Right now the Chinese are furiously working in their biolabs, as are a whole host of other nefarious nations, such as North Korea and likely Iran.

What are they working on?

Threlkeld added, Williams also had been vaccinated for COVID about a month ago and that testing found the two types of antibodies in his system - one type of antibody that results from a natural COVID infection, and a second type of antibody from the vaccine. Threlkeld also said Williams tested negative for COVID-19 while in the hospital. 

From The Hunt For Red October:

YOU ARROGANT ASS YOU KILLED US!

Coronaviruses are notorious for ADE reactions, where antibody presence potentiates the infection instead of protecting against it.  Using that as a bioweapon is stupid because you will score "own goals" on your own people and there is no way to control that.  As a result biological weapons generally are dumb; poison gas and such don't have this risk since it does not propagate but any disease does.

The poster child for ADE in coronaviruses was an attempted vaccine for a feline coronavirus that often made cats very sick.  The vaccine killed every one of them in the test when they were later exposed, wildly potentiating the infection.

Read that again folks: NOT ONE VACCINATED CAT SURVIVED A CHALLENGE WITH THE ACTUAL VIRUS.

Ordinary vaccines we have lots of experience with, such as measles, the flu shot, mumps and similar do not carry a risk beyond that of natural infection and cannot be weaponized because they produce the exact same antibody response as a natural infection.  If you have had either the measles or the shot you will have antibodies but an antibody test will not tell you which since they're not distinguishable.

I suspected from the start that due to the way these mRNA shots work -- they are not actually a vaccine at all in that they do not "mimic" natural infection but rather cause your cells to produce the spike protein that the virus has and that elicits an immune response -- that the antibodies produced by those jabs would be distinct and distinguishable from natural infection.

All of the so-called "experts" who worked to develop these and the firms involved knew damn well this was the case when they started developing them -- and did it anyway.

Now we have hard, scientific confirmation of that and it's very bad.

In fact it's potentially nation-ending bad.

An adversary that develops a virus (e.g. another modified/mutated bat virus, for example) that selectively targets ADE in people with the specific antibodies from vaccination, which are distinct from natural infection, could easily kill every single person who was vaccinated and not harm or only make mildly sick those who either had Covid-19 naturally or who were uninfected and unvaccinated.

The nightmare scenario that has always driven bioweapons research is the push to discover some genetically distinct means of targeting a bioweapon such that it only kills your adversary and leaves everyone else alone.  It's even worse for your adversary if your side gets and transmits it but doesn't get sick.  This has never been found despite diligent effort in the past; all attempts to find such a distinct vulnerability have failed, showing reactivity across the board and thus strongly suggesting that if that "thing" was completed and got out it would kill indiscriminately.  That you cannot stop a virus from circulating (even isolated islands eventually got hit by the 1918 pandemic flu!) means that releasing a virus or bacteria that nobody on "your" side has been sensitized to yet doesn't help because when (not if) the sensitizing agent gets into your population all your people die too.

This has now, for the first time in human history, been changed by the idiotic actions of our governments and pharmaceutical companies in that we are now tagging people for death by the literal millions and they will die if an adversary is able to develop a virus that targets those specific antibodies. 

Of course, said adversary will not deploy the tagging via said shots in their population and thus their people will not be attacked and killed.  Since it takes an actual jab of a needle to be sensitized absent intentional action there is no risk to the adversary's population or troops.

I give the odds of an adversary (remember, we're talking nations here with nearly unlimited resources and plenty of smart people) figuring out how to selectively target Covid-19 vaccination antibodies at 50% or better within the next five years.

If they succeed every single person who took one of the vaccines that produces a distinguishable antibody titer dies.

You can bet your last nickel they're working on it right now.

What happens if they succeed and we forcibly vaccinated our children and anyone who wishes to have a "normal" life back?  The entire procreation-capable stock of people in the United States will die and so will America.

That risk is wildly beyond the boundaries of sanity to have ever been accepted and it was deliberately concealed from the people -- not just here, but throughout the Western World.

It's clearly not enough for certain ghouls to have destroyed a full year of most school-age children's education; now they propose to risk literally extinguishing all of their lives and thus the future generations they would be able to create down the road.

I pray I'm wrong.

Unfortunately I know that I'm not -- there are plenty of people, both terrorists and evil nation-states that would love to unleash something like this on those they hate, they will work on this problem and if they discover a way to exploit it they will do so.

The use of any "vaccine" that does not produce an identical antibody to natural infection must be halted immediately and never done again.  We cannot do anything for the people already stabbed but we can eliminate the incentive to develop such a weapon by not having any material percentage of the productive and young population able to be targeted.

The option to cancel the risk of self-destruction of our nation and many others will expire within weeks.

No, really?

About 1 in 3 Americans say they definitely or probably won’t get the COVID-19 vaccine, according to a new poll that some experts say is discouraging news if the U.S. hopes to achieve herd immunity and vanquish the outbreak.

I wonder why they're skeptical?

Maybe it's because those so-called "experts" are lying right then and there.

We must use vaccines to have "hope" of achieving herd immunity?

We already have herd immunity.

What does this look like?

Sure looks like herd immunity to me and it wasn't due to vaccines -- the peak occurred before any person had the shots and today we are just reaching the first people who have (1) had both shots and (2) waited the requisite 14 days for antibodies to build protection.

