Category: plague

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Playing with viruses

A beautiful house with a view over the lake was destroyed years ago by the grandchildren playing with matches under the deck, right out of a parent’s nightmare. But what if the grandchildren are adults, scientists, virologists, playing with deadly viruses, with no goal in mind other than seeing what they can do with genetic recombinatory technologies?

Well folks, that appears to be exactly what happened with COVID.

According to an article in  the National Post this morning,

 

Wuhan and U.S. scientists were planning to create entirely new coronaviruses that did not exist in nature by combining the genetic code of other viruses, proposals show.

Documents leaked last month of a grant application submitted to the U.S. Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), reveal that the international team of scientists was planning to mix genetic data of closely related strains, and grow new viruses.

A genetics expert working with the World Health Organization who uncovered the plan after studying the proposals in detail said that if Sars-CoV-2 had been produced in this way, it would explain why a close match in nature has never been found.So far, the closest naturally occurring virus to Sars-CoV-2 is a strain called Banal-52, which was found in Laos last month and shares 96.8 per cent of the genome. Scientists expect a direct ancestor to be about a 99.98 per cent match, and none has been found so far.
The DARPA proposals, which were leaked to Drastic, the pandemic origins analysis group, show that the team had planned to take sequences from naturally occurring coronaviruses and use them to create a brand new sequence, which was an average of all the strains.Explaining the proposal, a WHO collaborator who asked not to be named for fear of reprisals, said that the team planned to “take various sequences from similar coronaviruses, and create a new sequence that is essentially the average of them… They would then synthesize the viral genome from the computer sequence, thus creating a virus genome that did not exist in nature, but looks natural – as it is the average of natural viruses.”The proposal, which was not funded, was submitted by the British zoologist Peter Daszak on behalf of a consortium including Daszak EcoHealth Alliance, the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the University of North Carolina and Duke NUS in Singapore.The WHO source said: “If Sars-CoV-2 comes from an artificial consensus sequence composed of genomes with 95 per cent similarity to each other… I would predict that we will never find a really good match in nature and just a bunch of close matches across parts of the sequence, which so far is what we are seeing. The problem is that those opposed to a lab-leak scenario will always just say that we need to sample more… Scientists overall are afraid of discussing the issue of the origins due to the political situation. This leaves a small and vocal minority of biased scientists free to spread misinformation.”

Daszak, a member of the WHO team investigating the pandemic origins, was also behind a letter published in The Lancet, which dismissed suggestions that COVID-19 did not have a natural origin as a conspiracy theory.

So the guy behind the claims that COVID has a natural origin was also the lead in the proposal to create the frankenvirus. There is more to come in this tale of conflicts of interest, bad faith, and cosmic arrogance.

Unfortunately, as I am not the Master of the Universe, I cannot have Daszak hanged for crimes against humanity.

 

Peter Daszak, virologist, and possible author of COVID-19

 

Watch Daszak assert that there is no evidence that the virus leaked from the Wuhan lab, which he claimed was “well built, well designed and well run.” The whole CNN piece is carefully designed to make you believe COVID came from an animal market. But Daszak was interested in not finding the truth if it meant the virology lab leaked COVID, or if evidence led back to his possible involvement in the viral research that created the COVID blend.

 

 

I am reaching the point where this man makes sense

It is not about your health.

I spent an evening with a well-meaning Torontonian lady last night, in an over-priced restaurant serving pretentious food. Her entire conversation was focused on COVID avoidance procedures here and in Toronto. Every aspect of family life and education has been re-organized to avoid COVID, including a changing station for clothes when the kids come home from outside. From her conversation it would appear that most other families of her social class are equally as vigilant in protecting against the contagion. She spoke of widows not even able to see their husbands in their dying moments and unable to mark their deaths with a funeral.

As Rebel Yell has tirelessly shown,  a huge gap exists between the actual risk and what is the perceived risk of getting sick, let alone dying from COVID. If Toronto remains enslaved to these avoidance practices, we will never recover our  society and economy.

I keep thinking the COVID scare is a dress rehearsal for totalitarian social control. That is what the man in the video above has concluded. I don’t know whether all that he says is true, but the suspicion is growing.

In the meantime the Trudeau Family Regime (TFR) gets away with $250,000 in speaker’s fees from the self-promoting Kielburger brothers. Noting to see here. Move on. Parliament is not in session. Indeed, maybe Parliament can be permanently dispensed with.

It is not about your health.

The other suspicion that I have is that the people who run the world got so freaked out over Trump’s election that they have panicked and gone overboard. They are now running a candidate who is obviously demented in senility, and they are not even pretending that he will be President for long if he wins. We are in very dark place right now, and it will get worse.

Social distancing for everyone except protesters at Black Lives Matter rallies. 

After all, we have to respect the historic moment.

 

 

See you one trade deal, raise you one plague

This is self-explanatory.

Our California correspondent writes from his bunker in ultra-liberal Berkeley:

“Whether it’s gene editing human babies, irresponsible AI research, creating space junk on purpose, or their ruinous virus research; China has way too little ethical/moral awareness for how much access they have to global catastrophe- causing technology.

“They either need a cultural realignment (ie elevation from their “insectoid” attitude), or the world (ie the western world) has to take their toys away (which they won’t allow – meaning global conflict).”

Take a deep breath

I came across this paragraph as I ate breakfast this morning:

“In 1848, revolutions broke out again in Europe. For several years economic recession and hunger had provoked food riots in parts of Germany and France. By early 1848, almost a third of the workers of Paris were unemployed. In February, as the crisis rapidly worsened, the Parisians rose and overthrew the July monarchy”.

The citation comes from David Gress’ fascinating “From Plato to Nato: the Idea of the West and its Opponents” (at page 327).

Now that the Covid-19 plague is upon us, and as everything shuts down to slow the rate of infection, we can read paragraphs like that with fresh eyes:

hunger riots

one third unemployment

As recently as 1848!

Our current crisis is being met with cancellations of large meetings, shutdowns of sporting events, self-monitoring, isolation, quarantines, and concerns for whether the wine collection would last more than a week. My pension continues to arrive via electronic transfer. I may be seriously inconvenienced. Mrs. Dalwhinnie may not be able to visit some of her aged patients. The crisis is serious, but it not catastrophic.

In the duration I may finally be able to finish Gress’ book. It is highly recommendable for anyone whose interests include western civilization: does it exist? (yes) What does it stand for? (quite a lot) Has its meaning changed over time (yes). I thought I was learned in history before I read this book; clearly I was in error. Gress appears to have read and remembered everything since the pre-Socratics. A tour de force.