Have you seen the ideas put forward by JJ Couey on this topic?
One key foundational premise is that RNA viruses are in a sense fail-safe for bioweapons research because very little of the genome is conserved owing to low fidelity replication. So if you manage to optimize them by tinkering, they rapidly regress to, in the case of coronaviruses, a harmless cold for which humans have a deep defensive architecture.
He goes on to say that the RNA signal alleged to exist in the "spread" of COVID around the world, can only be explained by a program of deliberate deployment of infectious clones in an attempt to simulate the spread of a dangerous pathogen. These clones would be lab-made high fidelity copies of the engineered pathogen, which could be deployed in high concentrations and would be replication-competent, but by the nature of RNA viruses, the "spread" of the pathogen would be limited by the poor replication fidelity - what little of the next generation that was replication competent would rapidly regress away from the optimized pathogen.
The clones are produced by a DNA template method similar to how the mRNA shots are produced, resulting in high quality copies, and might be just raw RNA encapsulated (e.g. in an LNP or other virus-like-particle), it would not necessarily need to be an actual virion.
The high level thesis:
1. the bioweapon / lab leak danger narrative has been pushed for many years
2. lots of legal preparation (e.g. PREP act) and war games pushing the idea of pandemic viruses
3. the pandemic was faked by seeded infections, that do not show patterns matching epidemic spread (e.g. the work of Jessica Hockett and Denis Rancourt)
4. the pandemic narrative was supported by inaccurate tests that pick up an existing coronavirus background
5. the bioweapon / lab leak / natural origin debate was supported as a method to accept the premise that the pandemic was real and "might" (probably was) engineered and therefore we need to accept a new world of countermeasures
6. iatrogenic deaths (DNR for cardiac and opioid, hospitals in chaos, ventilators and remdesivir) to produce a real signal of deaths, but not really from COVID
7. all with the intent of getting the vax rollout to happen, which also killed millions and did untold harms
at least that is my take - it is an interesting idea and to me it has merit.
i dont know if there's a good source for his ideas (they are in the new RFK book, but not strongly featured)
Research from Japan a few months ago showed that most of the new strains of COVID seemed to be essentially unrelated to other circulating strains, as if there had been a series of discrete releases of separately derived project-viruses.
Funny, that...
They couldn't say it quite that way, but said they just couldn't figure out how that happened.
I'm not too knowledgeable about the phylogeny analysis, but I've seen a lot of analysis that makes it look pretty fishy. Omicron made that huge jump for example. However what JJC is saying is actually sort of the opposite... That it doesn't make sense that the genome is so well conserved across large distances and long time periods. Which suggests that maybe the sequencing is just fictional, or else that even the cases where there is very little evolution are actually the result of widespread controlled releases? I am not sure I believe it but the claim is that RNA viruses simply cannot create an epidemic without significant genetic change.
Do take a look at those 2 links I sent Josh in comments about Ft. Detrick and the analysis showing that COVID was circulating in China in early 2018. That one analyzes the genetic drift of Omicron, and says that it had to diverge from any other circulating strain no later than March 2018. More recently I have read that Omicron was circulating in Puerto Rico in 2020, but not noticed until much later. So many authoritative announcements have been erroneous.
JJ is great and inspired my latest. This is a FANTASTIC summary of his recent output.
However, In a nutshell, my thesis is you don't need any of that science to prove there was no pandemic. You just need to trust your own lived experience. When you do that you realize the was never any pandemic.
Wittingly or not, this book will delight the perpetrators of the covid scam.
They’ve successfully got everyone obsessed by the false dichotomy of lab-leak vs zoonotic origin while ignoring the central question: to what extent did we have a pandemic at all?
We also had a pandemic that could have been treated with prophylactic vitamin-D supplementation. Tony Fauci once revealed that he took 6000 IU/day himself. https://c19early.org/d
He probably shot for a blood level above 60. He also knew about HCQ and zinc efficacy against coronaviruses decades ahead of time.
I was going to be informative, but you mention the retirement center deaths near Ft. Detrick MD in summer of 2019, just before the Virology lab was shut down for "breach", "but no harm was done".
This is the very best article I have read on Covid origins. (I have nearly 400 in my database.) Josh has assembled the most thoughtful analyses I've seen (I'm thinking especially of Ron Unz) into a coherent picture. Thank you for doing so, and directing your readers to stop the madness.