Yet the case rate is down by approximately 75% and hospitalization is down by more than half, with hospitalization peaking almost exactly two weeks later as expected.  Deaths are reported late (not back-dated to "date of") and will shortly start falling as well.

Let's go down the litany of lies, because if you expect people to believe the vaccines are "safe and effective" when pronounced by these very same experts then they must account and pay for their previous lies and the harm those lies have done.

• "15 days to slow the spread"; it is now nearly a year later and we have not released the alleged "mitigations" that were claimed would control the pandemic.  The original two weeks turned into six of a near-complete lockdown in most of the nation.
  
  
• "Asymptomatic transmission"; there is no science behind this.  Never once in the history of an epidemic has asymptomatic transmission been of any material consequence.  Oh, it happens, but very rarely.  A peer reviewed paper in NATURE failed to find one such documented case with Covid-19 across 10 million people.  Yet it is the entire premise of mass-actions including mask orders, lockdowns, mass-testing of those without any sign of disease, business and school closures.  There is zero hard science supporting that premise; it is entirely made up based on computer models.  In addition to there being no hard science behind it the premise is mathematically implausible due to viral replication being exponential.
  
  
• "Its all droplets"; Yes, it most-certainly was "droplets" between apartments in Hong Kong and China separated by ten floors with people who did not know each other, but who shared sinks and toilets on the same vertical drain line without P-traps.  The near-certainty that fecal transmission is part of the problem has been known since March of 2020 and deliberately ignored.  Further, that aerosol transmission was implicated in a meat-packing plant where they were able to sequence and trace the index case in Germany has also been ignored on purpose for the simple reason that if either is in play then none of the "NPI" interventions can possibly work.  Oh, golly gee, over time the data has proved that they don't work.
  
  
• "Masks work"; No they don't -- the data is clear.  But the previous lie is utterly essential to this one, so it was maintained.  Never mind that the entire premise of masks can't work for anything other than gross (and very visible) sized spittle.  We've known this for 40 years as hard science via random controlled trial and there are zero controlled trials that have found otherwise.  An attempt to do so during Covid-19 had its publication deliberately interfered with because it did not show that masks worked (the Danish trial) with multiple journals refusing to publish the study not due to claimed problems with the study but because they did not agree with the results; specifically, the confidence interval spread raised the possibility that masks might actually increase infections.  Again: There has never been a single random controlled trial that has shown statistical evidence that common cloth, paper or surgical masks interrupt transmission of viral disease and there are multiple such trials that show they're worthless or may actually be harmful.  Oh, don't just believe me on the last three points -- read here too.
  
  
• "Masks are better than vaccines"; Stated in sworn testimony by Dr. Redfield, the CDC's Director in September, with a plea for the people to wear them for 4, 6, or 8 weeks and the promise that if we did the pandemic would be under control.  Virtually the entire nation was in fact under such a mandate at the time and compliance in most areas was 90%+.  Less than one month after that statement was made the winter spike began reaching more than triple the case and hospitalization rate in virtually every state and locale irrespective of mandates.  Obviously that statement was false.  You now want people to believe that, given this recent and proximate false statement that anything else from the same organization about safety and effectiveness is true?
  
  
• "The vaccines underwent extensive testing and are known safe";  Oh really?  They were not tested in (1) pregnant women, (2) old, medically frail people and (3) those who previously had Covid-19; all three were excluded from the trials.  Also excluded from the trials were children under 18.  VARES says 453 people have died associated with one (or both) Covid-19 shots as of the end of January.  The same query for seasonal flu vaccines (all of the sub-types selectable) from August of last year to now returns 20 deaths associated with flu vaccines.  By the CDC's own data the Covid-19 vaccines are twenty times as likely to be associated with your death as the seasonal flu shot and that is with incomplete administration for Covid; this year's flu shot round has all been administered by now.  Adjusting for a roughly 30% prevalence of flu vaccination, which is a decent guess, it appears the Covid-19 vaccines are somewhere between one hundred and two hundred times as likely to kill you as is the flu shot.  The varicella (Chicken Pox) vaccine over its entire period of administration has recorded only 161 associated deaths over nearly 30 years of use with just ONE death in 2020.   Does this, on a comparative basis, sound "safe" to you?  Further, the CDC refuses to commit to these vaccines producing sterilizing immunity because they did not require it to grant the EUA at the FDA which is why they refuse to tell you that you can discard the masks and distancing after being vaccinated.  Vaccines that do not produce sterilizing immunity are dangerous to the population as a whole even if they provide personal benefit.  In short it is entirely possible we are jabbing people with something dangerous to others and we are deliberately giving those jabs without knowing if this is true.
  
  
• "Vaccines have a long and successful safety record"; True in the general case and irrelevant to this specific case.  The commonly used vaccines all have decades-long safety records and were fully tested in a process that typically takes at least five years -- and often more than ten years.  The Chicken Pox (varicella) vaccine took nearly 20 years to be certified. Further, vaccines that use whole killed or attenuated virus are well-understood and produce the same immune response as an actual infection does, minus the nasty infection consequences because they are the same thing.  This path was not used to produce vaccines for Covid-19 because coronaviruses have repeatedly proved to be unable to be safely vaccinated against via this path and in animal trials have killed the animals that received the shots when later infected by the same agent, likely due to natural mutations that potentiate ADE.  We do not know if the approach taken with these shots is safe over the intermediate and longer term because we were in a big hurry to get them out there rather than fully test them and thus did neither the animal trials nor did we take the several years it takes to find out in small test populations in humans.
  
