Pertaining to GMOs and what we've learned about genetically engineering viruses.

Should the results of the genetically engineered virus give us concern about genetically modifying seeds/food?

The clear answer is yes, for the following reasons:

• Everyone involved lied about the SARS-CoV2 origins.  Ecohealth got caught lying quite early on when DRASTIC was exposed; DARPA turned down their requested program to engineer and test modified coronaviruses in Chinese caves, and among the slams in that refusal was the fact that the population of the nation in question were effectively not being asked for their consent.  That Ecohealth arrogated to itself the right to test a genetically-modified organism on someone else's soil without the informed consent of the people residing there was sufficient grounds to destroy the organization and jail every single person involved.  DARPA has no authority to do that, but our DOJ does and didn't.  The deception did not stop there; Fauci claimed that NIH wasn't actually funding said research when it was, and we now know he was lying.  He didn't go to jail for that either, did he?  That the virus was clearly engineered was known very early on because it contained a patented sequence and, in addition, had another sequence in it that never occurs in nature.  The latter is routinely used by virus labs for this exact reason; if you put a virus through some process (e.g. through a cell line) and that sequence comes out the other end you know what you did worked because it can't occur naturally.  That this was present in SARS-CoV2 was known within weeks of its alleged "arrival" in the US.
  
  
• Everyone involved lied about when Covid was first "out" in the population.  This was known too.  When it first arrived in Washington State and NY, along with the outbreak in Italy, we knew that the strain in NY was not the same as the one on the west coast; it was instead essentially the same as that in Italy.  We also knew at that point from the mutational rate it had to be in the wild no later than roughly the end of September of 2019.  I posted on this at the time and we later proved this was correct because analysis of blood donated during the first week of December of 2019 detected antibodies specific to SARS-CoV2 which, at the time (there were no jabs of course) could have only occurred if the person who donated the blood had become previously infected and survived.

There were plenty of additional lies but those are enough.

GMOs are typically engineered so as to provide resistance to herbicides.  Round-up ready seeds, for example, are GMO'd so the plants are not killed by glyphosate where a non-GMO plant is.  This allows glyphosate ("RoundUp") to be used as a pre-emergent and post-emergent weed killer in fields without destroying the crop, and that in turn increases crop yields.

However this also means that the seeds then are patented and, because a farmer cannot completely control exactly where everything he puts on a crop ends up it effectively forces all the other farmers around him to buy the same Round-up resistant seeds or risk their crop's damage or destruction from drift of the spray.  I will note that 15 USC Chapter 1 states that it is a criminal felony to attempt to restrain trade or engage in a monopoly practice where market power is implicated.  Effectively forcing the next farmer over to buy your GMO seeds lest his crop be damaged or destroyed when the spraying occurs is pretty-much the description of such felonious conduct, yet it goes on every single day and not one person has gone to prison for it.

That right there is enough reason for me to be "concerned", but what adds to that concern is that there have been repeated claims that these herbicides in particular are "safe."  Are they?  We don't know.  The EPA says "no" to cancer risks in particular but on the other hand there are many lawsuits over exposure to it and non-Hodgkin's lymphoma and Bayer/Monsanto has entered into an $11 billion dollar settlement.  Clearly they were concerned they might lose; nobody tosses that sort of money around otherwise.

What is very clear is that the reason these GMOs are designed is to provide pesticide and herbicide resistance; that's the point of doing it.  The thuggery that inherently exists when you create a thing that is resistant to what which someone wants to use and they then do so in an uncontrolled environment, which is always the case when someone is growing a thing outdoors (as opposed to in a closed greenhouse where "side contamination" of other people's land is controllable) ought to be enough, in my view, to severely limit or even ban such actions unless the users are fully liable for the harm to anyone not using the product as a result.  We of course do not do this; there is a similar problem with dicamba, another herbicide that is a double-chlorine-containing compound that is quite-mobile after application and thus raises serious concerns in neighboring fields.  This in turn has led to a second round of the same problem: If the farmers near you are using these GMO'd seeds you have to or you're at risk of your crop being destroyed by the neighbor's application of the herbicide.

Thus there are two distinct risks, neither of which has been run to ground at a level sufficient for my comfort:

• At what residual level is there zero risk to humans from ingestion, and is bio-concentration (e.g. by animals we then eat) a potential issue?  Bio-concentration concerns are real in any compound containing two or more chlorines; this is fairly basic organic chemistry stuff.  That doesn't mean it is particularly going to be a problem with a given compound but the potential is there.  I'm unaware of anything dispositive, but the fact that at higher concentrations there is a carcinogenic risk appears to be factual.  Virtually anything is poisonous or carcinogenic at sufficient concentration so the open question is where is the dose curve and what is a person's expected lifetime exposure -- and how does it fit against that curve?  I'm unaware of anyone putting in the many billions of dollars to answer this with any sort of reasonable precision and short-term studies do not necessarily extrapolate at all to longer-term risks.  This is where the majority of my concern comes from with these GMO'd plants which are intended for both animal and human consumption.  It's not the GMO -- its what gets on and in the plant deliberately because its been engineered to not die when what would otherwise kill it is sprayed on and around it.
  
  
• Is there an issue of transfection of the genetic material into the tissues of that which consumes it?  In general the answer is expected to be "no" with most things but again, we're talking about doses over a human lifetime, which do not square at all with doses over a study period of a year or two, nor in animals with much shorter lifespans.  To my knowledge nobody is looking for evidence in longer-lived animals which have been exposed over long periods of time -- in part because its hard to find such in the wild.  I am aware of nobody, for example, taking elephants or primates in a zoo and deliberately feeding them GMO'd grains and products of said grains for a decade or more, with proper controls in some other disjoint environment (where such is not fed) and then doing sampling to see whether or not anything odd in terms of transfection has occurred. Without this evidence its impossible to know; I do not believe this risk is particularly material, but to out-of-hand dismiss it is unwise.

The latter is probably not in play, and I'd be reasonably comfortable with not acting against these things up front on that basis.  But the former is another matter; these farmed products should be forcibly tested with any detected residue forcing their destruction, particularly given that much plant "seed" material these days (e.g. corn) is wildly concentrated in the form of seed oils which is then used for human consumption.  It is one thing to eat an ear of corn that might have a tiny amount of residue that was taken up and is in the kernels.  It's entirely different if you concentrate that by several orders of magnitude -- thousands or more -- through machine processing to extract usable amounts of oil that are then ingested.