I learned so much from the linked paper on the origins of Ebola. It sure looks like the same virologists that conspired with Fauci to hide the lab origin of Covid did the dirty work to hide the lab origin of Ebola.
"We hypothesize that the AIDS pandemic may have originated with a contaminated polio vaccine that was administered to inhabitants of Equatorial Africa from 1957 to 1959. The mechanism of evolution of HIV from this vaccine remains to be determined."
A quick summary: everything you report on feels like you know certain policies cause harms. On one hand, it sounds like you're trying to rally the public in order to get the harmful policies stopped. On the other, it feels you have no real plan to do so unless the people enforcing the policies allow or give you permission to stop them.
The laws currently in place already make forcing anyone to get anything injected for any reason illegal. Also in all Western nations, politicians are neither above nor exempt from any of these laws.
If we're too afraid to stand up for these laws now, what good does 'reinstating' those laws or adding others we are also too fearful to uphold going to do? You're skipping a step. You're skipping a necessary step that you can not skip in this situation.
If I asked you to, could you right now set aside your fears &/or anxieties about the prospect of standing up to politicians? I ask this because you know who can't? Everyone I've ever met. The fear is so ingrained no one will admit TO themselves they have it.
But they always react to avoid it. So the fear prevents people from treating the decision-makers in charge as mere mortals we need to hold accountable, & we cannot end the harmful policies without mass public support & without holding them accountable.
That's a closed circle. We have to break out of that BEFORE we CAN lead something that can end the policies.
We have to remove their fear. & that also requires another step BEFORE we can do that.
People can't shut their fear of authority figures unless they feel something else can protect them from their Divine Wrath. Something that feels Big Enough to do that.
It has to be a movement, & that movement has to make them feel secure. It can't be built overnight. But it CAN be built to become too large to block or dismiss, possibly within the year.
The problem with all of this debate is that there was never any pandemic. The only reason, and I mean the only reason we think there was one is because that is what we were told.
I agree that COVID mortality was not high enough to call it a pandemic. Nevertheless, there is strong evidence that the SARS-CoV-2 virus was genetically engineered to be toxic.
Josh, do you care to speculate what the impact of computerized vote fraud might be on RFK Jr.'s electoral chances?
I'm hoping that the support he has on the right includes those who program the voting machines. Perhaps they might help him out in the primaries. Even if so, I can't help but recall you once making the point that their power only goes so far. They can't reverse a landslide. And I suspect Biden will beat RFK in a landslide. I know Charles Eisenstein is far more optimistic than I am. I hope he's right, but I see no reason to think so.
Sure, I'd like to see an end to bioweapons research and bioweapons development. But I don't lose any sleep over it. I’m just not very afraid of bio-weapons. That's because germ theory of disease is weak at best. It makes a poor foundation for weaponry.
The case of Kary Mullis trying to find a paper to cite which showed HIV caused AIDS is famous. He made much of the fact that there isn't one. But is there such a paper for any disease and its implicated microbe? Research fraud in medical science seems to have exploded lately. But Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English show in For Her Own Good that it dates back to the origins of the medical profession in the 19th century. Physician scientists of the time were unable to demonstrate microbial origins of diseases back then, but it didn't stop them from laying the blame. Ehrenreich and English argue doctors wanted to blame disease on something only they had province over. Ordinary people didn't have microscopes.
Could microbes be made more lethal? Sure. And sticking tennis balls into pillows would make pillow fights more lethal. It just strikes me as a dingbat way to go about trying to kill people. Of course I know no good comes of it, and it probably has hurt/killed some people, but I do get a kick out of the notion that they are failing in their evil deeds because they believe their own nonsense.
Why do I think Some harm has occurred? Well, I would walk back a little from my claim that viruses aren't pathogenic. I do believe they have some pathogenicity, though not in the way that is commonly believed. I don't see them as having an independent existence. Josh, you suggested in your anti-aging blog last August 6th that we think of extracellular vesicles as endogenous viruses, and that they can be used to communicate with other individuals. So why not think of viruses as exogenous extracellular vesicles? And a message they might be communicating is that the population has gotten dense, that it's time to thin our numbers. Perhaps they are a mechanism of aging. I know of course that there are other explanations for why they disproportionately effect the elderly, but this notion that they're agents of aging has really stuck with me.
