Category: Gain of Function

Defeat of the narrative

Gain of Function Safe and Effective 59 Comments

Gee, I wonder if there was a scientist out there who had predicted exactly how and why Covid is behaving in such an out of the ordinary manner as we see today? Could his name be Geert Vanden Bossche?

Two and a half years in, the world is discovering SARS-CoV-2 isn’t behaving with neat, predictable, winter-bound waves like the flu, but with multiple rollers that are coming faster, each new wave starting before the last one hasn’t quite finished with us. Instead of a lull period, peaks are occurring within months of each other.

 

A nation of glitches

Gain of Function Let Them Eat Taser 10 Comments

Well, hey, I guess its worth it if it keeps us all safe, right?

Crouch is quadruple vaccinated, has not tested positive for COVID-19 and is showing no symptoms. The border guard who waved him back into Canada last week said nothing about getting a COVID test, or quarantine, but when he got home he found an email and a notification in his ArriveCan app, telling him to stay home for two weeks.

“It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy when Minister Mendicino says ArriveCan will reduce border delays. But it will not be due to technology, it will be due to reduced volume.”

One Flu Out Of The Wuhan Nest

Gain of Function Let Them Eat Taser 5 Comments

NIH Records Reveal FBI Inquiry of Wuhan Grant

Judicial Watch announced today that it received 1651 pages of records from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) revealing an FBI “inquiry” into the NIH’s controversial bat coronavirus grant tied to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The records also show National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) officials were concerned about “gain-of-function” research in China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology in 2016. The Fauci agency was also concerned about EcoHealth Alliance’s lack of compliance with reporting rules and use of gain-of-function research in the NIH-funded research involving bat coronaviruses in Wuhan, China.

It doesn’t feel like much of a story anymore. I get the sense that governments, media and academia have quietly accepted that Covid-19 was a lab leak, and they’re going to let that messy little factoid fade into the background undisturbed and unaddressed, as though nothing about it was extraordinary.

And after a time, we’ll be told by experts that test tube pandemics are just a small price to pay so that governments can keep us Safe® from the more deadly natural pandemics, and that only dangerous extremists and science deniers would even raise the question of accountability.

The forever vaccine

Gain of Function It's Probably Nothing 71 Comments

It’s becoming increasingly clear that the mainstream pandemic narrative is collapsing into a heap of naked contradictions and frantic back-pedalling.

Canada now needs to decide whether the goal of its strategy with current generation vaccines is to protect against severe COVID or to try to prevent transmission altogether, Gommerman says, until a new vaccine or variant changes the game.

“If your goal is to prevent infection, we’re just gonna have to keep boosting forever,” Gommeman said.

“Omicron has evolved and it’s so much different than our vaccines and infections prior to Omicron — the type of immunity that you got is just a different beast,” said Sarah Otto, an expert in modelling and evolutionary biology at the University of British Columbia.

“And so what we’re seeing with vaccine protection is that it’s not so much the number of doses as it is how recent your last dose has been, and I think that’s because the neutralizing antibodies in our bloodstream, they’re not recognizing the virus as well.”

Intriguing to note that not one of these experts recalls Geert Vanden Bossche predicting exactly this….two years ago.

98% Effective

Gain of Function Safe and Effective 58 Comments

Word among Israelis on Twitter has it that mask mandates are going to be re-imposed tomorrow. The banging of heads against the wall resumes. Didn’t some guy named Geert Vanden Bossche predict this? Odd how the left-wing corporate media never mentions him.

Some 10,200 new COVID-19 cases were recorded across Israel on Sunday, the highest number of new daily cases seen in Israel since early in April.

Of some 26,200 authorized PCR and antigen tests taken throughout Sunday, 38.95% returned a positive result. The R-rate currently stands at 1.32, a slight increase from the previous day

Happy travels?

Gain of Function Great Healing Forward 21 Comments

Now that some airlines are beginning to push back on the vaccine mandates for air travel, it’s possible that the restrictions might end next month. In the meantime, putting the economy through the blender remains official federal government policy. Almost no one in authority seems to care about the impact.

In April, the Greater Toronto Airports Authority said it held 2,204 planes from abroad on the tarmac, versus just eight in the same period pre-pandemic. In the second week of May, 18,000 arriving international passengers were held on board for longer than 30 minutes and 3,000 for longer than 75 minutes. The Canadian Airports Council said it is taking four times as long to process people as it did before the pandemic.

