Covid-19 and Genetic Engineering by Environmental Manipulation

As far as possible, the blog author intends that his readers should assimilate a few ideas and arrive at their own conclusions.

Several authorities have stated that the virus responsible for Covid-19, SARS-CoV2, has "not been genetically engineered." In the first of the videos linked to below, an authoritative scientific figure states that there is no evidence to support that conclusion. What he actually means is: the authorities who made this statement, very early on in the history of the current pandemic, had grounds only for saying that there was no evidence of the sort of gene-splicing that is the layman's and journalist's primary concept of genetic engineering. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, but that's not quite the point. The real point is that there are at least two ways of manipulating the genetic make-up of viruses that do not require any direct gene splicing, therefore they will not leave any of the signatures that the various scientific authorities piously looked for.

One method is a variation on the sort of environmental selective breeding that has, over many years, created many different breeds of sheep, suited to different parts of the United Kingdom. Essentially, you dump a herd down in a new environment and keep breeding from it in that environment. If the environment is harsh and lacking in food, sooner or later your sheep will become small, tough and agile (like Soay Sheep), to make the best of what they've got. On the other hand, take a herd of Suffolk sheep who have grown large to suit a more comfortable and frankly lush East Anglian environment and move them to even better pastures in Bedfordshire, and they will grow bigger still in less than a hundred years. Nobody is directly controlling what the sheep shall become: the sheep's own survival and fertility rate is doing that. A sheep generation is only a few years, but even a few weeks could represent an awful lot of virus generations.

To make a virus adapt itself to a new host, it is only really necessary to inject blood from an infected animal at the peak of its infectivity, into several animals of a different species. Then, samples of blood are taken from those animals that actually become infected (it might well only be one to start with), not at peak infectivity but at the point where the animal's immune system is close to getting rid of the virus altogether. Because that is when you are most likely to come across viruses which have a degree of adaptation to the new species. You then take samples from that animal and inject them into more animals of the same species. And you can go on doing this at regular intervals, dependent on the immune response of the new species. Four weeks would be a realistic interval, apparently. The virus will keep on mutating for as long as you care to do this, but the mutations will only survive as long as they better adapt the virus to its new host species. Eventually, and it might take several months or a couple of years rather than a century, the virus will cease to change significantly with each repetition: it will have stabilised in its new host species. By all accounts, SARS-CoV2 does not seem to be mutating all that fast in humans, which would rather suggest that it was already stabilised in humans before it escaped into the wild. (This could be circumstantial evidence for a serious breach of medical ethics by someone or other.)

Another method, which also leaves no trace of artificial gene-splicing, is to create hybrid viruses by infecting one animal (or tissue sample in this case) of the species you have adapted your virus/es to, with two viruses of the same family at once. They will inevitably swap genetic material (RNA rather than DNA with many viruses) and the main work will be infecting a few more test animals or cultures to separate out the different hybrids and selecting the ones you want, much as in the first method above.

A painstaking application and appropriate combination of these two simple methods is all that would be necessary to achieve the sort of novel virus creation being discussed by the professor in the first video, below.

These two videos are not connected with each other in any place other than this blog (by the time of publication at least!) and the two content creators have nothing to do with each other. There are thousands of other videos out there on related subjects, but if you watch these two videos one after the other, with the first one (and the methods described above) still in your mind, you might start having ideas...

Blogger no longer allows YouTube videos to be simply embedded. This means you may have to skip adverts to get to the actual videos.

Here is a link to the first video, by Sky News in Australia.

Here is a link to the second video, by the YouTuber Laowhy86.

He has lived in China for a decade and is fluent in Chinese. 

The other answer to "how can a virus like SARS-CoV2 be created?" is: "by accident, or at least by a series of deliberate actions that were meant to have another outcome."

Because SARS-CoV2 appears to have no cardinal virtues, other than being unusually well-adapted to binding to the human ACE-2 receptor described in the first video. A biological weapon would need to be much more lethal than this: most victims are not even incapacitated for more than a few days and some infected people are not incapacitated at all! A biological weapon is also rarely created without some way of shielding the creator's own population, which seems to be what's missing here. 

It does not appear to manipulate the victim's DNA as other viruses (notably HIV) are known to do. In fact, binding to ACE-2 receptors on cell membranes in the lungs and blood vessels is pretty much all that it does: it even reproduces without necessarily damaging the nucleus of the infected cell! The life-threatening symptoms all seem to be related either to the effect that binding itself has on the normal functions of the cells concerned, or to an over-reaction of the immune system to the presence of the virus. (This would explain why vitamin-D seems to help: vitamin D helps the body's  immune system to modulate its own responses.)