Fred, you suggest a further idea, that viruses are exosomes that signal population density. In a passive sense, this is conservative ecological reasoning. Epidemics help to control population density when it gets too high. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0022519309002422
If you're suggesting that viruses and their hosts are co-evolved to avoid excess population density, this is a further, and imaginative hypothesis. How would you test it?
Co-evolved? No. I’m suggesting viruses are normal parts of our bodies like any other macro-molecular assembly one might find in there. If you were trying to understand ribosomal/mRNA/tRNA complexes, you wouldn’t be thinking in terms of co-evolution with the ‘host’. Sure viruses leave our bodies, but that doesn’t imply independent existence. I suppose that gives them a good opportunity to go rogue. But I say innocent until proven guilty. Perhaps they remain honorable team players all the way. An extended phenotype sort of perspective might be interesting or helpful, but not co-evolution.
I take it you still stand by the paper you cited. I just find it odd that, though I’ve read much of your aging related work since, I don’t recall any Red Queen stuff. Maybe it just bounced off me. Anyway, that paper assumes the commonsense notion that epidemics are visited upon populations by microbes with an existence independent of said populations. Here I’m suggesting the not at all commonsense notion that epidemics (viral ones anyway) are not foisted upon populations from without, but generated from within. I’m not suggesting senescence as an evolved response to the selection pressure of epidemics. The epidemic IS the senescence (evolved for some other reason).
I get the impression you’re thinking solely about exosomes acting within the body. That’s a very interesting subject, especially now that we know it’s the crux of why E5 works. But your post was about bio-weapons, and I was only referring to interpersonal spread of viruses. I suggest that when someone coughs a virus into the air, it’s not a foreign object, but an exogenous extracellular vesicle conveying a signal to the elderly that it’s time to self-destruct. (An absurd notion to many, but of course, you’re familiar with programmed aging.) In traditional epidemiology, disease spread is dose-dependent. The number of viral particles received might serve as a good proxy for population density, which of course is part of your model about ecosystem stability as a reason why aging would evolve. I didn’t mean to suggest proliferation of the exosomes occurs in the recipients of the signals/viruses, or even suggest anything at all about mechanisms of signal transduction. Proliferation becomes an important matter when we look at what happens on a community (or larger) scale. But as to what happens inside the recipient individual to promote aging once such a signal is acted upon - well I wouldn’t even hazard a guess. You could totally be right that it’s something SASP-esque. But it seems just as reasonable to me to suppose that other molecules take over, that the exosome merely inaugurates some pathway, then submits itself for degradation.
This subject gets me thinking about levels of selection. So the following line in your paper stood out: “The effects of senescence on individual fitness are wholly negative, so if senescence is to evolve as an adaptation, it must be at the group level.” Why not go the other way? I’ve long thought you’re too harsh on gene-level selection, that such accommodates said challenge to individual level selection better than group selection does. I was starting to explain why until I realized a problem with my reasoning - lol. Perhaps that’s a topic for another day. Getting kind of tangential anyhow. Just a quick question on that if I may: Has Richard Dawkins ever weighed in on the notion of programmed aging?
This is a fascinating perspective. It deserves a book length exegesis from you and a thoughtful multi-layered response from me. The way you think is related to the Gaia hypothesis -- life is one thing -- and related to a book I reviewed last year, https://www.chelseagreen.com/product/biocivilisations/
The traditional view of the relationship between viruses and exosomes: Exosomes evolved as communication between cells. But this opened a possibility for a rogue, selfish exosome to reprogram a cell to create more exosomes like itself. This was the first virus, and viruses evolved as parasites.
As you say, the line between virus and exosome is not so sharp. Sometimes the cell receives a warning in an exosome, and passes on the warning by making more exosomes like it. This is "legitimate" use of exosomes but it starts to look like a virus.
You suggest a possibility that aging is promoted by proliferation of age-related exosomes. This would be like the SASP, or Senescence-Associated Secretory Phenotype. When cells become senescent, for example through telomere shortening, they send out cytokines, molecular signals, that cause other cells to become senescent. So cell senescence can lead to an exponential cascade, which is understood to be a primary factor in aging. In fact, it is known that lifespan of rodents can be extended substantially by killing senescent cells. You lose the cell that way, but at least it can't trigger a cascade of dead cells.
Maybe age-related exosomes work the same way. Maybe cells pick up the exosome with an old-age signal in it and it reprograms the cell to create old-age exosomes of its own. This aligns with the Conboy lab and their project to remediate aging by removing blood plasma (including exosomes and many other constituents).
