Snake Bit? The Slytherin Hypothesis
The Vaccine Wars Part XXXIV
"We Slytherins are brave, yes, but not stupid. For instance, given the choice, we will always choose to save our own necks." -Phineas Nigellus (J.K. Rowling)
I wouldn't blame you if you skipped reading this article.
When Steve Kirsch invited me to a meeting with Dr. Bryan Ardis regarding poisoning of the water supply as the true source of the pandemic, I was highly skeptical, and not particularly excited about the time spent. But I have appreciated Ardis's public stance regarding remdesivir—an expensive drug with the side effect of renal failure, being used late during hospitalization (generally too late for an antiviral to work on a virus that usually ceases the replication process prior to hospitalization), to stop a disease with an extremely high mortality coefficient for those who experience renal failure.
Then again, every time I see him speak, I feel like I'm watching a commercial. Does he sit at home and practice delivering lines? Why do I feel like that's what I'm watching? Is it just me?
I would have given time to the discussion and kept an open mind, perhaps just as an exercise in seeing what we all might need to further learn en route to distinguishing correlating evidence from a tight theory. But perhaps he would convince me. At the time, I was not yet aware that snake venom would be the most interesting aspect of the discussion.
What is "Watch the Water" and Why?
Since I was not a close follower of QAnon, I hadn't made the connection, but…
Oh boy. Let the fight for objective or at least educational discussion amidst the mental-emotional states of our era commence! What do the fact checkers tell us?
I dearly hope that the name of the Ardis documentary was not chosen to stoke the memories of an extremely vague and several year old QAnon post. I do worry that it might have been. But let us, regardless of our biases, give some thought to the topics at hand. After all, we are talking about a virus with significant signs of genetic engineering [of dangerous elements] which were then engineered into biological injectable products that have been delivered to billions of people without regard for the plain need to surpass ordinary standards of evidence of efficacy.
What would make an observer feel uncomfortable with Ardis's story to the level of thinking it's a psy-op? How many people are thinking that? Or are at least wondering?
Source: Brian Mowrey
The Documentary
Suggestion: skip the first ten minutes of the video below, which is a combination of dramatic music and Stew Peters summarizing his view of the pandemonium. Maybe use that extra ten minutes to perform an internet search on toxin libraries and databases. If you're not up for that level of difficult reading, picking a random point in the documentary and watch for a couple of minutes on 0.5x speed. I'll explain later.
https://rumble.com/v10mnew-live-world-premiere-watch-the-water.html
You can read Steve Kirsch's initial take here.
My very first thought was, "Why does an examination of potential links between snake venom (or other toxins) have to come joined with a hypothesis about how the water supply was poisoned?" Or are they joined? If there was a particularly good reason not to separate the two as distinct discussions, I did not catch it. I will treat these as two hypotheses: (1) the snake venom hypothesis (SVH) and (2) the water poisoning hypothesis (WPH). While I don't think that the evidence was presented coherently, I think the SVH is by far the more interesting of the two, meaning that I suspect that I am more likely to learn something valuable while examining it.
Note: I have created an entry in the campfire.wiki for the venom poisoning hypothesis.
Toxins, Neurotoxins, Venoms, and Peptides
I would like to begin by saying that I am out of my depth in these topics. I have just enough knowledge to read recent research, learn some from it, then have a lot of questions because there are parts that I don't understand. And ultimately, my spare time is a bit on the thin side. Fortunately for me, my wife is a biochemist with experience in bioterrorism defense, so I was able to get a few questions answered from home that allowed me to reach the point where I'm slightly less out of my depth in these topics. Hoorah for small victories.
Snake venoms are toxins, and toxins themselves are an interesting and sometimes fruitful area of research in biology precisely because each one perturbs some biological system(s). Some pharmacological investigations begin with searches of molecular databases of toxins such as the Toxin and Toxin-Target Database (T3DB). Even as we have nascent understanding of many biochemical interactions, we can sometimes figure out how to strum the right biological strings to produce resonance. One of the more well known applications is the targeting of tumors with toxins (chemotherapeutics).
I'll quote Mowrey one more time before moving onward:
Ardis is on the right track when he proposes that the most coherent rationale for choosing snake venom (“the original bioweapon”) for Covid-19 and/or SARS-CoV-2 and for the mRNA transfections would be essentially symbolic. So, if you are inclined to think that the virus or its spike protein was designed in a lab, Ardis’ argument remains interesting, even if you don’t buy the parts about the tap water or Remdesivir.
