"Society is produced by our wants, and government by our wickedness"

-Thomas Paine

Five years into the pandemic its hard not to feel like the die have been cast, and that there’s no stopping the tsunami of death that’s slowly building and gathering itself just off the shores of every nation on earth as SARS-CoV-2 slowly eats away at our collective immunity to previously suppressed pathogens, one T-cell at a time. Measles, TB, Whooping Cough - Little House on the Prairie about to be all up in this bitch.

So at this point, I don’t think there’s anything I could do or write that would do more than change the minds of maybe a few dozen people at a time, even with the most compelling and well-crafted article imaginable.

But even after all these years and all this failure, it turns out that there’s still nothing I enjoy more than pissing as hard as I can directly into a blizzard.

And the good news is, if you’re comfortable hanging your junk out in the bitter windswept cold for long enough - and stubborn enough to ignore the fact that no matter how hard you clench that you’re not going to be able to fight-off this snowstorm with one lackluster stream - in time, you’re still going to be better-off having fought back, as futile as the fight might always have been from the very start.

For instance, while trying to get the letter below out there, I finally got solid proof that there is in fact a journalistic global omerta against publishing anything indicating that SARS-CoV-2 might have been engineered.

Over the past several years I’ve tried to find either a lawyer or someone in public relations who’d be able to help get a press release sent out about our two peer-reviewed papers. Since despite being first-in-the-door in January 2020 and then passing peer-review for those same ideas in August 2020, the mainstream corporate media’s entirely refused to mention any of our work - a pattern also mimicked by the U.S. Government, as even the pretend Congressional investigations into COVID’s origins have failed to cite or mention that our peer-reviewed work exists at all.

If Richard Ebright and Alina Chan were really interested in the origins of SARS-CoV-2, wouldn’t they have embraced our August 2020 paper pointing to serial passage, and which also highlighted how vacuous most of the technical arguments in Proximal Origins were?

But regardless of how you want to slice that ethical cake, it turns out that it’s functionally impossible to get a press release sent out musing about a possibly artificial origin of SARS-CoV-2:

So given that my resources are pretty limited and I already blew up my credit cards and went through a bankruptcy after trying and failing to buy publicity for these idea to save a few billion strangers - given the current media landscape it felt like it was a good time to punt on trying to use the intertubes to get the truth out there.

But the good news is printers are fairly cheap, so instead of trying to use social media and emails to get the truth out there, I spent this spring printing-out 20-something copies of the letter below and all its accompanying files. Since although the Exhibits are hyperlinked for ease of access below, all of this was sent out in hardcopy so each Exhibit was printed out and stapled as part of a large snail-mailed package.

And the results were productive enough that in the coming weeks I’m planning on sending out another wave of letters to a few dozen more recipients, at which point I’ll publish the full list of everyone who was mailed. Turns out that kicking things old school can in fact be a productive approach to intransigent government issues. Although to be fair, there’s now a non-zero chance that I’ll soon be disappeared into an El Salvadorian gulag in the not-too-distant future.

So on the off chance there aren’t any more articles in 2025, well, lo siento - but at least rest assured that the flavor of prison-food that I’m eating will be vastly improved from what I got used to in the Maryland state system.

To Whom It May Concern:

This letter outlines efforts by elements within the United States government to occlude the origins of the COVID-19 Pandemic, due to the fact SARS-CoV-2 began as a joint SARS-like live-attenuated vaccine (LAV) program developed between America’s DARPA and China’s PLA which reverted out-of-control at the Wuhan Military Games. This echoes 1977’s unexpected reversion of a LAV against H1N1 and that global pandemic, and 2009’s global H1N1 pandemic which has also been traced to a reverting LAV, in that case it was Mexican pork farms thought to be responsible.[1]

Given that history, as well as the fact that today there’s only one virus that’s known to be engineered and causing active human infections – OPV, the LAV against Polio – just based on first principles, shouldn’t any discussion around the providence of an unexpected pandemic virus begin with reverting LAVs?

Instead of excluding them entirely?

In late January 2020 my childhood best-friend, Jason Daniel Shell, who was then serving as the Director of National Intelligence Programs for America’s NSC conveyed a whitepaper written by me and my father titled Logistical and Technical Exploration into the Origins of the Wuhan Strain of Coronavirus (COVID-19) to the NSC outlining multiple lines of evidence indicating that SARS-CoV-2 had in fact been engineered. That paper formed the backbone for the first peer-reviewed paper to argue that this novel virus has in fact been engineered: Might SARS-CoV-2 Have Arisen via Serial Passage through an Animal Host or Cell Culture? written by me and my father, and which you’ll find enclosed. [Exhibit A]

Proof that our January 2020 whitepaper was in fact conveyed to the NSC and taken seriously can also be found enclosed [Exhibit B], as FOIA results from the DOE’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) after it was tasked with investigating the origins of SARS-CoV-2 capture our whitepaper being emailed from at least 2021 through 2023, on a chain that includes the Z-Division’s Director, David J. Rakestraw. Another name on that email chain is Nils Carlson, who in February 2021 received an exceptional service award from the ODNI while it was headed by Avril Haines.

And although neither me nor father have been formally contacted by anyone from the United States Government in these first five years of the pandemic - despite the fact that my dad worked at NIH for decades and received a Q clearance in the 1980s, and I was TSI/SCI cleared in 2001 at 18 for a scholarship with the NSA - in August 2020 a former Secretary of the Navy who’s been consulting with DARPA for over a decade named Richard Danzig emailed me and my father, since Danzig had noticed that our peer-reviewed paper didn’t have a citation to support our assertion that the H1N1 variant of 1977 had in fact been engineered – in the decades since that virus’s emergence, no one had yet been able to prove whether it was natural or not.

However this was just a clerical oversight, I’d found but failed to link a previously buried and un-referenced Soviet paper from 1981 demonstrating that the H1N1 variant of 1977 had definitively been engineered by serial passage. That lost Soviet paper was highlighted in our peer-reviewed clarification published in February 2021, which demonstrated that the 1977 H1N1 variant had in fact been engineered and was not in fact natural [Exhibit C].

1977’s H1N1 variant has long been speculated to have been the result of a live-attenuated vaccine (LAV) against human influenza developed by either the Soviet or Chinese military, and which reverted unexpectedly out-of-control after it was tested on soldiers, and then spread from them on to their communities and then the rest of the world. And our February 2021 paper demonstrated that the 1977 outbreak almost certainly started with a LAV by linking it directly to serial passage – a process inextricable from developing LAVs. Humanity’s first viral LAV was created by Louis Pasteur, who serially passaged a weakened rabies virus through rabbit cells to attenuate the rabies virus down enough so that it could serve as a LAV against the disease, in humanity’s very first version of viral engineering.

And as well as being the first example of viral engineering, LAVs would eventually become the first form of engineered virus to claim a human life, after an improperly designed LAV against Polio that was tested in 1935 killed five of the American orphans it was tested on and left ten more of them paralyzed. The good news is that a LAV against Polio was eventually perfected by Albert Sabin which was totally safe to administer, however the bad news was that even a completely safe LAV like Sabin’s Oral Polio Vaccine (OPV) still had the potential to revert all the way back to full virulence, and create active infections. A phenomenon Sabin’s OPV began to personify by 2017, when for the first time cases of Polio from reverted OPV exceeded the number of cases caused by the wild Polio virus.

Then between 2017 and 2022, cases of Polio caused by reverted OPV spiked from 21 all the way up to 786, and by 2023 even an updated version of Sabin’s OPV-LAV called nOPV which was specifically designed in 2012 not to revert – it had also begun to revert as well.

Richard Danzig has been working as a consultant for DARPA since at least May 2008, when he penned a whitepaper for them titled Preparing for Catastrophic Bioterrorism which features an extensive Acknowledgement section [Exhibit D] which includes COVID-19 bureaucratic all-stars such as Tom Inglesby and Bob Kadlec. Far more curiously, Richard Danzig was later a co-author alongside Avril Haines on a 2018 whitepaper [Exhibit E] which includes the following excerpt:

“If, for example, a highly contagious disease like SARS broke out in North Korea, we believe the resulting concerns would render America and China, at least for these purposes, allies.”

So although I can’t present concrete evidence that Avril Haines and the ODNI have been aware of any of our work, I can say that by at least November 2020 David Asher and the rest of the State Department’s Arms Control Team was using our August 2020 paper to try and lay the groundwork to invoke Article V of the UN’s Biological Weapons Convention against China [Exhibit F]. And as earlier demonstrated: by at least 2021 and through 2023, the LLNL team tasked to investigate COVID’s origins has been emailing about our work, including Nils Carlson, a scientist who’d received a reward directly from the ODNI.

And yet, the only somewhat direct contact my father and I have had from our government came in April 2021, when David Asher, who’d been emailing about our work with his State Department Arms Control Team since at least November 2020 and was then tasked with investigating the origins of SARS-CoV-2, contacted us from his personal Protonmail. This contact only came after I published Golden Silkworms in Pandora’s Box on April 1^st 2021, which directly argued that this pandemic began just like the H1N1 Pandemic of 1977 had started – as a live-attenuated vaccine that reverted out-of-control.

After all, as the introduction to that paper highlights: Baric’s lab at UNC was the only place in the world known to be working on a LAV against SARS-like viruses, and also would’ve been the perfect intermediary for known WIV-UNC collaborators such as Dr. Shi Zhengli to convey this knowledge on to China’s PLA. Mr. Asher directly referenced Golden Silkworms in Pandora’s Box as my “magnum opus” during our phone-call using Signal, and then dangled the offer of $10,000 to let Jamie Metzl – whose name also appears on the FOIAed documents from LLNL – take public control of the narrative.

Then in the fall of 2021, media coverage switched to the “DEFUSE” program, which Maj. Murphy claimed described a program to create a live-attenuated vaccine for bats. However not only does SARS-CoV-2 barely bind to bat cells, there is absolutely nothing in the DEFUSE documents that describes the creation of a live-attenuated vaccine - DEFUSE instead describes totally novel vaccine-delivery systems which are not in any way LAVs. Additionally, the only portions of DEFUSE that reference humanizing a virus was already highlighted in our August 2020 paper:

And in subsequent years, EcoHealth Alliance received funding for project proposals outlining gain‐of‐function research to be done in Wuhan, hoping to use cell cultures and humanized mice as well as “[spike]‐protein sequence data, infectious clone technology, in vitro and in vivo infection experiments and analysis of receptor binding”^{[ 33 ]} to manipulate bat coronavirus genomes—all of which are consistent with the wet‐work that would be needed to engineer this novel coronavirus in a laboratory.

A citation which points to a grant, Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence that appears to be linked to DEFUSE, since they share significant overlapping passages when examined in-full.

Over the past years, the United States Government has still refused to publicly acknowledge our work in any form at all, and even the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic refused to mention or reference our work, despite numerous communications to its Chairman’s office by both telephone and mail, including a letter sent by my father both electronically and traditionally and also published online for good measure [Exhibit G].

Our research has been buried because “serial passage” is nearly synonymous with the creation of LAVs, and just like 1977’s H1N1 Pandemic – the COVID-19 Pandemic is the result of a SARS-like LAV that reverted faster-than-expected, in this case likely nucleating at the Wuhan Military Games in the fall of 2019.

After all, as Ron Fouchier of 2012 gain-0f-function experiment infamy stated in July of 2019 at the European Conference of Virology:

“That’s what happened in the 70s, people were trying to do live-attenuated vaccines and doing human challenge studies and that might be the way the H1 re-emerged in the 70s. Some people say it was a lab accident. I don’t believe that. I think it was actually human challenge studies and live-attenuated vaccines that reverted that are the likely candidates of the 1970 reemergence of H1. And we need to make sure that doesn’t happen again.”

The deafening silence around the idea that SARS-CoV-2 could’ve begun as a LAV is the result of a directed campaign to point any discussion around an engineered origin for this virus towards a nebulous “lab leak” whose providence could be blamed on careless science in general, and wouldn’t threaten the cloak of omnipotence that’s currently cloaked over vaccine development. Nor would a “lab leak” be an intentional act for which anyone within the Chinese or American governments could be held fully accountable.

Which is why the only voices that are being allowed within America’s media are those arguing for some kind of indeterminate “lab leak,” a mistake that was overlooked, a simple accident – not the development and testing of a vaccine which was very intentionally administered, likely telling themselves that shattering the global population’s trust in vaccines would be worse than the truth getting out.

Everything in this letter is open-source and has already been publicly published on my Substack, my TS/SCI ran out almost 20 years ago, and neither me nor my father have had any formal contact with any representative of the U.S. Government – oddly the only contact we’ve had was through David Asher’s personal Protonmail and not an official government channel, contact which only came in April 2021, shortly after I’d published Golden Silkworms in Pandora’s Box which outlined exactly how SARS-CoV-2 came to be as a reverting live-attenuated vaccine against SARS-like viruses as a collaborative American and Chinese project.

Ralph Baric’s lab at UNC was the only place in the world publicly known to be working on a LAV against the original SARS-CoV, and the PLA has plenty of resources outside the WIV to develop a LAV in secret, and many thousands of captive Uighurs to conceivably test it on. A test which may have appeared to go smoothly in those camps, since unlike the vast majority of other Chinese, Uighurs wash fastidiously after using the bathroom as part of their Muslim practice.

However the Wuhan Military Games, with it’s 250,000 outside volunteers brought in and amplifying the already crowded sanitary conditions of an average Chinese city, would’ve been the perfect format to accelerate the reversion of a LAV - since feces it the most potent viral vector and because OPV is well-known to only revert around poor sanitary conditions that discourage handwashing since that leads to fecal spread.

But since Wikipedia refuses to link our peer-reviewed work and no American newswire will carry a release about it, and all my other efforts to get this story out through the American media have failed - despite New York Times editor William J. Broad emailing me in January 2020 after our whitepaper first made its way in front of the NSC, and contact with reporters from CNN, The Washington Post, New York Magazine, The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, The Intercept, USRTK and more – I’m hoping you folks might know some reporters outside Washington DC’s political and America’s corporate influence who might be interested in getting this story out there.

Because – in case you haven’t noticed the burgeoning outbreaks of previously-suppressed pathogens like TB and measles and various fungi - there’s a very real possibility that SARS-CoV-2 is going to prove something akin to airborne-HIV, and that humanity is a real long way from winning this fight.

x_________________

Dan Sirotkin

harvard2thebighouse@gmail.com

[1] Gibbs, A. J., Armstrong, J. S., & Downie, J. C. (2009, November 24). From where did the 2009 “swine-origin” influenza A virus (H1N1) emerge? Virology journal. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2787513/

Return to part I here.

Albert Sabin was only able to create his temporarily miraculous live-attenuated vaccine against Polio because he noticed that not only could Polio infect the central nervous-system and create the debilitating paralysis that Polio was most known and feared for, but after autopsying hundreds of human cadavers around the Cincinnati area, he found that Polio first infected intestinal tissue before moving on to the nervous system.

And if you were following closely at the start of this pandemic, you might remember that much was made of the fact that SARS-CoV-2 could bind to the receptor ACE2, since it’s expressed a bit in the lungs and would so might facilitate airborne transmission, which somehow was up for debate in the first several years of this pandemic. It was the original SARS-CoV’s ability to bind to ACE2 which scientists assumed gave it the ability to transmit through the air, so in the early months of the pandemic much was made of the fact that SARS-CoV-2 could also bind to this receptor.

However, sometimes only a picture can do reality justice. And if you take a moment to examine the data, you’ll learn that its exceedingly unlikely that ACE2 is the sole receptor that opens the door to airborne transmission, since its in no way unique to our lungs and in fact is far more concentrated throughout our gastrointestinal tracts:

Although it has probably the most lyrical name in our guts, the duodenum isn’t widely known as part of the human gastrointestinal tract, so given the chart above that’s probably worth pointing that out. It’s the third label on the Y-axis, after Small Intestine and Colon, and about a dozen organs before Lungs are listed.

So despite all the celebrity around SARS-CoV-2’s affinity to ACE2 having something to do with its airborne transmission and the many thousands of academic papers documenting how much our friendly novel neighborhood coronavirus just absolutely adores ACE2, it turns out that this affinity is far more likely to be related to wanting to bind with our gastrointestinal tissues - the very same viral nature that Albert Sabin identified to design his almost infallible LAV against Polio.

And in terms of bat-like coronaviruses that bind to ACE2, the first of those was found by a Chinese researcher with the Wuhan Institute of Virology named Xingyi Ge, the lead author of a paper published back in 2013 that would list the WIV’s batwoman, Zhengli Shi, as the final and corresponding author. Then within two years, both of those bat-wrangling WIV all-stars would be co-authors on what would become one of the most notorious research-papers in history, the 2015 masterpiece from Baric’s lab which featured the creation of chimeric coronaviruses whose spike-proteins had been swapped around.

An experiment that you might be able to attach to the development of biological weapons if you’re sporting an extra chromosome of your own and squint really hard, but which makes far more sense as a step in eventually developing a live-attenuated vaccine against SARS-like viruses. After all, Baric’s lab at UNC wasn’t the only known place on earth to be developing SARS-like bioweapons, it was in fact the only place on earth known to be trying to create a live-attenuated vaccine for SARS-like viruses.

And as important as weapons obviously are, humanity’s never actually seen the deployment of a viral WMD or any virus that’s been weaponized at all short of corpses being catapulted over ancient walls - probably in no little part due to the reality that the world is now so interconnected with international travel. It’s not quite literally impossible to imagine deploying an effectively weaponized virus that wouldn’t make its way back to your own population within at least a few years.

But the development of a live-attenuated vaccine against all SARS-like viruses, curing the Common Cold forever? Totally peaceful endeavor, and beyond that - if you stick the landing, many millions of lives are saved, and you’ve just so happened to create the most lucrative viral strain in the history of the world.

Which would explain Xingyi Ge and Zhengli Shi’s coauthorship on that 2015 paper on chimeric coronaviruses out of Baric’s lab at UNC, since although the original SARS-CoV had bound to ACE2 back in 2003, that distinguished it from other known bat-related coronaviruses known to the scientific community at the time especially since it was supposed to come from civets and not bats.

And if the original SARS-CoV was part of an entirely covert live-attenuated vaccine program that leaked out well before it could be weakened but was meant to immunize against the common cold and every other coronavirus known to man, its affinity for ACE2 would also make sense - after all, in the years following its initial emergence SARS-CoV managed to escape from Chinese labs at least four times. In that scenario, its airborne transmission might be a result of other receptors beyond ACE2 that allow for airborne coronavirus transmission along with the instinct for highly-pathogenic viruses of all kinds - but especially coronaviruses - to explore new hosts via airborne transmission.

So just as 2003’s original SARS-Cov and also MERS-CoV were likely part of covert LAV programs that got out way before they were attenuated down into a live-attenuated vaccines, SARS-CoV-2 is what happens when a LAV reverts out of control - something that happened with LAVs against H1N1 in both 1977 and 2009.

Since despite all of its molecular mysteries, the most telling element of SARS-CoV-2 is that after you remove its notorious furin-cleavage site, or FCS, it acts in a completely alien way compared to an influenza whose FCS has been removed. In the case of influenza, if you remove its FCS you get a flu that’s still going to debilitate its host and make active infections like almost nothing has changed, it’s just going to have a hard time jumping into a new species and probably won’t infect nerve tissue as well. But if you remove the FCS of SARS-CoV-2, turns out you get a vastly weakened virus which in fact works as live-attenuated vaccine against further spread of SARS-CoV-2, and won’t even spread among cohoused hamsters.

But just in case that’s not convincing, here’s a bunch more evidence that SARS-CoV-2 began its life as a live-attenuated vaccine:

• Baric’s lab at UNC was the only place on earth attempting to make SARS-like LAVs

• SARS-CoV-2 is demonstrating the highly convergent “gatekeeping” mutations that are the hallmark of the best-studied reverting LAV, OPV

• SARS-CoV-2’s behavior indicates it may have been cold-adapted, a common approach with LAVs to make sure they can replicate in the upper respiratory tract but not the lungs

• SARS-Cov-2’s genes are generally more potent immune suppressors than their homologues from the other coronaviruses, including the temporally paradoxical observation that “SARS-CoV-2 proteins are more potent in their inhibition of innate immune signaling than the corresponding SARS-CoV-1 protein.”

• SARS-CoV-2 has a novel gene named CaORF15 which encodes a protein which has never been seen before other than in RaTG13, which is a consensus sequence with no natural provenance either, and seems to have the immunosuppressive activity that you would expect for a vaccine.

• SARS-Cov-2’s CpG dinucleotide ratio looks like it was part of the same codon deoptimization used to attenuate OPV

So perhaps it’s a coincidence, but just prior to the emergence of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic in the summer of 2019, a scientist intimately involved with gain-of-function research named Ron Fouchier made the rather pointed statement below at the European Congress of Virology, in reference to the H1N1 outbreak of 1977 - a virus that wasn’t demonstrated to be artificial until my dad and I published the Clarification that headlines this article in February 2021:

“That’s what happened in the 70s, people were trying to do live-attenuated vaccines and doing human challenge studies and that might be the way the H1 re-emerged in the 70s. Some people say it was a lab accident. I don’t believe that. I think it was actually human challenge studies and live-attenuated vaccines that reverted that are the likely candidates of the 1970 reemergence of H1. And we need to make sure that doesn’t happen again.”

Then by the early months of 2020, perhaps Fouchier’s fears were just remarkably prescient, or perhaps he knew due to his notorious gain-of-function experiments of 2012 with H5N1 which involved an FCS that seemed to appear out-of-nowhere and allow for airborne transmission between ferrets, and due to the history of OPV’s unexpected reversion, just maybe Dr. Ron Fouchier - who rose to notoriety after his 2012 gain-of-function experiments serially passaging H5N1 through ferrets - had a bit of preemptively guilty conscience.

And if Fouchier was aware of covert experiments run by China’s Peoples Liberation Army (PLA) serially passaging coronaviruses, likely at least lightly mimicking his experiments from over a decade ago, that would also explain his statement in this FOIAed email made in the early months of 2020:

At the time, Fouchier’s statement in point two - that a furin-cleavage site (FCS) can appear in human coronaviruses after serial passage - brought a fair amount of confusion among Tony Fauci and his friends who received that email. Because at the time, there was nothing in the published and publicly-available literature about any coronavirus gaining a FCS during passage, that’d only been demonstrated during the notorious gain-of-function experiments of 2012 with H5N1 and ferrets, an avian influenza not a human coronavirus.

But - and you might want to hang on as tight as you can to your pearls here - militaries from China to America do in fact operate all kinds of secret scientific projects involving genetic manipulation, especially when they’re related to bioweapons - either their creation or prevention. In the case of SARS-C0V-2 and any artificial chimera that can bind to human cells, there’s always going to be a little of both. Because in their un-attenuated form highly-pathogenic viruses that can bind to human cells well enough for head-to-head transmission like the original SARS-CoV and MERS-CoV hold clear potential to be weaponized, but after you attenuate a highly-pathogenic virus down into a LAV - like the Rabies virus going from a nightmare death sentence to a miracle after attenuation - there’s no longer any threat, so long as onward community transmission is limited like with OPV around handwashing.

So maybe that’s why it took fifty years for the fact that 1977’s H1N1 variant was in fact engineered to become part of the known and published scientific corpus. Well, kind of, because that paper’s been almost entirely buried despite its link to SARS-CoV-2’s engineered origins. Perhaps that’s a coincidence, or perhaps that’s the result of a concentrated effort to occlude SARS-CoV-2’s origins in yet another LAV program that went sideways.

Ferrets also have an intimate relationship with our ongoing COVID-19 Pandemic and the development of live-attenuated vaccines for SARS-like viruses, as the search for an intermediate species for SARS-CoV-2 was actually solved all the way back in August 2020, when the first peer-reviewed paper arguing for an engineered origin of this virus went out its way to point out that SARS-CoV-2’s immediate affinity for farmed mink had already answered the question of an intermediate host:

2.3. Ferreting Out the Signs of Serial Passage

Curiously, studies examining SARS‐CoV‐2's infectivity in ferrets found that it spreads readily among them, and also appears airborne in that animal model.^{[ 38 ]} This lends support to the idea that ferrets may have been used for serial passage since viruses typically take a significant many months if not years to acclimate enough to spread at all among any new species, nonetheless become airborne, which requires further mutations.

This relationship was further supported by reports out of the Netherlands that the novel coronavirus had spread among thirteen different mink farms there, and also to at least one farm in Denmark^{[ 39 ]} and to another in Spain where 87% of the mink were infected.^{[ 40 ]} Minks are a closely related subspecies of ferret that can produce fertile offspring together, and so the fact that not only did the virus spread to fifteen different farms in three countries, but also appears to have spread from minks into farm workers^{[ 41 ]} indicates that accidental commercial serial passage through minks could have played a role in its creation, as an alternative to laboratory ferrets. Nevertheless, regardless of where any possible serial passage occurred, the fact that SARS‐CoV‐2 spreads from humans to minks and then back to humans demonstrates a high affinity for both species, despite neither nominally being a natural reservoir.

However it’s a solution that’s been completely and entirely buried by the media, and everyone pretending they’re investigating an engineered origin of SARS-CoV-2, which is probably because ferrets are the animal of choice to develop vaccines for SARS-like viruses:

“Although different animal models are used in vaccine studies, the most appropriate model for studying SARS is ferret since it develops the typical clinical signs, viral replication patterns and lung pathology compatible with that of SARS pathogenesis in humans.”

Since the appearance of an FCS in the 2012 gain-of-function experiments came as a surprise to the currently accepted model of mostly linear virology that assumes one set genome moves in near complete stability from host-to-host, it doesn’t come as a surprise at all if you account for virology’s long-lost field: Quasispecies Swarm Theory. A field which was originally proposed by Francis Crick of DNA fame to Dr. Manfred Eigen over an otherwise uneventful breakfast in 1971, and seemed promising given the results already obtained by Sol Spiegelman and colleagues from their serial transfer experiments of RNA taken from a virus that infects bacteria in a closed system, which demonstrated Darwinian behavior in vitro.

A more complicated way of saying that since as far back as DNA was being proposed and accepted, there was a model of RNA behavior which both held up to experimental conditions and also presented a viable framework to help explain how life first emerged from a fractal model of baby-proteins that only build in complexity ever-so-slightly from one stage to the next.

The quasispecies swarm model approaches RNA viruses not as discrete genotypes transmitted on by discrete strains, but instead as quasispecies of mutant swarms of virions which carry distinct but complimentary sets of alleles - collections of genes thought to work together - which cooperate in concert in real-time to establish and expand infections. A concept that can help explain why it’s only farmworkers or others in close and continual contact with live birds who contract H5N1 through the air, a process that that takes multiples waves of infections as the quasispecies swarm looks for the best combination of variants to infect the new host. And so one of the first empirical changes that comes once you consider an RNA virus as a quasispecies genomically, is that at any point in time an average of all the swarm’s variant genomes serves as the smallest selective unit, as opposed to using individual virions or any single extant genome in a population, the classical approach.

When the classical approach is applied to more advanced organisms it seems self-evident, of course each of us has our own discrete genome and pattern of nucleotides that’s unique to who we are as individuals. Right?

Our free will is written into the unique pattern of the nucleotides that makes us who we are.

However infections from RNA viruses don’t work the same way as large organisms being programmed by DNA, and there’s no such thing as an RNA virus that exists out on its own without a whole bunch of its relatives inhabitating neighboring cells. All RNA viruses exists as quasispecies swarms of related variants, sharing related and complimentary genomes just as you share extremely similar genomes with all of your aunts, uncles, and cousins.

So although it’s possible to pluck each of us out away from our families and examine us as discrete units at any one moment in time - Is it really possible to separate any given individual completely and entirely from their family, when you consider the course of their entire lives? So while our lives take many decades to fully take form, RNA viruses go through many generations within just a few hours.

Genetically, at any given moment, sure - your genes aren’t exactly the same as your parents or siblings, assuming you don’t have an identical twin. However just as RNA viruses exist in obvious and observable experiments as collections of related but slightly-different alleles all trying to work together in real time to conquer a new host over the course of hours and days, so do extended families work together to help their close relatives and offer support to accomplish goals - but with humans the timescale is more often years and decades, a reflection of the fact that our ability for reproduction is a nine-month gauntlet to make one copy, as opposed to the viral ability to spit off hundreds of offspring in an hour.