Experiments could be done to test your hypothesis. It could be easy to do this in cell culture, adding old-age exosomes to the culture and see if more old-age exosomes are generated. But at this point, the idea of an "old-age exosome" is a theoretical construct. We don't know how to identify one if we saw it.
That traditional folk belief rings true with me. I think it points to needing an entirely new conception of health and disease. This is most obvious in the case of mental health. I don't find the concept of craziness useful. Such is all reasonable responses to a screwed up world. Once you see that, you have to ask if the concept of bodily sickness is useful either. All the unpleasant stuff is your body doing what it ought to do in order to address a problem.
I don't exactly have a good paradigm to replace it with though. I believe in naturopathy, that the secret to health is to live in the context natural selection adapted us to. Fitness is niche-dependent.
I also subscribe to terrain theory. Look not to the virulence of the germ, but the weakness of your body. Even if a microbe plays a role in the etiology of a disease, that fact probably isn't very interesting. Microbes are everywhere. Trying to avoid contact is futile and dumb. What in your environment has weakened you? Diet? Pollution? Lack of love? Livelihood at risk if you don't submit to that horrible boss? etc.
Infirmities due to old age belong in a different class though. That's deliberate self-destruction.
I agree with you and Kary that the case for a viral cause of AIDS is weak. But for smallpox I'd say it's open-and-shut. And it's hard to explain the observed contagion of COVID without a pathogen that can be communicated through aerosols.
Bioweapons have killed a lot of people. Vaccines have probably killed even more. And vaccines justified by bioweapons are the Devil's handiwork.
You argue that bioweapns are a flawed bioweapon. I agree. In favor of the argument I would say (1) you can't prevent blowback, (2) they mutate rapidly, with unpredictable results, and (3) people tend to develop immunity, if given the chance, and it's hard to control who will be immune and who will succumb.
Have you seen the ideas put forward by JJ Couey on this topic?
One key foundational premise is that RNA viruses are in a sense fail-safe for bioweapons research because very little of the genome is conserved owing to low fidelity replication. So if you manage to optimize them by tinkering, they rapidly regress to, in the case of coronaviruses, a harmless cold for which humans have a deep defensive architecture.
He goes on to say that the RNA signal alleged to exist in the "spread" of COVID around the world, can only be explained by a program of deliberate deployment of infectious clones in an attempt to simulate the spread of a dangerous pathogen. These clones would be lab-made high fidelity copies of the engineered pathogen, which could be deployed in high concentrations and would be replication-competent, but by the nature of RNA viruses, the "spread" of the pathogen would be limited by the poor replication fidelity - what little of the next generation that was replication competent would rapidly regress away from the optimized pathogen.
The clones are produced by a DNA template method similar to how the mRNA shots are produced, resulting in high quality copies, and might be just raw RNA encapsulated (e.g. in an LNP or other virus-like-particle), it would not necessarily need to be an actual virion.
The high level thesis:
1. the bioweapon / lab leak danger narrative has been pushed for many years
2. lots of legal preparation (e.g. PREP act) and war games pushing the idea of pandemic viruses
3. the pandemic was faked by seeded infections, that do not show patterns matching epidemic spread (e.g. the work of Jessica Hockett and Denis Rancourt)
4. the pandemic narrative was supported by inaccurate tests that pick up an existing coronavirus background
5. the bioweapon / lab leak / natural origin debate was supported as a method to accept the premise that the pandemic was real and "might" (probably was) engineered and therefore we need to accept a new world of countermeasures
6. iatrogenic deaths (DNR for cardiac and opioid, hospitals in chaos, ventilators and remdesivir) to produce a real signal of deaths, but not really from COVID
7. all with the intent of getting the vax rollout to happen, which also killed millions and did untold harms
at least that is my take - it is an interesting idea and to me it has merit.
i dont know if there's a good source for his ideas (they are in the new RFK book, but not strongly featured)
this is a pretty good summary.
https://odysee.com/@Oisin.page:f/(2023-11-19)-Medical-Doctors-for-COVID-Ethics-International---JJ-Couey,-Gigaohm-Biological-High-Resistance-Low-Noise-Information-Brief:8
Research from Japan a few months ago showed that most of the new strains of COVID seemed to be essentially unrelated to other circulating strains, as if there had been a series of discrete releases of separately derived project-viruses.
Funny, that...
