world is a complete lack of accountability on the part of researchers. They not only are not taking the time to justify their efforts to the world at large, but many get downright offended if you even suggest such accountability. That is what needs to change.
"1977 flu pandemic" - this was not a novel lab derived pathogen. It was a copy of 1950 H1N1, which had just completed it's normal natural "cycle" in humans (replaced by H2N2 in 1958 which was replaced by H3N2 in 1968).
Point being that flu is sui generis in that you have multiple human-compatible species of HA gene preserved in the avian reservoir where they will always spill over and probably always have been spilling over, but usually only the one with the least pre-existing immunity is able to do so, and usually there's a bit more of a barrier (because you still need one or two mutations to the avian species) to that spilling over. So when we started keeping preserved copies of fully humanized H1N1 then that barrier was lowered. This is more akin to "domestication" of flu's normal cycles than anything nefarious.
As such, it is a poor precedent for the alleged dangers of GOF. Just because you can domesticate a cat doesn't mean you can create a functioning cat/human hybrid (some would say sadly).
What the 1977 flu pandemic demonstrates is that "lab leak" is a real possibility with real dangers. No, the 1977 influenza was not an enhanced strain, but it emerged from a laboratory.
Thus extreme caution must be exercised by any virology lab--and there has been reporting well before the SARS-CoV-2 virus entered into the picture that even US BSL4 labs have had numerous safety and containment breaches.
Thus when we read of virologists grafting portions of original Wuhan strain onto Omicron virions, or creating Influenza/RSV hybrids in the lab environment, yes, we have to be concerned--because the track record of even the best BSL4 labs cannot offer a 100% guarantee that a pathogen will not escape.
And even without being an enhanced pathogen, the influenza strain from the 1977 pandemic has some 700,000 deaths attributed to it.
Also, after the anthrax attacks--which were done using a "vaccine challenge" strain of the bacteria--GOF dangers are not alleged. If pathogens with increased virulence and pathogenicity get outside the laboratory environment, the results can be fatal. If, as many would argue has been largely substantiated by circumstantial evidence, SARS-CoV-2 is also a product of GoF research, even if we discount the lethality of the virus due to the presence of multiple severe comorbidities, we still have a substantial amount of death directly attributable to the virus.
Currently some 1.11 million deaths in the US are attributed to the SARS-CoV-2 virus.
Taking the data at face value, that means that SARS-CoV-2 by itself succeeded in killing some 55,500 people in the US alone. That's a higher mortality figure than the most recent pre-pandemic flu seasons as per the CDC.
With lab leaks an historical reality, with the lethality of enhanced pathogens an historical reality, and with the probability (at the very least) that SARS-CoV-2 is itself an enhanced pathogen, to say that GoF should be approached with extreme caution and even a modicum of reluctance is quite a reasonable stance to take.
Given the myriad safety concerns surrounding any research at even a BSL4 lab, the ethical propriety of GoF research is dubious at best. These are not consequence-free intellectual exercises; I for one am unpersuaded that virologists who are engaging in some of this research understand that reality.
"even US BSL4 labs have had numerous safety and containment breaches." That's exactly why 1977 H1N1 is not a precedent for anything. It was made by nature, not a lab. So all this other stuff that we make in labs has never established long term transmission. But nature-made-H1N1 did so at a much smaller scale of lab work after only 20 years.
If you can be as sloppy with lab-made viruses as you like a million times and nothing happens, but sloppy with a nature-made-H1N1 a mere hundred times and it gets out, what does that tell you about lab-made viruses?
They are always freaks with no chance of establishing long term transmission. The only apparent or lets say alleged exception is SARS-CoV-2. So you can't give SARS-CoV-2 a pass based on nature-made-H1N1. SARS-CoV-2 putatively belongs in the scrapheap of lab made mutants that never have gone anywhere.
