A Biological Warfare Threat, Part 2: Please Do Not Feed the Biomafia
The Wars of the DoD
Other Wars of the DoD articles can be found here.
Note: This article contains discussion about the quasi-species swarm model of viruses that is critical to understanding some pandemic illusions.
Judging by some commentary in a large listserv in which one of my recent articles was inserted into a thread, I figured it would be helpful to add some additional thoughts.
My article was mostly askew from the question of whether gain-of-function (GoF) is a good idea or not. Don't mistake that for anything like apathy. I am currently working on a game-theoretic argument that I co-developed with J.J. Couey against GoF that will argue from a statistical perspective that justifications for "combatting nature" are illusory, but there are some nuances that I'd like to discuss in this article. There are tricky issues at the margins of what might be called GoF, depending on how widely we want to define it, but I will get around all that by saying this:
It is a very bad idea to allow the NIH to continue controlling such a large proportion of research dollars, while secretly (not-so-secretly to insiders) acting as a PR and budgeting arm of the DoD.
Professional writers very strongly recommend against using the word "very", but I very much think it fits the point. I think my above stance takes care of most of the arguments at the margins. Now, I'll try to explain why there are margins, and share some thoughts about them.
First, I'd like to respond to a couple of comments from the listserv.
Comment: "Does anyone have a rejoinder/rebuttal for this Matthew Crawford Rounding the Earth Substack claim that the BU experiment is not to be feared and that medical freedom folks are a bit ignorant about the science? Thanks!"
I believe the phrase I used for the research was "pfucked up", but if somebody didn't read that far into the article before linking to it on a listserv saying that my position was, "not to be feared," maybe that implicitly identifies my critique, in part.
Look—those seeking freedom have been barraged with distractions and false messages for decades as part of the process of eroding true opposition to the power mongers, whom I will talk about shortly.
I've spent essentially my entire life studying how best to engineer systems of healthy freedom.
Comment (anonymous): "Why do you want to respond to that troll? I can't even understand half of what he scribbled." (referring to me)
Troll indeed!
How does this person know to be nasty toward me if they aren't sure what I've written?
Hmmm…
The exchange struck me as performative, and with the purpose of misrepresenting my thoughts. Oddly—and particularly since my work on the DMED project—I've been the subject of some gossip attacks. Early this year, a friend sent me copies of numerous email chains discussing an in-group directive to suppress my reach. I was asked not to publish the exchanges because my friend would be revealed as not onboard the directed groupthink operation, but those communications are just part of why I worry about infiltration and steering of the Medical Freedom Movement.
Other reasons, which I plan to write or talk about next month, include stories I've heard from the U.S. trucker convoy, where the truckers were never given evidence of how much money was raised and portions of the caravan fizzled after being jerked around and sent (by the same person, repeatedly) to the wrong locations; and also from the Arise USA tour which kicked out one of its speakers over a combination of speech to incite violence and what seemed like the intentional compromising of one of the other leaders. I wonder if my many phone calls lately investigating these stories has bumped me up on a "hate this person out" list. There is also a disturbing (and video-documented) story of somebody within the Medical Freedom Movement directly encouraging violence at the Capitol on January 6, 2021 (though not among the arrests…hmmmm).
All I do is work on stats, promote the idea that antivirals work better when applied early, examine evidence of harms of vaccines (and don't tolerate promoting evidence that is easily discredited), look for unexamined biases in the data, help explain the flaws in testing and interpretation models, a whole bunch of other stuff, and try to document it all. How odd it would be that I would be the subject of Mean Girls-esque ingroup attack, eh? But not the person driving the SUV full of guns, inserting themselves into the trucker convoy after the passenger had been asked numerous times to leave (yes, that's what I'm told)?
Hmmm.
Now, back to our regularly scheduled program…
GoF and the BU Paper
The BU paper (Chen et al, 2022) is the "80% of the mice died or were euthanized due to disease/injury" paper.
Was this GoF research?
Is GoF the defining feature of research that we should be worried about?
Is there some other principle about research funding from which we need to guard from being distracted?
The answer to (1) depends on your definition of "gain-of-function". Should we define it by procedure, or intention (tactics vs. strategy)? If we define it by intention, how do we stop people from gaming the system without a mind reading device?