They couldn't say it quite that way, but said they just couldn't figure out how that happened.
I'm not too knowledgeable about the phylogeny analysis, but I've seen a lot of analysis that makes it look pretty fishy. Omicron made that huge jump for example. However what JJC is saying is actually sort of the opposite... That it doesn't make sense that the genome is so well conserved across large distances and long time periods. Which suggests that maybe the sequencing is just fictional, or else that even the cases where there is very little evolution are actually the result of widespread controlled releases? I am not sure I believe it but the claim is that RNA viruses simply cannot create an epidemic without significant genetic change.
Do take a look at those 2 links I sent Josh in comments about Ft. Detrick and the analysis showing that COVID was circulating in China in early 2018. That one analyzes the genetic drift of Omicron, and says that it had to diverge from any other circulating strain no later than March 2018. More recently I have read that Omicron was circulating in Puerto Rico in 2020, but not noticed until much later. So many authoritative announcements have been erroneous.
JJ is great and inspired my latest. This is a FANTASTIC summary of his recent output.
However, In a nutshell, my thesis is you don't need any of that science to prove there was no pandemic. You just need to trust your own lived experience. When you do that you realize the was never any pandemic.
https://reportsfromtherabbithole.substack.com/p/the-virus-telenovella
Wittingly or not, this book will delight the perpetrators of the covid scam.
They’ve successfully got everyone obsessed by the false dichotomy of lab-leak vs zoonotic origin while ignoring the central question: to what extent did we have a pandemic at all?
https://open.substack.com/pub/pandauncut/p/the-lombardy-analysis
We had a pandemic after the vaccines were distributed.
Don’t disagree with that.
We also had a pandemic that could have been treated with prophylactic vitamin-D supplementation. Tony Fauci once revealed that he took 6000 IU/day himself. https://c19early.org/d
He probably shot for a blood level above 60. He also knew about HCQ and zinc efficacy against coronaviruses decades ahead of time.
We didn’t actually have a pandemic of anything but social contagion.
Bingo
Thanks Josh. Good work. Lots of work...
I was going to be informative, but you mention the retirement center deaths near Ft. Detrick MD in summer of 2019, just before the Virology lab was shut down for "breach", "but no harm was done".
https://www.johndayblog.com/2021/06/fort-detrick.html
This is very good virology work, too:
China’s CCP Concealed SARS-CoV-2 Presence in China as Far Back as March 2018
https://theethicalskeptic.com/2021/11/15/chinas-ccp-concealed-sars-cov-2-presence-in-china-as-far-back-as-march-2018/
Thanks for these extra clues, John. It's a tangled web that will have many subplots before we sort this all out.
This is the very best article I have read on Covid origins. (I have nearly 400 in my database.) Josh has assembled the most thoughtful analyses I've seen (I'm thinking especially of Ron Unz) into a coherent picture. Thank you for doing so, and directing your readers to stop the madness.
I learned so much from the linked paper on the origins of Ebola. It sure looks like the same virologists that conspired with Fauci to hide the lab origin of Covid did the dirty work to hide the lab origin of Ebola.
Experimental Polio vaccine may have been the origin of AIDS: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/7935079/#:~:text=We%20hypothesize%20that%20the%20AIDS,vaccine%20remains%20to%20be%20determined.
"We hypothesize that the AIDS pandemic may have originated with a contaminated polio vaccine that was administered to inhabitants of Equatorial Africa from 1957 to 1959. The mechanism of evolution of HIV from this vaccine remains to be determined."
Your were more objective and truthful than RFK Jr, so deeper reading if interested:
https://pete843.substack.com/p/the-blobs-manhattan-project-and-defuse
https://jimhaslam.substack.com/p/6-if-you-believe-the-wiv-engineered
A quick summary: everything you report on feels like you know certain policies cause harms. On one hand, it sounds like you're trying to rally the public in order to get the harmful policies stopped. On the other, it feels you have no real plan to do so unless the people enforcing the policies allow or give you permission to stop them.
The laws currently in place already make forcing anyone to get anything injected for any reason illegal. Also in all Western nations, politicians are neither above nor exempt from any of these laws.
If we're too afraid to stand up for these laws now, what good does 'reinstating' those laws or adding others we are also too fearful to uphold going to do? You're skipping a step. You're skipping a necessary step that you can not skip in this situation.