Anthrax does not help substantiate the lab leak apocalypse trope. Russia ran the largest anthrax factory in the world, pumped product into the air by mistake one night, scarcely anyone affected. Max Perutz's review of Alibek's confession book:
"One evening in 1979 [bla bla bla anthrax-growing lab accident] a cloud of anthrax spores escaped which the wind blew over the town. Alibek writes: "No one wanted to set off a panic or to alert outsiders [...] military sentries were posted in the immediate neighborhood of the plant to keep intruders away, and KGB officers pretending to be doctors visited the homes of victims' families with falsified death certificates." Reports about the number of deaths differ between 66 and 105, far fewer than the thousand reported earlier. Alibek calls Sverdlovsk as serious a disaster as the one at Chernobyl. In fact, the number of deaths is surprisingly small for an urban area containing about a quarter of a million people, possibly because inhaled anthrax spores are not very infectious to humans."
If it emerged from a lab, and the 1977 influenza strain emerged from a lab, it is a precedent for the perils of lab safety. That the strain was one that was stored vs one that was manufactured is not relevant insofar as lab safety is concerned.
If virologists are making viruses more virulent, more pathogenic, and more lethal, and without extraordinary care regarding lab safety, there is a risk of something much worse than the 1977 pandemic arising.
The only way SARS-CoV-2 winds up on any scrap heap is if it is either not a lab leak or not the result of GoF research.
If it is both a lab leak and the result of GoF research--and there's more than a little evidence that this is the case--then it alone demolishes any argument that there are no serious public health risks from GoF research. That the virus is now endemic worldwide effectively removes it from any viral scrap heap.
The outcome does not need to be a rescripting of Resident Evil to constitute a serious risk as well as an identifiable one.
One lab mistake resulted in 700,000 deaths in 1977. That is multiple orders of magnitude more death from Chernobyl and Fukushima combined.
Another lab mistake arguably resulted in the COVID pandemic, also with hundreds of thousands of deaths if not millions (depending on how one wishes to account for comorbidities), and a new endemic infectious respiratory pathogen to trouble humanity for the foreseeable future.
How many such instances are required for us to scrutinize virological research with a view towards the potential public health risks from even innocent mistakes during that research? And asking if the research is justifiable given the risks?
I think Brian's point is that GOF viruses aren't actually gaining function. They might be more properly characterized as attempted gain of function.
Although they appear to have become more virulent or more lethal in lab settings there is very little evidence that Amy of them actually 'work' in nature.
Lab created viruses are like a 6 year old trying to build a jet. Lets suppose he can read the print and knows the physics and engineering. He gets it togethwr and it 'should work' but it doesn't. We don't know why, but it seems to not work.
Of course saying, 'but look at covid' is begging the question. The truth about sars cov2 is still very dubious.
If, as you say, it is merely "attempted" GoF, that the modifications/enhancements/mutations made to pathogens in the laboratory setting don't actually "work", then in addition to the safety considerations must also be asked the utility question: why bother? With a goodly amount of viral research being funded by tax dollars, if such lines of research don't actually work, then is that really the best use of our tax dollars?
But the principal challenge remains one of lab safety. The reality of GoF research is that the outcomes--the mutated and modified viruses--are not known ahead of time. A new pathogen created in a lab might have been intended to be engineered along certain lines of virulence and pathogenicity, but an incomplete understanding of the entirety of what the genetic instructions within the viral genome actually do means the totality of the pathogen's characteristics and capabilities cannot possibly be fully understood.
It has been proven that "leaky" avian vaccines against Marek's Disease can result in the emergence of more virulent strains of the disease--and the mRNA inoculations are the epitome of a "leaky" vaccine (and thus truly not a vaccine at all).
It has recently been found that Merck's COVID antiviral molnupiravir, which works by forcing the SARS-CoV-2 virus to mutate, ostensibly into non-viable strains, has resulted in new transmissible strains of the SARS-CoV-2 virus.
In both instances, we are dealing with unintended outcomes.
Whether the GoF is actual or merely attempted, what is being ignored are the outcomes which are both not sought and potentially not detected. With the safety records of even the best labs far from perfect, these unknown and unknowable consequences of such research efforts should give everyone pause.
Nor is the SARS-CoV-2 virus a case of "begging the question". While we as yet have no "smoking gun" evidence that SARS-CoV-2 escaped from a virology lab in Wuhan, the circumstantial evidence that the virus did in fact escape from a virology lab in Wuhan is quite considerable, to the extent that the lab origin theories of how the virus came to be are at this juncture the most probable explanations on the table. While it is not certain that the virus is the explicit product of GoF research, it is highly probable that it is the consequence of lab research, and that it is in the wild now because of lab accident.