However, Ardis doesn’t actually offer a lot of compelling evidence for the “venom”-ness of the spike protein. Beyond that, it’s not a very useful theory beyond speculating about the state of mind of those who may have designed the virus. Maybe the spike protein has bits of snake venom. But snake venom is a grab-bag of peptides that interact with host molecules; which is already the definition of a viral protein as well.
Rattlesnake venom contains a relative of sPLA2-II, which is expressed in all human tissues. SARS-CoV-2 infections were found by Snider, et al. to prompt extreme secretions of sPLA2-II by these same tissues, mimicking venom-poisoning. Out-of-control bacterial infections leading to sepsis also promote extreme secretions of sPLA2-II, mimicking venom-poisoning.
Addendum: This is a good spot to drop Geneticism Kevin McKernan's excellent thread with respect to the proposed cobra toxin.
Problematic Presentation
The first 10 minutes of the documentary were absolutely painful. I would describe them as pharmacopartisan loyalty testing (even if most or all of it is correct), which is a way of turning off one audience while stroking the ego of another. That's not the way to win hearts and minds in the middle, and preaching to the choir about an untested hypothesis runs the risk of sending thousands of people who too quickly accept the hypotheses as the truth (perhaps based on their positive views of Ardis and Peters) out into the vicious internet combat zone unprepared for the rightly reasonable grilling and skepticism they would be showered with (not to mention the inevitable mean-spirited labeling and insult hurling).
For kicks, just to around where the conversation begins and listen on 0.5x speed. That's what I do to transcribe videos, and I've found it HI-LARIOUS at times. Almost everyone sounds drunk or high. This is one of those times. Emphasis mine.
There's no part of me who brought this information to Stew, and started any of this research to create fear and panic…Dr. Pierre Kory, you were right. Dr. Paul Marik, you were right. Dr. Ben Marble and Zev Zelenko, you were right. Simone Gold, you were correct. Sherry Tenpenny, you were right…Dr. Ryan Cole will be able to finally conclude why the findings under the slides—under the microscope—have become so monumentally evil…
Beginning discussion of a tale that should be presented as a working hypothesis rather than "the truth" (there is certainly no smoking gun, and a lot of details to work out), then engineering association with the field of COVID celebrities comes off as dressing up an incomplete case to look more like a finished masterpiece. This is part of a slow and painful ramping into the meat of the conversation that also involves expressing religious and spiritual bonds among those fighting for truth. Beginning or ending with a prayer that does not fill the middle of the documentary where we're waiting with suspense to experience the reveal would be more respectful of the audience that collectively spent more than a million hours viewing the documentary already this week.
But I won't judge the evidence on that basis, of course. I will however give the 21:00 mark a suggested listen at 0.5x because it's a good couple of minutes for my complaint over the drama-to-signal ratio.
Ardis: Is it not a virus? Is it a venom? Like this is what I want to know. Is COVID a venom and this is why they don't want you using monoclonal antibodies.
Peters: I mean, that sounds completely insane. As a theory.
Ardis: It is completely insane.
Peters: I mean, How…how would the masses be infected by snake bites.
Ardis: Yeah. Let me ask you a question. May I ask you a question?
Peters: Sure.
Ardis: Do you believe the mass media is controlled?
Peters: Of course.
Ardis: And you actually do…believe that?
Peters: Yes.
Ardis: So you believe that whatever is being pumped out in the media is being orchestrated and controlled.
Peters: Of course.
Ardis: Like across all of it.
Peters: Across all of it.
They seem to be patting the audience on the back for the obvious intuition and perception that the media is wrong. I'm flattered. Are you flattered? I'm flattered. Let's move on.
Not A does not imply B.
I'd rather get there (wherever we're going with all this) through more rigorous study of some version or piece of the SVH is true. And if there is something to this story that is worth discovering (and there might be, whether or not this presentation is fully correct), I'd like to focus in on that five minutes of information that I can evaluate in this 60 minute documentary that never should have been stretched out that long. Just give me a page with the study links handy, and when it rises to the top of my priority list, I'll read em. Better would have been to email them out to a wide group of researchers for feedback prior to producing the documentary.