If I asked you to, could you right now set aside your fears &/or anxieties about the prospect of standing up to politicians? I ask this because you know who can't? Everyone I've ever met. The fear is so ingrained no one will admit TO themselves they have it.
But they always react to avoid it. So the fear prevents people from treating the decision-makers in charge as mere mortals we need to hold accountable, & we cannot end the harmful policies without mass public support & without holding them accountable.
That's a closed circle. We have to break out of that BEFORE we CAN lead something that can end the policies.
We have to remove their fear. & that also requires another step BEFORE we can do that.
People can't shut their fear of authority figures unless they feel something else can protect them from their Divine Wrath. Something that feels Big Enough to do that.
It has to be a movement, & that movement has to make them feel secure. It can't be built overnight. But it CAN be built to become too large to block or dismiss, possibly within the year.
Care to chat?
The problem with all of this debate is that there was never any pandemic. The only reason, and I mean the only reason we think there was one is because that is what we were told.
I wrote about this, an excerpt:
𝘈𝘭𝘭 𝘢𝘯𝘺𝘰𝘯𝘦 𝘩𝘢𝘴 𝘵𝘰 𝘥𝘰 𝘪𝘴 𝘭𝘰𝘰𝘬 𝘢𝘵 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘪𝘳 𝘰𝘸𝘯 𝘭𝘪𝘷𝘦𝘥 𝘦𝘹𝘱𝘦𝘳𝘪𝘦𝘯𝘤𝘦 𝘧𝘳𝘰𝘮 2020 𝘰𝘯𝘸𝘢𝘳𝘥. 𝘋𝘦𝘴𝘱𝘪𝘵𝘦 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘮𝘦𝘥𝘪𝘢’𝘴 𝘥𝘢𝘪𝘭𝘺 𝘤𝘢𝘴𝘦-𝘤𝘰𝘶𝘯𝘵𝘦𝘳-𝘱𝘰𝘳𝘯, 𝘯𝘰 𝘩𝘰𝘯𝘦𝘴𝘵 𝘱𝘦𝘳𝘴𝘰𝘯 𝘸𝘰𝘶𝘭𝘥 𝘴𝘢𝘺 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘴𝘦 𝘳𝘦𝘱𝘰𝘳𝘵𝘴 𝘸𝘦𝘳𝘦 𝘢 𝘳𝘦𝘧𝘭𝘦𝘤𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯 𝘰𝘧 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘪𝘳 𝘦𝘷𝘦𝘳𝘺𝘥𝘢𝘺 𝘭𝘪𝘷𝘦𝘴. 𝘛𝘩𝘦𝘳𝘦 𝘸𝘦𝘳𝘦 𝘤𝘦𝘳𝘵𝘢𝘪𝘯𝘭𝘺 𝘳𝘦𝘢𝘤𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯𝘴 𝘧𝘳𝘰𝘮 𝘩𝘦𝘢𝘭𝘵𝘩 𝘰𝘧𝘧𝘪𝘤𝘪𝘢𝘭𝘴 𝘵𝘰 𝘢 𝘱𝘢𝘯𝘥𝘦𝘮𝘪𝘤, 𝘫𝘶𝘴𝘵 𝘯𝘰 𝘱𝘢𝘯𝘥𝘦𝘮𝘪𝘤. 𝘐𝘧 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘳𝘦 𝘸𝘢𝘴𝘯’𝘵 𝘢𝘤𝘵𝘶𝘢𝘭𝘭𝘺 𝘢 𝘱𝘢𝘯𝘥𝘦𝘮𝘪𝘤, 𝘪𝘵 𝘪𝘴𝘯’𝘵 𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘮𝘶𝘤𝘩 𝘰𝘧 𝘢 𝘴𝘵𝘳𝘦𝘵𝘤𝘩 𝘵𝘰 𝘴𝘢𝘺 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘳𝘦 𝘸𝘢𝘴 𝘯𝘦𝘷𝘦𝘳 𝘢𝘯𝘺 𝘯𝘰𝘷𝘦𝘭 𝘷𝘪𝘳𝘶𝘴.
Have a read if the urge overtakes you.
https://reportsfromtherabbithole.substack.com/p/the-virus-telenovella
I agree that COVID mortality was not high enough to call it a pandemic. Nevertheless, there is strong evidence that the SARS-CoV-2 virus was genetically engineered to be toxic.
Josh, do you care to speculate what the impact of computerized vote fraud might be on RFK Jr.'s electoral chances?