In both the case of the 1977 flu pandemic and the COVID pandemic, we are presented with the reality that virological research has a public health risk that, based on the cavalier attitudes displayed not just by the Jordon Walker research groupies but the actual viral researchers at places like Boston University, is given scant consideration if any at all.
That GoF research arguably does not work and therefore is of dubious informational value merely makes that lack of safety concern even more disconcerting. It's one thing to take risks in the pursuit of knowledge, but it's quite another to take risks so virologists can treat infectious pathogens as their own personal box of Tinkertoys.
It's been a problem for a year. All they need to do is remove the root thread input box from nested urls or fix it to auto-nest entered text. Back when I used to argue on other substack threads more often, it was the worst, because I always entered into that field when I was angry haha
I think the livestream Kevin & I did last night was a better and more comprehensive overview of the various elements under discussion. Certainly better than the stream discussed here. I continue to appreciate your thoughtful analyses, even if I don't agree with all of your conclusions.
https://rumble.com/v28yc5q-giga-spiral-3-clones-and-exosomes-with-charles-rixey.html
I was watching - I think your decision not to revisit the Couey stream kept the discussion more nuanced, so probably my perception of the previous video was an overreaction.
A very interesting outline Brian! I wasn't sure if the Zoom call was public so I didn't watch it. I hope it was a rather engaging discussion more than a debate.
Nihilism is probably the best way of outlining what's happening, and the purity tests no doubt are increasing in prevalence.
As you mentioned on your Sunday post a week ago it seems as if Team Skeptic, or the freedom movement, or whatever this is has lost sight that the main thing to point out are the adverse reactions from the vaccines, figuring out what is happening, and seeing what can be done about it.
But that doesn't seem to be the case. Rather, many people who seem to speak up about their vaccine injury are shut down in comments with most people asking "why did you even take it? Didn't you know better?" Pardon me, but many people have forgotten that information was actually very limited during the early release of the vaccines. Even I was going to decide to get the vaccines, but it was only after people I worked with started complaining about not feeling well or even taking a day or two off where I just thought that seemed very off. I didn't have much else to go off of but anecdotes, and so it's strange that now the argument has been that we've known all of this information that the vaccines would do X, Y, or Z (something I've called hindsight masquerading as foresight previously).
Take a recent interview where Viva talked with Stephanie de Garay (Maddie's mother) about Maddie's vaccine injury, and see how hostile the comments are against her. It's not like Stephanie doesn't feel absolutely guilty about what happened to her daughter, but the fact that she continues to be attacked while trying to find help for her daughter is aggravating.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IlDSAhbIfoY
I could probably ramble on more, but I'll leave it at that for now. 🤷♂️
I wanted natural immunity from the start, and was pretty sure I had it from being active in the Bay in the months before the lockdowns - but if they had done some kind of early enforcement on the mask exemption here (as opposed to honor system, which I just flaunted) I might have gotten the JJ because I wasn't looking into the false "traditional" halo attached to it and because I am always down for leaping without looking as a general rule.
As for vaccine injuries, I think everyone's realizing there's not going to be any statistical smoking gun at this point, and no magic OAS disaster etc., just sort of a boring "Scott Adams envies the unvaxxed" denouement
That's interesting. Where I live we entered into masking very early on and so I think that caused me to buy into the hysteria. I may have gotten J&J as being one dose (apparently everyone around here was offered Moderna) if I didn't intuit something funky going on.
It was fortunate that my coworkers having these comments about it "immunity hurting so good" that it all just seemed so weird and I noped out.
I see a lot of people talking about the infighting going on right now, and I think a lot of it may just be owed to things seeming to have just suddenly stopped. No one's really talking about COVID or vaccines anymore aside from small groups, so I think many people are frustrated because they think they window for everything has just gone. Rather than figuring things out more people have turned to the nihilism as you pointed out, so now we're dealing with spike shedding and graphene and all of these other things aside from the reality of just vaccine injured and maybe spike-related.