The fundamentally amorphous nature of RNA virus genomes, especially when considered over time, means that the quasispecies approach invalidates the idea of a singular “wild type” isolate genome with one immutable nucleotide sequence described as the contagion at any one moment, since under this approach every RNA virus is by definition a swarming ever-changing mutant cloud of quasispecies variant virions. This results in a probabilistic uncertainty around exactly which section of the cloud is being observed at any one moment, a cloud which will be different the next time you sample it regardless of how representative your first sample was.

As one study revealed, although it’s usually possible to identify a majority consensus sequence from a sample of a host infected by COVID-19, the sample had a broad median variant count of 23, with nearly 250 different variants found in total just within one single host. And considering that about half of the observed mutations thought to have a significant impact on gene expression and samples differing throughout the day even in the same organ system, as well as the fact that barely 2% of the minority variants were found to overlap at all between any two hosts - the inherently nebulous quasispecies swarming nature of SARS-CoV-2 begins to coalesce even more.

And one of the most fundamental premises of quasispecies theory is that unlike the broadly accepted linear theory which imagines that new variants only emerge after recombination or other predictable processes, minority variants can in fact appear seemingly out of nowhere, especially in the context of the swarm recovering from being forced through an evolutionary bottleneck, as occurs with reverting live-attenuating vaccines.

Or in the parlance of quasispecies theory and the inherently cloaked nature of minority variants, its possible for an altered genome to exist within the quasispecies swarm and remain hidden unless you present it with a bottleneck that requires its unique set of skills - such as the airborne jump to a new species which the FCS seems to enable for both influenza and SARS-CoV-2 - at which point it’ll quickly reach fixation.

If that sounds a bit complicated, there’s good news: Back in 2012 the aforementioned Ron Fouchier and another team helped demonstrate this concept with a gain-of-function experiment.

In each of the 2012 gain-of-function serial passage experiments with influenza strains and ferrets, the FCS didn’t appear as a response to the challenge of airborne transmission between hosts, it existed in a very small frequency within each H5N1 swarm prior to each experiment - getting created not by a natural predictable evolutionary process, but instead by the direct artificial outside manipulation of both teams of scientists - and then quickly reached majority status once the bottleneck of jumping from ferret-to-ferret in the air was presented as an evolutionary opportunity.

It was observed by each team after successful airborne transmission between ferrets, however before this challenge was presented to the H5N1 swarms, they were both first heavily mutated by artificial outside means - directly splicing in genes from H1N1 in the case of Dr. Yoshiro Kawaoka, and bathing the swarm in a mutagen in the case of Dr. Ron Fouchier - both artificial, inherently sloppy, and unpredictable processes a long way from surgically splicing precise nucleotides in-and-out. It was these mutational processes which led to the cryptic emergence of the FCS in small minority subpopulations of their swarms prior to their presentation to caged ferrets for passaging.

These were the events that created the FCS during those experiments, the outside intervention of scientists intent on carrying out their gain-of-function experiments - not the challenge of jumping through the air between ferrets. Once it exists anywhere in the swarm, the FCS is going to remain at levels that are too small for typical detection until its special ability is called for: Airborne transmission between mammalian hosts. Directly supporting this specialized airborne role for the FCS is the apparent reemergence of SARS-CoV-2’s FCS within Calu-3 cells - cells grown from the surface of human lungs - after it falls off in Vero cells. The swarm doesn’t need an FCS to flourish inside monkey kidney cells, inside Vero cells - however once it gets placed into human lung cells, now the chance of airborne transmission is back on the table, and so the FCS quickly returns to dominance inside the swarm, reaching complete fixation in just a single passage.

So in 2012 with H5N1, it was caged ferrets who first taught humanity that it just takes one FCS created by unpredictable mutational processes to enable airborne viral transmission. And in 2019 at the Wuhan Military Games it was the 250,000 volunteers from all over China and many thousands of athletes from all over the world crowding into Wuhan, combined with the cultural practices of both pooping in holes and not being overly concerned with handwashing who summoned the FCS back into existence. Which of course is just a fancy way of saying all it would take is a single FCS left behind in the many thousands of doses of a live-attenuated vaccine doses needed for meaningful large-scale testing to eventually reach complete fixation with the SARS-CoV-2 quasispecies swarm, and send the whole thing airborne.

This is probably a good time to mention that the scientist who first promoted hand-washing to prevent the transmission of pathogens lived roughly 200 years ago.

In perhaps the scientific and medical communities’ single biggest warning to anyone who dare rock their boat, Ignaz Semmelweis first proposed back in 1847 that everyone should wash their hands when they went from patient-to-patient, and especially doctors between going from dissecting a cadaver and then shoving themselves forearms-deep up inside birthing women. And yet because he had no theory to explain what seems like the most common sense of practices now, Semmelweis was ridiculed and rejected by the entirety of the scientific community and forced into professional isolation.

Then about 20 years after his assertion, Semmelweis’s voice had been silenced.

Not because it’d been disproven, but because in 1865 due to the strain of arguing against the entirety of civilization and probably seeing lots and lots of corpses every hour of every day for years at a time no matter where he looked and even after he closed his eyes, Semmelweis was committed to an insane asylum. And then within two weeks, he was dead - not technically from the beating he got from the guards, but almost certainly from the gangrene infection that resulted from their beating.

And although live-attenuated vaccines wouldn’t start to revert for a very long time, Semmelweis had also described the single best preventative measure to stop the spread of many pathogens, including the reversion of LAVs. Since although OPV spent decades appearing totally safe, within communities where hand-washing isn’t really a thing or where there isn’t modern plumbing to begin with for any number of reasons, feces will always remain as a specter since they are the most potent viral vector.

Luckily for humanity, Semmelweis’s assertions around the importance of handwashing would begin to start becoming accepted within about 20 years of his death. And in the years that followed he would eventually become known as the “Father of Infection Control” and even the “Savior of Mothers” due to how obviously and immediately deadly unwashed hands could prove to birthing or expectant birthing women especially if they’d recently been shoved up inside a cadaver that’d been dead for months.

So the medical and scientific communities didn’t admit they were wrong in the 1850s without an inordinate amount of kicking-and-screaming, as well as what just about amounted to a homicide of the scientist trying to warn them about how dangerous their practices actually were.

Has much at all changed in nearly 200 years?

Just like the gain-of-function experiments of 2012, the FCS is an unexpected addition whose appearance speaks to the lack of complete scientific knowledge and industrial mistakes, not a weapons system. Was the FCS expected to appear in 2012 with H5N1 and serial passage through ferrets among two different teams in two different parts of the world?

Nope, total surprise, came out of nowhere. Arguably just as much of a surprise to the scientific community as the idea that you should wash your hands after dissecting a cadaver if you were about to shove them up inside a pregnant woman shortly thereafter.

And just like the first deaths due to viral engineering all the way back in 1935 were an accident and not the result of scientific malicious intent, those souls were still helpless orphans slaughtered in the name of science - scientists often don’t set out to kill people, but when they do the first instinct isn’t to apologize, it’s to deflect. Just like the reversion of a live-attenuated vaccine for H1N1 that went global back in 1977 was an accident that became a fifty-year mystery, and just like almost no one - scientist or not - knows that the H1N1 Pandemic of 2009 can be very directly tied to the origins of HIV, as both outbreaks originated as LAVs gone wrong.

But even if you’re having a hard time digesting the reality of where SARS-CoV-2 came from, that doesn’t change any of the results below. All of which indicate not only that this virus not getting weaker, but that taken all together - there isn’t any meaningful difference between what’s happening now and the scenario of HIV going airborne before it could be detected. Because after all, although Hollywood has been overly dramatic when it comes to its depiction of what Evil would look like if it emerged as a viral pandemic, its already nailed the nature of the Devil when it comes to his presence among us.

When the Devil shows up its not with hooves and horns and it’s not with uncontrollable plumes of infected blood. When the Devil shows up and his influence goes unchecked, the only time Evil really has a chance to spread among everyone alive on earth, is when the infestation of his influence is silent and quiet and doesn’t even seem to be happening.

Since one of the things Hollywood got right, is that the Devil’s greatest trick is convincing us that he isn’t even really there at all.

The worst case scenario of a viral infection isn’t a highly-pathogenic and obviously deadly strain like Ebola or the original SARS-CoV, it’s the story that’s already been partially told by HIV. Bombs that beep and make themselves known are possible to defuse, that’s not the worst kind of bomb. The worst kind of bomb is one without a visible public countdown, which won’t be defused because no one even realizes that it’s counting down at all.

So just how much do HIV and SARS-CoV-2 have in common?

Well, both HIV and SARS-CoV-2 have the ability to infect immature red blood cells, causing a drastic imbalance in their level and throwing oxygen levels out of whack - something not observed in other viruses. Building on this mimicry, they also both directly infect and destroy CD4+ T cells, using a similar mechanism - their mass death is the hallmark of HIV’s first ravages. And they share a number of other eerie evolutionary parallels:

“Both viruses evolve using insertions, deletions, and recombination in addition to base substitution. Both viruses evolve under immune pressure and have circulating variants with mutations in key epitope regions that confer relative resistance to neutralizing antibodies; indels are important for the evolution of antibody resistance in both HIV-1 and SARS-CoV-2. Both viruses have heavily glycosylated receptor-binding surface proteins that enable entry into host cells”

Even more alarming, SARS-CoV-2 has begun targeting white blood cells, the immune system’s defenders, by disrupting their basic metabolic functions. Our novel coronavirus has also been observed reactivating endogenous retroviruses within white blood cells, something that also occurs as HIV develops into AIDS, attacking helpful T-cells in a similar fashion to HIV, and also invading our white blood cells without even needing to use ACE2.

And if HIV was linked to CHAT-OPV, that hasn’t been accepted and was barely humored by the scientific community after about 50 years despite plenty of debate. And back in early 2020, no one had even proven that 1977’s H1N1 was engineered at all, nonetheless linked to a live-attenuated vaccine program that had reverted out-of-control. Plus it’s not like anyone was publicly trying to link the H1N1 Pandemic of 2009 to a reverting LAV either, and since reverting LAVs weren’t something the academic world were ever encouraged to investigate or even learn about - The time was ripe for another cover-up.

Starting with the a lead scientific editor with two Pulitzers at The New York Times, so long as the entirety of the media ecosystem was in their pocket - we’d have contact with The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, CNN, The Washington Post, Pro Publica, and Vanity Fair, however all of them would refuse to admit our work existed at all - all they had to do was wait for SARS-CoV-2 to fade away just like H1N1 in LAV-form had done twice in recent memory. Of course it would get weaker over time just like H1N1, the fabled “Spanish Flu,” had. However even after being engineered by serial passage, H1N1 was still a natural virus carrying natural genes, ones which had been infecting humans for the many thousands of years that influenza has been infecting humanity.

And it’s not just giant organizations like the New York Times refusing to report on the peer-reviewed research pointing at “serial passage” as a primary method used to engineer SARS-CoV-2, even a seemingly well-meaning organization like USRTK will refer to “serial passage” multiple times in its reporting - but not once like to the peer-reviewed papers that explain it, nor even mention that my father and I exist at all. This is not journalism, it's an intentional distraction from any mention of “live-attenuated vaccines” or their past reversions. Even after USRTK’s own FOIA revealed that the head of the DOE’s secretive Z-Division had been discussing our January 2020 whitepaper, I only found that file after stumbling across it on their site - if they were behaving ethically and honestly, why not reach out to us?

Well, perhaps this has something to do with it:

And just in case that seems a bit dated, here’s Claire Danes explaining how the relationship between the CIA and supposedly independent journalists is facilitated right now.

SARS-CoV-2’s viral parallel is OPV, a LAV made from three mutant strains of Polio isolated from samples that’d been extensively passaged through non-human species, and which weren’t ever supposed to be able to cause active infections in humans at all. And although influenzas can have hidden long-term effects that take decades to reveal themselves, no influenza presents with anything like Polio’s paralytic curse. And just like OPV gets stronger the more transmission there is within a community, and just like reverted OPV can blow through the vaccines meant to stop not only natural Polio but even those tailored to stop reverting LAVs - SARS-CoV-2 is quite clearly growing stronger and laughing at vaccines as it blows by them.

Our not-so-friendly neighborhood coronavirus is in no way getting weaker.

On a fundamental molecular level, SARS-CoV-2 has been getting more thermodynamically stable as it reverts back closer-and-closer to its original strongest form, allowing initial infections to more easily penetrate deeper into host bodies. And this thermodynamic stability also translates into structural stability, allowing the virus to exist for longer and longer on surfaces, as the newer Omicron variant lasts between three and five times longer than earlier strains depending on the surface they’re being tested on.

This is correlated with how much stronger our novel coronavirus is compared to the flu, since while influenza is inactivated just floating around in the air after just thirty minutes it takes SARS-CoV-2 days to become inactivated in typical commercial air. A phenomenon that likely contributes to the fact that the Omicron variant is now seven-times more lethal than influenza in Hong Kong’s children.

And while the virus is growing sturdier, it’s also regaining more of its highly-pathogenic capabilities and gaining the ability to infect new mammalian hosts. Newer variants are beginning to show the ability to infect hosts ranging from mice, marmosets, and koalas all the way to rats and civets. Jumping into rats is an inevitability that will turn every urban sewer on earth into white-hot forges for new swarming variants, other mutations waiting to happen have the potential to increase binding by one-thousand fold. And beginning to explore a jump into civets is a reminder that they were incorrectly identified as the original host for the first SARS - all samples jumped from humans into civets, not the other way around - a chimeric virus with roughly a 15% mortality rate.

There is nothing slowing this reversion down, the futility of all the vaccination programs is even more apparent than it was a year ago, as new studies “suggest that SARS-CoV-2 is diverging into distinct serological phenotypes and that vaccines tailored to one variant may become vulnerable to infections with another." And due to the emergence of new serotypes, the first step for ADE, it already appears as if troublesome infection-enhancing antibodies are emerging in spike-protein gene-therapy recipients who are exposed to newer variants - while ADE didn’t appear with exposure to the original Wuhan strain, even just the Delta variant was already beginning to use ADE against us.

This means newer, stronger variants will inevitably produce more ADE within vaccinated populations, all the while the Biden Administration very intentionally chose political expediency instead of public health, embodying the Nazi ideal of telling its victims they’re just headed off to the showers as part of their normal daily productive routine - when really the system they’re a part of is dictating their eventual and inevitable execution.

There’s a very good reason that the worst crime anyone in the media is willing to even vaguely humor at all when it comes to the origins of SARS-CoV-2 is the idea that maybe NIH had somehow managed to accidentally fund the gain-of-function research that eventually led to a virus that may have leaked out - totally by accident and with no intention by anyone at all, and certainly not with any intent from China. The finger is pointed at Tony Fauci as if he’ll be able to hold the weight of hundreds of millions of innocent souls lost too early, but then if he gets a pardon he’s untouchable and on paper the cover-up is airtight.

Airtight, at least so long as there’s no one busy poking holes in the entire thing.

So despite the fact that the State Department’s Arms Control team was looking to use our August 2020 peer-reviewed paper on serial passage as early as November 2020 to try and invoke the Biological Weapons Convention against China, we didn’t hear from anyone on that team - or from anyone officially linked to our own government at all - until a couple weeks into April 2021, after I’d published this site’s pinned article on April 1st, where I first argued explicitly that this pandemic began when an orally-administered live-attenuated vaccine against SARS-like viruses first conceived at Baric’s lab in UNC and created as a joint PLA-DARPA project began to revert out-of-control at the Wuhan Military Games.

Because there are plenty of scenarios a lot worse than the idea of a virus that was carelessly funded and which then leaked out somehow, but definitely completely and entirely by accident. Because if SARS-CoV-2 did begin as a live-attenuated vaccine designed and tested in secret by the PLA, well then of course it was polished on China’s Uighur concentration camps - now that orphans and invalids and prisoners and Africans are off-limits for immoral experimental scientific testing for the multi-billionare dollar pharmaceutical industry, do you really believe that the Uighurs would be left unvictimized?

By the biggest authoritarian government on the planet, as a captive and utterly helpless population?

And since Uighurs are Muslims who always wash their hands after defecation, and bathe many times a day by default, what might’ve seemed like the successful test of a live-attenuated vaccine among the Uighur concentration camps would’ve turned into humanity’s last gong-show at the Wuhan Military Games where 250,000 Chinese volunteers would’ve been pooping in open holes and washing their hands much less than half the time. So a virus that seemed totally safe in one scenario, among Muslims who wash fastidiously, would’ve quickly begun to transmit and revert within an overcrowded urban scenario among a population that’s used to pooping in an open hole and only sometimes washing their hands afterwards.

This was in fact the very first scenario that resulted in engineered viruses killing people at all, untested poorly designed LAVs being tested on innocent populations, in experiments that have remained almost entirely undiscussed within the scientific literature for nearly a century. And if anyone with any sort of virological background at all was being even the tiniest bit honest about a discussion around engineered viruses that could infect humans all across the globe, they would be starting with reverting live-attenuated vaccines.

After all, right now at this very moment there’s only one kind of virus that’s definitively known to be engineered that’s infecting humans all over the earth, and that’s the same sort of engineered virus that’s already been linked in the scientific literature to global pandemics twice in just the past fifty years. But despite the best efforts of a whole bunch of folks, just about all of whom have existing ties - either direct or financial - with the U.S. Government, and all of whom have refused to publicly admit that our peer-reviewed work on “serial passage” exists at all, the discussion around reverting live-attenuated vaccines hasn’t remained entirely buried.

Confronting the idea that SARS-CoV-2 began as a live-attenuated vaccine would require the scientific and academic communities to betray the very natures that they’ve been exhibiting for nearly a century, when experimentation on helpless victims was written-off as expediency - putting the useless to at least some kind of use. Behavior that would continue throughout the AIDS Pandemic, when none other than Tony Fauci was rolled-out to both demonize the afflicted and present a cure that didn’t work at all.

To test the first live-attenuated vaccines, human subjects had to be found, and so American scientists flocked first to orphanages to find victims whose death and disappearance no one would notice. But then when our laws got updated enough to make experimenting on orphans and prisoners and anyone else who’d been institutionalized and forgotten illegal, such as the Willowbrook State School whose heinous experiments on vulnerable kids were revealed in the early 1970s by Geraldo’s expose, that pool of subjects dried up. Then finally with the exposure of the heinous Tuskegee Syphilis Study and MK-ULTRA, it seemed like immoral government-sponsored human experimentation might finally be over.

But then unluckily for all of us, men like Bill Gates didn’t let Tuskegee stop them, and moved on to using Africa as one giant pharmaceutical testing ground in the decades that followed, and so experimental drugs and vaccines were pumped into the continent without anything even vaguely resembling ethical safety controls. And when a company couldn’t afford to get its testing done all the way over in Africa, then there were always plenty of African-Americans and other disenfranchised minorities right at home - slipping through the cracks and just waiting to be double-blinded!

There are few people alive more interested in vaccine development than Bill Gates, perhaps because after feeling like he’d pretty much conquered the digital world of ones and zeroes by the late 1990s, there was nothing left for him to do but apply his genius to the genetic world of nucleotides: As, Ts, Gs, and Cs.

Not binary like the digital world, but perhaps close enough.

So perhaps its just one big unfortunate coincidence that it's been Gates’ Global Polio Eradication Initiative, heavily funded by Gates since the 1980s, which first called attention to the need for an improved version of OPV and which created the nOPV which… didn’t work either, and still reverts all the way back to virulent Polio. Because there is no one alive better positioned to liaison between the Chinese government and secretive elements within the American government like DARPA, which perhaps is why Gates was present at Event 201 which took place in NYC in the fall at 2019 right as the Wuhan Military Games were occurring, a date multiple lines of evidence point to as the actual start of the COVID-19 Pandemic.

And Event 201 was also attended by Avril Haines, who was then Deputy Director of the CIA, and would soon become head of the entire Intelligence Community as the Director of National Intelligence. Which is the position she held in August 2020, when our peer-reviewed paper was published, and then within a couple weeks Haines had long-time DARPA and Intelligence Community consultant Richard Danzig email me and my dad to try and get that paper retracted. An email whose distrubtion included luminaries such as Johns Hopkins’ Gigi Kwik-Gronvall - one of the loudest proponents against a lab origin.

It’s probably a good time to point out that Johns Hopkins and DARPA are many hundreds of millions of dollars deep in each others’ business.

When Richard Danzig emailed us we had no idea who he was, but a quick googling revealed that in 2018 he was still very much involved with DARPA and the Intelligence Community, and just a couple years before the pandemic was coauthoring papers alongside Avril Haines pitching the idea that a pandemic would mean a truce between China and America:

This global environment requires that a successful American security strategy do more than attempt to prevail in or manage competition; it must artfully blend and balance competition and cooperation. This is particularly evident in our relations with China, a nation whose economic power, we have emphasized, is approaching America’s and will probably come to exceed it. In this context, our recommended strategic premises encourage a willingness to take risks for peace that at least approaches our acceptance of risk in conflict. This example provides some illustrations of how our call for cooperative initiatives might be translated into action.

…

So it may be in the years ahead. If, for example, a highly contagious disease like SARS broke out in North Korea, we believe the resulting concerns would render America and China, at least for these purposes, allies.

So given that co-authorship between Danzig and Haines, and given Danzig’s uninvited contact with us, its worth taking a moment to take a look at some of the names Danzig acknowledged in his May 2008 paper Preparing for Catastrophic Bioterrorism where he’s specifically listed as a consultant to DARPA and “other Federal Agencies.” Among the handful of names Danzig lists in that 2008 paper is Bob Kadlec, who at the time was just a member of the White House Homeland Security Council. However by 2023, Kadlec had advanced quite a bit, since he was the Assistant Secretary for the US Department of Health during the pandemic.

So if Richard Danzig had a pre-existing relationship with Bob Kadlec dating back to 2008, and if Danzig had co-authored a geopolitical security paper alongside Avril Haines as recently as 2018 - Is it really a huge stretch to imagine that both Avril Haines and Bob Kadlec have been following along with all of this for the past few years?

What are the chances that Richard Danzig contacted us - the authors of the first peer-reviewed paper arguing for a lab origin of SARS-CoV-2 which pointed directly at the serial passage that defines live-attenuated vaccines - and that Haines and Kadlec and everyone else he’s been working with inside DARPA for decades were completely and entirely in the dark about all of it?

Those odds are pretty much zero, especially when you consider how Kadlec describes the genesis of this pandemic:

Some within the United States Government – including Kadlec – now suspect it was vaccine research by People’s Liberation Army scientist Zhou Yusen that may have led to the pandemic. Like Ben Hu, Zhou was also close to Shi Zhengli. Zhou was a decorated Chinese military scientist who worked on coronaviruses at the Beijing Institute of Microbiology and Epidemiology, which is part of the Chinese Academy of Military Medical Sciences and sits under the control of the People’s Liberation Army. His work for the Chinese military was extensive and he often worked alongside the Wuhan Institute of Virology and Shi Zhengli.

…

Perhaps no one has analysed more of Zhou Yusen’s ­papers than Bob Kadlec, one of the top health officials in the US administration at the time of the pandemic. “We think vaccine research resulted in the pandemic – that vaccine ­research was the proximate cause,” he tells this magazine.

Kadlec notes that the type of coronavirus vaccine ­research Zhou Yusen was involved in was “very high risk” because it involved infecting live animals, administering some of them with the vaccine and using others as a control, and then keeping them alive for a period of days or even weeks before eventually euthanising them.

And so, if events were spinning out of control in the aftermath of the Wuhan Military Games in the fall of 2019, where 250,000 extra volunteers gathered in addition to all the international athletes and the poor sanitation of temporary porta-potties at best and pooping in holes by default super-charged the reversion of SARS-CoV-2 just like it does with OPV. So if just one single FCS had been left behind during the industrial attenuation and production process of a LAV meant for thousands - if you take quasispecies theory and the ability of even the smallest minority variant to reach fixation into consideration, you’ll understand that’s all it would’ve taken to send SARS-CoV-2 airborne and begin the COVID-19 Pandemic.

So if something like that was going on, how do you think Bill Gates would’ve been spending his time and energy, and whole epic fuckloads of his money:

What followed [the start of the pandemic] was a steady, almost inexorable shift in power from the overwhelmed governments to a group of non-governmental organizations, according to a seven-month investigation by POLITICO journalists based in the U.S. and Europe and the German newspaper WELT. Armed with expertise, bolstered by contacts at the highest levels of Western nations and empowered by well-grooved relationships with drug makers, the four organizations took on roles often played by governments — but without the accountability of governments.

The four organizations had worked together in the past, and three of them shared a common history. The largest and most powerful was the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, one of the largest philanthropies in the world. Then there was Gavi, the global vaccine organization that Gates helped to found to inoculate people in low-income nations, and the Wellcome Trust, a British research foundation with a multibillion dollar endowment that had worked with the Gates Foundation in previous years. Finally, there was the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, or CEPI, the international vaccine research and development group that Gates and Wellcome both helped to create in 2017.

While dozens of global health organizations participated in the world’s response to Covid, the POLITICO and WELT investigation focused on these four organizations because of their connections to one another — both Gavi and CEPI received seed funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation — and because they together played a critical role in advising governments and the WHO.

The WHO was crucial to the groups’ rise to power. All had longstanding ties to the global health body. The boards of both CEPI and Gavi have a specially designated WHO representative. There is also a revolving door between employment in the groups and work for the WHO: Former WHO employees now work at the Gates Foundation and CEPI; some, such as Chris Wolff, the deputy director of country partnerships at the Gates Foundation, occupy important positions.

Much of the groups’ clout with the WHO stems simply from money. Since the start of the pandemic in 2020, the Gates Foundation, Gavi, and the Wellcome Trust have donated collectively more than $1.4 billion to the WHO — a significantly greater amount than most other official member states, including the United States and the European Commission, according to data provided by the WHO.

“You have to remember that when you’re dealing with the Gates Foundation, it’s almost like you’re dealing with another major country in terms of their donations to these global health organizations,” a former senior U.S. health official said.

So all that said, the bad news for humanity is that there’s quite literally no one with significant power and a voice interested in doing anything more than at most distracting from the truth.

The only reason anyone would want you to focus on bat-caves at this point is to distract you from the fact that although SARS-CoV-2’s distant ancestor’s hosts were bats, when it first hit the world it only spread among two species: humans and the farmed mink which are overlapping species with the lab ferrets used to attenuate LAVs - it barely bound to bat cells at all and never spread from people to them. Simply asserting that SARS-CoV-2 was engineered and leaked out somehow by accident, without first accounting for the long and ongoing history of reverting live-attenuated vaccines infecting humans all across the globe for almost a century, only gives the Devil more and more material for his disguise.

After all, Satan’s greatest trick is to distract you from the reality that he could even be there at all. Sure bad things happen, but those are mostly accidents - not the result of intentional human malice.

And it’s no coincidence at all that there’s an enormous number of folks insisting that this virus is both engineered and that it’s not really a threat, and that infection shouldn’t be seen as any sort of big deal. Turns out that if they aren’t virologists who have spent the past several years acting like there’s no way “serial passage” played a role in its creation, then they often have ties directly either with the billionaires whose existence depends on keeping the economy chugging along like nothing is wrong, or with DARPA if you bother to google their names - from David Relman to Alex Washburne - the entire discourse around direct engineering and accidental leaks is a very intentional distraction.

A distraction that got its start all the way back in early 2020 in an almost simultaneous genesis with this pandemic, when on a brisk Thursday afternoon, the former head of Harvard’s Chemistry Department, Dr. Charles Lieber, strode out of a Boston federal courthouse after agreeing to pay a $1 million cash bond, surrender his and his wife’s passports, and disclose any foreign bank accounts.Lieber had been arrested by the FBI just two days early on January 28th, 2020, on charges that he’d made false statements to Department of Defense and Harvard investigators looking into his ongoing ties with the CCP’s Ten Thousand Talents program, including collaboration with ongoing projects in Wuhan and collecting millions of dollars from the Chinese government for his assistance.

In the confusion around the pandemic’s emergence, the arrest of a Harvard chemistry professor with loose ties to the city of Wuhan certainly seemed strange, but it didn’t seem to have any direct involvement. When samples of SARS-CoV-2 were first being released to the world they seemed remarkably similar, and given how much they spread over the wet market, certainly didn’t seem to be hiding or hard to detect.

So maybe a professor with profound ties to China who’d pioneered research into using electromagnetic fields and nanotechnology to simultaneously detect individual viruses getting arrested at first appeared likely to be coincidental. At the time of its creation in 2004, Lieber marketed the nanotechnology as an invaluable tool for the military to detect biological weapons, and in the years that followed it was presumably privatized and patented since this virus-detecting nanotechnology and Dr. Charles Lieber both just about disappear from the internet until his arrest in January 2020.