In that email thread, one biotech entrepreneur chimed in:
However, this study also failed to produce a "killer", despite what they claim in their title and abstract. There was no transmission demonstrated in vivo - spraying mice into the nasal cavity is not transmission.
In humans Wuhan was about as deadly as influenza, not dangerous to healthy people under 65. Their Omi-S abracadabra was 80% vs Wuhan 100% mouse killer, so by logical conclusion it would be less dangerous than Wuhan strain in humans.
I think the government sponsors of GOF should be quite upset with these absolutely unimpressive results.
And later,
Based on my reading of those sections, my opinion is that nothing of any real danger was created by these clowns who call themselves scientists at BU, and that we wasted some more taxpayer dollars on a piece of promotion of the concept of "emerging infectious diseases" that must be "anticipated" by the government. The entire enslavement of our society hinges on this made up concept. So we need to be a bit more critical here.
This is all true, though I still fall on the side of, "this is dangerous territory," and I'll talk more about that later. But at the very least, it appears that somebody in biotech didn't dismiss the direction of my thoughts as "trolling".
I'll also share thoughts from a geneticist in that email chain. Emphasis always mine.
While they made a virus less lethal than Wuhan-1, they also made a virus more lethal than omicron.
It’s logically valid to claim The wuhan-1 virus gained omicrons spike immune escape and since there are mysteriously no ancestors that link omicron to wuhan-1 (no intermediates), we can’t know the outcome in humans. A virus with a more deadly IFR was just given immune escape to the majority of MAbs and vaccines deployed in the field to date.
The part in bold is one of the reasons I suspected omicron of being synthetic from the start.
“Humanized Mouse data doesn’t predict human GOF risk but we’re going to use only mice data to put vaccines into kids” is an incoherent policy position.
Indeed!
As you allude to
Risk = transmissibility x lethality.
And they didn’t measure R0… but by definition, measurement of human R0 can never ethically be performed on GOF. Even measuring this in mice is risky.
If you give them this latitude than anything more lethal than Wuhan-1 is also less lethal than SARs1 and also not GOF.
There will be no end to this moral relativism. It’s loophole they are testing.
This gets to the meat of the matter. I'll offer a solution later.
Finally, they have the 10 pieces (contigs) of this assembly they can mix and match with CPER and we must assume they have all of the contigs for both Wuhan-1 and Omicron.
The next step they will take is to mix and match all of the VOCs back and forth between Omicron and Wuhan-1 to finally have a map of the functionality of the VOCs. This could be a treasure trove for vaccine design as you could design more distributed epitopes to make a vax more tolerant of genetic drift.
This is not something we should encourage in Boston. Pandemic potential research should be relegated to low contact map jurisdictions, not adjacent to the Boston T and Logan airport.
There is now a liability free $100B testing and vax market bounty incentivizing the next leak and a precedent set that no one will be held to account if they can cast enough political dispersions and gaslighting.
And later,
I agree with your sentiments regarding the bio security state.
One of the authors of this paper (Darell N Kotton) is married to the Ms Camille N. Kotton on the ACIP panel. While one partner is making new viruses, the other parting the red tape sea to get them into children. Lovely.
Now, for my solution (again):
Never allow government so large and centralized that a bureaucratic halo can be cast over an organization like the NIH to act as the PR firm and funding agency for the DoD, whose life as an organization is inextricably intertwined with the banking system which profits most of all through laundering money from black markets (drug trade and human trafficking in particular) and implicitly slave-taxing the whole world. And war.
Oops, too late.
Does it now make more sense why I'm worried when a rush-to-publication substack contest coupled with lack-of-communication and due diligence leads portions of the Medical Freedom Movement to act as a billboard for real or misunderstood threats to the world?
This is why I don't often utilize an executive summary, which would act as a shock beacon. My goal is to educate as I explore, not manipulate the viral transmission overly basic headlines.
My bold solution above is the answer to (3) that leaps past (1) and (2). Understand that the first two questions are less important than the ability to fund a Manhattan Project level of bio-Frankensteinian research that allows for distant decisions over who lives and dies worldwide. And there is research that wouldn't qualify as GoF that is just important to the process. As my wife (a bioterrorism defense expert for the world's largest defense contractor prior to shifting to primarily cancer research) has joked ("joked"?), she can find something on your kitchen counter, purify it, and kill you with it. No GoF required.