In a darker sense, and I won't deny that I've felt this way, but it just feels like many people have made a ton of money off of COVID on both sides without much coming from it, so I think the frustrations are being felt that most people will just move on without any accountability.
Not with a bang but a whimper, as the phrase goes. Like when it stopped mattering when new iPhones came out.
A shame, really. There's still plenty of vaccine injured people who probably aren't receiving any help and likely won't given the current state of affairs. I guess that's how it goes with these sorts of things.
Yeah. I cannot even scroll down to the end of your comment, to which I can then specifically reply to it. So frustrating.
Anyhow, my original comment was:
Who is Damar Hamlin? (insert winking emoji: 😉)
*I know. The time gap ruins the humour. Good grief.
Ok, I just had a brainstorm. You might be wondering, how are these releases accomplished? How about contaminated vape juice? If it can be designed to survive the aerosolization process in an typical vape pen this would be perfect!
Usually, on bigger substacks, when someone proposes vape vector someone else chimes in about the temperatures being too hostile. I haven't looked into it.
So much of "our" economy operates in what is essentially a black box, ie Chinese factories and imports, that vector delivery could be anything. Or it could be sprayed from planes, who knows. In all events it only needs to be marginally effective to trip off waves when you aren't dismissive of the virus-ness of the virus. For all we know this is how lots of viruses actually work (atmospheric distribution of mostly-destroyed virion clouds), for me the only thing that matters is there is no precedent for a novel virus thriving in such a niche without "help."
I looked up the temperature, and for THC vapes, the heating element is at 278F, which is probably too hot for the virus, but I would expect that not all of the content of the emitted vapor reaches that temperature. I would expect that the rapid physical expansion of the material being rapidly heated carries along a lot of material that does not get heated much at all. I guess to me it's plausible that this could work.
As you say, there are lots of potential vectors, and transmission / method of infection is pretty poorly understood. Vape vector occurred to me in particular because of the 2019 rash of vape-related respiratory disease that AFAIK was never really properly explained.
It would make a great DARPA proposal I'm sure!
Thanks for the reference, I will take a look
Has Brian ever covered the possibility that omicron was created as a sort of "transmissible vaccine"? The circumstances of its discovery seem a bit odd. Unnamed diplomats (with the immunity that comes along with being a diplomat) show up in Botswana right before the first case is discovered. It quickly travels to South Africa, where for some reason the corporate media then starts reporting as its country of origin. Then men with microscopes and degrees begin to examine it and report to us that it seems to have done some fancy mutating and doesn't appear to have decended directly from any other known strains. Is this theory pure nonsense, or is it at least within the realm of possibility?
The difficulty in inferring the motive of "Omicron" (if a lab was involved) is the simultaneous emergence of BA.1 and BA.2/5, which have different qualities. So which one was "meant" to be released? It seems (if a lab was involved) that there was an unexpected co-release, and maybe the "real Omicron" never took off or was sequenced at all. But barring that problem, the idea of the Omicron family as an antidote to the ancestral virus seems strong. Even then, it's unclear if this indicates "white hat" intentions or pure, chaotic "hacker lulz" intentions.
Have you done an article on this? Or do you know of anyone who has that is worth reading? I've heard speculation that the Chinese government created it in hopes of obtaining a get-out-of-jail-free card. People pushing that theory tend to ignore the US government's involvement. I've also heard more "fringe" speculation that communicable vaccines were always the plan. Although this theory seems less tinfoil hattish after you look into the research that's been conducted on it.
I proposed a fictional account for Omicron in which the co-infecting problem forced "them" to amplify multiple variants and therefore we will never know that "they" were trying to do, https://unglossed.substack.com/p/omicron-origins-part-2 - I would just note that after researching the earlier VOCs and realizing they share some of the traits that I argued show Omicron was lab-made, I am now more open to the idea that Omicron actually somehow just evolved in human-to-human transmission.
Thanks for this, Brian. It is helpful.
Tbh, it feels like I'm always playing catch up with the divergent theories 'swarming' about.
I still remember the day this whole crazy mess started. Damar Hamlin was sprinting for the intercept -- wait... that's not right...