  
• "There are no safe and effective treatments"; This is flat-out false.  Both HCQ and Ivermectin (in particular the latter) are known safe having been used for decades in humans.  Both are also effective although once again Ivermectin appears to be wildly superior.  Then there's budesonide, which a Texas doctor claimed to have near-100% results with and also wasn't looked at because once again -- it's cheap and now has a study out in peer review that showed it was 90% effective.  These have been intentionally not trialed over the previous year by public health authorities and the state of both being safe has been lied about repeatedly by physicians and health officials because the EUA process for vaccines or any other drug requires that there be no safe and effective alternative.  In other words hundreds of thousands of people in the US were intentionally denied safe and likely effective treatments so as to make possible the accelerated rollout of these vaccines and roughly 300,000 of the 400,000+ dead expired as a result of intentionally-withheld treatments with decades-long safety records that might have prevented said deaths.  You now want to tell people after killing close to half a million in the US that your "alternative" is safe and effective and expect to be believed?
  
  
• "The death reports are honest and the vaccines will stop it"; Oh really?  The CDC illegally changed the means of recording death causes in March of 2020 after using the previous methodology for decades including across multiple epidemics and pandemics.  As a government agency the OMB, PRA and APA legal requirements all apply to the CDC; all require written justification and a comment period.  These very requirements are why many of Trump's E/Os and unilateral changes were struck down in court; it was not that he did not have the authority but that irrespective of an E/O no agency can sidestep those requirements in implementing the changes.  The same is true here yet the CDC deliberately tampered with death certificate reporting without going through that procedure and by doing so made disentangling their change impossible as you cannot compare the two methodologies.  Are all 400,000+ of these deaths actually from Covid19?  We know that claim is false since there are over 14,000 deaths by suicide, poisoning and accident claimed in their own data set to be "caused" by Covid!  How many more are not really caused by Covid19?  We do not know; the CDC deliberately destroyed the very basis of public health reporting by changing the rules just for this specific condition.  The Florida House of Representatives investigated this set of circumstances and found that a huge percentage of alleged "Covid" deaths were not factually classifiable as being caused by Covid-19.  While is is clear that there was more death in 2020 what is not clear nor separable as a direct consequence of these reporting changes is how much of it was actually from Covid-19 and how much of it was caused by government mandates in the form of suicides, drug overdoses, deferred medical care and similar.

How much more do you need?

Were I at specific risk might I find that the vaccines, despite the lack of testing, intermediate and long-term data and the fact that they are using an approach never before attempted in humans to evade a known risk with coronavirus vaccines that might kill me, to be worth it for myself in an individual capacity? 

Perhaps.

But for people without specific morbidity factors there is no way you can justify the shot on a comparative risk basis.  VARES says 453 people are dead associated with these shots as of the end of January.  The CDC claims that roughly 13 million Americans have received at least one dose as of the end of January.  That's a death rate of 0.00003, or statistically identical to the risk of dying from Covid-19 if you do not have any of the listed specific co-morbidities.  Note that while VARES reporting does not prove that shot is the cause of the result neither does being called a Covid-19 death prove that Covid was the cause of the result either by the CDC's own admission in their own data.

May I note again for those of you who can't be bothered to read that Chicken Pox, which in children has a death risk approximately equal to Covid-19, that is, roughly 4/100,000 (Covid-19 is about 3/100,000), has a vaccine that took roughly 20 years to be certified.  Over the last roughly 30 years of use the varicella vaccine has recorded a total of 161 associated deaths in VARES with just ONE DEATH in all of 2020.  Yet in less than two months for a disease with the same risk profile in healthy individuals the Covid-19 vaccines have recorded a stunning 453 associated deaths which is NEARLY THREE THOUSAND TIMES GREATER RISK OF DEATH ASSOCIATED WITH THE COVID 19 VACCINES THAN THAT FOR THE VARICELLA SHOT OVER A COMPARABLE PERIOD OF TIME.

The pharmaceutical industry would never be able to get a vaccine for any other condition through "full approval" in non-morbid individuals if the risk of dying from the vaccine was equivalent to the risk of dying if you got the infection.  If the Chicken Pox vaccines killed 3,000 kids a year there would be an uproar and the CDC would have been sacked and the earth on which it stood salted with diesel fuel years ago.  Yet that is exactly what the data from the CDC's own databases show for these Covid vaccines if you do not have any of the specific known morbid factors.

It is abundantly clear that these shots are not approvable for other than at-risk population segments on the basis of the CDC's own data known and published alone and in addition are several thousand times as dangerous as the shot for Chicken Pox and roughly 100 times as dangerous as a flu shot.  What's worse is that unlike the Chicken Pox shot these shots are presumed to be an annual thing so the risk is not taken once it is taken once per year.

Again note that this death rate for the disease itself is without widespread use of Ivermectin or HCQ in the United States.  With it the death rate may be materially lower.  Additionally Israel apparently has uncovered a compound that has no serious side effect risk in their trials and is 100% effective. They are proceeding to Phase III trials with this compound, and since it's not a vaccine mutations will not evade it unlike vaccines which will likely be evaded by natural viral mutation.  But what is clear thus far is that for people without any such co-morbidity the vaccinations are approximately equally dangerous as infection, if you the take the shot the risk is certain but infection is not certain and as a result the shot is more dangerous than the risk of exposure to the disease in persons without one or more of those comorbid factors.

