1/n More gems from Peter Daszak’s December 9 interview: “You can manipulate [coronaviruses] in the lab pretty easily, it is the spike protein who drives a lot of what happens with the coronavirus zoonotic risk. You can get the sequence, you can build the protein. We worked...
2/n “Ralph Baric at UNC who did this, insert into a backbone of another virus and do some work in the lab. So, you can get more predictive when you find a sequence.”
3/n “If you are going to develop a vaccine for SARS people are going to use pandemic SARS, but let’s try to insert some of these others and get a better vaccine.”
Was this work ongoing at WIV? Inserting other spikes into various backbones to develop a pan-coronavirus vaccine?
4/4 Source (around the 30:00 mark)
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My new essay about the origins of Covid. Where do we stand 2 years later? Personally, I think the case for lab leak has only strengthened, especially given what we have learned from the EcoHealth DEFUSE proposal leak. In particular,
I think it makes a strong case that the PRRA insertion which has created a novel furin cleavage site so uncharacteristic of bat SARS-like viruses was, as Kristian Andersen initially suspected, indeed engineered.
Moreover, it might answer "why proline" and "why PRRA":
2/5
Remember RmYN02 with its PAA "insertion"? I find it quite odd that it is coded by
CCT GCA GCG
codons; and the PRRA insertion in SARS2 is coded by
CCT cgg cgg GCA
i.e. its codons for proline (CCT) and alanine (GCA) are identical to those found in RmYN02.
3/5
So I took a look at the 1989 Malone et al. paper cited as proof of his "mRNA vaccines inventorship" to see what the invention was. If I read it correctly, what they did is take the known method of DNA lipofection (delivering DNA into cells using lipids) and applied it to RNA:
Also, as they state in the opening paragraph, other groups have already shown ways to deliver RNA into cells years before:
"By comparison, progress in introducing RNA molecules into cells has been very slow and restricted to a few cases (1-4)."
2nd pic has those references 1-4:
Regarding Malone's 5 patents — all of them were actually filed by Vical *after* Malone left Vical in 1989, and probably carry his name only because they all are continuations of application US32630589A filed in March 1989 (this way the 5 patents all get the 1989 priority date).
Some people seem to think Omicron is a good thing — a mild variant that can bring this pandemic to an end. I disagree. Omicron is bad news.
1/8
First of all, many more people will die than would not have if Omicron didn’t appear. It will burn through existing immunity and infect huge numbers of people worldwide. Even at a 5x lower death rate, because of many more people getting it, it will cause many extra deaths.
2/8
Second, there is no guarantee Omicron can even rid us of Delta, let alone end the pandemic. On the contrary, its arrival is bad news: that a variant can arise that can escape existing immunity greatly diminishes the hope that vaccines/immunity can eventually eradicate SARS2.
"We show SARS-CoV-2 disseminates across the human body and brain early in infection at high levels, and provide evidence of virus replication at multiple extrapulmonary sites during the first week [of] symptom[s]."
"Others have previously reported SARS-CoV-2 RNA within the heart, lymph node, small intestine, and adrenal gland. We demonstrate conclusively that SARS-CoV-2 is capable of infecting and replicating within these tissues."
"≥50% of late cases also had persistence in the myocardium, thoracic cavity lymph nodes, tongue, peripheral nerves, ocular tissue, and in all sampled areas of the brain, except the dura mater."
I mean seriously, why does it fall to me to educate virologists? 😂 Fact: CoVs *love* to recombine and can pick up all sorts of RNAs during template switching events. CoVs are positive stranded but use a negative template strand for replication. VSV are negative stranded, so
it seems quite possible to me that a CoV RdRp could pick up a negative VSV-SARS2 strand during template switching. Especially given that the VSV-SARS2 spike gene is identical to WT SARS2 save for immunoevading mutations, so
if the template switch happens during spike gene synthesis, the VSV-SARS2 strand will fit right in.
So what do we know on the topic of "Pfizer falsified vaccine trial data"? The only evidence for this comes from @thackerpd piece in @bmj_latest: an action item to discuss "e-diary issue/falsifying data, etc." and a note that one staffer was "verbally counseled for changing data":
The Pfizer trial started screening patients on July 27, 2020 (see attached). So what eDiary data could have been falsified in "early August 2020"? Height/weight/BP? It is not even clear if the staffer counseled for changing data was counseled in connection with the Pfizer trial.
Also, the whistleblower who inspired the BMJ article, Brook Jackson, started her ~2-week stint at Ventavia in September, as the emails she released indicate, i.e. ~1 month after the purported counseling of employee over changed data.