Beautiful presentation Brian. I imagined the transitions and animation that were not present in the pdf. You visualized your thoughts so well. "Ideological purity" is a perfect description of that which muddies the water.
Epiphany.....have we considered quantum mechanics as the mode of virus transmission? I got a whiff of Schrodinger's Cat on slides 14-18.
Thank you! There aren't any animations yet, haha, this being my first presentation and the whole thing having been whipped up in a couple hours.
Wasn't that something Montagnier was flirting with? Water retaining DNA information or something like that. The Waring blender experiment was a lot more brute-force. But the transmission thing is very important as far as "virology" goes. In the mid-20th, even to the 90s, it was still acknowledged and emphasized that transmission is totally mysterious. When discussion of this mystery goes away in the last few decades, you know virology has thrown away skepticism and lapsed into "We know that" modes of thinking.
Another good article. I'm surprised your substack doesn't get much traffic. I guess it's because you're correcting the errors on the anti-vax side rather than posting clickbait.
Have you seen Dr Rancourt's new article? https://denisrancourt.ca/entries.php?id=126
Seems to be that the shots are killing people that are elderly, not so much the young, just like the virus itself. I've even looked into the mortality rates from different causes by age. Young people are dying more often, but the increase is mostly in drug ODs.
This is CDC data, only goes up to 2021 though: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1MDqO7jl0ohTsEPdDIzMmP7JnP1l6Xa318ZvBJXpTIr8/edit?usp=sharing
Thank you! - and, well, as the Bloggerman's Creed goes, there are many unpopular blogs, but this one is mine.
Thank you - I'll take a look at the Rancourt data. It is perilous to offer a quick take, but when you talk about excess mortality and doses per day stats, which easily show overlapping spikes because stats/reports about virus deaths drive political booster decisions and public injections, the question is "ok stats wonk, can you show the vaxxed are dying?" Usually, no. So all these graphs are usually showing is a "soldiers wearing helmets causes being shot" effect (but on a population level).
And as far as age patterns in VAERS, the problem here is that most VAERS deaths in absolute counts are breakthrough infections (which doesn't tell you whether the virus death rate is higher or lower than the unvaxxed because you aren't seeing the denominator, all it tells you is reporting bias in that other causes of death are assumed not to be worth entering into VAERS).
So we'll see if there's anything actually linking the vaccine to deaths.
I try to reason things out with a bit of logic. At first a big problem appears to be that almost everything involves a degree of assumption so can't be fully logical. However, logic can at least be used to show that two sets of assumptions can't easily co-exist...
So for example it's impossible to have both zero covid and some degree of endemic covid coexisting, so which is more likely in the long term? But look at the way that some 'zero covid' countries vainly tried to hang onto their status, instead of treating it more of a case of delayed covid, and planning for the inevitable.
As to how to apply this to the above, I'm not so sure. What assumptions can't easily co-exist with the assumption of deliberately released biowarfare variants?
(I have to admit I do lean more away from the global conspiracy type stuff, seems more to me like not letting a crisis go to waste but using it to further agendas. Something not lost on a certain Dr Fauci when he managed to negotiate the highest salary of a federal offical, including the President AFAIK!)
"What assumptions can't easily co-exist with the assumption of deliberately released biowarfare variants?" - truly - hence the big problem with my middle-of-the-road approach is a lack of proof.
As for the not letting a crisis go to waste, again it's a question of precedent. Why was the crisis predicted in the first place? What was that based on? Besides flu which we actually understand now to be a very specialized cross-species co-evolution where different HA species re-emerge from the static avian reservoir, they are not something that truly come out of "nowhere".
A few thoughts on the (im)propriety of Gain-of-Function experimentation.
We must be precise with the definition. It is one thing to look for drug-resistant strains of a particular pathogen in the cellular environment with a particular therapeutic. To replicate within a laboratory context a general process that will occur "in the wild" may uncover more virulent and more dangerous strains of a pathogen, but it can hardly be said that the end product is a pathogen of particular virulence or with particular characteristics that affect its virulence.