So there’s no way of knowing exactly how fine-tuned Lieber’s nanotechnology became in the fifteen years before the COVID-19 Pandemic began, since when it was first announced in 2004 it was only mentioned as being able to distinguish between different families of virus – such as influenza or adenovirus, H1N1 or Dengue Fever. However in all that time, it seems plausible that Lieber’s technology was refined to be able to detect the difference even between different classes of influenza strains. And from looking at one of the patents, it sure seems like it might’ve advanced to the point where it would be able to remotely detect individual nucleotide variations.

And its hard to imagine that Charles Lieber’s release would’ve happened without the intervention of one of the co-founders of MIT’s Broad Institute, Stuart Schreiber, who organized a letter meant to rally support for poor downtrodden Dr. Lieber. Whose only crime was secretly accepting millions and millions of dollars from an adversarial foreign government with an extremely questionable past of unethical genetic experimentation, and which is almost openly committing an institutionalized genocide of an ethnic minority.

Apparently one of the co-founders of the Broad Institute wants his good buddy Chuck back on Harvard’s payroll and reinstated, since if the Department of Justice keeps being mean to preeminent American scientists who secretly accept millions of dollars in bribes for forwarding the interests of a foreign government and then lying about it – other American scientists might not collaborate with Chinese scientists. And if other American scientists aren’t accepting bribes from the CCP and if the actual origins of this pandemic are exposed asgain-of-function research, how is the Broad Institute ever going to make sure its brand-new program which just got a $32 million grant from DARPA is able to carry-out the dangerous and unpredictable gain-of-function research on the human genome it has planned - if there’s another moratorium against gain-of-function work even vaguely touching on the human genome?

Although none of its copy mentions manipulating viruses by name, MIT’s Foundry makes it very clear that tinkering with the human genome is a priority – nominally to improve it of course – however with fully 10% of the human genome derived from one virus or another, including a gene that appears to be fundamentally involved with memory which uses a virus-like action, the idea that the full gamut of experiments on the human genome can be run without being able to serially passage viruses to fully illuminate their full range of interactions with our genome is absurd.

So the world’s billionaires are depending on you being a very particular flavor of stupid, to ignore the fact that the Broad Institute’s Alina Chan’s cartoonishly flattering biopic in Boston Magazine was published less than three-weeks after my father and I first got published in a peer-reviewed publication arguing extensively about the fundamental role serial passage must’ve played in the genesis of SARS-CoV-2. In the years since, Alina Chan has acted like she’s some kind of downtrodden victim despite being quoted many times in countless articles, giving dozens of interviews, and writing a book.

All of that despite never passing peer-review and being a markedly junior scientist, especially compared to my father’s career across multiple decades including being GenBank’s longest serving scientist when he retired right before the pandemic. And following that same pattern, my father and I didn’t were only contacted by a government employee about all of our work after I published Golden Silkworms in Pandora’s Box on April 1st 2021, where I explicitly argued this pandemic began when an orally-administered SARS-like LAV designed with the help of Baric’s lab at UNC started to revert out-of-control at the Wuhan Military Games.

This is despite the fact that David Asher had been aware of our peer-reviewed work since at least November 2020, and yet waited all those months - until I explicitly began writing about a reverting LAV - to contact us at all.

And then after Asher failed to silence us, a few months later in the fall of 2021 the “DEFUSE” proposal was “leaked” by a DARPA employee pretending to suddenly get a streak of integrity for some random reason nearly two years into the pandemic, and all of a sudden that became the only possibly explanation for an engineered virus. A proposal that wasn’t even written until August 2021, and that described the creation of a LAV designed to infect bats - not humans. And although SARS-CoV-2’s ancestral genome appears to have come from bats at some point in the past, our friendly novel neighborhood coronavirus hardly infects bat cells at all, and has never infected bats outside of a lab where they can be completely bathed with the virus. In the first months of this pandemic, SARS-CoV-2 only transmitted among two species: humans and the mink who are sister species with the lab ferrets used to attenuate LAVs.

In the meantime, Alina Chan would be busy attempting to bribe other scientists to have them remove me and my dad from another joint paper we’d been working on about the origins of this pandemic.

Why is it that the American government and the entirety of the media is very excited about interviewing and quoting Alina Chan, an employee of an organization that’s already been linked to Jeffery Epstein’s infiltration and corruption of America’s government, but has never once quoted or interviewed me or my dad - despite our two peer-reviewed publications, the second of which resolved a scientific mystery that’s almost fifty years old?

Well for an entire multitude of reasons, the American government has also managed to keep Jeffery Epstein’s client list and obvious relationship to our intelligence agencies pretty much out of public view or discussion. And just in case it seems a little bit out of left field to suddenly invoke Jeffery Epstein’s name and crimes, there are in fact an enormous number of ties linking Jeffery Epstein not just to MIT, but also to the Broad Institute in particular.

For example, while another one of the Broad Institute’s cofounders was fighting for Stuart Schreiber’s adjudication, here’s why Eric Lander - another Broad Institute cofounder and Biden White House Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy until 2022 - couldn’t get himself confirmed in Biden’s Cabinet, followed by a picture that should help color in some of the edges:

Lander is the director of the Broad Institute of M.I.T. and Harvard and Biden’s pick to be director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, which the president for the first time has made a Cabinet-level post. He’s the only Cabinet nominee who has yet to be confirmed (Biden has not yet nominated an Office of Management and Budget director after he had to withdraw his first pick). His confirmation hearing is set for April 29, more than two months after the hearings for Biden’s other Cabinet nominees wrapped up.

Lander and several other professors met with Epstein in 2012 in the office of Martin Nowak, a Harvard mathematical biologist, four years after Epstein pleaded guilty to solicitation of prostitution involving an underage girl. The meeting was reported by BuzzFeed News as part of a 2019 investigation that revealed Epstein’s lavish donations to scientists at M.I.T. and Harvard. There are also several photographs of the meeting showing Epstein with scientists, including two of Epstein and Lander. The pictures had previously been on JeffreyEpstein.org, a website Epstein ran for one of his foundations.

And since those telltale photos of Epstein and Lander appear to have been pretty thoroughly scrubbed from the internet, here’s one that gets the same message across:

And although the insistence that SARS-C0V-2 is entirely tame is the worst kind of atrocity, at least it’s more transparently evil than pretending there’s no way to know how bad it is at all.

That’s not to say everyone involved in the obfuscation understands exactly what they’re doing, far from it. That’s the entire idea, most folks without billions of dollars haven’t sold their souls yet - they’re not intentionally helping the perpetuation of Evil, just as none of the scientists involved with the testing on helpless orphans and prisoners over the past many decades thought they were doing Satan’s deeds. Long before Milgram, they proved that well-meaning people would do all sorts of heinous shit in the name of scientific progress.

So just so you’re aware, it’d be real easy for the CIA to do what it’s done over-and-over again for decades, and spread its tentacles around enough to convince a bunch of misguided Americans and greedy foreign-nationals that hiding the truth about the origins of SARS-CoV-2 was in America’s best interest, and that helping to occlude our involvement in any way with a virus that got out, that spinning those lies would somehow would make them patriots.

Effective Evil is a quiet thing that silently twists our hearts with the illusion of well-meaning.

The CIA quite literally makes its living convincing people put in places of trust to do really heinous acts of violence and betrayal. People throughout history who believed they were serving the public good, because of course their ends justified their means.

A relationship between intentions and outcomes that was likely noticed shortly after genetic engineered as a concept entered the public consciousness, since it didn’t take long after the manipulation of nucleotides emerged for parallels to be made to the inherent prohibition against “playing God” that’s long been understood to be symbolized within the first tree that shows up in the Book of Genesis.

A tree that most people don’t realize bears two simultaneous and interwoven names: The Tree of Life as well as The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. So given the power that nucleotides gives those who manipulate them over the very fabric of all life that exists, it shouldn’t come as any sort of a surprise that genetic engineering has so long been linked with just about the oldest moral, ethical, and religious warnings that exists.

Because scientists haven’t gotten everything right, but at least before long they realized that genetic engineering poses a threat not just to a few civilizations gathered around any particular basin or other geographical feature, but a clear and present danger to all humanity - to us as a very species. Because if Evil is allowed to spread unchecked, if Satan’s mask never slips because there’s just one set of hands tugging at it, if the day does come when the courage of men fails, when we forsake our friends, and break all bonds of fellowship - that’s when Evil wins and Satan prevails.

But there’s some good news, and in addition to illuminating the cloaked nature the Devil seeks when he takes human form, Hollywood definitely nailed what it means to fight back against Evil. So despite the fact that we all wish this pandemic hadn’t come to us, all we have to do is decide what to do with the time that is given us. Things have seemed all wrong, and by rights none of us should even be here. But we are. And maybe in the end, it’s like we’re in the great stories - the ones that really mattered, full of darkness and danger they were. And sometimes you didn’t want to know the end, because how could the end be happy?

How could the world go back to the way it was after so much bad had happened?

The stories that came down to just one person, no matter how small or uninfluential they think they might be, making a choice to do the right thing, and doing whatever they can to fight back against the Evil that’s threatening to consume us all.

Because make no mistake, the clock is ticking and our time may very well be coming to an end.

Our current existence as a species is in fact no different than the first few years of the theoretical scenario of HIV going airborne, and slowly consuming humanity’s collective ability to fight-back against pathogens we easily fend off while healthy. You’ll find an enormous amount of evidence for that below, and perhaps the most you can do is link one more study with more evidence of SARS-CoV-2’s insidious effects, comments are open to everyone so don’t be shy.

But for some of you, maybe that’s not where your story ends.

No way to know until you wake up tomorrow and decide to turn yet another page, but perhaps taking a little more time to notice all that your ancestors have already written on the pages that have come before, and all the warnings that they’ve been attempting to leave you.

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The Obfuscation around and Hidden Effects of SARS-CoV-2:

Hospitals are no longer required to report COVID cases caught inside of them in April 2023

EU trying to normalize mortality data to hide it.

SARS-CoV-2 can create silent infections that don’t leave antibodies behind.

Wastewater sampling in Canada suggests COVID case rate 19 times higher than reported.

Long Covid can develop without ever testing positive.

Can cloak itself from white blood-cells using genes also used by HIV.

Kills nearly one-third of patients within a year after they leave the ICU following treatment.

Nearly 80% of infected kids eventually developed a new health condition.

Kills children while misclassified as SIDS.

Appears to be accelerating the growth of several types of cancer all across the world.

Unusual child deaths are spiking.

Outbreaks of antibiotic-resistant bacteria are increasing.

COVID creates long term silent damage in multiple organ systems.

Teenage math and reading skills in an unprecedented decline all across the world.

In June 2023 there was a surge of abnormal brain abscesses in children.

It can persist and grow in a wide range of hidden tissue reservoirs.

Cases of measles are spiking in Japan.

Whooping cough are spiking in England.

Toxic shock syndrome is growing at an unprecedented rate in Japan.

Military pilots reported 17-times more medical incidents during the pandemic.

Decreased performance in one-quarter of infected Marines.

Tuberculosis in America is increasing after a 30-year decline.

Measles is spiking all across America.

Maternal mortality increased 80% from 2020 to 2021 in Pennsylvania.

25% of students in Ohio were chronically absent in 2023.

Infection increases your odds of a car crash as much as drunk-driving or having a seizure disorder.

Tuberculosis in Scotland surged by 40% in 2023, the largest increase ever recorded.

Long Covid is already affecting nearly one-quarter of the population.

SARS-CoV-2 is Getting Stronger

Omicron’s increased severity.

New variants get better-and-better at evading our immune system.

Newer variants are more neuroinvasive than older ones.

There’s been an evolution of enhanced innate immune suppression by SARS-CoV-2 Omicron subvariants

Omicron is far better at infecting noses than earlier variants.

Omicron is far better at infecting and damaging the entire central nervous system than previous variants.

Newer variants have more structural stability and resist degrading more.

Infection by old variants provides almost no protection against new variants.

Newer variants have increased immune evasion and spread, and are more immune resistant.

The newest variants are the most resistant to antibodies and spread the most effectively.

SARS-CoV-2’s Influence on Autoimmunity and Cancer

Leads to a substantially increased risk of developing a wide spectrum of new-onset autoimmune diseases.

It reactivates endogenous human retroviruses like Herpes.

Battling omicron led to a 30-fold increase in the likelihood of infection by another variant within a year.

Triggers molecular pathways known to lead to cancer formation.

Raises your risk of developing multiple sclerosis

Causes a long-term reduction in all of your innate and adaptive immune cells.

Productively infects all the primary human immune cells.

Predisposes you to staph infections.

Causes lymphopenia, the low white blood-cell count associated with HIV that occurs when protective T-cells are killed-off.

Decreased T-cell responses by more than 75% in about 75% of cases.

Reduces T-cells more than AIDS, reduces B-cells as much as AIDS, and drops CD8+ counts much more than AIDS.

Binds directly to white blood cells.

Causes immune changes known to lead to Schizophrenia.

Activates the expresses of endogenous retroviruses that cause inflammation and disease.

Increases the risk you’ll develop herpes.

Damages children’s immune systems by impairing defensive cells.

Interacts with multiple pathways known to eventually lead to cancer over the course of years.

Causes immune cells to age more rapidly and can kill protective T-cells.

Long Covid is linked to the death of T4 cells, disarming the immune system.

Attacks and impairs the dendritic cells that act as our frontline defense against all viral infections.

Triggers a latent virus in the oral mucosa that’s linked to Chronic Fatigue Syndrome.

Caused a surge of a multidrug-resistant fungal pathogen in Israeli hospitals, and in American ones.

Reactivates the Epstein-Barr Virus which leads to Long Covid.

Suppress innate immunity by targeting mitochondrial defenses.

Makes colon cancer cells more invasive.

Infects a range of lymphocytes, the cells also destroyed by HIV.

Persists in T-cells for at least two years.

Increases autoimmune and connective tissue disorders.

Creates long-term damage to the immune system.

Long Covid is linked with T-cell dysregulation and an uncoordinated adaptive immune response.

Can supercharge cervical cancer by removing immune pressure on precancerous cells.

Promotes the malignancy and growth of breast cancer cells.

Increases the rate of pancreatic cancers.

Accelerates the development of Type I diabetes in children predisposed to it.

Over 40% of patients worldwide had a coinfection with drug-resistant organisms.

Rapidly kills off protective white blood-cells.

Increased the rate of autoimmune hepatitis in kids by over three-times.

Antibodies meant to fight against it rapidly disappear from bone-marrow.

Genetic Disruptions from SARS-CoV-2

Dysregulates your immune system by changing the way its genes are expressed.

COVID-19 accelerates biological aging by accelerating your epigenetic clock.

SARS-CoV-2 alters the scaffolding of your DNA.

Changes the gene expression of white blood cells to increase clotting and cause dysfunction.

Interacts with cancer-causing genes.

Overstimulates lung genes to create an irreversible effect that looks like end-stage pulmonary fibrosis.

Increases intestinal permeability and inflammation while attacking your healthy bacteria.

SARS-CoV-2’s Neurological Damage

Alters your brain structure to make you dumber.

Makes brain cells fuse together into clumps that impair brain function.

Mirrors the effects of HIV against the brain.

Infects neurons then migrates throughout the brain.

Causes persistent structural, functional, and cognitive changes in key areas of young-adult brains.

Creates brain-damage that makes it look like your brain has aged 20 years.

Increases the risk of Alzheimer’s by over three-times, Parkinson’s and stroke almost three-times, and ups the risk of brain-bleeds by nearly five-times.

Brain damage and cognitive complaints continue even two years after infection.

Damages your brain with the same pattern that high-altitude disease does.

Causes brain leakages that can accelerate brain-aging and lead to irreversible neurological conditions.

Creates brain damage that isn’t detectable by typical tests.

Causes structural and functional neurological changes linked to a wide range of psychiatric disorders.

Attacks and infects multiple types of brain-cells leading to long term damage.

Causes brain-damage in infants infected during pregnancy.

Accelerates the progression of existing brain tumors.

Damages small cerebral blood vessels causing neurological symptoms.

Can create a silent and deadly “happy hypoxia.”

Caused increased memory and concentration problems.

SARS-CoV-2 RNA persists in the central nervous system of non-human primates despite clinical recovery

Eats more of your brain the more previous exposure to other coronaviruses you’ve had.

May cause persistent dysfunction in brainstems.

Caused a spike in autoimmune encephalitis.

Causes abnormalities in cerebral spinal fluid that are linked to cognitive dysfunction.

Created a worldwide surge in a vast array of psychiatric disorders.

Leads to neurotoxic clumps of proteins known as amyloids also linked to Alzheimer’s and Parkinsons.

Can lead to Lewy body dementia.

Directly alters your brain architecture.

Creates the same structural neurological destruction as Alzheimer’s.

Create lasting damage to mitochondria, the powerhouse of the cell.

Causes cognitive defects.

Leads to overlapping nervous system disorders indistinguishable from those caused by HIV.

Directly infects brain marrow and can surf along the central-nervous system.

Accelerates brain-aging in middle-aged adults.

Creates a wide range of neurological and mental health problems in kids.

Changes the shape of your hippocampus and causes anxiety and depression.

Led to abnormal brain scans in over 40% of kids worldwide.

Infections increase the rate of dementia, depression, anxiety, and disturbed sleep.

Gastrointestinal Issues Linked to SARS-CoV-2

Leads to fatal gastrointestinal disorders that kill you via sepsis.

Sheds through feces for at least seven months after infection.

Colonizes your intestines since they express more ACE2 than any other organ.

Newer variants create increased fecal shedding.

A parasitic infection known as an AIDS-defining illness is hitting 20-year highs and spreading to kids.

Heart and Lung Complications from SARS-CoV-2

Can activate latent Tuberculosis.

Attacks the blood vessels and creates an increased risk of cardiac events, especially if you’ve already had problems.

Can lead to clotting issues so bad that amputation is needed.

Heart attacks in young adults are up 30% over the expected rate

Caused a marked increase in heart disease, strokes, and cardiac arrhythmias well past the acute stage of infection.

Creates pulmonary dysfunction in 25% of patients for at least a year.

Results in a high risk of heart tumors.

Can persist in the lungs for at least 18 months after infection.

Leads to a higher risk of heart failure even without previous heart disease.

Persistently infects heart tissue and leads to an increased risk of stroke and other dysfunction.

Leaves 75% of young adult patients with a cardiac injury visible on MRI.

90% of kids with Long Covid have decreased cardiovascular function.

Infections double your risk of suffering an adverse cardiac event, from stoke to death.

Reproductive Problems from SARS-CoV-2

Reduces the quality of semen for months

Creates alterations in the placenta that lead to pregnancy complications.

Drastically decreases semen DNA quality.

Mothers transmit it to their fetus, where it causes organ abnormalities.

Caused neurodevelopmental impairment in about half of infants.

Infected mothers alter the neurodevelopment of their babies.

Accelerates the rate at which erectile dysfunction worsens.

Increases the chances your baby has a malformed brain.

Damages fetal brains in their first trimester, increasing the odds of a brain-bleed.

Infected mothers have babies with a ten-times increased chance of developmental delay.

Impairs male fertility by targeting semen quality and testosterone levels.

Increases localized placental damage.

Even after surgical correction of malformations, babies born to infected mothers have serious growth and developmental delays, and still suffer increased gastrointestinal issues.

Babies born with heart defects are up 16% during the pandemic.

Credit to tern for many of the charts above.

Dan Sirotkin is the co-author of the first peer-reviewed paper examining a laboratory origin for SARS-CoV-2, as well as its addendum, which settled a 50-year mystery and formally linked the H1N1 Spanish Flu pandemic strain release of 1977 to gain-of-function research.

Up until the comforts of modern civilization rolled around and imbued humanity with the idea that Death was a slow and someday thing, the vast majority of stories in cultures all across the world described the inevitable fate that awaits each of us when we reach the end of our days. And often as an extension of this theme, the civilizational apocalypse that comes to immoral societies which have lost their way.

In the oldest tale we share, The Epic of Gilgamesh, humanity is warned about the fate awaiting every mortal being as our bereft hero, Gilgamesh, has to say goodbye to his beloved Enkidu. And his unquenchable pain and longing are unmistakable as he mourns over his bestfriend’s lifeless body - a scene in a story that may be a metaphor for the love shared between mankind and our dogs:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

Shouldn’t my cheeks be hollow, 
Shouldn’t my face be ravaged,
Frost-chilled, and burnt by the desert sun?
Shouldn’t my heart be filled with grief?
Shouldn’t I be worn out and ready to collapse?

My friend, my brother, whom I loved so dearly,
Who accompanied me through every danger 
Enkidu, my brother, whom I loved so dearly,
Who accompanied me through every danger 
The fate of mankind has overwhelmed him.

And of course in the oldest extant religious text known to the West, the entire thing begins with human behavior leading to the destruction of paradise, before transitioning to the near-extinction of all mankind in the Flood, and then after that there’s the complete destruction of a few different cities for their wanton behavior.

So although the Flood is supposed to be the last time all humanity is nearly extinguished - by water, at least - much of the rest of Old Testament then goes on to chronicle the Ten Plagues that destroyed Egypt and the Israelis’ subsequent Exodus, and then Israel’s destruction of various neighbors and their downfall, then vice-versa - rinsing and repeating a few times. All the while over the course of several hundred years, only a handful of individuals - Noah, Abraham, Moses, Samuel, Elijah, Elisha, Ezekiel, Daniel, Isaiah, and a few others - try to warn of the coming apocalypse, to protect their people from disaster.

But despite all their warnings, none of them had much success stemming Yahweh’s wrath.

Themes that are echoed in the Greek myths that trace back to around the same time as the stories of Old Testament and the near eastern Gilgamesh, with Orpheus retracing Gilgamesh’s path into the Underworld in an adventure that ended with a similar tragic end of his trip as he too leaves without his beloved. There’s also Pandora, the Greek Eve who serves both as their first woman, and a similar harbinger of destruction who also unleashes profound suffering onto humanity. And much like the Old Testament prophets whose warnings were shunned time after time, in the Greek tradition it was Cassandra whose prescient warnings went ignored - and of course in both cases, the destruction that was foretold would in fact ensue.

Then there’s Homer and his account of Troy’s destruction, which based on the most current archaeological evidence appears to be on a site that was rebuilt and razed many times. No one’s totally sure though, since there’s a whole bunch of other sites all along the eastern Mediterranean that were rebuilt and destroyed again and again, a phenomenon that prevents some of the most interesting digging since Lebanese skyscrapers now sit on some of the most enticing sites - constantly inhabited for many thousands of years, from mud hut to reinforced-concrete towers.

And over in the Far East, the oldest extant Chinese myths also speak of destruction, as The Classic of Mountains and Seas speaks of cataclysm and a Great Flood, all occurring in an era when Heaven and Earth were thrown entirely off-kilter since the pillars holding up the very sky had collapsed. And of course anyone who lived through it remembers the Mayan Calendar Apocalypse of 2012, which wasn’t as bad as predicted, but which the Mayans had in fact taken great pains to predict on their massive stone calendars, depicting the same cycle of rebirth and destruction found in belief systems all across the Americas. Then of course there’s the Vedas of the Indian Subcontinent, which are also about never-ending cycles of cataclysmic destruction, and told with stories that wouldn’t be all that unfamiliar to the ancient Egyptians.

So perhaps it’s important to note that it’s not like any of these writings were totally detached from reality, since everything from volcanoes to droughts to plagues to earthquakes to tsunamis to meteors have all had their cataclysmic effects on human population centers over the long course of the past millennia. An ongoing phenomenon that was noticed by Eric Cline in the preface to his surprise blockbuster hit 1177 B.C. - The Year Civilization Collapsed, which tells the tale of the Late Bronze Age Collapse, an event that extinguished several civilizations from around the Mediterranean Basin and left the only surviving societies severely crippled:

“And then the COVID-19 Pandemic hit full force, with devastating effects worldwide, millions of people infected, and hundreds of thousands dead. The full effects of this pestilence on top of the perfect storm of other stressors affecting our globalized world remains to be seen. But it is already clear that the future history of life on this planet will be changed, perhaps as fundamentally as life changed in the Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean regions some thirty-two hundred years ago. Now, however, the changes that lie ahead are not limited to those areas but are global in scope.”

So not only are humanity’s shared stories absolutely jam-packed with various forms of apocalypse literature back as far as we can go into history, but at least one prominent modern historian who’s spent his career documenting past civilizational collapses is already arguing that we may be heading for a pretty hard civilizational reset due in no little part to the COVID-19 Pandemic.

In modern times, the nightmare civilization-ending scenario of the escape of an apocalyptic engineered virus is supposed to have the kinds of dramatic Hollywood deaths that involve blood spurting four to five feet into the air from infected eyeballs within just a few hours of transmission, and a death that comes at most within a matter of hours - maybe days to the lucky.

However this image of violent inescapable viral death, popularized in films like Contagion and 12 Monkeys and associated with fearsome diseases like Ebola or Marburg, doesn’t even vaguely reflect the real worst-case scenario for an infectious agent. Because diseases which create symptoms within a few hours or days of infection allow their hosts to self-isolate before they infect an inordinate number of their neighbors, following one of the most fundamental instincts that exists in social animals, and preventing the emergence of highly-pathogenic viral variants that kill from one-half to all of a population.

So the world has been able to ward-off anything resembling a pandemic from those blood-borne and quickly lethal agents like Ebola, which generally only propagate in countries with superstitions that fuel their spread by disregarding modern medical advice about avoiding blood-borne illnesses, and insist on burial practices that endanger the entire community. Even when lethal airborne agents such as 2003’s original SARS-CoV and then 2012’s MERS-CoV came around, because infection meant noticeable illness within days or at most a couple of weeks, hosts were able to self-isolate and avoid continuing their spread.

Highly-pathogenic avian influenzas like the H5N1 that’s currently ravaging the planet only initially emerge from industrial poultry farms. This happens because the artificial confined living conditions prevent the birds from self-isolating when they feel themselves becoming sick, an instinct found in higher-order social animals. So because they can’t isolate, and the air they all collective breathe is confined by walls and roofs, viral infections like H5N1 can be driven into the highly-pathogenic states that both kill off at least half of the average flock and sometimes all of it, and also allow for zoonotic transmission onwards to new species.

But this respiratory transmission from bird to man only ever happens to the farmworkers who are stuck shoulder-to-shoulder with the birds for dozens of hours a week. The surrounding wildlife can also become infected, but that’s never been demonstrated to be due to respiratory transmission and almost certainly comes from drinking contaminated water, since the fecal-oral route is the most potent viral transmission route and wild animals aren’t exactly picky about the water they drink. A phenomenon emphasized by the recent H5N1 outbreak, whose spread into American cows was almost certainly started by the practice of feeding them poultry waste, creating infected cows whose milk can then go to infect those who drink it if it’s left raw.

If viruses were able to jump through the air from their host population in a highly pathogenic state into a new taxonomic class or order of animal and immediately establish airborne head-to-head transmission and create active and lethal infections, the only thing alive on earth would be viruses. The best any natural virus on this planet has ever done is jump into individuals of new class or order that it has ongoing direct contact with, but it never manages to spread through the air to other individuals in that new species in a highly-pathogenic and lethal state. This applies to a virus as obvious and storied as Rabies, as much as it does to a more recent and unseen terror like Highly-Pathogenic Avian Influenzas - witnessed by the fact Rabies requites direct liquid contact to transfer, usually in the form of a bite.

Viruses don’t hold master keys to transmit through all vertebrates regardless of class, and it takes decades if not centuries for a virus to mutate and adapt enough to any one class’s genetic code so that it’s able to reach a highly-pathogenic state in just one host species.

Viruses have an instinct to integrate themselves into the cells of new hosts, they’re in no rush to kill a brand new host species off - because if they did, then they’d be all out of hosts incredibly quickly. Instead of exterminating the new host species, viruses seek to integrate themselves into the genomes of their new host where they can wait quietly and bide their time - a well-known and documented behavior of retroviruses. Something that’s happened so much throughout human evolutionary history, that roughly 10% of the entire human genome can be traced back to originally having viral origins.

So when the artificially confined conditions of industrial poultry farms prevent birds from self-isolating, viruses like H5N1 can build-up into highly-pathogenic swarms that kill-off at least half of the flocks that host them, and jump into the farmworkers who live among them. But in nature this hasn’t been documented because sick animals have instincts to wander off on their own when they’re sick so they don’t infect their friends and relatives. And those farmworkers have never once been demonstrated to go home and transmit the virus on to others, not even to their spouses - demonstrating the inability of an avian virus to establish head-to-head transmission in a totally different class of animal.