One Flu Out The Wuhan Nest

Claws of the Panda Gain of Function 6 Comments

And another, and another.

The Wuhan Institute of Virology is believed to have engaged in the risky form of research regarding bat coronaviruses, as now-deleted webpages reveal the lab manipulating bat coronaviruses to “replicate efficiently in primary human airway cells and achieve in vitro titers equivalent to epidemic strains of SARS-CoV.”

Now, the latest edition of the lab’s journal, Virologica Sinica, appears to contain a similar style of research with the H7N9 virus in chickens and mice. The publication’s Editor-in-Chief is Wuhan’s infamous “bat lady,” Shi Zhengli, who is the lab’s premier bat coronavirus researcher and a recipient of funds from Anthony Fauci through Peter Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance.

Virologica Sinica published the study “Combined Insertion of Basic and Non-basic Amino Acids at Hemagglutinin Cleavage Site of Highly Pathogenic H7N9 Virus Promotes Replication and Pathogenicity in Chickens and Mice” in its most recent edition, published February 2022.

Collateral damage

Gain of Function It's Probably Nothing 7 Comments

It’s always a shock when even the CBC publishes a piece where no attempt is made to sugarcoat bad news about the effects of the lockdowns and supply chain snarls. More people are waking up to the reality that the economy is not a VCR which can be seamlessly paused and restarted at will.

Over the years, the business occasionally struggled with slim profit margins, but it started seeing success when it started serving the hospitality industry a decade ago.

That work evaporated once the pandemic hit. While business started to rebound, DeFehr Furniture was hit by supply chain disruptions. There were shortages of the raw materials the company required, and the competition for those products was fierce.

In the last month, DeFehr shut down its plant for four days because it did not have handles.

Wuhan Poo

Gain of Function Wuhan Flu 18 Comments

Abstract:

SARS-CoV-2 has become one of the most studied viruses of the last century. It was assumed that the only possible host for these types of viruses was mammalian eukaryotic cells. Our recent studies show that microorganisms in the human gastrointestinal tract affect the severity of COVID-19 and for the first time provide indications that the virus might replicate in gut bacteria. In order to further support these findings, in the present work, cultures of bacteria from the human microbiome and SARS-CoV-2 were analyzed by electron and fluorescence microscopy. The images presented in this article, in association with the nitrogen (15 N) isotope-labeled culture medium experiment, suggest that SARS-CoV-2 could also infect bacteria in the gut microbiota, indicating that SARS-CoV-2 could act as a bacteriophage. Our results add new knowledge to the understanding of the mechanisms of SARS-CoV-2 infection and fill gaps in the study of the interactions between SARS-CoV-2 and non-mammalian cells. These findings could be useful in suggesting specific new pharmacological solutions to support the vaccination campaign.

Interesting findings.

Our previous work showed that people with COVID-19 had toxin-like peptides, which were almost identical to the toxic components of animal venoms, such as conotox, phospholipases A2, phosphodiesterases, zinc metal proteinases, and bradykinins, in both blood, feces, and urine [6]. In a later study, we observed spontaneous replication of SARS-CoV-2 in bacterial cultures from patient feces for up to 30 days and beyond [7,8]. For that matter, there have also been other researchers who have studied the relationship between the gut microbiota and COVID-19. Wang et al., 2021, for example, found significant alterations in the gut and respiratory microbiome in COVID-19 patients, finding that there was an increase in pathogenic bacteria and a decrease in beneficial ones [9].

[…]

Another very interesting finding emerged from a bioinformatics analysis that revealed that some members of commensal upper respiratory tract (URT) bacteria express proteins that bind the SARS-CoV-2 spike glycoprotein, for example the ACE2-like protein. Based on this analysis and available data showing a decline in the population of these bacteria in the elderly, it has also been proposed that some commensal bacteria of the upper respiratory tract prevent SARS-CoV-2 infectivity and that a decrease in these bacteria contributes to infection severity [11]. The same authors, in another study observed that N501Y mutations in the receptor-binding domain (RBD) of the SARS-CoV2 spike glycoprotein may allow increased binding to the ACE2 receptor when natural products (NPs) of upper respiratory tract bacteria are present [12].