Skepticism is, in other words, quite-clearly warranted on nothing more than the CDC's own data, and that ignores all of the previous lies told by government and other public-health agencies back to last March.

Vaccines that mimic infections have proved over time to be one of the medical discoveries that have saved countless lives, second only to perhaps antibiotics and surgical anesthesia.  But antibiotics can and often are misused, and their misuse leads to promotion of "super strains" of bacteria that can be extremely difficult -- and, on current trajectories, it is projected impossible in the future -- to control.

The common -- and safe -- vaccines given to people all work on the same basic principle: You take a virus, either attenuate it by modifying it so it cannot replicate well in a human cell (often by passing it through other animal cells) or kill it outright and then give it to the person or animal to be protected.  The recipient's immune system believes it is being attacked by the original disease and mounts an immune response.

But -- there is no, or only a very weak disease.

What you're left with is the same outcome you'd have from natural infection if you were to survive it in terms of immunity.  The immune "memory", in B and T cells, along with antibodies, looks identical -- or very close to identical -- as if you got the actual disease and suffered through it.

Qualifying these vaccines is primarily a process of making sure that they do not revert to their virulent form in the body, a risk that can happen with an attenuated vaccine product.  These vaccines produce "sterilizing" immunity in the recipient -- that is, you cannot get the infection again as your immune system will interdict the bug before replication can take place to any material degree, and thus if exposed later you will never have a material viral titer.  Without a viral titer you cannot shed anything and thus you also can't give the infection to someone else.

It is this key fact that makes most routine vaccines safe in terms of not potentiating mutations that all viruses undergo.  A vaccinated person who has "sterilizing immunity" cannot become part of a chain of replication for a mutated strain that is more-virulent because they are incapable of transmitting the virus to someone else.  The exception among the common vaccines used today in the US is polio; the injected form does not produce sterilizing immunity and this is only safe to do in the US because polio has not circulated in the US since the late 1970s.  When it was circulating we used a combination of both the shot and the oral attenuated vaccine for this very reason; the oral vaccine occasionally can and does produce polio but it also produces sterilizing immunity.  In parts of the world where polio still circulates the oral form is still used for this exact reason.

Coronaviruses, which infect not just humans but also domesticated and food-source animals, generally cannot be vaccinated against in this fashion; neither can HIV and a few other forms of viruses.  The reasons are different for each family of viruses where it does not work but all boil down to the virus' characteristics and mutation patterns, along with how your B cells respond.  With coronaviruses the problem is that attenuated viral vaccine attempts have repeatedly reverted to the virulent form in the body, usually after a couple of hundred passes through cells on average.  In addition these attempts in animals have repeatedly produced ADE instead of protection; in other words, instead of protecting the recipient they make a future infection worse, usually killing the infected animal (in particular this occurred with a candidate for a vaccine against a coronavirus that primarily infects cats.)

That has led to the various "novel" attempts at vaccines developed this time around for Covid-19.  This is not the first time we've tried this sort of thing, although it is the first time in humans.

Unfortunately the history of vaccines in the animal world with non-sterilizing immunity has taught us lessons that we apparently have set aside in our haste for a Covid-19 answer.  To understand the problem you must understand the natural progression of viruses generally.

It is to the advantage of a virus to spread widely, of course.  It's not that a virus has a mind, but rather that the more-widely it spreads without killing the host the more replicants of it there are.  It therefore "wins" genetically.  A virus that violently attacks a host and disables or kills the host before it is passed to another victim loses; a clearly-diseased human will be shunned by others, and one that is dead cannot interact with anyone else.  Thus by pure mathematics viruses as they mutate tend to favor less-virulent but more easily-transmitted mutations; those are more-successful in getting passed on to others before their more-virulent cousin manages to infect the same person and, as the population gains antibodies so long as the immunity has cross-reaction capacity those particular mutations are the ones most-likely to get passed on and the more-virulent ones are selected against.

A vaccine that mimics natural infection does not tamper with this process because from the virus' point of view a person vaccinated is someone already infected.  There is no difference in regard to how the virus behaves when it encounters someone who was either previously sick or vaccinated with such a formulation.

This is not true for vaccines that do not produce sterilizing immunity or worse, do not mimic natural infections at all.

Specifically it is very possible for such a vaccine to actually make it more-likely that a deadlier form of the virus will survive and in fact thrive!  If the vaccine prevents you from getting seriously ill or dying but not from developing a viral titer and being able to pass the infection to others then it erases the natural disadvantage that mutations making a virus more deadly would otherwise have.

That raises the risk of stopping or even reversing the natural mutation processes by which easily-communicable viruses decrease in their capacity to kill people.

Take SARS.  SARS died out quite quickly because you were not able to effectively transmit it until you were quite ill to the point that anyone who saw you would have good cause to think you were sick and it killed a large percentage of those infected.  Thus it very frequently failed to find a new host; general human revulsion to people who are violently ill, once word got out that "it might be SARS" kept a person afflicted from effectively giving it to others, and as a result the virus killed itself off by failing to propagate in a very short period of time.

Now consider a vaccine that makes SARS a low-level cold nuisance or a "silent" infection but does not produce sterilizing immunity.  A widely-vaccinated population would spread SARS like wildfire through the world and anyone unable to be vaccinated, who had their immunity wear off or who was not vaccinated would get it and DIE.