This same phenomenon of viruses reaching highly-pathogenic states when they sense their host populations becoming too crowded may also have led to the Spanish Flu Pandemic of 1918, caused by a distant relative of H5N1 called H1N1, which is still circulating in human populations today and was likely circulating in humans for thousands of years before the Spanish Flu, since depictions of what’s assumed to be the flu date back to Homer’s writings.

Unlike H5N1, H1N1 doesn’t really infect birds and seems the most acclimated to humans, however it can also infect pigs. The years leading up to 1918 were defined by the first World War, when humanity mobilized and concentrated itself like never before, and young men were forced together into boxcars and and barracks and bunkers, and then often into hospitals. And it was from English hospitals that the Spanish Flu, H1N1’s highly-pathogenic state, would first emerge - as just like poultry stuck on farms, patients stuck in hospitals are also unable to self-isolate to protect their friends.

And so it was back in 1916, two years before the official start of the 1918 Spanish Flu Pandemic, that the disease first began to emerge within English hospitals. However at the time the clinicians treating those patients had no idea of the darkness of the maw they were staring into, and since the disease didn’t appear to spread person-to-person in those initial years - no one had any idea that the most lethal pandemic in history up to that point was already stirring.

Then just like H5N1 can jump from birds into humans when it’s concentrated into a highly-pathogenic state on poultry farms where birds and humans share a living space, H1N1 eventually jumped from humans into pigs on our farms, killing many of them and establishing a permanent reservoir. So although it hasn’t been proven scientifically yet, this behavior likely mimics grasshoppers morphing into much more ravenous locusts when resources suddenly become scarce. Scarce resources force host populations into small dense crowds just like artificial settings do, and so viruses would have evolved a mechanism to survive if their current host population got too small and concentrated around dwindling food or water sources.

They make like locusts, become much better at flying and incredibly hungry, and then disperse as much as possible to try and find a new landscape to serve as their new host. And becoming a locust isn’t something that spreads from individual-to-individual either, it’s a population-wide response that occurs pretty much simultaneously.

So the first primary factor that determines how dangerous and deadly a virus will eventually be isn’t really anything about the virus itself, instead its whether or not its infected hosts are able to self-isolate. In the case of poultry farms and military hospitals that’s prevented by the living situations determined by modern settings, but self-isolation can also be short-circuited if infected hosts don’t even realize that they’re sick in the first place.

So although a virus that creates a quick-and-deadly disease, killing you by causing you to spout blood like a Champagne bottle from various orifices within a few days or maybe a couple weeks of infection sounds like the worst-case scenario - Modern humanity has already been dealing with viruses like that for at least several decades without too much issue, and they’ve likely been around for many thousands of years without causing human extinction or anything even vaguely close to it.

And so when pathogens emerge out-of-nowhere and quickly begin to claim souls within a matter of days or weeks, because they create disease in a relatively short timeframe, modern societies are able to isolate the sick so that although the stricken might not make it, at least they won’t infect their entire community.

A virus that’s really scary and lethal in a Petri dish or host animal is never going to kill all that many people, because creating visible illness within a few days or weeks means hosts can always be isolated one way or another. Pandemics aren’t the story of individuals or even viruses, they’re stories of social connection. Modern history records dozens and dozens of these lethal zoonotic plagues sweeping over humanity but leaving plenty of survivors behind, as the Roman Empire was weakened by several waves of pandemics before its fall, the Black Death took something like a third of the souls in Europe after first ravaging Asia - but still leaving plenty of survivors around, and various pestilences have visited us over the eons everywhere on the planet.

But all that, of course, only speaks to the nature of natural viruses.

Although it took until 1977 for an engineered virus to create a global pandemic and spread among more than a few crippled orphans, engineered viruses were already causing lethal infections in humans as far back as 1935, and the culprits would be live-attenuated vaccines (LAVs) that hadn’t been properly designed nor tested.

Back in 1935, two different teams attempted to weaken the Polio virus down into LAVs - the first kind of vaccine ever developed all the way back in the late 1800’s when Louis of Pasteurization fame serially passaged the Rabies virus through dozens of rabbits to attenuate it down into an effective human LAV against that terrifying virus, an extension of the observation made in Asia many hundreds of years before that dairymaids exposed to cowpox were then impervious to smallpox.

A process that’s closely related to creating live-attenuated vaccines, since using the close-but-not-contagious relationship between a virus that’s evolved to infect bovines, such as cowpox, to present the human immune system with the genetic warning signs of infection known as epitopes against a related disease such as smallpox doesn’t involve changing any individual virus into something else. Being exposed to cowpox has naturally inoculated dairymaids against smallpox for thousands of years, and so the practice of intentionally taking cowpox - a virus that can’t make harmful human infections - and forcing it into the human immune system was eventually popularized by William Jenner in the Western world.

However since Rabies didn’t have a tame doppelganger as existed between cowpox and smallpox, the process of serial passage can be used to force an artificial zoonosis in the lab, and weakens a virus by making it interact with new host species’ cells that it’s not totally acclimated to, a phenomenon that’s worked for viruses ranging from Rabies to Polio to Yellow Fever:

“Serial passage” is used as an umbrella term to encompass two of several different well-established bio-engineering protocols: passage through cell cultures typically done to attenuate a vaccine candidate strain, as well as passage through live host animals to force zoonosis into a new species or establish aerosol transmission within a species where direct-contact transmission is already established. This latter protocol is typically done as a form of gain-of-function research, for instance, in the experiments done on various strains of avian influenza, both aforementioned gains were observed.

When referring to the H1N1 Swine Flu strain, which presumably leaked out of a Soviet lab as part of a vaccine program in the late 1970s, “serial passage” refers to the expected attenuation of a viral strain that naturally occurs as it is forced to pass multiple times through cell lines, usually cells from a different species than originally hosted the virus. Serial passage for attenuation leads to a strain with lesser virulence, and mirrors the natural loss of virulence that generally occurs as a virus proliferates throughout a large population of hosts over many generations.

Enough passages through enough animals - making a LAV for Yellow Fever required hundreds of passages through five different species - results in a virus that’s still alive and formed enough to carry the markers our immune system would need to identify it, its full range of epitopes, but would be far too weak to create active infections or even be noticeable to the host when done right.

However those teams in 1935 definitely didn’t have their LAVs for Polio really figured-out yet, and neither of them actually used serial passage at all. Instead, they each used a different chemical, either ricinoleate or formalin, in unsuccessful attempts to create safe and effective LAVs. Unsuccessful since one vaccine didn’t really seem to work at all, and the other killed five children and left ten paralyzed, causing other scientists reviewing the work to call the designer of this dangerous LAV a murderer. So although they didn’t use serial passage, to be fair they were in fact mimicking the first live-attenuated vaccine Pasteur had accidentally created - for a bacteria not a virus - after leaving chicken blood contaminated with cholera bacteria out in the sun during a vacation, and then coming back to find that it didn’t cause visible infection in chickens but would inoculate them against further cholera infection.

So for those dangerous 1935 Polio LAVs, chemicals were serving as accelerated sunlight in a mistaken attempt to apply a method that’d been proven on bacteria onto a virus without proper testing, and the test-subjects would be orphans, many of them disabled in one form or another – a scientific practice that would last well into the 1960s.

But then luckily for humanity, in 1955 Jonas Salk presented his completely inactivated Polio vaccine to the world, which was entirely dead and so wasn’t a LAV and didn’t work as effectively, but was completely and entirely safe so long as it was manufactured properly. Then in 1961 Albert Sabin would bring the world his LAV against Polio known as Oral Polio Vaccine or OPV, more effective than Salk’s inactivated totally dead vaccine, and also apparently just as safe - arguably even safer, since the “Cutter Incident” of 1955 which paralyzed 200 children and killed 10 more had resulted from a poorly manufactured batch of Salk’s inactivated Polio vaccine, and spread public distrust of the whole endeavor across America.

In fact so much distrust was spread, that Sabin had to go back to his native Russia for widespread testing of OPV since he couldn’t get it approved in America - except for some testing on prisoners.

So Sabin’s LAV against Polio, OPV, appeared to be completely and entirely safe, for at least a couple of generations, and because it was more effective than the inactivated vaccine it quickly became the choice for governments and militaries around the world. But as so often when Man fiddles around with Nature, there was a catch. Because it would take awhile, but even LAVs as well-designed as Sabin’s OPV can do something inactivated vaccines cannot.

Because unlike all-the-way dead inactivated vaccines, LAVs are only mostly dead. And when things go wrong, they can emerge like an army bred with a single purpose.

So things didn’t go exactly as planned, and certainly not for as long as planned.

But to give Sabin credit where its due, it took almost 50 years for the first glimmers of a problem to show up, since it wasn’t until 1999 that America moved away from the might-possibly-revert OPV to the totally-dead inactivated vaccine from Salk due to OPV reversions in isolated pockets.

And then it was another decade and change before another step was taken, since it took until 2011 for scientists to admit they really had a problem, and that Sabin’s OPV live-attenuated vaccine - designed from three heavily passaged and so presumably mutated strains which were thought not to ever cause any human disease at all and chosen from countless passaging experiments through various animals and tissue cultures - was more zombie than fully dead.

Although to be fair, when you learn just how extraordinarily attenuated and mutated those strains were, it really is understandable that Sabin and the rest of the scientific community assumed - correctly for the first few decades - that there was absolutely no way at all these Polio strains would be able to find their way back to virulence. The first strain was originally isolated from the feces of healthy children, which is where two of Sabin’s three strains started - a shared stinky origin story that hinges on the reality that it’s only within poop that you can isolate the full range of viral variants infecting a mammalian host.

After isolation, each of the three variants was extensively passaged dozens of times, though a combination of monkey kidney cells, monkey testicle cells, and nerve cells of white mice - theoretically stripping away all the genetic memory of being able to infect human cells at all, but between all three strains it turns out that all of Polio’s important genes were still preserved albeit in damaged states.

But unfortunately for humanity, it turned out that over the course of several years even those extensively altered and attenuated strains were really good at slowly work themselves back together into virulent versions of the virus, very slow-motion versions of the T-1000’s mercurial behavior in Terminator 2: Judgement Day, which of course also deals with yet another global apocalypse.

So by 2011 there was enough OPV reverting back to full virulence and causing paralysis across the globe that the decision was made to improve and update OPV into a version that would be more stable and less prone to reversion. Since although the reversion only seemed to be happening in pockets of the world where healthcare systems had collapsed, making hand-washing difficult even if you wanted to, the reality was that OPV will always spread from its initial recipient out into the community through poop, which at first was seen as a good thing since it effectively meant free vaccinations in the surrounding community, but then it turns out that anywhere without proper sanitation and traditions of hand-washing would eventually be at risk of this decades-long reversion back to full virulence.

Fears that played out by 2017, a watershed year for LAV reversion when for the first time more children were paralyzed by Sabin’s reverted OPV than by wild cases of the virus. Then by 2022, those 21 cases from the reverted LAV back in 2017 had ballooned all the way up to 786 cases all around the world, vastly outpacing the infection rate of wild Polio. Clearly, something was going increasingly wrong.

Then things got even worse in 2023, when that specialized LAV known as nOPV which had been designed back in 2011 specifically not to revert at all and also block cases from reverting OPV, also began to generate cases of its own after reverting all the way back to virulence just like the original OPV.

And this phenomenon, of reverting LAVs, hasn’t just been confined to Polio.

In 1977 the world was gripped with the fear there was a second Spanish Flu on the way, since there was a sudden outbreak of the same variant of influenza that’d caused so much death back in 1918, H1N1. However we were in luck, and in the end the disease only seemed to cause mild illness and hardly much death at all compared to 1918. So even by the time it hit America’s shores in early 1978, there was plenty of alarm but very little death compared to the Spanish Flu’s toll. But the providence of this virus would remain debated for almost 50 years, since it wasn’t until 2021 when a peer-reviewed paper linked directly to some long-lost research which demonstrated that the H1N1 variant of 1977 had in fact been engineered by serial passage, due to its temporally mismatched genes - pointing directly at H1N1 LAV trials known to be occurring within Chinese and Soviet militaries at the time.

A similar scene repeated in 2009, when H1N1 began spreading across the planet and yet again the world feared that the Spanish Flu might be rearing its head, and the WHO declared the third global H1N1 Pandemic in under one-hundred years. However just like 1977, the symptoms weren’t nearly as bad as the original Spanish Flu and not much death seemed to be happening at all, although in 2009 there was likely at least a bit of increased mortality.

And just like 1977, the 2009 outbreak of H1N1 was also caused by the reversion of a LAV, but one originally given to Mexican pigs and not soldiers like in 1977. The H1N1 of 2009 not only originated in one small area of Veracruz, but also had genes that were mismatched in a similar manner to the H1N1 of 1977 - yet again indicating serial passage and the development of LAVs, in this case porcine instead of martial.

And just in case the quiet specter of reverting LAVs hasn’t become apparent yet, there’s long been an argument linking one of the early versions of OPV to the genesis of HIV. This version was called CHAT-OPV, and actually got its name from an infant child living in an institution for retarded children in 1957 named Charlton, who like so many of his cohort wasn’t exactly able to give his consent for the medical experiment done on him that led to the LAV bearing his name.

The theory that HIV was seeded by an improperly prepared batch of the experimental CHAT-OPV vaccine that had been accidentally contaminated with the monkey-virus SIV recently outcompeted five other possible scenarios in a complex statistical computer simulation: Since the earliest 68% of AIDS cases and 76% of HIV that emerged in Africa emerged in the villages where the experimental CHAT-OPV administered was passaged through cells isolated from African chimpanzees known to host SIV – nominally considered to be HIV’s natural parent virus – instead of the SIV-free Asian macaque cells used for serial passage and vaccine production in the rest of the world.

The argument that HIV’s emergence wasn’t entirely natural was bolstered by another study, which looked at the amount of genetic distance between HIV’s putative ancestor, SIV, and especially noting the extraordinarily low odds of the four transitional mutations that were needed all occurring within one host, also suggest human involvement playing a role in HIV’s emergence as a mutated offspring of SIV. Instead of contaminated CHAT-OPV batches, they suggest that the accidental serial passage of SIV-infected cells between random patients that was amplified by the widespread use of unsterilized needles throughout Africa in the 1950s.

And if SIV was going to jump into humans and suddenly create a horrible disease, there’s no natural reason it would wait until the same era as those experimental CHAT-OPV vaccinations programs since SIV has been around for tens of thousands of years and in some communities its seroprevalence is nearly 20% - meaning that for many thousands of years SIV has been infecting communities that eat monkeys, their doctors have been using unsterilized blades to treat the community in a manner virologically identical to shared-needles, but there was no sign of disease and HIV managed not to emerge since maybe it didn’t quite hate the gays quite enough yet?

And those CHAT-OPV experiments may have been occurring alongside any other number of undocumented and just as experimental LAV trials run by companies or militaries using the same test subjects for the same reason after improperly passaging their LAVs: Their subjects were hidden and isolated, what could possibly go wrong?

When you compare HIV and SIV, you also find that their genes appear to have aged out-of-sync with each other, and so determining when a theoretical natural evolution from SIV into HIV happened has no good answer - especially since serial passage in a lab could also explain how those genes got swapped around, the same telltale sign carried by 1977’s H1N1 which proved it’d been passaged.

But it’s unlikely to be a debate that’ll ever be settled as there are fundamental disagreements about which vaccine batches were passaged where, but regardless of whether the virology that led to HIV happened naturally due to some hopefully intoxicated interspecies orgiastic experimentation, or because of an improperly processed batch of OPV or other live-attenuated vaccines passaged through simian cells with SIV and left unexposed to the protein-cleaving enzyme meant to deactivate any latent viruses – the fact of the matter is that an improperly prepared batch of an experimental live-attenuated vaccine of any kind may well have sparked the ongoing global AIDS pandemic, which has extinguished 40 million lives and counting since it started.

And it’s pretty hard to imagine it’s a coincidence that an experimental new vaccine which makes a lot of sense as the progenitor of HIV was in fact being tested on the third world, in the geopolitical middle-of-nowhere. Because so what if something went wrong, it’s just a bunch of African villagers – what recourse could they possibly have if they were harmed by CHAT-OPV, or any other experimental vaccine?

The silenced cannot speak for themselves.

But whether you believe HIV came from a natural zoonosis, bushmeat consumption or simian love-making, improperly sterilized needles or CHAT-OPV - it’s worth taking a moment to consider what would’ve happened if HIV had somehow managed to establish airborne transmission, especially before the early 1980s when it was first isolated and officially recognized. Since unlike the sensationalized Hollywood version of a dangerous and deadly virus that kills within a matter of weeks or sometimes even hours, HIV has an exactly 0% mortality rate during its acute phase.

This is probably a good time to mention that SARS-CoV-2’s mortality rate during acute infection is very unlikely to be above 1%, and is probably much less than that.

And of course, HIV leaving you alive after its acute phase - which seems like a cold if you notice at all - doesn’t mean it's done with you. It takes five to ten years if you’re left untreated, but in time HIV will have eaten enough of your white blood-cells, such as the famed killer T-cells, that simple everyday pathogens begin to colonize your weakened body. But while this is happening you won’t really notice, and will seem “cured” from that initial cold - so you’ll have a chance of transmitting HIV to anyone you have unprotected sex with or share a needle with during the five to ten years it takes any symptoms to show up at all.

Today with treatment, fungal infections like cryptococcosis and candidiasis are no longer likely to kill you by effectively drowning you after colonizing your lungs, and the “good” news is that you’ll make it quite a few more years without dying from Herpes or Tuberculosis these days, but the bad news is that it’s only a matter of time until cancer, hepatitis, or cardiovascular disease still comes for you.

Until fantastically expensive and laborious drug-cocktails were invented to suppress the virus, HIV was very much a decades-long death sentence, and men like Magic Johnson still walking around in good health after decades of HIV infection is a miracle of modern medicine... combined with many millions of dollars to fund cutting-edge treatments. But even his life is going to be cut short, despite all the most expensive care in the world.

So imagine, if you will: HIV figures out how to somehow go airborne in the early 1970s, when zoonotically or otherwise it was circulating in most of the world but hadn’t been in any way isolated or identified. Well, hundreds of millions of people would all end up with unusual cold and flu-like symptoms over the course of several months or maybe a couple years, since international flight wasn’t as everyday as it is now and populations weren’t as dense and interconnected so it’s hard to say exactly how long the spread would take even after it became airborne.

No one who had that initial “cold” and then recovered would have any idea at all that they were still sick with something far more insidious than the common cold, not for years and years, so they’d return to society and still be breathing the virus into every public space they occupied, giving everyone in the room a chance of infection. Except in this case, the afflicted wouldn’t be limited to those practicing unsafe sexual practices, and instead every man, woman, and child on earth would’ve been at risk.

If that’d happened and HIV had mutated to spread through the air instead of just through bodily fluids in the early 1970s, every person alive at the time sans a few lucky remote villagers would definitely have been infected within a year or two. Then where do things go? At the time no one would have been all that alarmed, after all, even if the novel virus had been eventually been isolated and identified - it hadn’t actually killed anyone yet, so whatever - what’s the big deal?

“The case fatality rate of HIV is literally zero, it’s obviously just a cold.”

The vast majority of people don’t self-isolate much for a cold, and even if they had - within a few weeks they would’ve been back on their feet, rawdogging the air along with everyone else and joining in on a very public bukkake of an insidiously lethal virus every time they went into a building or vehicle that shared the air with others.

So if that airborne mutation had occurred, certainly by the mid 1980s it would’ve become obvious that something was going terribly wrong. And absolutely none of it, none of it at all, would involve anything like what’s been depicted by Hollywood. After HIV has killed enough of the protective immune cells for AIDS to set in, it doesn’t cause you to bleed from your eyes or any other orifice, and you don’t die while violently expelling fluids from anywhere while a helpless medical team in hazmat suits looks on in horror.

Because technically it’s not even the virus killing you, HIV/AIDS just opens the door for other pathogens which otherwise wouldn’t be a threat to do the work. So in a sense you die “naturally” because the real perp doesn’t even leave its own fingerprints on the crime at all, other than the murdered guards whose dead bodies are the real evidence that it was HIV/AIDS doing the dirty work all along,

Since HIV is so insidiously sneaky as it kills, it was barely noticed at all in the first few decades of its emergence and spread, and so many millions of lives have been claimed by its decade-long viral poison.

It managed to hide within populations all across the world for roughly three decades before it was finally isolated and identified, and even at that point in 1982 the inevitability of the death it brings without treatment wasn’t fully understood. Widespread condom usage wasn’t called for by the Surgeon General until 1986, and it wouldn’t be until 1991 when the first national condom-usage campaigns would start. But since HIV’s spread was so limited and mostly concentrated among homosexual and drug-addicted communities due to the nature of its fluid-borne transmission, and since it does take about a decade to kill you - it’s far from the deadliest virus in human history in any statistical sense. AIDS is only estimated to have killed somewhere north of 40 million people, at a time when earth’s population has grown from roughly 4 to 8 billion. So even if all 40 million deaths are jammed back into a population of 4 billion, that’s still just one-tenth of one-percent who have died even following decades of exposure.

Which doesn’t sound so bad compared to the Black Death killing one-third of Europe, or Ebola killing about two-thirds of those it infects within weeks, or even MERS-CoV killing about one-third of its hosts inside of a few months. Unless you remember that until complex, expensive, modern drug cocktails came around to suppress it, HIV would eventually kill everyone it infected by opening the door to opportunistic pathogens, and only being able to spread through bodily fluids kept it far more constrained than a respiratory virus.

So AIDS’ case fatality rate seems pretty tame, until you realize that if HIV had managed to figure airborne transmission out in the years before it was isolated and understood to be a viral poison whose real effects can take a decade or more to emerge, and before there were any effective way to slow it down - there’d probably only be a few thousand humans left alive in the world today. Because despite all the efforts, it’s proved totally impossible to make a vaccine that prevents infection by HIV. In fact, HIV acts just as resistant to vaccines as SARS-CoV-2 is still acting today. Behavior also shared with reverting OPV, which definitely began as a LAV, and is proving to be resistant even against the updated modern LAV named nOPV designed to stop OPV’s reversion which was introduced back in 2011.

Perhaps its designers never heard about old ladies swallowing flies.

However whether or not you believe that HIV began its story as a LAV, that doesn’t change the nearly invisible nature of its slow-motion pathogenesis nor the threat posed by a virus that just presents as a cold at first but which is really a slow-acting viral poison that can take a decade or more to do its job and put you in the ground. And along those same lines, it doesn’t really matter whether you believe that SARS-CoV-2 began the story of its global pandemic just like H1N1 did in both 1977 and 2009 - as a reverting live-attenuated vaccine - or not.

What matters is that, just like HIV, SARS-CoV-2 first appears to be just the flu. Perhaps it should be a bit of a warning that SARS-CoV-2 does in fact kill people during its acute phase, unlike HIV - tens of millions of them all across the globe so far. And you should probably keep in mind that if anyone had tried to calculate HIV’s case-fatality rate in the 1970s in the first five or so years of the HIV Pandemic - the case-fatality rate would’ve been exactly zero.

But unlike HIV, SARS-CoV-2 is definitively airborne, so transmissible in fact that in just two years antibodies signaling previous infection went from a prevalence of about 5% averaged across Europe in December 2020, all the way up to 96.4% within America by September 2022. So although Europe and America aren’t the same place, they’re both modern industrialized societies “neighboring” by airplane, and since it’s been an additional two years and given those numbers, it doesn’t seem too hard to extrapolate that just about every person today not living in a very remote jungle hut has been exposed to the virus.

So in that sense, the COVID-19 Pandemic is just like HIV going airborne - in both scenarios we have a virus of unknown origins that generally presents as a pretty harmless cold at first, and which has managed to spread across the entire planet.

And this extraordinarily profligate spread is pretty easily explained once you realize that just like HIV, SARS-CoV-2 is incredibly well-adapted to spread asymptomatically. In the case of highly-pathogenic H5N1 on poultry farms, birds are prevented from self-isolating because of the roofs and walls that keep them in place. But in the case of viruses like HIV and SARS-CoV-2, self-isolation doesn’t happen because the host doesn’t even realize that they’re sick at all. This doesn’t happen with zoonotic transmissions, when H5N1 jumps into farmworkers, they get horribly sick and about half of them die. Bad news for those particular farmworkers, but good news for the rest of society since causing crippling acute symptoms that set in within a few days allows new hosts to stay away from their friends and family, an act of self-isolation that saves those lives.

This is also the case with Ebola, and will be the case with whatever novel zoonotic viruses emerge from undeveloped jungles, especially after SARS-CoV-2 has already swept over their populations and drastically weakened the overall population immunity, lowering the threshold needed for local zoonosis.

Natural viruses don’t jump into a new host without reaching a highly-pathogenic state that can kill their old hosts, at least among higher-order animals, and also cause acute, active infections in their new hosts. Rabies is the best example of this, it has an extraordinarily high host range, but also an unmissable presentation that begins within a few days and kills with a 99% mortality rate inside of a month. However because of the unmistakable slathering nature of its presentation, horrific fate it causes, and wide spread, it also served as an obvious target to become history’s first viral LAV.

But whether it’s Rabies or a tamer barnyard virus like Foot-and-Mouth Disease or any of the influenzas, none of these natural zoonotic diseases spread unless there’s a lot of their original hosts left behind, either visibly sick or dead. And despite what Alina Chan might want you to believe in The New York Times, neither 2003’s original SARS-CoV nor its cousin MERS-CoV which showed up about a decade later actually have demonstrated zoonotic origins. Although unlike HIV, this reality hasn’t entered the public or even academic consciousness, and just about everyone thinks that in 2003 SARS-CoV jumped from civets to humans, and then in 2012 MERS-CoV jumped from camels into humans.

At no point has that been scientifically demonstrated, and those supposed zoonoses are a primary reason the 21st-century world was so ready to accept that SARS-CoV-2 also had a zoonotic origin.

Because when you actually look at the genetic evidence, although civets and other small carnivores were found infected with the first SARS-C0V, humans appear to have given it to them in all cases. Not incidentally, this passing serological experience with the virus has recently been used to try and assert that SARS-CoV-2 originated in caged civets at a wet market near the WIV, but in neither case - the original SARS-CoV nor our novel SARS-CoV-2 - does leaving passing serological evidence mean that animal was the intermediate species that introduced either virus to humanity.

And in the case of MERS, its initial outbreak was said to definitively originate from a single molecular source, however in many early cases there was no history of contact with camels or anyone who could’ve been infected by them at all. Plus MERS-CoV’s supposed molecular link to nature was incredibly scant: One single sample from a batch that might’ve been later accidentally thawed taken from one lonely bat was the only place the “matching” region of base-pairs was ever found - that is why you probably thought MERS-CoV “came from camels.”

So if you’re confused about how MERS-CoV could’ve been a virus that ancestrally looked linked to bats but then somehow jumped into camels and then directly into humans - congratulations, you’ve been paying far more attention that most biologists alive. Same goes for 2003’s original SARS-CoV - How exactly does a natural virus jump from bats to civets and then right into humans?

That kind of interspecies promiscuity isn’t the domain of natural viruses, it’s the domain of highly-pathogenic viruses that either emerge from massive industrial farms or are created in laboratories.

But because the world was reassured by Dr. Ian Lipkin, who would later be one of the five co-authors of the most logically convoluted, scientifically vapid, and lethally misleading science paper ever published, The proximal origins of SARS-CoV-2, which speciously and erroneously claimed to demonstrate that the COVID-19 Pandemic was almost certainly the result of a natural zoonosis, everyone had believed him that MERS-CoV was a natural virus as well about a decade back.

And Dr. Lipkin then implied that the people doubting him or calling his judgement or ethics or ties to the kind of gain-of-function research which could’ve created MERS-CoV in a lab were just jealous of his unabashed and undeniable genius. But because such a limited number of people died and most countries were left entirely unaffected, the general public shrugged after both of those outbreaks, went back to whatever daily regime of prescription medications most in the West are on, and later almost entirely went along with the narrative that the COVID-19 Pandemic was the product of a natural zoonosis throughout the entire first year of its existence – “SARS and MERS both had been, so what’s one more? Shouldn’t this be sort of expected?”