Source: handsforhealthandfreedom.org
I'm fine entertaining conspiracy theory because I fully believe some conspiracies are at play. But this image does not inspire confidence in objectivity. It's a minor tour de force in creating an unnecessary spectacle. It's the same problem that the Plandemic documentary suffered from, but magnified. And the last thing you want to do is give up whatever gem of truth might survive the gauntlet of examination because it came in the form of a non-rigorous examination declared as truth in a premature documentary.
Consistency and Facts
It gives me the willies to invoke Bing's murder as a spiritual connection to whether or not a speculative hypothesis is true. That's not because I dislike speculative hypotheses. We need to explore many of them to get closer to the truth, and we need to be friendlier to the people who do because a lot of difficult truths begin there. That's exactly why I spent time examining different aspects of the omicron hypotheses (which Igor Chudov took up writing about, including some information that was going in my future articles, and some information I did not yet know). Back to Bing: I dislike the dramatic reveal of the fortune cookie. If it's true, it's better saved for a later date—after the hypothesis has been properly put to the test—and after Bing's murder has been properly investigated (something that never took place). Leading with it on day 1 feels like using a death to draw in more audience emotionally. I could also come with the consequences of inhibiting the desire for one partisan audience to need an investigation to form a conclusion, and cause the other partisan "team" not to want the case followed to completion. That pushes beyond my boundaries of taste, and I worry that it sets the audience up for greater disappointment if and when the hypothesis turns out to be wrong or even partially wrong—either of which will result in attacks by the cudgel-wielding consumers of the Crusted News Notworks.
The use of snake venom is so common in pharmaceutical research, that we need to go substantially beyond that starting point to establish correlation. The research identifying the snake venom toxin homolog in the SARS-CoV-2 receptor binding domain (RBD) is real (Farsalinos et al, 2020). And if SARS-CoV-2 was genetically engineered (which I do believe fairly strongly), then it may very well be that such a toxin was in fact inserted into the SARS-CoV-2 genome (and thus the quasi-vaccines) to harm people. And yes, that research does note the interaction of that specific toxin with nicotinic acetylcholine receptors. But this is something that researchers, including many paying attention to the Engineered vs. Zoonosis/Other debate already knew. And yes, researchers like Dmitry Kats who talked about it were banned from social media.
I read the paper that Ardis talked about early during the substantive portion of the documentary pointing to the similarity between the SARS-CoV-2 and snake CoV genomes (Wei Ji et al, 2020). I feel like Ardis is leaving out some important aspects of this paper (emphasis mine):
Studies of relative synonymous codon usage (RSCU) bias between viruses and their hosts suggested that viruses tends to evolve codon usage bias that is comparable to their hosts.10, 11 Results from our analysis suggest that 2019-nCoV has most similar genetic information with bat coronovirus and has most similar codon usage bias with snake.
So, per nucleotide, the genetics are more similar with bat CoVs.
As we see, that similarity is particularly high for Clade A, derived from bats in Nanjing, China. And it's hard to look at this graph and not think "nature, nature, nature, NOT NATURE, nature…", which is to say that I do believe that SARS-CoV-2 was engineered from a CoV taken from nature, and most likely originally found in a bat.
What does it even mean that there is more similar codon usage bias with snakes?
Codon usage bias relates to the fact that each amino acid can be generated by different three-nucleotide sequences. I'll start by stealing from one of my own prior articles:
There is a lingo barrier to overcome here, so here is a basic genetics lesson:
Proteins are the building blocks of the body.
Amino acids are the building blocks of proteins.
A codon is a three-nucleotide sequence that corresponds to an amino acid.
Note: There are 4*4*4 = 64 codons, three of which are "stop codons" that signal for termination of a protein synthesis process. That's where the amino acid chain that makes up a protein ends. Each of the other 61 codons encodes for one of 20 possible amino acids. There are more codons than amino acids because an amino acid can be generated using more than one codon sequence. Most amino acids can be produced by 2 or 4 distinct codons.
Naively, you might think that any mutation would be disastrous with respect to the process of producing the right amino acid sequence to create a protein. However, the several codons that produce a particular amino acid are often similar enough that changing one (or even two) of the nucleotides results in a synonymous codon (one that encodes for the same exact amino acid). Other times, non-synonymous codon mutations that do change an amino acid still don't greatly affect the overall shape or function of the generated protein.