Such a vaccine would take the few thousand deaths from SARS and turn it into tens of millions or even hundreds of millions of deaths, selecting with vicious efficiency for extermination the elderly who poorly responded to a vaccine or were unable to take it due to serious illness where the vaccine might kill them outright, those with cancer, people with autoimmune diseases who could not be vaccinated, those who couldn't afford vaccination and those who either decided not to take the shot or who's immunity wore off.

Is this a realistic risk from the Covid-19 vaccines?

YES, and if it happens there will be exactly nothing we can do about it.

Remember that the CDC and other "authorities" are telling you point-blank that they do not believe these vaccines produce sterilizing immunity.  That is, you cannot take off your mask, stop distancing and resume your normal life after being vaccinated.  Why not?  There is only one reasonable explanation: They do not believe the vaccines prevent you from being infected and producing a titer of virus sufficient to infect others -- the vaccines only decrease the rate of severe disease and death.

Such "vaccines" must NEVER be given on a widespread basis to the public when a particular virus is circulating in the population as doing so risks a catastrophic mutation cascade that will kill tens or even hundreds of millions of people.  While numerically the risk of this occurring is likely quite small the consequence if it does happen is catastrophic and thus that course of action should never be undertaken.  A vaccine that behaves this way is simply never safe in the general population; the only rational use is in very high-risk individuals who make up a too-small and non-concentrated portion of the population to form a disease chain vector for a more-virulent mutation.

Today Covid-19 is not a very virulent virus, despite all the screaming Karens.  If infects easily but only kills, statistically, those who are seriously morbid in the first place.  The primary factor is not age contrary to people's assertions -- the NYC Coroner data makes this crystal clear but the media and our so-called "experts" are knowingly lying even with nearly a year's worth of said data now under our belts.  Simply put if you are not severely-morbid the odds of Covid-19 killing you are about 3/100,000 irrespective of age if you get infected -- that is, 0.003%.  Or, if you prefer, 99.997% of the time you will survive.

The risk is not age-specific; you can literally count on your fingers the number of people over 75 who do not have one of the listed conditions that Covid-19 has killed in NYC.

This is a very mild disease in those who are not morbid -- in fact it is materially less dangerous than the flu which more-frequently kills young people with no particular morbidity.  That doesn't mean it can't kill someone without one or more known risk factors -- it most-certainly can and occasionally does, just as Chicken Pox did occasionally kill a child who got it.  But unless you have one of a particular list of morbid conditions you accept far more risk of death by using a passenger car, either as a driver or passenger, over a period of about six months.

Now if you do have one or more of those conditions you're at materially higher risk.

But even so -- perspective is important.  We have learned how to treat this disease and in many cases how to prevent it from transmitting from one person to another using prophylaxis, not vaccines.  If you are one of the people who is not going to get seriously hurt or killed from a public health perspective your infection is beneficial to the community as a whole.

The question of whether your vaccination is likewise beneficial is not known.  We cannot say that it is identically beneficial as an infection because these vaccines are not mimicking natural infections; they intentionally target only part of the viral structure because attenuated vaccines are known to be unsafe with coronaviruses in that they revert and wind up causing disease -- so to avoid that they intentionally didn't use the entire virus.  Instead they "engineered" an injection that causes your body to produce the spike (and only the spike) and then your immune system produces antibodies to that.

But -- this means we do not know if you can get infected and emit the virus toward others after being vaccinated.  We did not study it in the lab because challenge studies are generally not ethically permissible in humans, we did not do the animal trials and there has been insufficient data from infections and monitoring the population yet here we are jabbing people willy-nilly without knowing this critical fact.

These vaccines should have never been put into widespread use until and unless we knew if they produced sterilizing immunity as that should always be a gating requirement for widespread use of any vaccine.  By using them widely, if they do not produce sterilizing immunity, we take the very real risk of promulgating a much more-lethal strain of Covid-19 that would otherwise fail to find traction statistically and thus harm very few before it is outcompeted instead spreading it worldwide, and for those who have had their immunity wane, who cannot be vaccinated due to immune or medical compromise (e.g. anyone undergoing cancer treatment which damages the immune system) or otherwise that strain will result in a massive amount of mortality.

This is not conjecture folks -- it has happened in animal husbandry and has resulted in avian flu potentiation wildly beyond what used to be the case.  Avian flu strains used to kill a fair number of birds who contracted it but now, as a result of vaccines that do not present sterilizing immunity it is now nearly universally fatal among poultry.  If such is detected in a flock today the usual response is immediate culling of the entire population at that location because it is nearly-certain to be fatal to the infected birds anyway and if it gets out of that facility and into another one it will kill all the birds there too.

The nightmare scenario is one in which the virus mutates in this fashion and in the process evades the vaccines as well in which case you now have not a 3/100,000 risk of dying but a 1/100 or even 10/100 risk with no effective means to stop it at all.

The odds are relatively low that this will occur will but the path for it to happen has been deliberately opened up by distributing vaccines on a widespread basis, not just to those at the highest risk (e.g. nursing home patients) without first proving up that they do produce sterilizing immunity and refusing to approve those that do not.

This was and is stupid and if we lose the bet there will be literally nothing we can do about it other than suck it up and watch the worldwide population get nailed to whatever degree occurs.