That much is nothing new: see the whole history of Anthrax attacks.
Stability of the Quasi-Species Swarm
Though I referred to the BU research as "pfucked up", the GoF aspect may not be any more dangerous than culturing a viral sample—and nobody is making a big deal about the same mouse-model research prior to recombination. It is unlikely that the degree of danger is particularly divergent. Sure, recombination allows for the study of optimal mortality, but that can't even be studied without release into the human population. These studies don't even guarantee human transmissibility, much less stability of the viral swarm that would result.
Let's talk about the quasi-species swarm now. It's a concept that I knew nothing about prior to the pandemic, but that I've found highly illuminating as I've gradually read up on it, meditated on it, and understood it better since. From a paper (Domingo & Perales, 2019) published just prior to the pandemic (ahem):
Viral quasispecies refers to a population structure that consists of extremely large numbers of variant genomes, termed mutant spectra, mutant swarms or mutant clouds. Fueled by high mutation rates, mutants arise continually, and they change in relative frequency as viral replication proceeds. The term quasispecies was adopted from a theory of the origin of life in which primitive replicons) consisted of mutant distributions, as found experimentally with present day RNA viruses. The theory provided a new definition of wild type, and a conceptual framework for the interpretation of the adaptive potential of RNA viruses that contrasted with classical studies based on consensus sequences. Standard clonal analyses and deep sequencing methodologies have confirmed the presence of myriads of mutant genomes in viral populations, and their participation in adaptive processes. The quasispecies concept applies to any biological entity, but its impact is more evident when the genome size is limited and the mutation rate is high. This is the case of the RNA viruses, ubiquitous in our biosphere, and that comprise many important pathogens. In virology, quasispecies are defined as complex distributions of closely related variant genomes subjected to genetic variation, competition and selection, and that may act as a unit of selection. Despite being an integral part of their replication, high mutation rates have an upper limit compatible with inheritable information. Crossing such a limit leads to RNA virus extinction, a transition that is the basis of an antiviral design termed lethal mutagenesis.
One of the major problems during the pandemic has been in assumptions about testing and sequencing. Any given PCR primer can only test for some proportion of the viral swarm in which virions have different genetic sequences. That's one problem, and one of the implications is that the surveillance methods used haven't necessarily excluded the possibility that some or all of the so-called "escape variants" might have already been part of the swarm (something I talked about in Omicron Hypothesis articles)! Other escape variants might have been channeled through a "tunnel" of selective pressure, reaching a new stability pattern, but would otherwise never have existed (somewhat like the emergence of antibiotic-resistant bacteria). We should not be naming or referencing these phenomena in an overly-similar manner.
Another problem is that the scientific community as a whole still does not know enough about the dynamics of the swarm. There is a "survival of the flattest" principle (Elena et al, 2008) that states that swarms with greater genetic similarity (but just enough diversity for basic survival-jujitsu) tend to become the most stable. However, this is like comparing the Amish (flat) to the denizens of New York City (multi-strain; non-flat)—certainly both have existed for longer than we've been alive. So, "stability" is something that can be measured on time scales. And a swarm containing several different lineages of coronaviruses can manage to get along together—at least for a while. This may result in the apparent disappearance of some strains that remain in low proportion within the swarm, making them invisible to common surveillance techniques as one form of what we call "viral interference".
The flat swarm would likely generally only be particularly harmful to the unhealthy. The non-flat swarm is more likely to be dangerous—while it lasts.
A highly diverse swarm, seeded with a leaked/released "psychopathic wildtype" genetic strain (with all the harmful features of the spike protein) might then operate within a non-flat swarm cloud. Perhaps that cloud does revert to an evolutionarily-tested Original Gangsta flat swarm after some time (maybe two or three years like public health officials seemed to predict, oddly even before global COVID deaths ever began to flatten; or like the Spanish flu) that is capable of its operational jujitsu without help from other elements in the swarm.
Note that the semi-stable non-flat swarms lend the "vaccines result in negative tests without reducing illness" hypothesis greater credibility.