This is qualitatively different from the "chimeric" viruses that are being created not only with the SARS-CoV-2 virus but also Influenza and RSV at a minimum. These are pathogens that would arguably NOT emerge outside of the laboratory context.
It is also qualitatively different from the influenza research in 2011 at both the University of Wisconsin and Erasmus University in The Netherlands, where virologists used serial passage through a number of ferrets to force an avian (H5N1) influenza strain to become infectious within ferrets (which tends to also suggest human infectivity as well).
https://www.nature.com/articles/nature10831
https://journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/JVI.06828-11
Another concern regarding such research techniques is one of fundamental lab safety. Containment accidents are far more common even at leading BSL3 and BSL4 labs than the corporate media has wanted to acknowledge, and we know both from the 1977 flu pandemic as well as the post-9/11 anthrax attacks that pathogens can get out of the laboratory environment to cause disease and ultimately death. These are not hypothetical scenarios but historical realities.
Thus we are properly concerned when the likes of Jordon Walker casually talks about Pfizer "mutating" the SARS-CoV-2 virus--regardless of the actual research activities in question, Walker asserted that Pfizer was actively studying how to change either the structure or the function of various strains of SARS-CoV-2 virus. The problem is not what they might do deliberately but what might happen accidentally.
https://newsletter.allfactsmatter.us/p/what-to-do-with-jordon-walker
It's what we do not know about Pfizer's research activities that is cause for concern.
This is also the inherent corruption of the now global rubric of "threat reduction". The implicit presumption of carrying such research on in a BSL4 lab is that accidental releases of altered pathogens does not happen--only it does. We know from the historical record that it does.
A simple accident is all that is required for biological "threat reduction" to become biological "threat creation", regardless of whether the original intent was to weaponize a pathogen or no.
https://newsletter.allfactsmatter.us/p/when-is-bioweapons-research-not-bioweapons
The concern we should all have over Gain-of-Function research (and really all advanced research into dangerous pathogens) is how much control do researchers have over the created pathogens?
Are they able to guarantee that dangerous pathogens won't slip into the environment somehow?
Is the research leading to genuinely more effective treatments and therapeutics against disease? It is worth noting that the US and Russia teamed up to map the monkeypox genome back in the early 2000s, and yet when there was a global outbreak of monkeypox cases, there was no monkeypox vaccine established and awaiting deployment (which begs the question of why the genome mapping project was funded in the first place).
What we have seen with the many revelations surrounding coronavirus research in China, in the US, and around the world is a complete lack of accountability on the part of researchers. They not only are not taking the time to justify their efforts to the world at large, but many get downright offended if you even suggest such accountability. That is what needs to change.
"1977 flu pandemic" - this was not a novel lab derived pathogen. It was a copy of 1950 H1N1, which had just completed it's normal natural "cycle" in humans (replaced by H2N2 in 1958 which was replaced by H3N2 in 1968).
Point being that flu is sui generis in that you have multiple human-compatible species of HA gene preserved in the avian reservoir where they will always spill over and probably always have been spilling over, but usually only the one with the least pre-existing immunity is able to do so, and usually there's a bit more of a barrier (because you still need one or two mutations to the avian species) to that spilling over. So when we started keeping preserved copies of fully humanized H1N1 then that barrier was lowered. This is more akin to "domestication" of flu's normal cycles than anything nefarious.
As such, it is a poor precedent for the alleged dangers of GOF. Just because you can domesticate a cat doesn't mean you can create a functioning cat/human hybrid (some would say sadly).
What the 1977 flu pandemic demonstrates is that "lab leak" is a real possibility with real dangers. No, the 1977 influenza was not an enhanced strain, but it emerged from a laboratory.
Thus extreme caution must be exercised by any virology lab--and there has been reporting well before the SARS-CoV-2 virus entered into the picture that even US BSL4 labs have had numerous safety and containment breaches.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2015/05/29/some-recent-us-lab-incidents/25258237/
Thus when we read of virologists grafting portions of original Wuhan strain onto Omicron virions, or creating Influenza/RSV hybrids in the lab environment, yes, we have to be concerned--because the track record of even the best BSL4 labs cannot offer a 100% guarantee that a pathogen will not escape.