There are, however, a litany of reasons to believe that SARS-CoV-2 began its life just like the first type of virus known to be engineered by humans at all. A type which also just so happened to murder some of its first helpless victims all the way back in 1935, which likely created global pandemics in both 1977 and 2009, and which at this very moment is the only type of engineered virus known for certain to be causing active infections anywhere on the planet: A live-attenuated vaccine intentionally introduced into humans during a vaccine trial.

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…continue on to Part II here.

Dan Sirotkin is the co-author of the first peer-reviewed paper examining a laboratory origin for SARS-CoV-2, as well as its addendum, which settled a 50-year mystery and formally linked the H1N1 Spanish Flu pandemic strain release of 1977 to gain-of-function research.

Unbeknownst to me and my father at the time, all the way back in November 2020 before this pandemic that’s claimed so many millions of lives was even a year old, the State Department’s Arms Control Team was preparing to use Article V of the UN’s Biological Weapons Convention to start an investigation against China. And they were planning to use our paper as at least one of their main rationales, which you can see in an email chain titled “For Review: Draft Article 5 re China BWC compliance - serial passage as another technique that might have been applied.”

So here’s the thing, I can turn the most coordinated cover-up in history spanning the entire globe and the two most powerful governments on earth into a really simple magic-trick.

There’s nothing in my hands, take a good look. But don’t forget to take a moment and notice how many different times our last name shows up in existing State Department FOIA requests in the link above, none of those hits came from us - our name was just caught in those old nets over the course of several years.

Oddly enough, we wouldn’t hear from anyone on this team - or anyone from our own government at all - until many months later in April 2021. But more about that part of the story in a moment, first it’s worth taking a look at what the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) and its fifth article actually say:

Formally known as “The Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Production and Stockpiling of Bacteriological (Biological) and Toxin Weapons and on their Destruction”, the Convention was negotiated by the Conference of the Committee on Disarmament in Geneva, Switzerland. It opened for signature on 10 April 1972 and entered into force on 26 March 1975. The BWC supplements the 1925 Geneva Protocol, which had prohibited only the use of biological weapons.

States Parties to the Biological Weapons Convention undertook “never in any circumstances to develop, produce, stockpile or otherwise acquire or retain:

1. microbial or other biological agents, or toxins whatever their origin or method of production, of types and in quantities that have no justification for prophylactic, protective or other peaceful purposes;

2. weapons, equipment or means of delivery designed to use such agents or toxins for hostile purposes or in armed conflict.”

BWC States Parties have strived to ensure that the Convention remains relevant and effective, despite the changes in science and technology, politics and security since it entered into force. Throughout the intervening years, States Parties have met approximately every five years to review the operation of the BWC. Between these Review Conferences, States Parties have pursued various activities and initiatives to strengthen the effectiveness and improve the implementation of the Convention. A total of eight Review Conferences have taken place since the first one in 1980.

Article V:

The States party to this Convention undertake to consult one another and to cooperate in solving any problems which may arise in relation to the objective of, or in the application of the provisions of, the Convention. Consultation and cooperation pursuant to this Article may also be undertaken through appropriate international procedures within the framework of the United Nations and in accordance with its Charter.

And yet it wouldn’t be until many months later when Vanity Fair’s reporting in the summer of 2021 would reveal something about what happened within this Arms Control group and their early invocation of Article V against China:

Thomas DiNanno, former acting assistant secretary of the State Department’s Bureau of Arms Control, Verification, and Compliance, wrote that staff from two bureaus, his own and the Bureau of International Security and Nonproliferation, “warned” leaders within his bureau “not to pursue an investigation into the origin of COVID-19” because it would “‘open a can of worms’ if it continued.

As the group probed the lab-leak scenario, among other possibilities, its members were repeatedly advised not to open a ‘Pandora’s box,’ said four former State Department officials interviewed by Vanity Fair. The admonitions ‘smelled like a cover-up,’ said Thomas DiNanno, ‘and I wasn’t going to be part of it.’”

So one of the correspondents in the email chain discussing our peer-reviewed paper back in November 2020, Thomas DiNanno, would later write lots of memos about feeling like there was a cover-up and give quotes to a reporter with Vanity Fair to that effect… but felt no reason to mention the peer-reviewed paper me and my dad wrote, nor us in general? DiNanno didn’t want to point to a peer-reviewed paper that’d already become part of the published scientific literature and which was going to help him invoke Article V of the Biological Weapons Convention against China?

In case you think the government would insist on handling this internally and wouldn’t ever consult anyone on the outside given how classified all this could possibly be, DiNanno’s group at the State Department did in fact assemble a group of outside experts to evaluate a lab origin:

With deep distrust simmering, the State Department team convened a panel of experts to confidentially “red team” the lab-leak hypothesis. The idea was to pummel the theory and see if it still stood. The panel took place on the evening of January 7 2021…

Twenty-nine people logged on to a secure State Department video call that lasted three hours, according to meeting minutes obtained by Vanity Fair. The scientific experts included Ralph Baric, Alina Chan, and the Stanford microbiologist David Relman.

Wow, even all the way back then they managed to find twenty-nine people for this call about a lab origin including a bunch of folks who weren’t government employees, but for some reason didn’t think it was appropriate to even touch base with me and my dad? Even after we’d co-written the first peer-reviewed paper arguing for an engineered virus, had both previously held security clearances, and with this as just a summary of my dad’s resume:

Dr. Karl Sirotkin is a 40-year PhD in Microbiology and the architect of dbSNP, and the original databases behind NLM’s GenBank, with nearly 20 years of molecular wet-work experience. He previously taught molecular virology at the University of Tennessee, and worked within the Theoretical Biology Division of the Los Alamos National Laboratory on GenBank when it was managed there, as a component of the Human Genome Project. At the time of his retirement from government service, Dr. Sirotkin had more years working for GenBank than any other staff member - with his 28 years of service on the world’s premiere DNA sequencing database making him one of the most experienced scientists on the planet when it comes to managing and understanding genomic sequences.

So gee, for some silly reason it turns out our own government would rather trust and seek the advice of someone like Alina Chan, a foreign national with no allegiance to the United States of America and a hilariously junior scientist in comparison to my father. Must have been that preening article in Boston Magazine, which really conveniently came out just a couple weeks after me and my dad got our first peer-reviewed paper published - and distracted absolutely everyone alive from it.

What a strange coinky-dink. What timing, that a vapid biopic about Alina Chan would be published within a few weeks of the first peer-reviewed paper scientifically arguing for a lab origin, and so the actual peer-reviewed literature was totally ignored by everyone so that Alina China, sorry Chan, could be quoted throughout the corporate and government-controlled media.

Gosh golly.

So yeah, instead of me and my dad, the State Department turned to foreign nationals without any notable scientific expertise or relevant publications or experience, or to people like this fucking guy who lives in Hong Kong and has spent his entire career trying to make as much money as possible:

David Asher invited Dr. Steven Quay, a breast cancer specialist who’d founded a biopharmaceutical company, to present a statistical analysis weighing the probability of a lab origin versus a natural one… When a State Department adviser asked Quay whether he’d ever done a similar analysis, he replied there’s “a first time for everything,” according to the meeting minutes.

If you were reading carefully, you’ll remember David Asher’s name from the State Department’s FOIA results and the discussion around using our paper to invoke Article V of the Biological Weapons Convention against China. And it would be David Asher who would finally contact me and my dad in the spring of 2021, but not through official government channels. Asher would email us over a personal Protonmail, which isn’t what you’re supposed to do when you’re on official government business, and called me and my dad from his personal cell, which also isn’t exactly following protocol.

That’s when we’d first learn that our original whitepaper from January 2020 had in fact made it all the way to the White House and in front of the National Security Council after I’d asked my childhood bestfriend from second grade to pass it along, since at that point in January 2020 he was serving on the NSC as the Director of National Intelligence Programs. So even though David Asher had been aware of our work since at least November 2020, was aware that it was the first peer-reviewed science arguing for a lab origin, was aware that our whitepaper first put the idea of a lab origins on the radar of the U.S. Government at all back in January 2020… It took six-months to make any contact at all?

Probably seems strange, until you learn that David Asher only reached out to offer me and my father $10,000 to stop publicly discussing a lab origin, and let Jamie Metzl take over. Which yeah, also doesn’t really seem like official government protocol either.

And so back on January 7th 2021 when that big fancy meeting hosted by the State Department was going on twenty-nine entire people deep… somehow neither me nor my dad made that not-so-short list? Oh yeah hold on I’m sorry, I forgot that David Asher already explained why he and the U.S. Government as a whole have entirely disavowed all of my work:

My background issue “give[s] people the creeps,” huh?

Yeah I sort of feel like the fact that I’m a retired NSA counterterrorism analyst who held a TS/SCI clearance should be a little more salient than my criminal misdeeds, which didn’t have anything to do with academic integrity or intellectual theft, or anything to do with the origins of a pandemic at all.

That’s why the fact that the Arms Control team you were on was going to use my peer-reviewed work all the way back in November 2020 to try and get to the bottom of this pandemic, my “background issue” is why the peer-reviewed science I wrote with my dad’s help shouldn’t be publicly known or even mentioned once at all? You were ready to confront China using an international weapons treaty dating back to 1972 backed by the United Nations based on our work, but then totally changed your mind?

That’s why my father’s entire career should be erased? Because of his own son’s crimes?

Pretty sure there’s a lot of really old philosophy about how that goes, about how that whole cycle leads to destruction and isn’t a Good Thing. Okay sure, technically it goes the other way around, but that really doesn’t seem like an excuse given the circumstances and given what’s at stake:

For nearly two millennia, Western law visited the sins of fathers and mothers upon their illegitimate children, subjecting them to systematic discrimination and deprivation. The graver the sins of their parents, the further these children fell in social standing and legal protection. While some reformers sought to better the plight of illegitimate children, only in recent decades has illegitimacy lost its full legal sting. Yet the social, economic, and psychological costs of illegitimacy still remain high even in the liberal, affluent West.

And in case you’re ready to go a little deeper down this rabbit-hole, there’s concrete evidence that not only the State Department but also the Department of Energy and its highly-vaunted top-secret “Z-Division” has been aware of our work and the specter of reverting live-attenuating vaccines since at least 2021. This was first indicated back in May 2021, when the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) first began reporting on the possible engineered origins of this pandemic:

An intelligence analyst working with David Asher sifted through classified channels and turned up a report that outlined why the lab-leak hypothesis was plausible. It had been written in May 2021 by researchers at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, which performs national security research for the Department of Energy. But it appeared to have been buried within the classified collections system.

Y’all wanna see a magic trick? As per this article covering Lawrence Livermore National Lab’s double-super-secret “Z Division” and its report on COVID likely having an engineering origin, the man in charge of that ultra secretive division when it comes to biodefense is named Dr. David Rakestraw:

The Z Division report received only limited distribution at the time of its issuance, sources said, prompting some senior U.S. officials in the Trump administration to make inquiries into why it had not been brought to their attention last May. Senior officials at the Energy and State Departments were said to have intervened to quash efforts by lower-level U.S. officials who, intrigued by the Z Division report, contacted the Livermore scientists who wrote it to seek additional information. Seaver, the LLNL spokesperson, did not respond to that allegation.

One individual said to have been intimately involved in the preparation of the Z Division report is Dr. David J. Rakestraw, a senior science adviser who formerly ran LLNL’s biodefense programs and has been coordinating the lab’s technical response to COVID-19.

Alright here we go… nothing in my hands… wanna make me see David Rakestraw’s name appear?

Look away from your screen and then look right back - no further than this FOIA result dating back to March and June 2023, where down at the bottom he’s communicating with Jamie Metzl about the origins of this pandemic and responding within an email chain talking about our original whitepaper from January 2020. Okay you don’t recognize the first guy in that file, Nils Carlson, but it’s probably worth noting that in May 2021 Carlson received an award for exceptional service from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) for “exceptional service.”

Isn’t that delightfully open-ended? And if you’re not impressed yet, just keep on scrolling just a little bit until you get to the bottom of the file, where you’ll see Dr. David Rakestraw’s email.

And yet it wasn’t until the spring of 2023 when Vanity Fair would get around to reporting more about the DOE’s skeptical opinions, in the wake of the 90-day deadline the Intelligence Community was given to declassify everything about COVID’s origins. A declassification which of course didn’t happen, and of course no accountability resulted. So you’d think that maybe after three years had passed since our peer-reviewed paper was published, that maybe at that point Vanity Fair might consider mentioning me and my dad, or possibly our work or maybe even the term “serial passage” at all?

Oh, my sweet summer child.

If you take a moment to search both of the Vanity Fair articles that I’ve linked above, spanning almost the entirety of the pandemic, you’ll notice that not only are me and my father excluded entirely, but there’s no mention of “serial passage” or reverting live-attenuated vaccines or our peer-reviewed paper at all - despite playing such a pivotal role in both the State Department’s deliberations in November 2020, and Lawrence Livermore National Lab and their Z-Division’s analysis, which apparently involves our January 2020 whitepaper.

But in the end, the bad news is that there was a very legitimate reason not to use Article V of the Biological Weapons Convention to investigate the origins of this pandemic. Since as the treaty states, the only items covered until this convention “that have no justification for prophylactic, protective or other peaceful purposes” and biological weapons and their delivery.

A reverting live-attenuated vaccine would not in fact be covered by the Biological Weapons Convention, since on paper its entirely peaceful and shouldn’t ever hurt anyone. But that’s only if it’s a live-attenuated vaccine that’s been properly designed and tested, as the long history of wildly unethical and vastly evil experimentation on orphans just a few generations ago attests to.

The only reason humanity thought it stopped Polio was due to the live-attenuated vaccine against it known as OPV, which was refined by extensive testing on helpless orphans all across America. One of those orphans, Charlton, would lend his name to the particular strain of OPV known as CHAT-OPV that’s long been linked with originally seeding HIV in yet another false zoonosis born by medical experimentation and live-attenuated vaccines.

To be fair, the United States Government officials working with Dr. Ralph Baric at his lab in UNC, the only place on earth trying to make a live-attenuated vaccines against SARS-like viruses, and China’s People’s Liberation Army had good reason to believe that their live-attenuated vaccine that’d reverted unexpectedly would simply just fade away. After all that’s what’d happened in both 1977 and 2009 with live-attenuated vaccines against H1N1, the Spanish Flu pandemic strain of influenza, the former coming from either the Soviet or Chinese military, and the later Mexican pork farms.

And it was that past live-attenuated vaccine reversion of 1977 that unlocks so much of our ongoing pandemic, since in our original peer-reviewed paper I accidentally deleted the citation which demonstrated that the H1N1 variant of 1977 had indisputably been engineered by serial passage, which given the technology at the time pointed directly at live-attenuated vaccine programs known to exist at the time:

When referring to the H1N1 Swine Flu strain, which presumably leaked out of a Soviet lab as part of a vaccine program in the late 1970s, “serial passage” refers to the expected attenuation of a viral strain that naturally occurs as it is forced to pass multiple times through cell lines, usually cells from a different species than originally hosted the virus. Serial passage for attenuation leads to a strain with lesser virulence, and mirrors the natural loss of virulence that generally occurs as a virus proliferates throughout a large population of hosts over many generations.

But unfortunately, when we first mentioned serial passage while referencing that Soviet strain of H1N1 Swine Flu, one of our citations that made it just about beyond doubt that this strain of influenza had been subject to serial passage[1] was accidently elided by us in the process of coordinating several different manuscripts.

However the only reason we became aware of that mistake was due to an email from a bunch of government-adjacent folks trying real hard to act like they have no relation at all to the Intelligence Community. One of the people on that email was Gigi Kwik-Gronvall, who’s been one of the most outspoken critics against a lab origin for SARS-CoV-2, and who’s failed to ever admit that peer-reviewed science exists explaining a lab origin. But that email was authored by a former Secretary of the Navy and long-time bio-security consultant for DARPA, Richard Danzig, who has a rather interesting writing relationship with our sitting Director of National Intelligence, Avril Haines.

Before they emailed us I’d never heard of Richard Danzig or Gigi Kwik-Gronvall or anyone else on the email, but a little digging revealed that Danzig spent 2018 as the lead author of a paper directly lobbying with the help of Johns Hopkins for more scientific and academic engagement and cooperation with the CCP, especially if another pandemic broke out:

This global environment requires that a successful American security strategy do more than attempt to prevail in or manage competition; it must artfully blend and balance competition and cooperation. This is particularly evident in our relations with China, a nation whose economic power, we have emphasized, is approaching America’s and will probably come to exceed it. In this context, our recommended strategic premises encourage a willingness to take risks for peace that at least approaches our acceptance of risk in conflict. This example provides some illustrations of how our call for cooperative initiatives might be translated into action.

…

So it may be in the years ahead. If, for example, a highly contagious disease like SARS broke out in North Korea, we believe the resulting concerns would render America and China, at least for these purposes, allies.

Sure is interesting that Avril Haines, the current head of the Office of National Intelligence, is one of Danzig’s coauthors of a paper arguing that a pandemic would make the USA and China BFFs. Pretty hard to imagine that Richard Danzig would email me and my father about our peer-reviewed paper regarding an engineered origin for the COVID-19 Pandemic without her having any idea at all, ain’t it?

Maybe this comes across as more excessively paranoid and less of a magic trick, but keep in mind that not only have the entirety of Wikipedia and the corporate media refused to link our work on serial passage in any form at all, but even outlets like The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, USRTK, and The Intercept which pretend to be journalistically independent have refused to cite any of our work - even after their own reporting and FOIAs revealed extensive discussions about serial passage.

So if you want to know how to make many millions of innocent people disappear, all you have to do is follow the blueprint laid by the HIV epidemic, which almost certainly used the fact that the 1977 H1N1 Pandemic’s origins were totally disputed until February 2021 - disputed until my dad and I published the clarification pointing to the Soviet paper that made it clear it’d been engineered by serial passage:

When that Soviet paper was published back in 1981, the internet was still a bit off in the distance, however it’s not hard to imagine that it eventually made its way across Robert Gallo’s desk, while he was hard at work on retroviruses and furiously digging for the origins of AIDS. Tellingly, he’d go on to spend many years lying about the fact that he’d gotten the notorious virus he’d been researching from France, and it wasn’t something he’d independently isolated, a crime he wouldn’t apologize for until years later.

And there’d be good reason for Gallo to be on the lookout for anything in the scientific literature relating to serial passage through cell cultures, since a few years earlier in 1978 he’d been a key player in the founding of the Special Virus-Cancer Program, formed in large part because of how often the monkey virus SV-40 was being introduced into human research and vaccine lines especially during serial passage experiments, causing concerns it might be seeding cancers.

Then a few years later in 1982, Gallo would receive his first prestigious Lasker Award for being the first to associate this specific retrovirus with cancers, and then two more years later in 1984, his team would publish a series of four papers asserting together that the virus he’d gotten the Lasker for was in fact the cause of AIDS.

And although there’s nothing in these papers about SIV or the virus’s possible origins, there was probably no one else on the planet more capable and prepared than Gallo to read that Soviet paper about serial passage causing some but not all shared genes to line-up, and realize that the same phenomenon might apply to HIV and SIV, with SIV serving the same role as SV-40, a monkey virus that’d been introduced into human cell lines via vaccine research and gone on to infect humans prior to the emergence of HIV.

Since when you compare HIV and SIV, you also find that their genes appear to have aged out-of-sync with each other, and so determining when a theoretical evolution from SIV into HIV happened has no good answer. Scientists wave their hands a bunch and offer explanations, but by this measure HIV is just as unnatural as the 1977 H1N1 strain, probably more so since several genes are out of sync instead of just one.

And so back in the 1980s, Tony Fauci was brought in by Robert Gallo to occlude HIV’s origins in the CHAT-OPV vaccine programs, understanding how the viral contamination across cell-lines happened. But whether or not that’s ever proven - Fauci definitely got installed to push AZT as an unproven but miraculous solution.

Nearly nothing has changed, except for instead of a virus that only spreads through blood and sexual fluids, ours spreads right through the air. Might be a tiny bit more of a problem. And Tony’s old pal Robert Gallo has now become a horcrux for both Joseph Mengele and Joseph Goebbels - first pioneering the military cancer-vaccine research programs that emerged from experiments like the CHAT-OPV and lead to SARS-CoV-2, and now writing propaganda for Time Magazine while trying once again to gaslight the American people into complacency about an incredibly lethal virus whose origins Gallo is helping to occlude.

Up until April 2021, the only thing we were talking about was “serial passage” as a general technique that’d almost certainly been used to engineer SARS-CoV-2, since serial passage creates an artificial zoonosis and as a virus that’d been passaged through lab ferrets would be expected to do, it jumped right into farmed mink - a sister species to the incarcerated ferrets used to attenuate live-attenuated vaccines - all across the West.

And up until April 2021, no one officially attached to our own government had made any contact at all, the only contact was that Richard Danzig email, and on paper he’s retired. But then on April 1st 2021, I published Golden Silkworms in Pandora’s Box, which made the explicit argument that the pandemic began when a live-attenuated vaccine reverted unexpectedly just as has happened many times before, and is still happening right now with OPV all across the third-world as it reverts back to full virulence.

It was only then that David Asher, acting as the State Department’s lead investigator into a lab origin of the pandemic, actually made contact. He made no mention of his team’s use of our paper all the way back in November 2020, he just tried to buy our silence while communicating via his personal cell phone and Protonmail.

So unfortunately in the end, after you’ve seen the big picture and the full history of what’s really been going on - there isn’t really any magic happening at all. After you understand the truth, all you can see is treasonous collusion between multiple American government officials and agencies working alongside China’s Peoples Liberation Army to do what happened to the origins of HIV: Bury it in the past forever.

Leave the truth about its origins alongside the many millions of its victims, covered in dirt and hidden from public view.

Dan Sirotkin is the co-author of the first peer-reviewed paper examining a laboratory origin for SARS-CoV-2, as well as its addendum, which settled a 50-year mystery and formally linked the H1N1 Spanish Flu pandemic strain release of 1977 to gain-of-function research.

There are few people alive more interested in vaccine development than Bill Gates, perhaps because after feeling like he’d pretty much conquered the digital world of ones and zeroes by the late 1990s, there was nothing left for him to do but apply his genius to the genetic world of nucleotides: As, Ts, Gs, and Cs. 

Not binary like the digital world, but perhaps close enough. 

But the thing is, Gate’s forays into vaccination programs haven’t always gone so well. Back in 2009 a Gates-sponsored HPV vaccine from Merck caused severe side effects among hundreds of the Indian girls it was administered to, ultimately killing seven of them. In addition to the faulty science behind this vaccine program, was evidence that the majority of patients had no idea what they were signing up for, but were pushed through into treatment anyways. 

More unethical behavior was reported in the Gates-funded MenAfriVac campaign in Chad, in which between 50 and 500 children vaccinated for meningitis were reported to develop paralysis, leading a South African newspaper to announce that “we are guinea pigs for the drug-makers.” 

If you’re skeptical about those claims and the sourcing, a peer-reviewed look at the DTP and polio vaccine found that it caused much more harm than good during a huge vaccine campaign in urban Africa. And there are a scattershot of other accounts covering possible malfeasance by Gates-funded vaccination programs all across the globe. So not that Bill Gates is personally punching little kids in the face, but that his well-meaning funding may end up in a lot of the wrong places in the blind pursuit for results, providing financing for very shady and not-entirely ethical practices.

However an admittedly far more admirable vaccine push has come from the Global Polio Eradication Initiative, which has been heavily funded by Gates since the 1980s, and had quite nearly wiped Polio off the face of the earth. But then a funny thing happened in 2017, when for the first time more children were paralyzed by the reverted live-attenuated vaccine (LAV) against Polio known as OPV, than by wild cases of the virus. 

And then by 2022, those 21 cases from the reverted LAV back in 2017 had ballooned all the way up to 786 cases all around the world. Clearly, something was going wrong. Then things got even worse in 2023, when the specialized LAV known as nOPV that had been designed specifically not to revert at all and also block cases from reverting OPV, also began to generate cases of its own after reverting all the way back to virulence just like the original OPV. 

Bill Gates was beginning to learn what happened when he sent his spiders after his flies, already swallowed by old ladies across the third world. So with that history in mind, perhaps we should all be just a teensy bit skeptical about programs like this: 

Gates said he plans to set up a 3,000-person social media unit to help propagate accurate vaccine information in the future. He stressed that “good messages” need to be carried forward by people of trust in the community, such as political and ethnic leaders.

And just maybe it’s worth considering that there was something just a little bit fishy about Event 201, co-sponsored by Gates and the World Economic Forum, which was all about developing an emergency vaccine in response to a global pandemic, and which went down just as this pandemic has been estimated to have emerged. 

The past few years have been just a bit stressful.  

After it became obvious that the American government was deeply involved with covering-up SARS-CoV-2’s origins, for the first few months of 2020 after I begin publicly writing about this virus being engineered - I kept my blinds shut tight, hoping that’d keep a sniper’s bullet from exploding my head like an overripe watermelon. 

But probably the most unnerving moment throughout all of this happened a little bit after our  peer-reviewed paper arguing for a lab origin of this pandemic was finally published back in August 2020. A week or two later, right around when me and my dad were contacted by a group that included a former Secretary of the Navy who’d written whitepapers about cooperating more with China on STEM matters alongside current CIA director Avril Haines, an old family contact asked to come by the little room I rent above a garage for a visit. 

Which seemed odd. 

Dude had never once been interested in hanging-out with just me in the roughly 30 years I’d known him, but life as a registered sex-offender is fairly lonely, so I said sure. Previously the absolute only times I’d ever seen this guy was with my dad, since they’d met decades ago, and nothing had ever happened with me and him without my dad’s involvement as well. 

And although the only times I’d been around him previously were either at his house during big parties or out to a meal with my dad along, for some fucking reason this fucking guy decided to invite me and my dog up to Deep Creek Lake to go out on his boat. Which might not sound terribly ominous on its face, just a guy with a boat - however when you consider that this fucking guy spent his career working for the “State Department” while heading off to Afghanistan, the Horn of Africa, and the Middle East to work on “agricultural matters” you’ll begin to understand my concern. 

Since the State Department is one of the primary covers used by the CIA for its spooks, which okay doesn’t necessarily mean anything - not everyone at State is actually a spook. But the thing is, when I was applying to the NSA’s high school scholarship program, I got one of my references from the late Frank Anderson, who by then was retired from being a rather notorious spook with the CIA and had been publicly talking about it for decades - he’d previously come to my seventh grade Career Day to discuss life as a CIA officer. 

And at the retirement for this contact I’ve been discussing, I heard a group of several older gentlemen with lots of white hair and white mustaches discussing Frank Anderson, who was still alive and fighting cancer at the time. They got real weird when I jumped in with a health update and discussed going to middle and high school with his son - and they definitely didn’t seem to appreciate that I then asked if they’d all worked together at some point in the past. 

Maybe like, farming together.

So no, luckily for me and my dog, I am not in fact fucking stupid enough to go out on a boat with someone who’s basically a stranger to me, especially not when they’re a “retired” CIA spook with who knows how much innocent blood on their hands already. And even more especially not after a paper I’d written had just been published, which began to expose the massive cover-up that my own government is very much involved with, that’s now claimed many tens of millions of lives and counting.

If that’d been an honest request to socialize, don’t you think an invitation all the way out to go hours away and out on a boat would’ve been tempered with, I dunno, maybe just driving fifteen minutes to come by his house for dinner? But after I declined the invitation to get me and my dog murdered out in the middle of a fucking lake, and never heard a peep from the guy again. However a few weeks later, Josh Rogin with the Washington Post would call pretending to be a reporter, ask a bunch about our paper, and then go write a bunch more for the Washington Post about the pandemic, all acting like our peer-reviewed paper did not exist. 

Perhaps I shouldn’t have been that surprised, since the New York Times and CNN had already pulled the exact same thing.

Behavior that’s been mimicked by Vanity Fair, The Intercept, ProPublica, The New York Times, The Economist, USRTK, and literally every other outlet that’s been cosplaying as journalists during this pandemic. All of which rely on large corporate donors to keep running, and none of which have even the slightest shred of journalistic integrity - spending years and years acting like our peer-reviewed papers and everything else I’ve written do not exist at all, despite being first in the door about a lab origin and having academic primacy. 