Note also what we learned from an early paper during the pandemic (Chaudhry et al, 2020), which is that the furin cleavage site increases in stability in a form of sick (cancer) cell, while decreasing in stability among another cell it was cultured in. It could be that as the less healthy population diminishes, evolutionary pressure for the novel strain to diminish in proportion (perhaps even to zero) increases.
Now, apply all this to laboratory research such as the BU experiment. Escape from a lab can certainly result in a short-term fiasco, but not likely an ongoing permanent crisis…unless…
One thing that might prolong the harm result after such a release might be the application of a whole bunch of mutagenic biological products all over the population, and in different combinations, training the swarm with the novel spike protein to dodge and parry obstacles while renewing the non-flat stability equilibrium over and over and over again—each time finding a new form of weakness (like a saddle point) in a new subset of hosts to exploit while maintaining that temporary non-flat swarm stability—the semi-permanent threat of a Biomafia with plausible deniability?
But why?
Because Dollar Dominance needed a new glue, most likely. The old systems are giving way to BRICS breakaway.
We are literally at a point at which the global banking system would collapse overnight if it lost its grip—much of which is maintained by the military and intelligence agencies—over global black market commerce (mostly drugs and human trafficking, laundered through the banks). And don't doubt for a moment that this state of affairs lies behind the bizarrely coincidental unanimous insanity among politicians and public officials. It looks and feels like mind control because it is in fact coerced. The mafia has the goods on most of them, whether or not they're bribed through stakes in the system. That swarm has been selected for, evolutionarily speaking, after generations of cultivation of the "psychopathic wildtype" strain of leadership.
You have an idea in the works here that's starting to cohere with other perspectives and viewpoints I'm aware have begun circulating in greater earnest, but there is also the sense in which getting this idea out there rushes over laying out the inferences. I'm very aware of how this works for me, and I see some of that here with your post, so I hope that this on-going narrative continues to shape and unfold the idea.
You're talking about not only a model for recognizing a quasi-swarm of a virus (which, I think, the folks who think this particular virus is "just a computer sequence" ought to let challenge their viewpoint, assuming as it does that a living thing is uniquely generated from an internally yet wholly contained genetic sequence that's particular and distinct for that individual living thing, rather than a distributed entity like a torrented seed on peer-to-peer networks), not only about a model for recognizing the human holobiont as a synergistic cooperation of competition-in-motion forms of life within the living space of a "single" life form, not only a model for recognizing social organisms as organismic in the way biological entities and systems are organismic, not only a model for understanding contemporary public economics as driven by illicit and underworld transnational markets, not only a model for recognizing the fundamental importance of military dominance in using violence as the primary means for sustaining those public and criminal markets, but also revealing a personal narrative of how your own reception and then dissemination of the synthesis of all these analyses runs up against the occult inertia inherent to social cliques resistant to new ideas and personal accountability. That's a long sentence: I guess I'm saying you're doing a lot of hard work in a tiny space.
But, honestly, knowing as much of your life as you've allowed us through these media, it seems like this is how you've always lived: underdog with a head in *clouds* (of networks, of data, of information nodes, &c) and heart for others and a compelling drive to educate those willing to listen with the limitations of space and time and resources.
Be strong, be resilient, our brother. You're onto something that's revealing itself more and more, how we are not only all interrelated and interconnected, but also caught up within several layers of deception and corruption challenging our integrity to uncover what within ourselves craves such deception and corruption. The divine in our hearts knows where our choices originate.
"If you could choose what your superpower is, what would you choose?" Once you realize the corruptly powerful seek out invisibility as their superhero power (rather than, say, flight or the universal capacity to translate any language from any consciousness into any other language for any consciousness), you stand in awe of the numbers of people who casually say they want invisibility as their superpower. Plato's example of the Ring of Gyges is still Tolkien's example of the One Ring: if you know your heart, you question how easily you will give in to the lack of accountability, and you will work to discipline what you are capable of being and becoming, knowing there actually is no such thing as a lack of accountability. The all-seeing Eye sees into the heart, knows whom to fear and how to cultivate.
The structure of democratic system is in the west has virtually ensure that the most psychopathic sociopathic people rise to the very top