I'm hoping that the support he has on the right includes those who program the voting machines. Perhaps they might help him out in the primaries. Even if so, I can't help but recall you once making the point that their power only goes so far. They can't reverse a landslide. And I suspect Biden will beat RFK in a landslide. I know Charles Eisenstein is far more optimistic than I am. I hope he's right, but I see no reason to think so.
Sure, I'd like to see an end to bioweapons research and bioweapons development. But I don't lose any sleep over it. I’m just not very afraid of bio-weapons. That's because germ theory of disease is weak at best. It makes a poor foundation for weaponry.
The case of Kary Mullis trying to find a paper to cite which showed HIV caused AIDS is famous. He made much of the fact that there isn't one. But is there such a paper for any disease and its implicated microbe? Research fraud in medical science seems to have exploded lately. But Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English show in For Her Own Good that it dates back to the origins of the medical profession in the 19th century. Physician scientists of the time were unable to demonstrate microbial origins of diseases back then, but it didn't stop them from laying the blame. Ehrenreich and English argue doctors wanted to blame disease on something only they had province over. Ordinary people didn't have microscopes.
Could microbes be made more lethal? Sure. And sticking tennis balls into pillows would make pillow fights more lethal. It just strikes me as a dingbat way to go about trying to kill people. Of course I know no good comes of it, and it probably has hurt/killed some people, but I do get a kick out of the notion that they are failing in their evil deeds because they believe their own nonsense.
Why do I think Some harm has occurred? Well, I would walk back a little from my claim that viruses aren't pathogenic. I do believe they have some pathogenicity, though not in the way that is commonly believed. I don't see them as having an independent existence. Josh, you suggested in your anti-aging blog last August 6th that we think of extracellular vesicles as endogenous viruses, and that they can be used to communicate with other individuals. So why not think of viruses as exogenous extracellular vesicles? And a message they might be communicating is that the population has gotten dense, that it's time to thin our numbers. Perhaps they are a mechanism of aging. I know of course that there are other explanations for why they disproportionately effect the elderly, but this notion that they're agents of aging has really stuck with me.
Fred, you suggest a further idea, that viruses are exosomes that signal population density. In a passive sense, this is conservative ecological reasoning. Epidemics help to control population density when it gets too high. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0022519309002422
If you're suggesting that viruses and their hosts are co-evolved to avoid excess population density, this is a further, and imaginative hypothesis. How would you test it?
Co-evolved? No. I’m suggesting viruses are normal parts of our bodies like any other macro-molecular assembly one might find in there. If you were trying to understand ribosomal/mRNA/tRNA complexes, you wouldn’t be thinking in terms of co-evolution with the ‘host’. Sure viruses leave our bodies, but that doesn’t imply independent existence. I suppose that gives them a good opportunity to go rogue. But I say innocent until proven guilty. Perhaps they remain honorable team players all the way. An extended phenotype sort of perspective might be interesting or helpful, but not co-evolution.
I take it you still stand by the paper you cited. I just find it odd that, though I’ve read much of your aging related work since, I don’t recall any Red Queen stuff. Maybe it just bounced off me. Anyway, that paper assumes the commonsense notion that epidemics are visited upon populations by microbes with an existence independent of said populations. Here I’m suggesting the not at all commonsense notion that epidemics (viral ones anyway) are not foisted upon populations from without, but generated from within. I’m not suggesting senescence as an evolved response to the selection pressure of epidemics. The epidemic IS the senescence (evolved for some other reason).
I get the impression you’re thinking solely about exosomes acting within the body. That’s a very interesting subject, especially now that we know it’s the crux of why E5 works. But your post was about bio-weapons, and I was only referring to interpersonal spread of viruses. I suggest that when someone coughs a virus into the air, it’s not a foreign object, but an exogenous extracellular vesicle conveying a signal to the elderly that it’s time to self-destruct. (An absurd notion to many, but of course, you’re familiar with programmed aging.) In traditional epidemiology, disease spread is dose-dependent. The number of viral particles received might serve as a good proxy for population density, which of course is part of your model about ecosystem stability as a reason why aging would evolve. I didn’t mean to suggest proliferation of the exosomes occurs in the recipients of the signals/viruses, or even suggest anything at all about mechanisms of signal transduction. Proliferation becomes an important matter when we look at what happens on a community (or larger) scale. But as to what happens inside the recipient individual to promote aging once such a signal is acted upon - well I wouldn’t even hazard a guess. You could totally be right that it’s something SASP-esque. But it seems just as reasonable to me to suppose that other molecules take over, that the exosome merely inaugurates some pathway, then submits itself for degradation.