Note -- this is a guest post thus the "Other Voices" category; the author(s) have asked to remain unattributed.   There have been no edits other than spacing and formatting necessary to post, and make sure the links to references display.

Many questions remain unanswered about the origin of SARS-CoV-2, and we are certainly not the only scientists that have them. There are likely benign convincing explanations to everything, but to date we have not seen them. 

Some will say: why does knowing the origin matter? It matters for several reasons. First of all, it will help us plan for the future. If this indeed was a virus that arose from close contact with wildlife and humans, this contact in the future will have to be managed. Secondly, if in the unlikely event this was perhaps escape from a lab, then lab procedures will have to be evaluated, and lab experiments with infectious possibly pandemic viruses will have to be additionally regulated. Finally, if this again was an unlikely escape from a lab, then knowing the exact type of virus we are dealing with would help us manage the current pandemic.

The story starts, we believe, with a noble goal: to prevent the world from ever having the type of pandemic we are currently experiencing, through production of a vaccine effective against all coronaviruses past and future.

Coronavirus vaccines can be difficult to make. In animals, while vaccines are sometimes successful, toxicity of the vaccine as well as incomplete immunity can happen. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7284272/ .

SARS-CoV-2 (COVID19) is a lot like SARS-CoV (SARS). SARS initially hit China and East Asia in 2003, killed 774 people, infected over 8000, and scared everyone. For the past 17 years there has been an enormous effort worldwide to develop a vaccine not only against SARS but also against all coronavirus strains. As we have detailed in another post, scientists knew in 2006 that recombinant spike protein RBD vaccines to SARS didn’t protect all animals from a re-challenge from a slightly different mutated coronavirus ( https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7124095/pdf/978-0-387-33012-9_Chapter_101.pdf ). Young animals can gain immunity, but it can be harder to get protective immunity in older animals ( https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17194199/ ). 

Killed whole coronavirus vaccines in animal models of SARS infection demonstrated that in some animals such as ferrets, killed whole virus vaccines gave a predominant Th2 response (you want Th1) and that there was an antibody dependent enhancement (ADE) of lung toxicity in mice ( https://jvi.asm.org/content/85/23/12201 ). This led to the idea of a live attenuated coronavirus vaccine ( https://www.nature.com/articles/nrmicro3143 ) ( https://www.nature.com/articles/nm.2972 ) ( https://www.nature.com/articles/nbt.1635 ), which is a vaccine that infects and reproduces in a human, results in immunity, but does not cause severe disease.

This has been an important issue since the SARS pandemic in 2003 and was reinforced by MERS epidemic in 2012. Enormous amounts of resources and human effort have been thrown at this problem, and these resources have come from just about everyone: governments, industry, NGOs, and philanthropy. 

Various live virus attenuated recombinant vaccines have two issues among many. First, these vaccines have to be able to be grown in culture in great quantity for testing and for mass production. Second, the vaccines can mutate and revert back to severe pathogenicity once administered, especially in those with weaker innate immune systems. These dual problems have confronted vaccine developers. 

To make a recombinant attenuated live coronavirus vaccine that you can grow in culture, it should be pretty obvious that (a) you have to have it gain function to make it more viable in culture; and (b) while at the same time make it less pathogenic and less able to recombine. These are somewhat contradictory goals and can be hard to do.

Live attenuated vaccines can be hard to make without them mutating a lot in culture in ways you do not expect, not being able to grow them in culture to make lots of virus to work with, and without them reverting back to a dangerous live virus once someone (animal or human) is vaccinated, as happened in 1998 with a live attenuated poliovirus vaccination on the island of Hispaniola (Haiti and the Dominican Republic) ( https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11896235/ ).

Virologists have been making recombinant man-made coronaviruses to try to find one that is safe and will work as an attenuated vaccine for over 15 years. To do this they use “reverse genetic systems” to make the virus they want in bacteria or yeast ( https://www.pnas.org/content/100/22/12995 )( https://www.pnas.org/content/110/40/16157 ). In these reverse genetic systems, to make man-made viruses with specific functions, mutations are inserted into the DNA copies of the virus. Bacteria or yeast make lots of these DNA copies, which are added mammalian cells in culture to provide live RNA viruses in the fluid surrounding them. These fluids containing the man-made viruses can then be used to infect animals or people ( https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19036930/ ). The goals of these experiments were likely twofold: (1) to find out how viruses like SARS can jump from bats to humans, to develop countermeasures; and (2) to develop universal vaccines to protect the world in the case of a coronavirus pandemic.

Scientists have used several man-made strategies to make viruses weaker to use as possible coronavirus vaccines. These strategies included increasing the number of attenuating mutations in the virus through alteration of a necessary viral RNA proofreading enzyme called ExoN ( https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3518599/ ), but these types of viruses were found to revert to a more aggressive phenotype with long term culture of 250 passages ( https://mbio.asm.org/content/8/6/e01503-17.abstract ). Viruses also were mutated to not recombine with each other (possibly increasing virulence through recombination) by changing a viral RNA “leader” sequence (ACGAAC to UGGUCGC) possibly responsible for this recombination ( https://www.nature.com/articles/s42003-018-0175-7 ).  Additionally, there has been consideration to mutate viruses in a way, called “codon de-optimization” in which the RNA of the virus is changed to make the same viral proteins, but make them slower, and thus have slower virus growth ( https://jvi.asm.org/content/89/7/3523 ). This has been done for multiple viruses including influenza ( https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20543832/ ). 