And even without being an enhanced pathogen, the influenza strain from the 1977 pandemic has some 700,000 deaths attributed to it.
Also, after the anthrax attacks--which were done using a "vaccine challenge" strain of the bacteria--GOF dangers are not alleged. If pathogens with increased virulence and pathogenicity get outside the laboratory environment, the results can be fatal. If, as many would argue has been largely substantiated by circumstantial evidence, SARS-CoV-2 is also a product of GoF research, even if we discount the lethality of the virus due to the presence of multiple severe comorbidities, we still have a substantial amount of death directly attributable to the virus.
Currently some 1.11 million deaths in the US are attributed to the SARS-CoV-2 virus.
https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explorer?zoomToSelection=true&time=2020-03-01..latest&facet=none&pickerSort=asc&pickerMetric=location&Metric=Confirmed+deaths&Interval=Cumulative&Relative+to+Population=false&Color+by+test+positivity=false&country=~USA
Currently, some 5% of those deaths have no comorbidity mentioned.
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid_weekly/index.htm#Comorbidities
Taking the data at face value, that means that SARS-CoV-2 by itself succeeded in killing some 55,500 people in the US alone. That's a higher mortality figure than the most recent pre-pandemic flu seasons as per the CDC.
https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/past-seasons.html
With lab leaks an historical reality, with the lethality of enhanced pathogens an historical reality, and with the probability (at the very least) that SARS-CoV-2 is itself an enhanced pathogen, to say that GoF should be approached with extreme caution and even a modicum of reluctance is quite a reasonable stance to take.
Given the myriad safety concerns surrounding any research at even a BSL4 lab, the ethical propriety of GoF research is dubious at best. These are not consequence-free intellectual exercises; I for one am unpersuaded that virologists who are engaging in some of this research understand that reality.
"even US BSL4 labs have had numerous safety and containment breaches." That's exactly why 1977 H1N1 is not a precedent for anything. It was made by nature, not a lab. So all this other stuff that we make in labs has never established long term transmission. But nature-made-H1N1 did so at a much smaller scale of lab work after only 20 years.
If you can be as sloppy with lab-made viruses as you like a million times and nothing happens, but sloppy with a nature-made-H1N1 a mere hundred times and it gets out, what does that tell you about lab-made viruses?
They are always freaks with no chance of establishing long term transmission. The only apparent or lets say alleged exception is SARS-CoV-2. So you can't give SARS-CoV-2 a pass based on nature-made-H1N1. SARS-CoV-2 putatively belongs in the scrapheap of lab made mutants that never have gone anywhere.
Anthrax does not help substantiate the lab leak apocalypse trope. Russia ran the largest anthrax factory in the world, pumped product into the air by mistake one night, scarcely anyone affected. Max Perutz's review of Alibek's confession book:
"One evening in 1979 [bla bla bla anthrax-growing lab accident] a cloud of anthrax spores escaped which the wind blew over the town. Alibek writes: "No one wanted to set off a panic or to alert outsiders [...] military sentries were posted in the immediate neighborhood of the plant to keep intruders away, and KGB officers pretending to be doctors visited the homes of victims' families with falsified death certificates." Reports about the number of deaths differ between 66 and 105, far fewer than the thousand reported earlier. Alibek calls Sverdlovsk as serious a disaster as the one at Chernobyl. In fact, the number of deaths is surprisingly small for an urban area containing about a quarter of a million people, possibly because inhaled anthrax spores are not very infectious to humans."
If it emerged from a lab, and the 1977 influenza strain emerged from a lab, it is a precedent for the perils of lab safety. That the strain was one that was stored vs one that was manufactured is not relevant insofar as lab safety is concerned.
If virologists are making viruses more virulent, more pathogenic, and more lethal, and without extraordinary care regarding lab safety, there is a risk of something much worse than the 1977 pandemic arising.
The only way SARS-CoV-2 winds up on any scrap heap is if it is either not a lab leak or not the result of GoF research.
If it is both a lab leak and the result of GoF research--and there's more than a little evidence that this is the case--then it alone demolishes any argument that there are no serious public health risks from GoF research. That the virus is now endemic worldwide effectively removes it from any viral scrap heap.