And on top of all that, then there was Alina Chan and Matt Ridley attempting to bribe other scientists to remove me and my dad from another paper we’d been working on in a big group about the pandemic’s origins:

All this started out frustrating, and then eventually became laughably transparent as CIA-influenced propaganda to help perpetuate the cover-up. After all, that’s been one of the CIA main functions for many decades:

“I was also an interrogator and indeed briefed the press when we, the CIA, wanted to circulate disinformation on a particular issue. This information is not necessarily a lie, it may be a half-truth, and we would pick-out a journalist, I would go do the briefing, and hope that he would put the information in print… and I would say our percentage [of success] planting that kind of data was seventy to eighty percent. 

“The correspondents we targeted were those who had terrific influence, the most respected journalists… We would go after these gentlemen, I would be directed to cultivate them, to spend time with them at the Caravel Hotel or the Continental Hotel, to socialize with them, and slowly but surely to try to gain their confidence by dolloping out valid information, information which was true and then I would drop in, into a conversation the data that we wanted to get across which might not be true.

Any of that starting to sound familiar?

    I didn’t realize it at at the time, but this story first began to turn its pages a couple decades ago all the way back in August 2001, while I was a tanned teenaged guest a few weeks graduated from high school, happily marinating within a private hot tub that was snuggled inside the hoity-toity beach enclaves of North Carolina’s Outer Banks.

After dragging myself out of bed each dawn for a long jog across the quiet morning sands inhabited in those early hours only by straggling hermit crabs and the odd abandoned collection of beer bottles, I settled into the hot tub and kicked my feet up, watching as another hazy sun burnt its way up through the rainbow’s spectrum, on its way to arch across the sky and set the slow solar metronome to another lazy summer day at the beach. 

Ironically, that beach house was owned by the first old friend to turn his back on me after my arrest, and - although I had no clue at the time - was purchased with blood money gained from yet another failed live-attenuated vaccine protocol that was forced out into the world regardless of any possible blowback, because of all the profit that had been dangled in front of its designers.  It always confused me why his dad never wanted to talk to my dad at all, since they were both supposed to be scientists. But that suddenly made sense when I realized that although my father is in fact an actual scientist guided by morals and ethics, while his father was a whore who was cosplaying as a scientist in an attempt to make as much money as possible - regardless of how much innocent life was damaged in the process. 

Since I’d be at the beach for two whole weeks, I figured I could get training runs in every morning, and cap those off by working my way through the packet I’d been given by my trainer at the NSA, which was funding my ROTC-style full-ride to Harvard, which the late Frank Anderson had written me a recommendation for. All expenses were paid but I was expected to work for the government for five years after graduating - seemed reasonable at the time. And easily the coolest thing about that packet was the UI/FOUO markings along the top and bottom of every single page - Unofficial, For Official Use Only. Finally, at long last, after all these years and all those Tom Clancy novels I’d ravaged all throughout elementary and middle school, some almost secret squirrel shit. 

“Almost” because those markings only meant the packet consisted of official government information, in theory maybe some of it used to be classified, but unlike the more involved markings that designate which countries could see certain reports and who had to approve their release, UI/FOUO didn’t really mean anything beyond an ego boost. So sitting back in that hot tub ready to rock-out like Jack Ryan with his cock-out, I started to try and shape my thinking around concepts of probabilities and uncertainty, and learning the basic elements of analytical spycraft. 

But when you’re kicked back in a hot tub alongside one of the ritziest and most exclusive beachfronts in the world, ready to step through Harvard’s doors in a few weeks on a full-ride from the Intelligence Community and as a recruited athlete, and when you’re pretty sure that during your senior year visit a few months prior Natalie Portman gave you directions to Harvard Station from South Station - seeming so very teeny-tiny for a movie star while holding Lord & Taylor bags and with giant Breakfast at Tiffany’s glasses on - isn’t everything going along exactly as it should be? 

What could possibly go wrong?  

Probably the first clue I had that the Intelligence Community wasn’t all it was purported to be was early September 2001, just a few weeks after my hot-tub reading through that secret squirrel packet, when my trainer at the NSA emailed me back to let me know that I was not allowed to take Arabic during my freshman year of college. This seemed really bizarre since I hadn’t passed out of the foreign language requirement that Harvard had for graduating, missing the cut-off of the French test by a few points out of several hundred, so I’d need a year of studying some foreign language for Harvard to let me graduate at all.

And since I’d already gotten permission to take a couple of courses on the Middle East and study that region in general, not being able to take a single year of Arabic seemed extraordinarily nonsensical and borderline moronic. But I was just a freshman in college a few weeks into his Department of Defense oath to preserve and protect the United States Constitution, so I backed down after my trainer threatened to put a formal disciplinary letter in my file, and I agreed to just take French for one more year instead of starting Arabic. 

But then a few days passed, and it was the eleventh day of the month. 

After frantically trying to call my dad since I was worried NIH might get hit next, from Taking Your Kid Into Work Day years before I remembered my dad working in one really big shiny building that seemed like it might be a nice juicy target. But the cell-towers were all full, and I just had to wait and watch the television along with the rest of my floor as the carnage spread across the East Coast.

Later in the afternoon I finally got through to my Dad via email, and then a little while later saw that my NSA trainer was calling me, so of course I immediately picked-up: 

“Yeah hey, thanks for the call… you, you what? You want me to take Arabic now? But like a week ago you threatened to discipline me for wanting to just study it for a single year? Okay yeah obviously things have changed, but send an email to me so I have this in writing, because I was threatened with disciplinary action for wanting to take Arabic literally a week ago. Yes… I can still change, classes aren’t finalized until the 15th.”

And so, Allah was in fact willing, and I began my four year journey studying a language that I’d never have more proficiency with than a severely learning-disabled second-grader. This entire experience probably should’ve shaken my faith in the Intelligence Community more than it did. 

Morally, intellectually, functionally - America has not had an Intelligence Community in at least several years and probably several decades, instead its many buildings worth of cowards and morons who are happy to drag their faces across their keyboards so long as the checks and eventually the promotions keep rolling in. Because that is the absolute only thing you need to get promoted inside the federal government: Keep sitting there, and you’ll be promoted in time. There is very little meritocratic about America’s government service in general, but the Intelligence Community especially has long become a pawn of weapons manufactures and special interests. 

Especially one extra-special interest, but more about him soon. 

And it turns out that, strangely enough, all the training I’d ever really need was in those Tom Clancy books I’d already read, and in that packet of UI/FOUO information I’d taken to the beach with me on vacation that was supposed to teach me the basics of Intelligence Analysis. The packet emphasized a few things: Being clear with your measurement of probability, be wary of misdirection, and being careful about attribution if you didn’t really have proof. 

Intelligence in the spycraft sense has always been about deception, so in nearly every Tom Clancy novel and certainly throughout history there’s always an effort to create cut-outs, intermediaries, red-herrings, limited hangouts - anything to insulate the people pulling the strings from what’s actually happening and redirect attention towards a decoy. Shell companies are created, covers are given to operatives, stories are told and lies woven - nothing is ever supposed to be what it seems. The guys who pulled-off 9/11 used fake IDs, lied about why they were training to fly, and used deception to hide what they were doing. 

The most important thing to do isn't trying to prove that the truth is completely false, but instead create as many frontmen as you can who are presenting distractions and parts of the truth, without the full picture. 

Just like special forces have always done throughout history, since the functional line between terrorist and spy or special forces has never been particularly thick. Although there’s certainly a moral line, one that was starkly drawn once again in blood-spattered sand about a year ago, as Israel began to learn some of the same lessons that American did on 9/11. 

So if elements within the American government such as senior staff inside NIH were closely involved with the funding and development of a live-attenuated vaccine (LAV) in partnership with China’s PLA, would they come clean and admit what happened if it reverted faster than expected and began to spread out of control - like the military-linked LAV for H1N1 did back in 1977 - or would they roll out the deception, misdirection, and distractions? 

In late November 2023, a rather startling whistleblower’s report was published by Public News revealing a massive internet censorship operation being run directly by elements within the American government: 

The whistleblower's documents describe everything from the genesis of modern digital censorship programs to the role of the military and intelligence agencies, partnerships with civil society organizations and commercial media, and the use of sock puppet accounts and other offensive techniques.

"Lock your shit down," explains one document about creating "your spy disguise.” Another explains that while such activities overseas are "typically" done by "the CIA and NSA and the Department of Defense," censorship efforts "against Americans" have to be done using private partners because the government doesn't have the "legal authority."

The ambitions of the 2020 pioneers of the Censorship Industrial Complex went far beyond simply urging Twitter to slap a warning label on Tweets, or to put individuals on blacklists. The Adversarial Misinformation and Influence Techniques (AMITT) framework calls for discrediting individuals as a necessary prerequisite of demanding censorship against them.

Oh hey, and if Alina Chan or Matt Ridley or Richard Ebright or a member of D.R.A.S.T.I.C hadn’t already told you already - I’m an ex-con who’s gonna be on the sex-offender registry for the rest of his life. What this has do with the origins of a pandemic virus that’s spreading out of control and murdering tens of millions of people all over the globe? 

Your guess is as good as mine. 

However bringing up my criminal record sure has helped keep all of my work buried, despite being the first to write about an engineered lab origin all the way back in January 2020 in a whitepaper that went in front of the National Security Council courtesy of their former Director of Intelligence Programs. And then passing peer-review and being academically published arguing for an engineered virus way back in August 2020 and then again in February 2021 - with that latter paper finally demonstrating that the virus of 1977 had been engineered via serial passage in what was clearly part of a live-attenuated vaccine protocol. 

Maybe all this has something to do with why the corporate media has refused to admit any of my work exists at all?

The sum total of the documents is a clear picture of a highly coordinated and sophisticated effort by the US and UK governments to build a domestic censorship effort and influence operations similar to the ones they have used in foreign countries. At one point, Terp openly referenced her work “in the background” on social media issues related to the Arab Spring. Another time, the whistleblower said, she expressed her own apparent surprise that she would ever use such tactics, developed for foreign nationals, against American citizens.

According to the whistleblower, roughly 12-20 active people involved in the Cyber Threat Intelligence League (CTIL) worked at the FBI or CIA…

CTIL’s approach to “disinformation” went far beyond censorship. The documents show that the group engaged in offensive operations to influence public opinion, discussing ways to promote “counter-messaging,” co-opt hashtags, dilute disfavored messaging, create sock puppet accounts, and infiltrate private invite-only groups. 

Breuer admitted in a podcast that his aim was to bring military tactics to use on social media platforms in the U.S. “I wear two hats,” he explained. “The military director of the Donovan Group, and one of two innovation officers at Sofwerx, which is a completely unclassified 501c3 nonprofit that's funded by U. S. Special Operations Command.”

Breuer went on to describe how they thought they were getting around the First Amendment. His work with Terp, he explained, was a way to get “nontraditional partners into one room,” including “maybe somebody from one of the social media companies, maybe a few special forces operators, and some folks from Department of Homeland Security… to talk in a non-attribution, open environment in an unclassified way so that we can collaborate better, more freely and really start to change the way that we address some of these issues.”

…

The report laments that governments and corporate media no longer have full  control of information. “For a long time, the ability to reach mass audiences belonged to the nation-state (e.g. in the USA via broadcast licensing through ABC, CBS and NBC). Now, however, control of informational instruments has been allowed to devolve to large technology companies who have been blissfully complacent and complicit in facilitating access to the public for information operators at a fraction of what it would have cost them by other means.”

The authors advocated for police, military, and intelligence involvement in censorship, across Five Eyes nations, and even suggested that Interpol should be involved.

Breuer spoke freely, openly stating that the information and narrative control he had in mind was comparable to that implemented by the Chinese government, only made more palatable for Americans. 

The Misinfosec report focused on information that “changes beliefs” through “narratives,” and recommended a way to counter misinformation by attacking specific links in a “kill chain” or influence chain from the misinfo “incident” before it becomes a full-blown narrative.

The report laments that governments and corporate media no longer have full  control of information. “For a long time, the ability to reach mass audiences belonged to the nation-state (e.g. in the USA via broadcast licensing through ABC, CBS and NBC). Now, however, control of informational instruments has been allowed to devolve to large technology companies who have been blissfully complacent and complicit in facilitating access to the public for information operators at a fraction of what it would have cost them by other means.”

The authors advocated for police, military, and intelligence involvement in censorship, across Five Eyes nations, and even suggested that Interpol should be involved.

So as per the secret squirrel-ish image above, dated March 2020, the American Intelligence Community had already decided that for some strange reason, “repeated” or serial passage through animals or cell culture could not be considered at all as a possible source of this pandemic. Wonder how many Langley buttholes puckered-UP tighter than a billionaire's submarine when me and my dad got our paper past peer-review in August 2020? 

Although it’s gotten more and more uses in the modern era, historical speaking “serial passage” points directly towards one thing: The development of live-attenuated vaccines. And if you’re looking to develop a live-attenuated vaccine against SARS-like viruses, there’s only one animal you’d use:

“Although different animal models are used in vaccine studies, the most appropriate model for studying SARS is ferret since it develops the typical clinical signs, viral replication patterns and lung pathology compatible with that of SARS pathogenesis in humans.”

So as our peer-reviewed paper pointed-out, there’s only one reason that SARS-CoV-2 would immediately infect mink farms all throughout the western world:

With all this in mind, it becomes inarguable that there’s only one person with the money, power, influence, and connections to steer the entirety of the international discourse away from the truth. So do you think it’s a coincidence that that same person has been intimately involved with the development of live-attenuated vaccines for several decades?

And has an obvious penchant for playing God?

How Bill Gates and partners used their clout to control the global response - with little oversight

The four organizations had worked together in the past, and three of them shared a common history. The largest and most powerful was the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, one of the largest philanthropies in the world. Then there was Gavi, the global vaccine organization that Gates helped to found to inoculate people in low-income nations, and the Wellcome Trust, a British research foundation with a multibillion dollar endowment that had worked with the Gates Foundation in previous years. Finally, there was the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, or CEPI, the international vaccine research and development group that Gates and Wellcome both helped to create in 2017.

While dozens of global health organizations participated in the world’s response to Covid, the POLITICO and WELT investigation focused on these four organizations because of their connections to one another — both Gavi and CEPI received seed funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation — and because they together played a critical role in advising governments and the WHO.

The WHO was crucial to the groups’ rise to power. All had longstanding ties to the global health body. The boards of both CEPI and Gavi have a specially designated WHO representative. There is also a revolving door between employment in the groups and work for the WHO: Former WHO employees now work at the Gates Foundation and CEPI; some, such as Chris Wolff, the deputy director of country partnerships at the Gates Foundation, occupy important positions.

Much of the groups’ clout with the WHO stems simply from money. Since the start of the pandemic in 2020, the Gates Foundation, Gavi, and the Wellcome Trust have donated collectively more than $1.4 billion to the WHO — a significantly greater amount than most other official member states, including the United States and the European Commission, according to data provided by the WHO.

“You have to remember that when you’re dealing with the Gates Foundation, it’s almost like you’re dealing with another major country in terms of their donations to these global health organizations,” a former senior U.S. health official said.

Working closely with the WHO, the four groups played a central role in creating an initiative known as the Access to Covid-19 Tools Accelerator, or ACT-A, that focused on securing and delivering tests, treatments and vaccine doses to low- and middle-income countries across the world. COVAX — a special consortium operated by Gavi, CEPI and UNICEF — is the vaccine pillar of the ACT-A initiative.

But ACT-A missed its delivery goals for 2021 on all three fronts — for testing, vaccine distribution and treatments, according to an independent review by Dalberg Global Development Advisors, a policy advisory firm based in New York.

Our collective history is littered with myths and tales that warn against flying too close to the sun, against trying to leave our humanity behind and become gods ourselves. But it’s becoming increasingly apparent that those warnings have become antiquities, and for several decades Bill Gates has been attempting to treat human nucleotides like cousins to binary computer code. 

Instead of like the immutable whispers of the gods, as they really are. 

At least the experimentation he’d been doing has been chased out of Africa, however there was nothing and no one at all protecting the Uighurs stuck in China’s concentration camps. 

And since Bill Gates and the rest of Big Pharma has been chased out of Africa after all their exploitative experiments, the PLA used the Uighur concentration camps as their testing grounds. It'd be something between poetic and ironic if after swearing "Never Again" following the Holocaust, that humanity watched something very similar happen to the Uighurs, collectively shrugged, and then went extinct because of the experiments run in those camps. 

Uighurs are Muslims with good sanitary practices, at the Wuhan Military Games they brought in 250,000 volunteers, so you can imagine the temporary toileting facilities weren't ideal - plus in most of China pooping in a hole in the ground and not washing your hands is fairly common. 

OPV reverts back to virulence in the Third World, where there's crowding and bad sanitation, since feces carry the most potent viral load. So although the PLA thought their LAV was safe after testing in the Uighur camps, that was with good community sanitation - at the Wuhan Military Games the transmission dynamics were much stronger due to the poor sanitation and overcrowding, which presented SARS-CoV-2's FCS with the chance to emerge from the swarm and start this pandemic.

That was the fall of 2019, and then by the spring of 2020 the cover-up was already in full-swing. But the bad news for rich sociopaths everywhere is that money can buy an awful lot of things - however it can’t buy you the Truth.

And as this email and subsequent discussion on Slack illustrates, no matter how much money you have - there’s always gonna be someone who does not give a fuck and has absolutely nothing at all left to lose. 

GET IT RIGHT: I LIVE IN A TINY ROOM ABOVE A GARAGE, YOU FUCKIN’ DICKS. 

The letter below was written during the most trying psychological experience of my incarceration: Waiting for the final word from parole that would either send me home or keep me behind bars for about two more years.

Well, as you’ve hopefully heard by now, my original Hearing Officer recommended me for a June 2016 release back on May 20th. As expected, the first Parole Commissioner to review my case rejected his recommendation – something that apparently happens in most cases. So on June 1st I requested an appeal of that decision, which I was told would take about two weeks since a panel of two Parole Commissioners would be thoroughly reviewing my case.

And so began the longest psychological trial of my life. I was told by everyone here – from other inmates to my teacher to the COs – that a ”No” usually came during that two-week period, and that a “Yes” would take a bit longer to arrive. So starting on about day 10 after requesting an appeal, I would spend all day trying to distract myself as best I could, and then toss and turn waiting for the night-shift CO to come by and put the rolled-up passes into the metal grate over the window of my cell door sometime between one and three in the morning.

Many of those mornings a pass would slip into the grate, my heart would fall out of my chest, and I would slowly uncurl it to reveal … a pass to Medical for my cell-buddy. Or a pass for me to go to the Package Room. Or a pass for my cell-buddy to stay late at his job in the Plumbing Shop.

So by the time passes were given out each Friday morning I would let relief wash over me – at least I could relax through Saturday and Sunday mornings since no passes would show-up over the weekend. And finally, on the Friday morning before Fourth of July weekend, I let myself feel a small kernel of elation. It had now been four weeks since I requested my appeal, and not only could I look forward to three days of no passes due to the Fourth being on Monday – it had been twice as long as hearing a “No” was supposed to take.

Maybe all of this was almost over. Maybe I was close to walking out the gates, hugging my parents for as long as I needed, and going to lay on their back lawn to watch the clouds turn into stars.

And as July stretched on I found myself spending my days in a weird sort of stasis – after I got back from tutoring my brain didn’t want me to do anything other than lay on the bottom bunk, stare up at the top bunk, and half-listen to the news or whatever was on PBS or live sports if they were on. Honestly, I can’t really remember too much from June or July other than small snippets.

Read more

Dan Sirotkin is the co-author of the first peer-reviewed paper examining a laboratory origin for SARS-CoV-2, as well as its addendum, which settled a 50-year mystery and formally linked the H1N1 Spanish Flu pandemic strain release of 1977 to gain-of-function research.

  Alright so before any big reveal there’s gotta be a little suspense, so just to get your juices going here’s just a few straightforward points which demonstrate that each and every scientist, academic, journalist, and whoever else that’s waxing eloquently about mathematical probabilities and Bayesian priors is a self-important dork who’s far ffaaaarrrr more concerned with sounding smart online and hearing themselves talk than the preservation of innocent life.  

1. If you’re going to analyze whether or not a novel virus came from a lab, shouldn’t the first question be whether there are currently any viruses that started in a lab in global circulation causing active infections? And if any viruses that began in a lab are in global circulation right now, what kind of virus is it exactly? Questions that have just one answer today: The only virus that’s known to have started in a lab currently in circulation and causing active infections is OPV, the live-attenuated vaccine against Polio which is reverting in dozens of different countries on multiple continents despite all attempts at a vaccine to stop it over the past decade. Maybe that sounds a bit familiar?  

2. Alright so if in the present moment there’s only one type of known-to-be-engineered virus in circulation, and it started as a live-attenuated vaccine, what about historical precedent? Well, although the original SARS-CoV has notoriously escaped from a few labs, those leaks never spread more than one country outside their country-of-origin - not a global outbreak. Same with possible Ebola leaks in Africa. However the very first instance of a mysterious variant of any virus spreading all across the globe was back in 1977 with a variant of H1N1, and its origins remained murky all the way until February of 2021, when me and my dad published the Clarification to our original August 2020 paper, proving that it’d been engineered by serial passage. Which at the time and given the nature of the outbreak, only points a live-attenuated H1N1 vaccine that reverted faster-than expected. And there’s good reason to believe that the enpigmatic H1N1 outbreak of 2009 started with a live-attenuated vaccine against it on pork farms gone-wrong. 

So uh, why is it that I’m the only voice there is discussing the fact that live-attenuated vaccines are kinda well-known for reverting and becoming fully virulent full grown viruses? And that maybe that’s how the COVID-19 Pandemic started - with a live-attenuated vaccine that reverted too fast, and then got covered-up by the governments involved? Speaking of government cover-ups, sure is strange that shortly before the pandemic started, our sitting Director of National Intelligence, Avril Haines, was writing stuff like this:

This global environment requires that a successful American security strategy do more than attempt to prevail in or manage competition; it must artfully blend and balance competition and cooperation. This is particularly evident in our relations with China, a nation whose economic power, we have emphasized, is approaching America’s and will probably come to exceed it. In this context, our recommended strategic premises encourage a willingness to take risks for peace that at least approaches our acceptance of risk in conflict. This example provides some illustrations of how our call for cooperative initiatives might be translated into action.  

…

So it may be in the years ahead. If, for example, a highly contagious disease like SARS broke out in North Korea, we believe the resulting concerns would render America and China, at least for these purposes, allies.

And it’s probably another coincidence that the lead author of that paper, Richard Danzig, was also the lead author of the email that tried to get our original August 2020 paper focusing on serial paper retracted. Could be thinking this pandemic started in a lab means I’m crazy I guess. But maybe hold off on that judgment until you get to the good stuff below. 

Back in June 2023, Katherine Eban reported in Vanity Fair, where she’s written several articles about the lab leak debate without managing to mention that me and my dad even exist at all, that the Department of Energy had changed its mind:

Wow, must’ve been something pretty incredible to cause the DOE to change its mind!! And luckily for us, we get to find out what that intelligence is, since when USRTK hit the DOE with a FOIA about its thoughts on COVID’s origins, guess what came back from the spring of 2023!?

HEY WEIRD, THAT SURE LOOKS FACKING FAMILIAR!! So if you thought it was strange that even after getting two peer-reviewed papers published, that neither the New York Times, Washington Post, New York Magazine, CNN, nor any other media outlet we talked to at all thought they should mention our work exists, now we have definitive proof that my January 2020 paper caused the DOE’s super-fancy Lawrence Livermore National Lab to change its mind. 

And yet not even USRTK think’s its worth mentioning even in passing? Wow, much journalisming!

Also isn’t it really strange that absolutely everyone else wants to wave their hands about a nebulous “lab leak” or “research related incident,” and yet those very same people refuse to even breath the words “live-attenuated vaccine.” Hey was anyone aware that the CIA has a really long history of manipulating the American press so they can control the public? CRAZY SHIT, WONDER WHAT THAT’S LIKE!! 

Dan Sirotkin is the co-author of the first peer-reviewed paper examining a laboratory origin for SARS-CoV-2, as well as its addendum, which settled a 50-year mystery and formally linked the H1N1 Spanish Flu pandemic strain release of 1977 to gain-of-function research.

Although it’s more visibly preserved within modern Christian traditions, the existence of angels and demons has been a topic of discussion within Judaism for millennia, as both are described throughout the Old Testament in several different ways. Many of these descriptions are otherworldly and kaleidoscopic, presenting them as entirely unfamiliar beings that are utterly alien to the limited scope of our human perception.

Then within later rabbinic discussions around how evil could exist in a world mastered by an omnipotent God, a more familiar idea emerged: “Goodly deeds created good angels, destructive behavior created destructive behaviors… most angels are the creation - really a by-product - of humans rather than God. Thus the balance between the angelic and demonic forces in the universe is a direct result of human decision and action.”

So it would follow that only humanity’s vilest and most destructive behaviors would be able to summon heaven’s most fearsome angel, named in Islamic traditions as Azrael, and within Judaism as the Angel of Death and given many names: Malach Adoni the Angel of the Lord, Mashchit the Destroyer, Samael the Gall of God, and Mavet the Personification of Death.

And perhaps most importantly, in almost all cases the Angel of Death is considered the slowest angel. “Except in times of epidemic, when he is the fastest.” Sure seems like it might be a little bit of a bad thing if this pandemic started as a reverting live-attenuated vaccine (LAV), just like the H1N1 outbreak of 1977 as outlined in our second paper linked above, whose origins have been very intentionally buried by the billionaire sociopaths who conceptualized and funded a SARS-live LAV in the first place.

Something that, incidentally I’m sure, was only being worked at in one place and by one person in the world: Dr. Ralph Baric at UNC.

But you don’t need to believe that this pandemic started as a LAV, nor that the Passover Seder was in fact humanity’s first LAV protocol, designed to protect against the highly-pathogenic swarm of farm-animals viruses that would emerge in the spring as sheep were taken for shearing after a long winter stuffed together in their stalls - just like highly-pathogenic avian influenzas emerge on industrial farms only among the workers in close-contact with the birds - and first took the form of the Angel of Death.

Nor do you need to believe that the only miracle in the Bible that’s supported by archeological evidence, Sennacherib’s retreat from Hezekiah’s Jerusalem in 722BCE after being destroyed by a plague, was the result of yet another highly-pathogenic angelic swarm. This time emerging from the mice that’d infested Sennacherib’s besieging army over the many months of their campaign, the virus finally going highly-pathogenic and slaughtering the Assyrians just in time to save the sometimes City of Peace, saved since the stinky sulfuric fumes from Holiest of Holies repels mice like it does most critters.

After all, that’s why the site for the Holiest of Holies was purchased by King David in the first place, it’d been at this particular threshing floor where an ancient God-sent plague came to a sudden and inexplicable halt, as we learn in the twenty-fourth chapter of second Samuel: 

15 So the Lord sent a plague on Israel from that morning until the end of the three days, and seventy thousand of the people from Dan to Beersheba died. 16 When the angel stretched out his hand to destroy Jerusalem, the Lord relented concerning the disaster and said to the angel who was afflicting the people, “Enough! Withdraw your hand.” The angel of the Lord was then at the threshing floor of Araunah the Jebusite.

Lucky for you, you can leave all that religious stuff behind if you’d like, and just focus on the science around what happens when SARS-CoV-2 is exposed to air that’s acidified by sulfuric fumes or by acidic industrial intent:

Hydrogen sulfide might be a bit stinky, but its trinity of immunological benefits is once again the only thing standing between humanity and our utter destruction. This was largely already the case given how long SARS-CoV-2 can exist in normal commercial air, since while natural viruses like influenza are inactivated just floating around in the air after just thirty minutes it takes our novel coronavirus several days to become inactivated in typical commercial air.

However, regardless of ventilation, if that air’s acidity-level is increased, these airborne viral particles that would otherwise remain alive floating around the air for days become inactivated in just thirty seconds. One way to do this is with nitric acid, which can also be derived from volcanic gasses since the nitric oxide found there reacts with water to form nitric acid, and hydrogen sulfide can also serve the same role, albeit more stinkily. 

A theory that has been put into practice within commercial settings a few times during this pandemic, with fantastic results:

Evidence is emerging of the beneficial effects of inhaling microaerosolized hypochlorous acid (HOCl) as an intervention in the prevention and treatment of respiratory virus infections, including SARS CoV-2. However, little information is available about the effects of inhalation of homogenous HOCl solutions in normal human subjects or in experimental animals. In this report we establish through independent laboratories that the SARS-CoV-2 virus is rapidly inactivated by exposure to HOCl. Inhalation of an aerosolized form of the same HOCl solution by rodents, in accordance with a US-EPA acute 4-hour inhalation toxicity protocol, then provided observational, gross pathological, and histopathological evidence that their pulmonary exposure did not result in any difference when compared to control animals.