As noted above, a major issue with experiments like these is that to fully examine the ways viruses jump from bats to people, and to fully develop man-made recombinant vaccines sometimes viruses are unexpectedly made that have the potential to become much more transmissible in animals and possibly in humans. These are called “gain-of-function” experiments. This appeared to happen in at least one experiment in mice published in 2015 ( https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26552008/ ). The danger of these experiments needs to be carefully weighed against the possible costs, since leaks from laboratories of viruses are not uncommon ( https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC416634/ ), and if a gain of function strain were to escape, we could have a pandemic similar to the one we are currently experiencing.

The US scientific community held a symposium in 2014, which led to the banning of funding of these “gain of function” experiments https://mbio.asm.org/content/5/6/e02366-14 . This ban was rescinded in 2016 https://osp.od.nih.gov/biotechnology/gain-of-function-research/ . Minutes of the meetings of the advisory body (the National Scientific Advisory Board for Biosecurity, or NSABB) to help the NIH and Secretary of Health (at the time, Sylvia Burwell) to decide to rescind the ban were heated ( https://osp.od.nih.gov/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/NSABB_January_2016_Meeting_Minutes.pdf ). The NSABB members asked for multiple safety “guardrails” for this research to proceed.

In 2013, six miners in Yunnan Province, 550 miles south of Wuhan, were cleaning out a copper mine of bat droppings. They all developed a severe pneumonia with symptoms very similar to SARS-CoV-2 pneumonia, and three died. During the workup of these miners it was determined that several of the miners developed antibodies to a SARS-like coronavirus ( https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/6981198-Analysis-of-Six-Patients-With-Unknown-Viruses.html ).

The WIV (Wuhan Institute of Virology) became involved, and in 2013-2014 isolated viruses from fecal swabs of 276 bats in the cave and found novel SARS-like coronaviruses in 138 of them. These samples were brought to Wuhan for further study. Manuscripts describing these viruses were published in 2016, but for some reason the publication left out the deaths of the miners from the cave ( https://www.pnas.org/content/100/22/12995 ) ( https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7090819/ ).

Investigators then determined that about 9% of residents of villages around the Yunnan cave had developed antibodies to a SARS-like coronavirus, yet none of them appeared to have severe symptoms. All of these villagers described bats flying around, and none of them visited the cities where SARS was endemic in 2003, so they likely developed an asymptomatic infection ( https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6178078/ ). 

This experiment of nature likely became a matter of intense interest. How could these humans around the cave be exposed to bats carrying a supposedly lethal SARS-like coronavirus yet have no or minimal symptoms? The implications of the answers to this question were obvious: (a) bat to human transmission could be probed in depth, and (b) a live attenuated vaccine to coronavirus could be developed by mimicking the natural process that led to an attenuated virus that caused antibody production to a SARS-like coronavirus without symptoms.

It is entirely possible that investigators at the WIV could have been performing such experiments in coronavirus gain-of-function manipulation, trying to obtain a live attenuated virus for an attenuated vaccine, based on coronaviruses isolated from Yunnan province or elsewhere, when there was a laboratory accident/leak of virus sometime in the fall of 2019.

Prominent virologists argued in a letter to Nature Medicine in early March ( https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0820-9 ) that lab escape, while not being entirely ruled out, was unlikely. Yet there are a number of unusual features of SARS-CoV-2, as well as some unusual scientific behavior of Chinese and US investigators, that requires explanation. Hopefully there are simple and trivial explanations, and that SARS-CoV-2 can be explained as a natural experiment that mimicked very closely a series of laboratory experiments performed in the exact place (Wuhan) where the virus was initially found in humans.

These questions point to a manipulated virus, which may have escaped from a WIV lab. These questions can be answered by an independent audit of the WIV P4 laboratories where the novel coronaviruses were being studied, which would have been one of the first steps international authorities usually take. Such an independent audit has not taken place, which is highly unusual scientific behavior.

Hopefully there are simple and trivial explanations, and that SARS-CoV-2 can be explained as a natural experiment that mimicked very closely a series of experiments performed in the exact place (Wuhan) where the virus was initially found in humans.

These questions, in no particular order, are as follows:

• Why didn’t the investigators mention the 2013 deaths of the miners from a likely novel coronavirus in their 2016 paper describing the sequence of novel Yunnan coronaviruses ( https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7090819/ )? This would have been a matter of intense interest worldwide.
  
  
• SARS-CoV-2, from its earliest isolates, appears to have optimal spike protein binding to ACE2, with very few new receptor binding domain (RBD) mutations in SARS-CoV-2 ( https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.03.074567v2 ). Usually viruses like coronavirus adapt their spike protein over time to bind human ACE2 more tightly. Can this be explained naturally?
  
  
• A pangolin coronavirus isolated in 2019 under study at the WIV and elsewhere appears to have an RBD of its spike protein is very close to SARS-CoV-2 (97.4% amino acid homology) where the rest of this pangolin coronavirus has less homology (85-92%) ( https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2169-0 ). RaTG13 has a lot less homology in the RBD with SARS-CoV-2, yet is more than 96% identical to SARS-CoV-2 over the entire virus ( https://www.cell.com/cell/pdf/S0092-8674(20)30262-2.pdf ). Recombination to make SARS-CoV-2 from an ancestor of these two viruses would be an extremely rare one-time event. Is there a natural explanation for this?
  