One Flu Out Of The Wuhan Nest

Gain of Function 21 Comments

A comprehensive survey of bat sarbecoviruses across China for the origin tracing of SARS-CoV and SARS-CoV-2

[W]e collected 22 environmental samples from cold storages for animal products and 80 samples from environment around animal-selling stalls of WHM, once we had brief access to WHM in February, 2020. These samples included swabs taken from grounds, walls, sewers, door handles, chopping blocks, knives, and scissors, and were combined into 11 pools, M1 to M11, and subjected for CoV screening and virome analysis (Table 1, Figure 2A). Sequence analysis revealed that there are four animal CoVs present in M1, M6, and M9 pools, indicating that the techniques and methods used are feasible. The M1 pool contained the sequences of hedgehog HKU31-related CoV under the genus Merbecovirus and rabbit HKU14-related CoV under the genus Embecovirus; M6 contained the sequences of canine CoV under the genus Tegacovirus; M9 contained the sequences of rat CoV of the genus Embecovirus. However, none of any sequence of SARS-CoV-2 or SC2r-CoVs was found in any samples…

Or anywhere else.

Via Yuri Deigin

One Flu Out Of The Wuhan Nest

CreepyJoeBiden Gain of Function 6 Comments

Daily Mail;

America’s coronavirus tsar, Dr. Anthony Fauci, silenced any discussion about COVID being caused by a lab leak – and not through animal-to-human transmission – after helping a controversial scientist get millions in federal funding to study bats, a Vanity Fair investigation has revealed.

Analyzing more than 100,000 leaked documents, the magazine claimed that Fauci’s approval of Peter Daszak helped his nonprofit, EcoHealth Alliance, an organization dedicated to shielding society from emerging infectious diseases, to develop the COVID-19 virus in a laboratory in China.

They also claim researchers associated with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, including Daszak, tried to hide evidence about the pandemic’s early spread as lab leak hypotheses began to emerge.

[…]

Around that time, Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Dr. Robert Redfield allegedly urged Fauci to ‘vigorously investigate’ both hypotheses.

‘We had to take the lab-leak hypothesis with extreme seriousness,’ he told the magazine, adding: ‘I personally felt it wasn’t biologically plausible that [SARS CoV-2] went from bats to humans through an [intermediate] animal and became one of the most infectious viruses to humans.’

Redfield claims after suggesting support for research into both theories he was then excluded from further discussions about the virus’ origin.

‘Their goal was to have a single narrative,’ he said of Fauci and his team.

Fauci is guilty as hell.

One Flu Out Of The Wuhan Nest

Gain of Function 13 Comments

Let us not be distracted from the people responsible for the deaths of millions;

Questions for those on that famous 1st Feb 20 call, who then suddenly changed their mind about the possibility of SARS-CoV-2 being a lab construct:

1/ Did you know that SARS-CoV-2 cleavage site ( RRAR|SVAS) is only found in hENaC, which was characterised precisely at UNC?

2/ Did you know of the DEFUSE work-plan?

T01-Task 3: Create a chimera
For this use a promising low prevalence pathogenic spike and a more prevalent lower-risk backbone.

RaTG13 would be at the exact top of the list as it was known to have very likely killed 3 people in 2012.

3/ Did Peter Daszak tell you at the time about the Mojiang story and RaTG13, which would have clued you to the fact that RaTG13 would have been the perfect candidate spike for this work?

Or did he like Shi at the time just forget to give any detail about the mine and the deaths?

Pour a coffee and get your reading glasses. It’s not as hard to understand as it first appears.

Hopeful signs…

Gain of Function Science 45 Comments

There’s no plausible reason not to act right this moment, but if Premier Moe follows through, this may be remembered as a signal victory against the pandemic restrictions.

“People are asking their government for a return to normal, a removal of public health restrictions,” he said.

“It is time for us as a government to do what Saskatchewan people are asking for.”

At present, all Saskatchewan residents must show proof that they have received two shots of the COVID-19 vaccine to enter restaurants, bars and other businesses. They also have the option to provide a negative COVID-19 test.

The current health order expires on Feb. 28. Moe said the vaccination policy will end sometime this month.

Boosters and Omicron

Gain of Function It's Probably Nothing Safe and Effective 16 Comments

More words of wisdom from virologist Geert Vanden Bossche regarding the efficacy of booster shots and the potential hazards of future mass vaccination for Omicron.

“[If we mass vaccinate for Omicron] we end up with a situation where the antibodies can still bind to that receptor binding site, but it has no effect because the virus no longer uses the previous receptor…it will use another domain….We end up with a virus that strongly binds antibodies but the antibodies cannot neutralize the virus…. and that is a recipe for Antibody Dependent Enhancement.”

Web page with all three interview segments can be found here.

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