[NOTE: Hypochlorous acid is much more potent acidifier than either sulfuric acid or nitric oxide, and has the benefit of just smelling like a pool instead of farts, so it mimics the effects of those volcanic fumes without the fuss.]

Efficacy of pure HOCl solutions versus SARS-CoV-2 virus Coronavirus suspensions exposed to HOCl for 120 seconds showed a log reduction value (LRV) of 4.25log10 , equivalent to a 99.994% inactivation compared to control recoveries.

[NOTE: Hypochlorous acid kills viruses real damn dead, which is probably why its used in numerous commercial and medical settings.]

At one location in Tacoma, Washington, roughly 35 miles from the authors, machine-shop employees opted to place a single-person tent near their front door. A pump, fogging nozzle, and HOCl reservoir were installed in the tent to provide a dense mist of HOCl. Self-selected employees chose to be exposed to 2 minutes of that aerosolized HOCl in an enclosed chamber for periods averaging 2 minutes prior to entering the facility.

Between 16 April and 24 June of 2020, information on a total of 102 aerosolized HOCl inhalation exposures within that machine shop in Washington state were submitted to the authors. The exposures documented a cumulative total of 191 minutes (3 hours, 11 minutes) of adults inhaling a dense 0.9% saline fog containing HOCl in a closed space. Ages ranged from 18 to 71, and 87% were male. The total volume of HOCl entering the pulmonary tree in those 102 exposures was roughly 72 ml. With that volume of pure hypochlorous acid in contact with delicate respiratory epithelium, zero serious issues were declared. All minor issues reported (6.9% of reports describing “nose tickle”, “runny nose”, and the like) were transient and resolved in less than 1 minute after leaving the tent.

Of the 102 human subject exposures to aerosolized HOCl for 2 minutes, 7 (6.9%) reported minor side effects. All side effects disappeared within 60 seconds of exiting the tent, and all reports were trivial (e.g., "nose itched”). That reporting is contrasted with 12 reports from within the same remote cohort stating improved respiration, relief from nasal congestion, relief from a sore throat or bronchitis, description of an eased headache, and a reduction in bronchodilator use for asthma over subsequent days.

A recent report on systemic administration of HOCl as a part of the therapeutic intervention in COVID-19 patients halted the progression of symptoms.(10) The authors attributed the success of their HOCl treatment of COVID-19 patients to its antiviral properties. Published evidence of the value of HOCl in vitro in protecting nasal mucosal epithelial cells against respiratory viral infections supports that interpretation.(5) Page 10/17 The changes experienced by healthcare workers who inhaled nebulized HOCl within the study conducted by Rafael et al. (11) indicate that there are systemic effects resulting from exposure to HOCl in this way, some of which are clearly beneficial and do not seem to be simply antimicrobial. Whether or not those are affected by HOCl directly or through reaction products arising at the point of mucosal contact remains to be determined.

There is a high likelihood that HOCl rapidly modifies a variety of constituents of both extracellular and intracellular fluids, with the interaction with taurine being one of the most prominent, resulting in the formation of N-chlorotaurine (NCT).(15, 16) Taurine is present in body fluids in amounts that can total 0.1% of total body weight and is particularly likely to be involved in the biological effects of HOCl exposure.(17) Previous work indicates that HOCl and NCT have anti-inflammatory properties (18, 19) and, while beyond the scope of this evaluation, it seems feasible that the anti-inflammatory properties of HOCl and NCT might also lead to reduced local inflammation, lower infectivity through reduced permeability, and perhaps lower morbidity and mortality overall.

So although I’m far from qualified to offer professional medical advice, if you were really inclined to replicate these results, hypochlorous acid smells just like bleach but is non-reactive to household material so doesn’t stain like bleach, and can be easily and fairly cheaply purchased from Amazon.

And although I don’t have any experience with industrial foggers, you can get a home-use humidifier just about anywhere. Just make sure to read the manufacture’s instructions, since most of them are only designed to take water, so adding something else may eventually lead to some issues.

Finally, since you don’t need to run that thing all day, to mimic the paper above just fill it with about two parts water and one part hypochlorous acid, and depending on the size of your room or house and if you’re sharing air in an apartment, use a timer like this to only have it turn on here and there throughout the day and night.

Since I just set mine up last night and had to read the directions for that model at least thirty-seven times, below there’s a translation for anyone who gets the timer and also has trouble with the on-off instruction settings. This shouldn’t replace doing nasal irrigation, which you should definitely start if you haven’t already - you can find a handy and not-at-all ridiculous instructional video embedded within this article along with a lot more guidance.

So especially if you’re at-home situation involves being unwillingly nasally bukkaked by the respiration of other folks in your apartment building or house, you should probably consider whether or not you’re doing enough to keep the Angel of Death from knocking at your door.

Okay so setting up the days of the week for the timer was pretty easy, the first prompt you get is all seven, but if you travel or something you can scroll through other options. Setting up the time was also clear, but here’s how you do the alarms after you’ve selected your days:

• Press the HOUR button until your desired hour of the day is selected. Do the same with MIN, for minute of the day. While you’re doing this, you’ll see “1on” in the bottom left, indicating that you’re setting the on time for your first alarm.

• Then press the PROG button once, now you should see “1off” in the bottom left, indicating that you’re now setting the off time for the first time that you just set the on time for. Now do the same thing with HOUR and MIN.

• If you want to keep going, press PROG again, and you’ll see “2on” in the bottom left, indicating that you’re about to set the on time for your second alarm - so you can do that following the same instructions to set a second alarm’s start and stop time, you can do up to eight different ones. If you just want one alarm, press CLOCK instead, and you’ll go back to the current time and save all the alarms you’ve just set.

Since dividing 24 hours by the eight alarms you can set gives you three hour chunks, you can set the humidifier to go for 15 to 40 minutes every three hours depending on how big your space is. And the good news is that you can see the fog working to estimate how long it takes to fill a room, if you darken your room and only let in a slit of sun from outside, you can easily see it dancing in the light.

More impactful than angels on pinheads, hopefully.

Although it took a shocking display of antisemitism, many normal Americans seem to finally be waking up to the reality that the Ivy Leagues and the rest of our oh-so-very prestigious institutions are in fact intellectually bankrupt cesspools.

But this isn’t anything new, and the worst part is this widespread institutional immorality has been central in the efforts to hide COVID’s origins as a reverting live-attenuated vaccine (LAV). Because Harvard and MIT’s joint efforts at the Broad Institute to use DARPA’s $32 million grant to extensively engineer human DNA are just a small step away:

BTL’s Nicol pioneered the application of manufacturing principles to DNA sequencing. This technology quickly scaled from deciphering a single human genome to examining thousands of organisms, including everything from soil bacteria to elephants. The Foundry is working to realize an analogous revolution in designing and writing DNA, in which instructions for useful biological functions are converted into physical DNA that can be put into living cells. This effort will be supported by DARPA funding derived from the agency’s “Living Foundries: 1000 Molecules” program, which seeks to establish facilities that can rapidly engineer cells to make chemicals and materials not found in nature.

And so not wanting to interrupt the ultimate possibility to play God, Alina Chan was rolled out a few weeks after our first peer-reviewed paper hit the press in August 2020, to distract from the idea of “serial passage,” which the authors of “Proximal Origins” and Tony Fauci and the rest of his friends have so obviously been attempting to bury from the start, since it points directly to the development of LAVs, especially when considering SARS-CoV-2’s early affinity for farmed mink, a sister-species with the lab ferrets used to attenuate vaccines:

But strangely enough, neither Harvard nor MIT were interested about the fact Alina Chan wrote several articles then a book which openly plagiarized from the original peer-reviewed science that I wrote with my dad’s guidance:

Ms. Chan's refusal to act like a responsible and ethical member of the scientific community, and defer to the primacy of the already published scientific research, was compounded when after continually refusing to engage with our paper at all she made the public statement on Twitter aimed at press covering the pandemic that: "You have to decide what peer review means to you. You can't criticize some peer-reviewed papers as bogus while also saying 'my paper is peer-reviewed why isn't everyone citing me? My opinion is to let the journalists/sci writers make their own judgement. Peer reviewed or not."

By encouraging the press at large to ignore the process and importance of peer reviewed publication, Ms. Chan makes it clear that she has no interest in being an honest member of the wider scientific community, and given her open association with Harvard/MIT reflects on your institutions as well. And she corrodes the very underpinnings of a functioning society, which relies upon institutional trust between the journalistic scientific communities and publication processes. 

This is finally demonstrated by her apparent drive to have me placed back in prison, as there have been indications from multiple people that Ms. Chan has contacted them to tell them about my criminal past, something I already served many years in prison for and paid my debt and completed therapy for, however Ms. Chan seems to be intent on informing people of that past and trying to somehow make that relevant to the scientific discussion at hand. My charges involved my relationship with a teenage girl who I had known for years and became far too close to, to the point where the relationship became intermittently sexual, they have nothing to do with any sort of institutional dishonesty or stealing or cheating.

And as the years of passed, multiple other grifting idiots have written books pretending like the original work me and my dad did together doesn’t exist at all, or given countless interviews acting like they came up with ideas we published first: such as David Relman at Stanford, who is so hilariously ethically bankrupt that he tried to argue that ignorance of an article excuses stealing from it:

On Jul 29, 2023, at 4:32 PM, Karl Sirotkin, PhD wrote:

Dr. Relman:

It's recently come to my attention that you authored a piece in November 2020 (https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2021133117) about the origins of the pandemic, which strangely makes no reference at all to the peer-reviewed papers my son wrote with my guidance, published August 2020:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7435492/

This paper was followed by a clarification, which provides proof the 1977 H1N1 strain was in fact engineered presumably by passaging: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/bies.202100017

Even though not peer reviewed, since it was so timely I would expect that one of your papers either formal or informal, would make reference to the first white paper on COVID origins, originally published January 31, 2020:

https://harvard2thebighouse.substack.com/p/logistical-and-technical-exploration

Strangely, your paper, as from other senior, well connected academics, makes no mention at all of the phenomenon of reverting LAVs, which happened in 1977, likely happened again with H1N1 in 2009 but this time because of industrial pork farming and their LAVs, and is happening all over the world with OPV as we speak. 

You have a massive audience and a gigantic reach, why would you publish something that acts like our peer-reviewed paper does not exist at all? Especially when our first paper entirely undermines all of the specious arguments in the "Proximal Origins" paper, which subpoenas have now revealed intentionally left-out the main subject of our paper: serial passage through cell cultures as well as whole hosts. 

Please correct this oversight, or we will be reaching out to Stanford's ethics board, which has been a bit busy recently but I'm sure won't mind more work, and additionally be taking out a national press release that highlights your wanton plagiarism. Millions are dead, have some shame, make this right. Even if this was an oversight, you should have known as it was clearly available by any search in the National Library of Medicines, PubMed and PMC site. And even if it was an oversight, you should correct this, ethically.

-Dr. Karl Sirotkin

And his response:

Dr. Sirotkin:

I appreciate your writing me and bringing to my attention this paper you coauthored on the origins of SARS-CoV2. 

My purpose in writing that 2020 PNAS Opinion piece was to bring additional attention to the inappropriate rush to judgment about the origins of the pandemic and to add my own voice to those who had already called for a more objective examination of the issue. I certainly did not claim or intend to suggest that I was the first to question the assumptions of those who insisted on a natural spillover mechanism. There had been many others early in 2020 including Jamie Metzl, Alina Chan, and the DRASTIC group, who had highlighted the possibility of a laboratory-associated origin. I was aware of many others who had posted blogs, analyses, and other communications, and assumed there were many many other postings on this topic that I would not be able to read and review. I was also limited in words and references. Because I was not aware of your or your son’s writings I could not have copied your ideas or words; hence, I did not plagiarize your work. 

The quest for greater clarity about the origins of the pandemic, which we should all support, would be a bit easier without personal attacks. I hope that good science and dispassionate discussion rule the day. 

Regards,

David Relman

Which was followed-up by a letter I wrote to several dozen biologists at Stanford, basically everyone I could find online:

To Whom It May Concern:

    In late July my father and I wrote to David Relman to ask him to correct the record, because his published work on the origins of the pandemic openly and hilariously plagiarized from the peer-reviewed paper my father and I wrote. 

Mr. Relman published in November 2020:

https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.2021133117

However strangely, someone with a bunch of fancy titles after his name and all sorts of previous publications failed to do the very first thing every student learns to do in an academic setting: Search the existing literature to make sure you do not steal anyone else's ideas, so that you can properly attribute them. 

Because if Mr. Relman had done this and done the most cursory search within PubMed, he would've found our original peer-reviewed paper, submitted April 2020 and published August 2020:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7435492/

When we contacted Mr. Relman to ask for attribution and to correct his oversight, he made the most vacuous excuse imaginable:

"Because I was not aware of your or your son’s writings I could not have copied your ideas or words; hence, I did not plagiarize your work."

There is no academic reality where ignorance of previously published work excuses stealing from others. Mr. Relman refused to apologize for his thievery, and instead attempted to act like lots of other people had been writing about the pandemic so he couldn't possibly have known about us:

"There had been many others early in 2020 including Jamie Metzl, Alina Chan, and the DRASTIC group, who had highlighted the possibility of a laboratory-associated origin. I was aware of many others who had posted blogs, analyses, and other communications, and assumed there were many many other postings on this topic that I would not be able to read and review. I was also limited in words and references."

None of these parties have published anything that passed peer-review, nonetheless with the primacy that comes with submitting our paper for peer-review all the way back in April 2020. So why in the world would Mr. Relman seek to attribute a bunch of people whose ideas hadn't even passed scientific scrutiny? Maybe this is because after my father and I published our first whitepaper back in January 2020, it was put in front of the National Security Council by its sitting Director for Intelligence Programs, Jason Shell:

https://harvardtothebighouse.com/2020/01/31/logistical-and-technical-analysis-of-the-origins-of-the-wuhan-coronavirus-2019-ncov/

DRASTIC, Jamie Metzl, Alina Chan, Matt Ridley, and all the rest begin going public months after that original report on the pandemic was inside of the White House in front of the National Security Council, because they're all acting as controlled opposition from elements inside the US government aligned with DARPA, who in turn helped China's People's Liberation Army design their LAV that went wrong. Technically, Mr. Relman is mostly plagiarizing this original paper, so even if he wants to hide behind the idea lots of people were writing about the pandemic early on, there was in fact just one original paper that journalistically explored the idea this pandemic could have begun in a lab. 

No one who came after us made a salient point that we didn't already attribute in our published works, it was all smoke and mirrors to distract from the truth. 

Additionally beyond our original paper, after a former Secretary of the Navy who'd previously written whitepapers with Avril Haines about cooperating more with China on STEM issues, Richard Danzig, contacted us along with several other scientists including JHU's Gigi Kwok-Gronvell, because they noticed we had an unsubstantiated claim about the H1N1 pandemic of 1977, which we asserted had in fact been engineered. 

As we explained in our correction, a doubled citation was accidentally elided during the process of juggling several drafts, so in that peer-reviewed correction we highlighted that old Soviet paper which demonstrated that the 1977 H1N1's temporally mismatched genes demonstrated that it had in fact been engineered, almost certainly by serial passage given the technology available at the time:

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/bies.202100017

What's particular strange is that David Relman has a longstanding relationship with The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, which has also refused to acknowledge that our peer-reviewed papers at all, despite the fact that it's editor-in-chief solicited an article from us all the way back in the early spring of 2020 after seeing our articles reprinted on Zero Hedge in early 2020:

https://thebulletin.org/2022/04/welcoming-david-relman-to-the-science-and-security-board/

Demonstrating that the virus of 1977 was engineered via serial passage makes previous reports that the virus was the result of a military live-attenuated vaccine trial that reverted faster than expected highly credible, and all-but-proven. So if that was the source of the last truly global viral pandemic, why is Mr. Relman and the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, New York Magazine, The Bulletin, and others refusing to cite our papers, or even admit that they admit at all? Despite the fact that each of those companies directly communicated with me and my father before publishing articles that went on to not only plagiarize from our work, but act like it does not exist at all.

Probably because Mr. Relman and the rest of the sociopathic journalists who can't get high enough on listening to themselves talk are all functionally acting as agents of China's People Liberation Army, whose SARS-like live-attenuated vaccine attenuated faster than expected at the Wuhan Military Games, in a fairly direct parallel to 1977. 

A cover-up that points directly to UNC, the only place in the world that was working on a LAV for SARS-like viruses, and which notoriously had extensive interactions with the first scientific team from Wuhan to discover a bat-borne virus that could use ACE2 at all. Which would explain why Mr. Relman wrote such a laughably fluffy and vaccous paper compared to the one I wrote with my father's scientific oversight, and then go on to argue that he had no responsibility to cite us because he had not bothered to do even a cursory search of the extant literature. 

Not only is Mr. Relman an unethical hack who's lies are responsible for tens of millions of innocent deaths across the world, he is also acting as an agent of China's PLA, openly committing treason against American interests.

Stanford should probably do something about this, because otherwise in a little bit more time, when this society has collapsed enough - every single survivor is going to be looking for answers, and people to blame. And right now the blame for all of this lies squarely on the shoulders of murderous clowns like Mr. Relman, who use their seniority to whitewash war-crimes, and refuse to exercise even the most basic academic ethics, because doing so would help the truth get out:

SARS-CoV-2 is a live-attenuated vaccine that's reverting out-of-control that was orally administered before the Wuhan Military Games (which explains its initial preference for colder tissue, this is a modern tactic to attenuate LAVs since it makes it harder for them to colonize respiratory tissue deeper in the body), as Avril Haines, George Gao, and Bill Gates watched from Event 201. 

In a few weeks we'll be sending out a series of press releases to explain everything that's happened, we tried a while ago but no company would carry a press release about the origins of the pandemic. Luckily that moratorium has ended, so hopefully Stanford pretends it cares about innocent human life at some point leading up to that, since otherwise your institution is going to join JHU and MIT as being instrumental parts of covering-up the worst crime against humanity in our shared history:

https://harvard2thebighouse.substack.com/p/understanding-covid-19-and-seasonal

Don't let one unethical hack poison your entire institution, do the right thing  -Dan Sirotkin  

And just to illustrate the arrogance, hubris, and utter idiocy that runs so thick throughout these academic institutions, here’s the only response I got back:

Gavin James Sherlock <gsherloc@stanford.edu>

Tue, Aug 29, 4:51 PM

David (actually Dr. or Professor) Relman (seeing as you’re so keen on having you father’s degree recognized when you refer to him) clearly did not plagiarize your work. He should have cited it, but missed it, and that’s about it. While your father’s credentials are impressive, I think you’ll find David’s are equally so. Waging some kind of conspiracy-laden campaign against him is really rather sad and reflects poorly on you and comes across as sour grapes. Grow up and move on.

So of course we started a friendly little dialogue:

Dan Sirotkin <harvard2thebighouse@gmail.com>

Aug 29, 2023, 4:53 PM

to Gavin

I can't wait to publish this email, thank you for reinforcing how vapid and morally bankrupt the academic community has become as a whole. 

The survivors are going to find you. 

Gavin James Sherlock <gsherloc@stanford.edu>

Aug 29, 2023, 4:56 PM

to me

Good luck with that

Dan Sirotkin <harvard2thebighouse@gmail.com>

Aug 29, 2023, 4:58 PM

to Gavin

Also, if you're so smart and clearly had the time to read and reply to this email, why haven't you been speaking out against the idea that a laboratory engineered virus was a conspiracy theory? 

You remained silent, because you're some combination of stupid and spineless. 

If you had anything useful to say, you would've been speaking out against the lies that were propagated over the past three years by the scientific and academic communities as millions of innocent people died all around you all. 

You remained silent, because you have nothing to offer the world other than lies. Enjoy the view from the ivory tower while it lasts, you absolutely worthless turd. 

Gavin James Sherlock <gsherloc@stanford.edu>

Aug 29, 2023, 5:06 

to me

Or, it’s simply not my area of expertise. Yes, I am a professor of genetics, but I’m not a virologist, nor am I an epidemiologist. There are countless scientists out there far better qualified that I to analyze the data and draw reasonable conclusions (my understanding from having read a smattering of such articles is that it will likely never be proven definitively one way or another), so there really was no need to me to embarrass myself and put on a cloak of coronavirus expertise that I did not possess. I saw several scientists suddenly proclaim themselves as experts and I certainly had no such pretensions.

I am neither stupid nor spineless; I simply recognize my limitations and narrow scope of my expertise (which is largely experimental evolution, using yeast as a model system). That does not make me a worthless turd; my worth simply lies elsewhere. Not every scientist who is faculty has the expertise to have analyzed these data in a robust and rigorous way, and I would argue that they should not have wasted their time.

Dan Sirotkin <harvard2thebighouse@gmail.com>

Aug 29, 2023, 5:15 

to Gavin

My last formal academic experience with biology was taking AP Bio about 25 years ago, I only got a 4. 

Despite that lack of background, it was transparently obvious that nothing about the emergence of this virus was normal or natural, it doesn't take long on Google to learn that neither SARS nor MERS have demonstrated zoonotic origins either. 

And neither does HIV. 

Throughout this process, I had to argue with my father, as well as Phil Murphy, who is acknowledged in our original paper: 

https://www.niaid.nih.gov/research/philip-murphy-md

The idea that you don't have a responsibility to engage with this kind of thing is utterly absurd, I didn't need any kind of expertise or even previous background to write the two papers that I wrote, otherwise actually having my father around to fact-check was invaluable. But I wrote those papers, he just told me where I was wrong or out on the wrong limb, it took a while, but I put the puzzle together within a few months.  

Serial passage is not some esoteric unknown approach to manipulating viruses, it's one of the very first methods developed as far as I understand. And besides, the idea that an engineered virus could propagate was absolutely never a conspiracy, despite what Francis Collins and Tony Fauci wanted to say,  and you and the rest of your colleagues were never going to contradict them publicly, because they control the funding for all of your projects.  

Maybe take the time to read the two papers that I wrote with my father's guidance, and ask yourself why an ex-con with no formal biological education for over 20 years was the one who got all of this past peer-review? 

You shouldn't be circling the wagons with other academics, you should be opening your eyes and looking around and seeing all the corpses and trying to make a difference and get the dying to stop. And that is not going to happen until the truth gets out ther

Dan Sirotkin <harvard2thebighouse@gmail.com>

Aug 29, 2023, 5:30 PM

to Gavin

P.S. Given your lab's work you'll probably be interested in Dr. Shi Huang's theory of maximum genetic diversity, my hobby project before the pandemic:

https://harvard2thebighouse.substack.com/p/maximum-genetic-diversity-mgd

Gavin James Sherlock <gsherloc@stanford.edu>

Aug 29, 2023, 5:32 

to me

Well, given what you were jailed for, I don’t think you have any standing to question my morality

Dan Sirotkin <harvard2thebighouse@gmail.com>

Aug 29, 2023, 5:32 PM

to Gavin

Yes, because being involved with a teenage girl is definitely in the same moral universe as millions and millions of innocent dead people. 

Like I said, the academic community is completely morally bankrupt.

Gavin James Sherlock <gsherloc@stanford.edu>

Aug 29, 2023, 5:35 

to me

No action I did or could have done would have affected the course of the pandemic.

Dan Sirotkin <harvard2thebighouse@gmail.com>

Aug 29, 2023, 5:38 PM

to Gavin

Okay, you can explain all that to the survivors after they come for you. 

All of you tenured fancy morons feeding on public funds are no different than the Nazi accountants who sat back and watched the slaughter, but thought because they had nothing directly to do with the death camps it wasn't their problem.  

All of you have an obligation to the truth, especially regarding a virus that is killing millions of people and maiming hundreds of millions besides. 

Your silence tells the world exactly who you are, you were never going to rock the boat, because then your lab wouldn't get funding from NIH

Gavin James Sherlock <gsherloc@stanford.edu>

Aug 29, 2023, 5:48 PM

to me

Maybe take a look at the serenity prayer. I’m not religious in the slightest (indeed am an ardent atheist) but the serenity prayer serves as a useful guide to how I live my life. I have the greatest impact in teaching and mentoring, things which I enjoy and I hope I am effective at. My research career had been fairly successful - I have more successful colleagues of course, but I’ve published a substantial number of papers that have been widely cited.

I see injustice everywhere, especially in the US, but they are injustices upon which I have little to no ability to have an impact. Mass incarceration is an outrage; lack of universal healthcare is an outrage; the level of child poverty is an outrage; political corruption and corrupt justices on the supreme court is an outrage; climate change is an outrage. If I had trained differently, maybe I would be working in public policy trying to effect change. But I didn’t - I was fascinated by science. Both my parents left school at 16, so I was the first to go to college and the first to get a PhD. My ancestors were agricultural laborers, bricklayers or worked in pubs. I was lucky enough to get my shot (thanks to a free university education) and I took it. I work at doing what I think has an impact as best I can. I’m not responsible for every moral failing of humanity, and you certainly don’t get to judge me for what I do or do not speak out about. In the end, I have but a small hope to impact any of these larger issues, and that is through the ballot box and to which political candidates I choose to donate.

Go fight your crusade if you must, but I will not join you. 

Dan Sirotkin <harvard2thebighouse@gmail.com>

Aug 29, 2023, 5:54 PM

to Gavin

Congratulations on squandering all of the sacrifice and hard work and risk your ancestors put in to put you in the position you have now. 

You're a stain on their legacy. 

Tell the dead to say the serenity prayer, see how that goes. 

Our “institutions of higher learning” are simple homes for very cowardly and very close-minded idiots who thrive on using complicated terms and broken ideologies to confuse the general public, and paint the perception that you somehow need years and years of study to even vaguely comprehend anything they’re doing.

And at this point, it doesn’t look like anything is going to chance until the entirety of society collapses alongside those institutions.

This seemed inevitable due to the many generations of economic disadvantage suffered by African-Americans, a trend that can be traced back directly to the genesis of the War on Drugs. And so as America’s countless social schisms continue to widen and the forces of Islamic fundamentalist terror consolidate themselves for another wave of attacks on the West, keep in mind that all of this has been a long time coming.

As our financial crisis deepens and the schisms between the haves and the have-nots continue to open, American drug laws and the prison system they’ve perpetuated are beginning to gather an increasingly harsh spotlight. But so what. It’s not like the War on Drugs, which started over forty-years ago in 1973, has done anything to increase the growing level of economic disparity in America… right?

A lot happened in 1973.

It was a few years after Nixon slammed the gold window shut, the waning hours of a decapitated Civil Rights movement, and the year we began to disentangle ourselves from Vietnam. But it also marks the genesis of the War on Drugs: the year the Rockefeller Drug Laws were passed. And that same year something funny happened: the income gap between black and white began to widen back out, instead of closing – as it had been up until 1973.

Did the start of the War on Drugs play a significant role in creating our present economic and social realities – where the average black family has eight-cents of wealth for every dollar owned by whites, and a black child is nine-times more likely than a white child to have a parent in prison?

Not having both parents around can be directly linked to any number of issues, in fifty-years of international studies of over 10,000 subjects, researchers haven’t been able to find “any other class of experience that has as strong and consistent effect on personality and personality development as does the experience of [parental] rejection… children who were often rejected by their parents tend to feel more anxious and insecure, as well as more hostile and aggressive toward others.” And surprisingly enough, the study showed that fatherly affection, or lack thereof, may shape our personality even more than attention from our mothers.

Just how damaging is it for a child to grow up in a fatherless home? Well, they produce: 71% of our high school drop-outs, 85% of the kids with behavioral disorders, 90% of our homeless and runaway children, 75% of the adolescents in drug abuse programs, and a striking majority in one final category. Out of all the kids in our juvenile detention facilities, 85% of them come from fatherless homes.

If your Dad’s in prison there’s an extraordinary high chance that you too will someday end up behind bars, creating a cycle of absence that has been perpetuating for two-generations within the African-American community.

And yet everyone from Bill Cosby to Ronald Reagan seems fond of placing the blame for our black community’s fate squarely on the shoulders of African-Americans, largely excusing the rest of America from any blame for their plight and refusing to consider that – just maybe – other factors might have come into play at some point during our shared history.

For the most part, the emergence of the modern Welfare State in particular has been singled-out as the single most detrimental force within our African-American community, since it supposedly allowed “welfare queens” with “80 names, 30 addresses, and 12 Social security cards” to pull in over $150,000 of tax-free income a year. As the argument goes, the Public Welfare Amendments of 1962 created a system that disincentived marriage by rewarding single mothers with loads of free cash.