With regard to the potential breach of ethics. The blog author published (nearly two years ago) a carefully-researched novel "The Lord of Billionaires' Row", which, amongst many other ideas, tried to convey, through adventure fiction, that at least some factions within the Chinese Communist Party see no value in individuals who fail to conform to their ideology and obey their rule, other than the value of the assets that can be forcibly confiscated from them, which even extend to bodily organs which can be harvested and sold for their value on the illegal transplant organ market. If you can take that idea on board, you have within your grasp an understanding of how the SARS-CoV2 virus appears to have come into the world from an unknown animal host (the professor in the first interview took a proper look at bats and pangolins and it wasn't either of those), already exceptionally well-adapted to binding onto specifically human ACE-2 receptors. 

A recurring theme in Chinese medical research and medicine-marketing is longevity. There is a search for an elixir of youth that Western medical research largely dismisses as superstition. (In the West, the average lifespan has increased bit by bit as medicine concentrates on cures for specific ways of dying, one by one. This is good enough for Western scientists but perhaps not for others.) The odds are: if the research was generously-funded and done in China, then it was expected one day to extend the lifespans of the elite, rather than kill people. But it wouldn't have mattered if numbers of non-elite people gave their all for the research along the way.

The novel (like this article) is not an exercise in China-bashing, because, for example, it also sets out to show how establishment complacency about the corruption of police officers by UK Organised Crime is now a life and death issue for British democracy, which is going largely unreported, barely debated and is not being opposed in any effective manner. The novel sets out to show that two different political cultures can each create their own unique failure modes. It also shows how corruption in those two different cultures can be working hand in hand, even if minds do not exactly meet!

Book Review of “Against the Loveless World” by Susan Abulhawa.

This is a warm book about bleak situations, ranging from a Palestinian neighbourhood in Kuwait before the Iraqi invasion, through the Iraqi occupation and the return of a now-vengeful Kuwaiti government once the Iraqis were expelled, to a more difficult life in Jordan (a much poorer country than Kuwait) and then a life of knife-edge danger in Palestine itself. The heroine’s only defence against psychopathic treatment is to love those she can. (That’s what separates the sheep from the sociopaths.) The people she loves includes one person who appears to exploit her in a very serious way and another who initially despises her for her (largely misreported) sexual conduct.

Arab and particularly Palestinian culture is shown in loving detail, and this is a necessary antidote to the perceptions that Westerners usually have of Palestine, which is a dusty impact zone for whatever artillery is fired at it. That perception is shaped by journalists feeling they have to “tell the truth” about what seem to be the most important things: such as little boys being shot by Israeli settlers and so on. That needs to be reported, but if it is all you report, then the story you are telling becomes a falsehood, because you are not showing the world what is worthwhile about the culture that is being steadily destroyed. The author isn’t merely trying to show that Palestinian culture is being cruelly destroyed, but that it is well worth saving. That is not really what we get from the “victimology” of social-Marxism, because Marxism in any form seeks to destroy ALL existing culture in order for something “better” to rise from the ashes. (If the fire is hot enough, nothing ever rises from the vitrified ash at all.) Anyone seeking to “help” Palestine on the basis of such victimology is doing the work of the Israeli oppressors for them.

Along the way, the author allows her heroine to realise that if they did not have the Palestinians to oppress, the Israelis would almost certainly kill each other with vigour and enthusiasm. This may be more literally true than even the author realises: during my past attempts to befriend apparently reasonable Israelis, I was surprised and not a little disturbed to discover how just much they loathed Israelis of other persuasions and how much they were hated in return. I would refer readers to the last third or so of “Screwtape Proposes a Toast” by CS Lewis (if they cannot bear to read the whole thing, which is not very long.) This has been Israel’s problem for millennia.

The heroine and other Palestinians are not solely oppressed by the Israelis and Americans, however: they are oppressed by many Kuwaitis (not all, by any means), largely because the Palestinians were exploited by Saddam to supply a tissue of justification for his attempted conquest of Kuwait. The scope of this book does not extend quite to the present day, but the way that the Iranian regime is currently exploiting the Palestinian cause to further its own regional interests is sowing the seeds of further oppression of Palestinians by Arab regimes that the Iranian one seeks to destroy. Where, exactly, is the line drawn between such exploitation and direct oppression? Is there one?