The outcome does not need to be a rescripting of Resident Evil to constitute a serious risk as well as an identifiable one.
One lab mistake resulted in 700,000 deaths in 1977. That is multiple orders of magnitude more death from Chernobyl and Fukushima combined.
Another lab mistake arguably resulted in the COVID pandemic, also with hundreds of thousands of deaths if not millions (depending on how one wishes to account for comorbidities), and a new endemic infectious respiratory pathogen to trouble humanity for the foreseeable future.
How many such instances are required for us to scrutinize virological research with a view towards the potential public health risks from even innocent mistakes during that research? And asking if the research is justifiable given the risks?
I think Brian's point is that GOF viruses aren't actually gaining function. They might be more properly characterized as attempted gain of function.
Although they appear to have become more virulent or more lethal in lab settings there is very little evidence that Amy of them actually 'work' in nature.
Lab created viruses are like a 6 year old trying to build a jet. Lets suppose he can read the print and knows the physics and engineering. He gets it togethwr and it 'should work' but it doesn't. We don't know why, but it seems to not work.
Of course saying, 'but look at covid' is begging the question. The truth about sars cov2 is still very dubious.
If, as you say, it is merely "attempted" GoF, that the modifications/enhancements/mutations made to pathogens in the laboratory setting don't actually "work", then in addition to the safety considerations must also be asked the utility question: why bother? With a goodly amount of viral research being funded by tax dollars, if such lines of research don't actually work, then is that really the best use of our tax dollars?
But the principal challenge remains one of lab safety. The reality of GoF research is that the outcomes--the mutated and modified viruses--are not known ahead of time. A new pathogen created in a lab might have been intended to be engineered along certain lines of virulence and pathogenicity, but an incomplete understanding of the entirety of what the genetic instructions within the viral genome actually do means the totality of the pathogen's characteristics and capabilities cannot possibly be fully understood.
It has been proven that "leaky" avian vaccines against Marek's Disease can result in the emergence of more virulent strains of the disease--and the mRNA inoculations are the epitome of a "leaky" vaccine (and thus truly not a vaccine at all).
https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.1002198#sec008
It has recently been found that Merck's COVID antiviral molnupiravir, which works by forcing the SARS-CoV-2 virus to mutate, ostensibly into non-viable strains, has resulted in new transmissible strains of the SARS-CoV-2 virus.
https://newsletter.allfactsmatter.us/p/molnupiravir-creating-new-covid-strains
In both instances, we are dealing with unintended outcomes.
Whether the GoF is actual or merely attempted, what is being ignored are the outcomes which are both not sought and potentially not detected. With the safety records of even the best labs far from perfect, these unknown and unknowable consequences of such research efforts should give everyone pause.
Nor is the SARS-CoV-2 virus a case of "begging the question". While we as yet have no "smoking gun" evidence that SARS-CoV-2 escaped from a virology lab in Wuhan, the circumstantial evidence that the virus did in fact escape from a virology lab in Wuhan is quite considerable, to the extent that the lab origin theories of how the virus came to be are at this juncture the most probable explanations on the table. While it is not certain that the virus is the explicit product of GoF research, it is highly probable that it is the consequence of lab research, and that it is in the wild now because of lab accident.
In both the case of the 1977 flu pandemic and the COVID pandemic, we are presented with the reality that virological research has a public health risk that, based on the cavalier attitudes displayed not just by the Jordon Walker research groupies but the actual viral researchers at places like Boston University, is given scant consideration if any at all.
https://newsletter.allfactsmatter.us/p/shell-games-the-faucists-close-ranks
That GoF research arguably does not work and therefore is of dubious informational value merely makes that lack of safety concern even more disconcerting. It's one thing to take risks in the pursuit of knowledge, but it's quite another to take risks so virologists can treat infectious pathogens as their own personal box of Tinkertoys.
Sorry, this was supposed to follow your comment to me down below. (substack app still needs work, imo)
It's been a problem for a year. All they need to do is remove the root thread input box from nested urls or fix it to auto-nest entered text. Back when I used to argue on other substack threads more often, it was the worst, because I always entered into that field when I was angry haha