  
• In 2018, experiments with a novel recombinant SARS coronavirus substituted the typical TRS transcription leader and body sequences with a novel sequence (UGGUCGC) in an attempt to further reduce recombination in animal models as a live vaccine candidate ( https://www.nature.com/articles/s42003-018-0175-7#Sec7 ). This TRS leader sequence, supposedly novel, is found starting at nucleotide 1465 in SARS-CoV-2 and could result, if utilized, in a novel viral RNA transcript that deletes part of the nsp2 protein of the ORF 1ab polyprotein. It is also found at nucleotide 1446 in RaTG13, one of the viruses found in the Yunnan cave in 2013, which has been proposed as a precursor to SARS-CoV-2. It is found in that area in no other coronavirus. This novel TRS sequence is also found in the 3’ ends of viral spike RNA transcripts of SARS-CoV. Why was this not mentioned in the 2018 paper describing the novel TRS sequence recombinant viruses? Is there an explanation for this? 
  
  
• A recombinant SARS-like coronavirus (SHC015-MA15) containing a human SARS Urbani spike protein sequence inserted into a mouse adapted SARS-like coronavirus was found to develop increased pathogenicity during infection of aged but not young mice compared to the parent MA15 strain in a 2015 publication ( https://www.nature.com/articles/nm.3985 ). The RNA sequence of this recombinant manipulated coronavirus was not deposited in Genbank until May 2020, five years later ( https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0924-2 ). This is highly unusual behavior. Is there an explanation for this?
  
  
• In the publication of SHC015-MA15 above in November 2015, the attribution of funding of Shi Zheng Li by the US NIAID was initially left out ( https://www.nature.com/articles/nm0416-446d ).  It was reinstated in the publication in 2016 in a corrigendum, perhaps after the meeting in January 2016 to possibly reinstate NIH funding for gain of function virus research. This is also unusual scientific behavior. Is there an explanation for this?
  
  
• After amino acid 604 of the spike protein of RaTG13, there is no difference between the spike of RaTG13 and SARS-CoV-2, yet other coronaviruses have multiple differences in this area ( https://www.cell.com/cell/pdf/S0092-8674(20)30262-2.pdf ).  The only difference between these two viruses is in the PRRA furin cleavage site, and there are novel nucleotide changes apparently inserted into SARS-CoV-2 that allow insertion of this furin cleavage site into RaTG13 ( https://medium.com/@yurideigin/lab-made-cov2-genealogy-through-the-lens-of-gain-of-function-research-f96dd7413748 ).  Is there a natural explanation for this?

There are quite possibly very simple and very benign explanations for all of these questions as well as others. They likely can be answered by a simple independent audit of the WIV P4 laboratories where the novel coronaviruses were being studied. This is one of the first steps international authorities usually take. Such an independent audit has not taken place, which is highly unusual scientific behavior.

The origin of the virus is extremely important in helping us determine what is going to happen going forward in the pandemic, as well as to suggest what possible therapies could have activity. 

It is therefore critical that we determine a precisely as we can the origin of the virus.

We are not the only scientists considering this.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/bies.202000091 

We do not want in any way to cast aspersions on individual scientists or countries. All we want to do, as we have done from the beginning, is ask questions of the data.  We hope that there is international cooperation to put this issue to rest, hopefully with a benign conclusion. We also hope there is again widespread honest discussion about the risks and the benefits of gain of function viral research.

I truly don't know how much more-clear I can make it than this.  I understand people don't read any more, and they certainly don't do their own research.  Damn near all I do is read when someone tells me something is true; I never take it at face value, especially when, if I'm wrong, I might be dead.  I don't care how many letters you have after your name; with 40 years of writing code for money under my belt I've known far too many PhDs who's degree had its best and highest use as birdcage liner.

Eight minutes is all I ask folks.  All the government's data, not mine. A Medical School's (full of doctors, of course) protocol, not mine.  Two dozen medical studies including ten random controlled trials, the gold standard of medicine with 100% positive results.

Do this and the entire Covid mess is literally over in one week.

No bullshit.

Get your jackets, your posterboard, your big Sharpie Markers and picket the Hospital, picket the local doctor's office, picket their house, picket every damned politician you can find and light up their phones to the point that their voicemail is clogged and useless.  Make every one of their lives insufferable just as they've made yours while they ghoulishly watched your loved ones die, clutching their pearls and clucking at you.  The willful and intentional refusal to do basic elementary school math has killed over 150,000 Americans quite possibly including your grandmother.  Why the hell are you not only letting them get away with it but willing to stand in line and take a not-fully-tested shot when a $2 alternative that does the same thing and has been proved safe over more than 30 years of time is available, and it also has a remarkable record of preventing serious disease and death.   This has been known for months.

We can stop Covid-19 in ONE WEEK.

One.  Not five, six, eight or ten as promised by Dr. Redfield with his "masks" who, I remind you, lied.  Covid-19 did not stop even though he got what he wanted.

The science and the CDC's own data says this will work in ONE WEEK.

And the risk if it doesn't work as the science and math says it will?

STATISTICALLY NONE; the drug in question has had over 3.5 billion doses dispensed worldwide and, on the data, is safer than Tylenol and the number of pills you must take is two.

Not two per day.

Two.