Although this book depicts some inspiring acts of resistance and defiance (not just against the Israelis) it’s pretty clear that these will not create a solution by themselves and are really a form of pleading for some outside force to step in and change the situation. For this to happen, there has to be a change in the attitude and behaviour of several different governments, and for THAT to happen, it has to be possible for people with clean hands to access the top jobs in the countries concerned. As I have tried to make clear in my own work, if you have conventions or even formal systems which prevent persons with clean hands getting to the top (because, you know, you cannot trust anyone with clean hands: they will never do the necessary dirty work) you will be ruled by homicidal sociopaths in perpetuity and they will ALWAYS be able to think of more dirty work that needs doing.

Published by Bloomsbury Publishing 23^rd of July 2020.

Book Review of “The Doors of Eden” by Adrian Tchaikovsky

This is a good novel, but at one point the author succumbs to the temptation to be lazy (perhaps even ignorant) about his political villainy and this is why he misses out on the five star recommendation that he might have got.

It is about parallel worlds, but not necessarily parallel universes because if you travel far enough from Earth after reality has branched, the rest of the universe has not necessarily changed at all. Or, if it has, the changes may be unrelated to any change on Earth.

The novel builds on small ideas to convey bigger ones, which facilitates the suspension of disbelief necessary to its enjoyment. It starts off with a small adventure gone wrong and a mystery, and it also starts off with a pair of young lesbian heroines, which is not a bad thing. (I once wrote a whole series of SF novels about an entire planetary colony of lesbian heroines. Which I wouldn’t get away with doing in the 21^st century as it’s turning out so far.) The parallel worlds theme allows for both adventure and whimsy (there is a world where super-intelligent big cats suborn all other species to their will) and the author has some fun with the attempts of staid MI5 officers to understand the weird. Mystery turns to conspiracy and then existential crisis, for the universe and not just all the parallel Earths. The conspiracy surrounds the character of Daniel Rove, who for most of the novel is convincingly and accurately drawn as a sociopath (and insider-dealing venture-capitalist).

Parties in conflict must be turned, somehow, into a coalition to solve the existential crisis. This happens slightly too easily, really, given how divergent the world views are of people from the alternative worlds. I was disappointed that neither the big cats nor the intelligent bird-man dinosaurs were asked to contribute to the solution. Cat-logic can be brilliant, in its own way.

Despite dealing with parallel Earths, the narrative is mostly sequential until the end is nigh, at which point there are several alternative narratives. There is a good reason for this, though, and it’s not just an attempt to meet an overall “mind-blowing weirdness” target set by a deranged publisher. None of the divergent narratives is a solution to the crisis: the fact that there are divergent narratives is itself the solution, which is not what the coalition of experts solving the crisis want to hear.

It is at this point that the Rove character, hitherto an insider-trader and laissez-faire capitalist, turns into a 21^st century Oswald Mosley, complete with an England-fixation. Of course, in the 21^st century you are not allowed to hate anyone, except racists, so Rove has to have a “racist” placard hung round his neck so the author can decently lynch him.

The real Oswald Mosley was the anti-thesis of a laissez-faire capitalist. He was First Secretary in a Labour Cabinet and he was economically hard left, just like Hitler and Mussolini. The state was to own everything and everyone. He was personally wealthy, but he did not earn any of it, and this is the key to understanding Oswald Mosley. As George Orwell observed of his classmates at Eton, it was extremely common for someone with an expensive education and a socking great trust fund, to be a hard-left socialist. It still is. Most people who have worked for their own bread are sympathetic to the idea that it is a matter of natural justice for people to actually benefit from their own efforts. When you deny that this is so, as Mosley consistently did, and as many Momentum activists do today, then you and the slave-trader become one flesh. Pharaoh, Lenin, Mosley and Hitler were all willing to make people slaves to build their Utopia.

If the Mosley persona is just meant to be shorthand for “appalling racist” then it’s still problematical, because sociopaths are available in both racist and anti-racist versions. The former blatantly try to divide communities to manipulate them, the latter are generally less blatant and this means they actually do more damage, to individual victims and the fabric of society, because their subtle lies can divide brothers and sisters, even husband and wife, in a way that racist lies cannot do.

“The Doors of Eden” is published by Macmillan on the 20^th of August 2020.