Since several distinct codon sequences can produce each amino acid, it makes sense to study whether one or another codon is more common in a genome, and then to examine the reasons why, and what that entails. For the record, my understanding of that area of genetics is merely basic. So, I have more questions than answers. But there could be something about the genetic engineering process that switches some codons, including tRNA availability (Yulong Wei et al, 2019) (consider the suggestion speculative). This might or might not involve the intentional insertion of snake venom peptides or proteins.
I had the chance to ask Ardis and his friend Dr. Tau Braun on a call where they were good enough to join in yesterday, but they spent the first 40 minutes largely just repeating the information in the documentary at rapid speed, so it was impossible to get into details, and I had to jump off the call by the time what felt like a manic episode took a pause (I had a prior engagement I was already late to).
I'll begin landing my plane here, for now, but I have too many priorities to think this will be worth me writing another article about. But you can expect that others will, and I suspect that will involve picking pieces apart as I currently do not have confidence in the ability of Ardis and Braun to interpret the research and formulate questions about what they do not yet understand. I wish I didn't have to say it that harshly, but Earthlings have already spent a few million hours on a story that feels poorly developed and maybe even manipulatively delivered. And if I lose a friend or two for saying so, so be it. That's my impression. But I would at least ask those people to go back and watch the documentary on 0.5x first.
I haven't had time to check. I feel like Ardis should have provided links. Until I see a more interesting story, I have higher priorities. But I'd like to know if somebody does check the list. At the very least, it gives me a list of potential antivenoms if I'm ever in a pinch.
Parsimony and Conspiracy Theory
I have a distaste for the casual dismissal of conspiracy theory. This is done by people who know full well that the world runs on conspiracies, and also the information impoverished individuals who don't know any better, but are willing to aim mean-spiritedness at those working at uncovering hidden truths. But there are N conspiracy theories for every 1 that is in a reasonable ballpark of truth. And for the most part, those in the ballpark of truth, as refined, pass tests of parsimony for at least a substantial portion of the honest experts diligently working on the task.
A conspiracy that requires many people around the world to introduce peptides into water supplies is delivered without evidence, as if the rest of the story requires for that piece to fit. A hypnotic documentary filled with partisan moments may have made it feel that way to some viewers, but I see no logical reason why that would be the case. The WPH strikes me as a purely naked assertion, and with no attempt to explain data patterns, of which there are many. A great many people would need to be involved, and to expect those people to successfully engineer SIRS-like Gompertz curves that we see in data all over the world is an extreme hurdle in the test of parsimony.
Why do we need a WPH at all when SARS-CoV-2 itself looks to carry a toxic spike protein that is also included in the quasi-vaccines? The lack of need doesn't make the WPH false, but makes it look like an extraordinary claim that needs something close to a smoking gun to take seriously.
How does that make me feel about my eerie feeling that every time I watch Ardis speak, my gut tells me he is well rehearsed?
I'll just let you chew on that thought on your own.
Addendum: Meryl Nass and James Lyons-Weiler weigh in. A common theme among many experts seems to be forming: the narrative is bunk, but yes we should pay attention to the RNA sequences (in both SARS-CoV-2 and the vaccines) for animo acid sequences that can form toxic peptides or proteins. That is already taking place. And nobody denies that we should not pay attention to the water we consume or the wastewater we produce. What we find there is important to our health, and may relate back to toxins, whether part of the pandemic or our health in general.
As unimportant as you may have felt your article was, Mr. Crawford, you actually did me a great service in reminding me that an ethical skeptic can believe SOME conspiracies without being obliged out of community loyalty to believe ALL conspiracies advanced by that same community, even one's that set off one's intellectual alarms for parsimony and utility.
We are all keeping weirder company than we used to. Thank you for a good reminder that it's okay for us to allow our intellectual integrity to override our tribal loyalty, even when we have a shared opponent that is collectively very evil.
Reminds me of the Bakersfield docs who got millions of views and shares. They were hopelessly bad at math and made us look stupid. They were self-interested and out of their depth but this seems more like a plant to discredit those they are claiming as associates (Kory, Marik, Cole, etc). False flag op.