This subject gets me thinking about levels of selection. So the following line in your paper stood out: “The effects of senescence on individual fitness are wholly negative, so if senescence is to evolve as an adaptation, it must be at the group level.” Why not go the other way? I’ve long thought you’re too harsh on gene-level selection, that such accommodates said challenge to individual level selection better than group selection does. I was starting to explain why until I realized a problem with my reasoning - lol. Perhaps that’s a topic for another day. Getting kind of tangential anyhow. Just a quick question on that if I may: Has Richard Dawkins ever weighed in on the notion of programmed aging?
Fred
This is a fascinating perspective. It deserves a book length exegesis from you and a thoughtful multi-layered response from me. The way you think is related to the Gaia hypothesis -- life is one thing -- and related to a book I reviewed last year, https://www.chelseagreen.com/product/biocivilisations/
Programmed aging is anathema to Dawkins.
Josh
The traditional view of the relationship between viruses and exosomes: Exosomes evolved as communication between cells. But this opened a possibility for a rogue, selfish exosome to reprogram a cell to create more exosomes like itself. This was the first virus, and viruses evolved as parasites.
As you say, the line between virus and exosome is not so sharp. Sometimes the cell receives a warning in an exosome, and passes on the warning by making more exosomes like it. This is "legitimate" use of exosomes but it starts to look like a virus.
You suggest a possibility that aging is promoted by proliferation of age-related exosomes. This would be like the SASP, or Senescence-Associated Secretory Phenotype. When cells become senescent, for example through telomere shortening, they send out cytokines, molecular signals, that cause other cells to become senescent. So cell senescence can lead to an exponential cascade, which is understood to be a primary factor in aging. In fact, it is known that lifespan of rodents can be extended substantially by killing senescent cells. You lose the cell that way, but at least it can't trigger a cascade of dead cells.
Maybe age-related exosomes work the same way. Maybe cells pick up the exosome with an old-age signal in it and it reprograms the cell to create old-age exosomes of its own. This aligns with the Conboy lab and their project to remediate aging by removing blood plasma (including exosomes and many other constituents).
Experiments could be done to test your hypothesis. It could be easy to do this in cell culture, adding old-age exosomes to the culture and see if more old-age exosomes are generated. But at this point, the idea of an "old-age exosome" is a theoretical construct. We don't know how to identify one if we saw it.
That traditional folk belief rings true with me. I think it points to needing an entirely new conception of health and disease. This is most obvious in the case of mental health. I don't find the concept of craziness useful. Such is all reasonable responses to a screwed up world. Once you see that, you have to ask if the concept of bodily sickness is useful either. All the unpleasant stuff is your body doing what it ought to do in order to address a problem.
I don't exactly have a good paradigm to replace it with though. I believe in naturopathy, that the secret to health is to live in the context natural selection adapted us to. Fitness is niche-dependent.
I also subscribe to terrain theory. Look not to the virulence of the germ, but the weakness of your body. Even if a microbe plays a role in the etiology of a disease, that fact probably isn't very interesting. Microbes are everywhere. Trying to avoid contact is futile and dumb. What in your environment has weakened you? Diet? Pollution? Lack of love? Livelihood at risk if you don't submit to that horrible boss? etc.
Infirmities due to old age belong in a different class though. That's deliberate self-destruction.
I agree with you and Kary that the case for a viral cause of AIDS is weak. But for smallpox I'd say it's open-and-shut. And it's hard to explain the observed contagion of COVID without a pathogen that can be communicated through aerosols.
Bioweapons have killed a lot of people. Vaccines have probably killed even more. And vaccines justified by bioweapons are the Devil's handiwork.
You argue that bioweapns are a flawed bioweapon. I agree. In favor of the argument I would say (1) you can't prevent blowback, (2) they mutate rapidly, with unpredictable results, and (3) people tend to develop immunity, if given the chance, and it's hard to control who will be immune and who will succumb.
OK
Dr. Craig appeared on the FLCCC Update to speak about her book.
https://rumble.com/v46fo3l-exposing-the-covid-myths-flccc-weekly-update-jan.-10-2024.html
Clare has 4 kids btw!