All they had to do was remain out of wedlock, and the checks would just keep on rolling in.

This view was popularized by a Nobel Prize winning physicist, William Shockley, who argued that these programs “tended to encourage childbirth, especially among less productive members of society (particularly blacks, whom he considered to be genetically inferior to whites), causing a reverse evolution.” Shockley popularized this hypothesis, bringing it to both Congress and the public, and even put forth a proposal offering financial rewards to minorities if they were voluntary sterilized.

So assuming that the Welfare State was created by black mothers who had no intent to ever marry, and willfully popped out babies to get paid, we’d expect to see a steady even rise in the rate of single black mothers starting right around 1962, when the Public Welfare Amendments were passed. And yet Welfare didn’t have anything to do with the destruction of the black family, it would take a decade for a different phenomenon to emerge and remove black fathers from the picture entirely and create the familial reality that African-Americans have lived in for the past two generations.

In the decade prior to the start of the War on Drugs, the first decade of the Public Welfare Amendments, the percentage of married African-American women roughly followed the national trend and declined proportionally by less than 6% – but then in the ’70s, as the national average rate remained stable, the proportional decline for African-American women tripled to nearly 18%:

(66.3 – 62.6 = 3.7% | 3.7 / 66.3 = 5.5% and 62.6 – 51.5 = 11.1% | 11.1 / 62.6 = 17.7%)

Seems a bit odd. Did it just take a full decade for black women to finally realize that all they had to do was pop out a baby or seven, marriage be damned, and they could start rolling in the dough? Or maybe something else happened that created a dearth of African-American men who were available to actually marry?

In 1971 President Nixon officially began the War on Drugs, which fully hit its stride in ’73 with the passage of the draconian Rockefeller Drugs Laws, and very quickly a distinct trend in the American prison population emerged:

And how would this spike affect the marriage rates of black folks? Well, if you’re familiar with American drug laws, it shouldn’t surprise you that some 90% of those arrested under the Rockefeller Drug Laws in the years after its passage were minorities. This baseline source of our prison population has persisted up until today, when over half of those in federal prison are serving time for a drug offense.

Sure, correlation doesn’t prove causation – but when you stop a moment and consider that marriage requires an eligible male, it’s not that hard to figure out why the black family begin to disintegrate just as our War on Drugs began, as it’s a little bit difficult to marry someone behind bars. And just how many African-American males were sent behind bars in the decades following the start of the War on Drugs?

A black male born in 1974 had a 13.4% chance of going to prison at some point in his life, while a white male had just a 2.2% chance. And it’s not like this trend got any better, by 1991 the odds a black male would spend time in prison had ballooned to 29%, while the odds a white male would end up in the clink had only increased to 4.4%

Today roughly 12% of the American population is black and yet about half of the two-million Americans locked up in prison are black. And at any one time in America, almost a third of black American males in their twenties are under some form of “correctional supervision” – if not actually incarcerated, then either on probation or on parole, meaning they’ve recently passed through the American penal system.

This means that as of 1996, a sixteen-year-old kid in America would have nearly a one-in-three chance of spending some time behind bars if he was unlucky enough to have been born black. If he happened to be born white, he’d only face a 4% chance of incarceration – a disparity that’s been steadily increasing since then. In Chicago’s home state there are 10,000 more black prisoners than black college students, and for every two black students enrolled in college there are five elsewhere in the state either locked up or on parole.

The explanation is not that blacks simply use drugs at a higher rate than whites. If anything, studies have shown that whites, “particularly white youths, are more likely to engage in drug crime than people of color.” Surveys published by the National Institute on Drug Abuse and the National Household Survey on Drug Abuse reported that compared to black students: white students were seven times as likely to use cocaine, eight times as likely to use crack cocaine, seven times as likely to use heroin, and were 33% more likely to have sold illegal drugs.

So it’s not all that difficult to see how the reduction in marriageable males effectively gutted African-American families. What’s also perfectly clear is how the growth of the American Prison State affected government welfare expenditures, and led directly to the emergence of our Modern Welfare State.

Welfare spending on families and children also witnesses a distinct spike during these same years – but it starts in the early ’70s not the early ’60s when the Public Welfare Amendments were first passed. Neither population growth nor total welfare spending explain this spike, both grew at a relatively flat linear rate during this time period.

If the growth of our Welfare State was caused simply by the laws funding it being passed, you’d expect to see American government expenditures on welfare funding sent to families and children spike in 1962, and then grow into the next few decades. 1962′s the year the Public Welfare Amendments were passed, which specifically increased aid to dependent children.

But that’s not what happened at all:

If the War on Drugs didn’t directly precipitate the destruction of the African-American family, why did the decline in married black women triple during the first decade of the War? And why did welfare spending spike in lockstep with our prison population right as it started?

We’ve certainly come a long way as a nation since Abolition, but the horrible reality is that a black child who was born during slavery was more likely to be raised by both parents than a black child born during the twenty-first century. As Fredrick Douglass explained, during slavery it was common practice to separate children born into slavery from their birth-mothers before their first birthday. Which makes perfect sense when you consider that under slavery blacks were human chattel, and separating newborns calves from their mothers is just what you do with livestock.

Things had been looking up for black families, back in 1963 as MLK gave his “I Have A Dream” speech about 70% of black families were headed by a married couple. But that percentage steadily began to drop, between 1970 and 2001 it declined by 34%, double the white decline, and by 2002 it had bottomed out at just 48%.

In fact, the impact of the War on Drugs has been so racially biased that in 2006 America had nearly six-times the proportion of its black population in prison than South Africa did at the height of Apartheid. And our penal system has grown so massive that the U.S. criminal justice system now employs more people than America’s two largest private employers, Wal-Mart and McDonald’s, combined.

And although only 14% of all illicit drug users are black, blacks make up over half of those in prison for drug offenses. A black man is eight-times as likely as a white man to be locked up at some point in his life.

After all, drug laws in America “have originally been based on racism… all of these laws are based on the belief that there is a class in society that can control themselves, and there is a class in society which cannot.” Nixon’s public motivation for the War on Drugs is that it was a response to the growing numbers of military serviceman who were getting hooked on heroin and other narcotics while serving in the Vietnam War.

Although that was a troublesome issue, when you know the history of all past American drugs laws it quickly becomes apparent that there’s no way in hell drug-using veterans was the only impetus behind this wave of anti-drug legislation, and that Nixon was using soldiers’ addiction as opportunistic displacement – especially when you consider that only 4.5% of returning servicemen tested positive for heroin. As one Nixon’s Chief of Staff wrote in his diary: “Nixon emphasized that you have to face the fact the whole problem is really the blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognises this while not appearing to.”

And if there’s any doubt about the weight that quote might have had on legislation, here are Nixon’s own words on abortion: “There are times when an abortion is necessary. I know that. ” And when exactly would that be? “When you have a black and a white.”

As the Arab world is wracked by the spasms of popular violence brought on by their social and economic inequality, many Americans have begun to stop and consider the possibility that violent fissures in our own society may begin to open. Much has been made of the emerging upperclass in American society, but the reality is that with the median white family having over twenty-times as much wealth as a black family – no economic disparity is starker than the one that correlates directly with race.

In the same way that the Arab Street finally erupted when food prices simply became too much, is there a timer on our own innercities ticking down as food stamp use and food inflation continue to skyrocket? Could a wave of urban homegrown terrorism erupt in American cities once our urban poor finally reach a tipping point and decide to lash out?

Maybe it doesn’t mean much to you that the average black family has eight-cents of wealth for every dollar of wealth owned by whites, that the the ongoing recession has doubled the wealth gap between blacks and whites, or that the unemployment rate of blacks is edging up on twice as high as the white rate – easily surpassing it when you count incarcerated blacks. After all, a black child in American is nine-times more likely than a white child to have a parent who’s locked up.

But let’s look into the data and the implications a little bit more.

The precise era that saw a drug-law fueled explosion in our prison population, the early 1970s, are the exact same years that the economic situation of blacks began to starkly worsen and that the gap between rich and poor is wrenched wide open. Beginning in those years and continuing into today, “the economic status of black compared to that of whites has, on average, stagnated or deteriorated.”

Up until 1973, the precise year the Rockefeller Drug Laws were passed, the difference between black and white median income had been closing. But then that year it changed course, and in “an ominous bellwether… the gap between black and white incomes started to grow wider again, in both absolute and relative terms.” Direct empirical research into incarceration’s economic effects weren’t done until recently, when a Pew Charitable Trusts research paper showed that prior to imprisonment two-thirds of male inmates were employed and half were their family’s primary source of income. Additionally, upon release an ex-con’s annual earnings were reduced by 40%

In the nearly forty years since America’s modern drug laws were passed, there has been a massive increase in economic inequality by any measure. In the early 1970′s not only did the income gap between black and white begin to widen again, it also becomes much more top-heavily favored to the very rich – who happen to be almost exclusively white as well.

With home equity making up 44% of an average American’s family’s net worth and fully 60% among our middle class, the statistics around homeownernship further delineate the racial schisms of American wealth. Not only do blacks pay higher interest rates, have higher downpayments, have less access to credit, get turned down more frequently for loans no matter what’s controlled for, and pay what amounts to an 18% “segregation tax” because homes in black neighborhoods have much less equity than homes in white neighborhoods – but since 1970 black homes have appreciated in value roughly half as much as white homes.

Even Eminem seemed to have little sense of the irony that was invoked as his self-consciously white autobiographical film, 8 Mile, highlighted the hopeless plight of Detroit’s urban black community. The 8 Mile district was created in 1941, when a six-foot wall was built around a black enclave that was deemed unfit to accept loans from the Federal Housing Administration. This was “part of a system that divided the whole city, in theory by credit-rating, in practice by colour.” And so the segregation that emerged in Detroit “was not accidental, but a direct consequence of government policy.”

This policy of segregated mortgages became known as “red-lining,” and by the 1950s one in five black borrowers was paying interest at over 8%, while it was about impossible to find a white family paying more than 7%.

And yet this economic line extends far past that generation. The fact that blacks are foreclosing at a much higher rate than whites in the current crisis was predestined by the conditions of the loans they received, as banks turn down equally-qualified blacks much more often than whites, and forced blacks to pay higher interest on their loans. Housing values are indelibly color-coded, as the average value of a white house appreciates much quicker than a black house. All of this is snowballing into a collective institutional bias that cost black families at least $82 billion even before this current crisis began.

Hotlanta served as a case study for mortgage-based racism, as the Pulitzer-winning series in the Atlanta Journal and Constitution “The Color of Money” so aptly captured.

It showed how blacks were routinely rejected for loans which whites in a comparable economic situation were accepted for. And this phenomenon wasn’t isolated to one city, as a 1991 study showed that out of 6.4 million mortgage applications nationwide, even after income was controlled for – blacks were rejected twice as often as their white counterparts. However that wasn’t the worst of it, in urban centers such as Boston, Philly, Chicago, Minneapolis, blacks were rejected three-times more often than whites.

Even well-to-do blacks have been unable to escape from this institutional prejudice.

Wealthy black neighborhoods in the DC suburbs have a much tougher time getting loans than low-income white areas, and in Boston blacks living on the exact same street as their white neighbors and earning similar incomes found it much tougher to get a mortgage than their white neighbors. Joe Kennedy summed up the cumulative effect of this racial injustice well, describing “an America where credit is a privilege of race and wealth, not a function of ability to pay back a loan.”

The city of Baltimore partly captures how higher-rate loans to blacks have affected foreclosure rates, with several Wells Fargo loan officers testifying that they targeted “mud people” for “ghetto loans,” resulting in 71% of foreclosures in that city being made on black homes in recent years. And so, even when income and credit score are controlled for, across the nation blacks are more than three-times more likely than whites to have their home foreclosed and be thrown out into the streets.

America may have nominally advanced from “separate but equal,” but the reality of racial disparity still haunts the bottomlines of black mortgages and checkbooks, holding them back from fully embracing the dream we’re all supposed to share.

The very idea of what it means to be poor is color-coded, as while 1 in 3 blacks live in poverty, less than 1 in 10 whites do. And yet the very definition of poverty itself now varies to the point of absurdity, since “poverty level whites control nearly as many mean net financial assets as the highest-earning blacks, $26,683 to $28,310. For those surviving at or below the poverty level, this indicates quite clearly that poverty means one thing for whites and another for blacks.”

The impact of these facts have echoed across generations, as nearly three-quarters of all black children grow up in homes with no net financial assets. That’s nearly double the rate of white kids. And nine in ten black kids grow up in homes without enough monetary reserves to last more than three months at the poverty line if their income were to drop, roughly four times the white ratio.

Nearly any way you look at it, our current economic crisis is impacting our poor black communities much more acutely than our poor white ones. The most obvious indicator is the still skyrocketing unemployment rate, which for young black males is now twice as high as their young white counterparts.

But simple unemployment doesn’t capture the full scope of economic distress, to understand where we are now you have to take a look at where we’re coming from.

Following the Civil War the earliest anti-drug laws were passed in some states, banning the consumption of alcohol. But not, of course, for everyone. Whites could drink as much as they pleased – as well as use opiates and cocaine, but if you were a minority in much of antebellum America you were prohibited from imbibing or using any drug at all.

At the time it was a widely held belief in American politics that some races, bless their brown souls, simply couldn’t control themselves. Furthering the codification of this perception, in 1901 Henry Cabot Lodge spearheaded a law in the U.S. Senate banning the sale of liquor and now opiates as well to all “uncivilized races.”

In this case, “uncivilized” was synonymous with “dark.” At this point in American history, whites could get as drunk, high, or smacked as they wanted – while the brown-skinned members of American society were completely banned from consuming any intoxicant.

Throughout the first half of the 20th Century, any violence carried out by a black man against a white could be attributed to the commonly-held caricature of a “cocaine-crazed negro.” Newspaper headlines screamed of coked-up black criminals who were SHOT BUT DON’T DIE! and policemen claiming that WE NEED BIGGER BULLETS! because their current caliber wasn’t large enough to stop the crack-crazed negroes they routinely came up against in the line of duty. It was actually this specter of THE COCAINIZED-NIGGER that led to police nationwide to upgrade their guns from .32 caliber to .38 caliber.

However blacks weren’t singled out as a racial minority, the first anti-marijuana laws targeted the wave of Mexican immigrants who were spreading across the American South. They were seen, then as now, to be stealing jobs and government resources from resident whites, and so politicians from that region of the country first banned marijuana use by minorities alone and then eventually altogether.

Nixon’s public claim that the War on Drugs was primarily a response to the growing number of addicted veterans was at best a lie of omission. Taking into account past legal precedent, and the fact that American urban centers were being wracked by a series of seemingly unending race riots, it becomes self-evident that the War on Drugs was simply another page in the story of American anti-drug laws that have always been rooted in racism.

Then in 1973, with Nixon desperately attempting to spin his way out of Watergate, New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller passed a set of laws that were soon mimicked by several other states and eventually the entire federal government.

They were minimum sentencing laws for drug crimes that, partially because they included a fifteen-year prison term for possessing even a small amount of narcotics, were the harshest the country had ever seen. The per-capita prison population of the United States remained constant from 1930 to right around 1973, at which point the graph begins an exponential climb that grows steeper and steeper with every passing year.

Is all of this just coincidence, or is there demonstrable cause-and-effect at work? Are things bad enough to cause the Department of Justice to deliberately massage its own data, effectively removing mixed-race prisoners from their statistics entirely?

These counter-narcotics laws that, both by design and in practice, fueled an explosion in our prison population – a population which started disproportionately black – with 90% of those incarcerated under the Rockefeller laws either Latino or black – and only growing to become more so as the years passed. Between 1979 and 1990 blacks made up a steady percent of our overall population, but between those same years blacks went from making up 39% of our drug-related prison population to 53% of it.

Today that number’s down to 51.2%. An improvement, but hardly.

Through the 1980s this disparate growth was fueled by the Anti-Drug Abuse Act, one of the hundreds of crime bills passed by state and Congressional legislatures in the 1980s and 1990s. The Anti-Drug Abuse Act imposed the first of the mandatory minimum sentencing laws, here five-years in prison without chance of parole for anyone caught selling a substantial-enough amount of heroin, methamphetamine, marijuana, or cocaine. This last drug, cocaine, had a unique provision.

You’d receive the same unparolable five-year sentence for selling either 5 grams of crack cocaine as you would selling one-hundred times that much – 500 grams – of powder cocaine. Crack and powder cocaine are pharmacologically the exact same drug, there’re only two important differences. One is that crack cocaine is smoked while powder cocaine is snorted. The other is a bit more telling. Powder cocaine was mainly consumed by whites, whereas crack cocaine was the form of choice for innercity blacks.

Critics, for good reason, blasted the law as shamelessly racist.

America introduced a solution to civil disorder and social injustice that wasn’t novel, it’s simply grown to become unmatched in scale. By 2003, the percentage of our population in prison dwarfed England’s level, our international neighbor whose culture and mores are closest to ours.

We have, proportionally, six-times the population locked up behind bars as our tea-sipping crumpet-munching cousins across the pond. For France and Germany, the difference approaches ten-times as many.

Our prison population has increased five-fold in just thirty years. In terms of the global population, we have just 5% of that but fully a quarter of the world’s prisoners. And these American prisoners have one common and inescapable denominator that you’ve almost certainly already stereotyped them with – but for good reason. The stereotype of the black male American prisoner is, among other things, an accurate reflection of reality.

Our prison system has created a nearly inescapable gyre of poverty and despair, as other than race the most unifying characteristic of our prison population might be that some 50% of American prisoners are both illiterate, and have a family member who’s also been incarcerated at some point.

If anything whites use drugs at a slightly higher rate than blacks, and yet two-thirds of those imprisoned for drug possession are black, and the rate of black drug arrests is four-times the white rate. Nearly half of all drug arrests in America are for simple marijuana offenses, and during the ’90s arrests for simple marijuana possession accounted for almost 80% of the increase in drug arrests. These statistical realities should do much more than stagger you.

If you’re black – they terrify you.

Numbers aside, there’s absolutely no way spending time in prison pacifies someone.

Getting a man to kill someone right in front of them is surprisingly tough to do. The US Army didn’t get the formula right until Vietnam, when it combined the modern psychological principles of classic and operant conditioning, along with heavy doses of desensitization to violence and the appropriate levels of cultural and moral distance.

Our modern prisons, while not using classic or operant conditioning, appear to be reaching the same ends. Not only does increased incarceration raise the rate of violent crimes at the community level, but sticking someone in jail desensitizes them to violence and increases their level of cultural, moral, and social distance from anyone not in their own race.

No where in the modern world is someone more forced to “practice thinking of a particular class as less than human in a socially stratified environment,” a crucial step in becoming prepared to take someone’s life. It is extremely difficult to survive in most prisons without at least loosely aligning yourself with whatever gang your race corresponds to, and steering well clear anything beyond cursory or institutionally-forced interaction with members of another race.

Although America’s five-fold per-capita increase in the incarceration rate hasn’t seemed to have increased the overall level of violent crime, a study released in 2002 revealed that without the advances in medical technology that we’ve made since 1970 the murder rate would be between three and four times higher than it is today.

And upon their release, prisoners often become ineligible for public housing and are denied welfare. So getting a job and trying to find a legitimate way to support themselves is far from easy for ex-cons, more often then not they feel forced to go back to a life of crime to support themselves and any family they might have.

Unemployment rates as high as fifty-percent are frequently cited by those who have researched and followed the lives of former prisoners. One recent study put the unemployment rate at 60% in the first year after release, and another survey found that two-thirds of the employers surveyed in five large cities would never hire an ex-con. Having to state that you’ve been incarcerated on your job application means that any jobs beyond the most menial and low-paying will likely remain out-of-reach. And in today’s turbulent economic times, when even those with advanced college degrees have trouble finding any kind of paid work, the prospect for an ex-con is even more grim.

Due to the incredibly high concentration of blacks in the American prison population, the hope-numbing impact of being held in prison and then being hard-pressed to find employment afterward enforces “the stigma of race [that] remains the unmeltable condition of the black social and economic situation.”

Racism is generally understood in America to have fallen to an all-time low. But this is an illusion, created because our prisons and the hundreds of thousands of black men inside of them are built at sites unseen.

A “subtler and more covert” racism has been enabled as prison populations artificially bend racially specific underemployment rates as “mass incarceration makes it easier for the majority culture to continue to ignore the urban ghettos that live on beneath official rhetoric.”

The Civil Rights movement was marked by dozens and dozens of indelible images of racism that were carried in the media each day – black children being marched past an angry white mob into a newly segregated school, police dogs being sicced on peaceful black protesters, burnt-out remains of bombed black churches, one black man behind a pulpit preaching of Christian love and patience and another black man punctuating with his fist the need for angry black action, crowds full of college students both black and white being sprayed at times by firehoses and other times by bullets.

We’ve all seen the living, breathing, killing reality of racism in the 1970s. None of us now are able to see its existence now, because racism no longer lives on the front pages of our newspapers and on our evening news – instead it’s been suffocated inside poured concrete walls which rise and fall in invisible existence, locked safely out of sight.

“America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves.”

-Abraham Lincoln

Heard you might be coming home, just got bail
Wanna go to the mosque, don’t wanna chase tail
It seems I lost my little homie, he’s a changed man
Hit the pen and now no sinnin’ is the game plan

– Tupac Shakur

In the penultimate chapter of Tremble the Devil written nearly 20 years ago, I argued that America was growing increasingly ripe for a novel wave of Islamic terrorism, however unlike 9/11 the next wave of attacks wouldn’t just be due to outsiders coming in - but instead would rely on help from dissatisfied and disenfranchised ex-cons who’d been exposed to radical Islam while incarcerated. Most of whom would be minorities, due to America’s long legacy of economic disparities breaking-down so cleanly along racial lines, opening the door for Iranians and other outsiders to infiltrate America and use our own citizens as an insurgency force against the rest of America, likely using the DC Sniper as a mold.

So, although I’ve been wrong so far, as Israel’s invasion of Gaza begins and the threat of worldwide reprisals loom, perhaps it’ll turn out that I was just early.

Wouldn’t be the first time.

Pools of empty light regularly dot the endless concrete corridors of the Norfolk Prison Colony. They illuminate a lifeless pattern that glows only with the promise of another tomorrow dictated by the clockwork routine of prison life. There’s no warmth found in these pools of light.

But in one of them, you can find hope. At least for fifty-eight minutes out of every hour.

For the other two minutes of each hour Malcolm X waits in his bed while feigning sleep to avoid the regular patrol of the prison guard. Once the guard passes, X slips out of his bed and back into the pool of light cast into his prison cell by an unblinking corridor light, and cracks his book back open.

The first book he reads is the dictionary, he copies down words on its first page and then silently reads them back to himself. This takes Malcolm X the entire night. Then, after months of painstakingly building a vocabulary, he begins to read the works of H.G. Wells, of Gregor Mendel, of Mahatma Gandhi, and of W.E.B. Du Bois. He reads histories, novels, science fiction, and fables. Malcolm X, a man who came of age on the race-divided and crime-rich innercity streets of America, gains his education on the concrete floor of his prison cell. He reads, he learns, and he begins to question.¹

And then one day, his brother comes to visit.

It’s during this visit that Malcolm X is introduced to the religion of Islam. Although this isn’t Islam in its original and authentic form, far from it. The Islam that Malcolm X’s brother brings to him is something of an offshoot, it’s a unique and American sect of Islam that in a way follows the pattern of Mormonism – a unique and American sect of Christianity.

The version of Islam that Malcolm X is brought to has, like Mormonism, its own unique mythology. A mythology that’s wrought with scientific fallacies, historical impossibilities, and genetic absurdities. But what’s more telling is that the beliefs expounded by Christians in the Church of Latter-Day Saints and Muslims in the Nation of Islam are both rooted in a sense of outside persecution. And while persecution for the Mormons came from other Americans who also considered themselves Christians but who resented the Mormons’ cultish secrecy and their leader’s quirky predilection for marrying multiple underage wives, persecution for members of the Nation of Islam came from the Devil himself.

For who but the Devil would’ve trafficked in flesh that was cut off from its native land and then raped so brutally so many millions of times that its own identity was forgotten? Who but the Devil would teach this flesh to hate its own kind – its language, its customs, and the very color of its own skin? Who but the Devil would try to bring that flesh to a religion which taught that God looked nothing like it, but instead that God in fact looked just like the Devil himself? A religion that told that flesh that heaven, escape from its condition, would only come after death while the Devil created its own heaven here on earth from that flesh’s toil?

And who but the Devil himself would keep the poorest and least of that flesh caged behind bars so it would remain deprived, oppressed, and ignorant?¹

To Malcolm X, a man who’d grown up in poverty because his father was murdered by white men, been told as a child by a white man that he was a nigger who could never be a lawyer, had white men pull him away from his own black family and place him in white foster care, shined white men’s shoes for nickels as they danced in all-white dances clad in hundred-dollar suits, sold drugs and women to the very same white men who treated him like a social degenerate, whose red hair came from the white slavemaster who’d raped his grandmother, and who’d been put in a cage by white men because the only way he knew to make a living was on the streets – it was an argument that rang with a deafening amount of truth.

And because the Devil is not someone you can live alongside, Malcolm X knew the Devil must be fought. So following his release from prison into the warm early-summer days of 1957, two years after Rosa Parks made way into American legend by refusing to move from her seat on another city bus that forever changed the history of a nation, Malcolm X set out to begin his war against the Devil.

The years that followed have become strewn with misconceptions and inaccuracies. But the funny thing is, the most misleading statement made about the Civil Rights movement aren’t about the life of Malcolm X.

If there’s one event that captures the way that era has been willfully misrepresented, it would be 1963’s March on Washington. It was during the March on Washington that Martin Luther King Jr. gave his “I Have a Dream” speech, words that have become emblematic of the successes of the Civil Rights movement and that have posthumously become King’s final message. The March on Washington is often heralded as a sign of the progress the Civil Rights movement made, and the Speech is conveyed to today’s generations of children as King’s last message to America.

Neither of these assertions are true.

In the years leading up to the March on Washington blacks had staged peaceful sit-ins at segregated restaurants, boycotted bus lines, and blacks and whites alike had been attacked “with fists and iron bars” while staging Freedom Rides that challenged laws against integrated interstate travel. Blacks staging sit-ins were beaten, bombs murdered little black girls attending Sunday school, buses full of Freedom Riders were set afire, and the federal government “watched, took notes, did nothing.”²

In the early 1960s “black people rose in rebellion all over the South” and it seemed that “revolt was always minutes away, in a timing mechanism which no one had set, but which might go off with some unpredictable set of events.”³ It was in this heady and volatile mixture of racial tension and youthful idealism that a spontaneous plan emerged among groups of blacks to get to Washington “any way they could – in rickety old cars, on buses, hitch-hiking – walking, even, if they had to”⁴ and then march “on Washington, march on the Senate, march on the White House, march on the Congress, and tie it up, bring it to a halt, not let the government proceed.”⁵ It was to be “a national bitterness; militant, unorganized, and leaderless” that would be undertaken by those who were “sick and tired of the black man’s neck under the white man’s heel.”⁶

But  that’s not what it was at all. When the white establishment learned of the angry black wave which was beginning to ripple across the nation towards the shores of Washington, they enacted an ingenious plan to counter it – they became a part of it, and welcomed it.

The white establishment knew this would be possible because the New York Times had reported that the main civil rights organizations were all scrambling for donations, each attempting to elbow the other away from the potential donors who were in short supply. The NAACP especially felt that since whenever another organization put on a highly publicized demonstration that drew in large crowds and a large influx of money, it should be given a share of the money since it ended up bailing many of the other organization’s jailed protesters out of jail and representing them in court.⁷

These financial fissure points were filled with a highly publicized white donation to the “big six,” the leaders of the various Civil Rights groups who were looked to by blacks to dictate the terms of the March on Washington, in return for being allowed to add four white members to their group and create a “big ten.” Media coverage implied that it would be this “big ten” who would “supervise” the “mood” and “direction” of the March on Washington. The Kennedy administration, fearful of the massive potential for unrest in the nation’s capital, gave its tacit approval to the “big ten” and made it seem democratic for Americans to join the March.⁸

Soon the middle and upper class blacks who had at first deplored what they perceived as a poor black March joined the tide, as did the whites who joined the March on Washington as it became a chic status-symbol, became a Kentucky Derby but with a bunch of negroes running around instead of horses. As a result, the March on Washington, in the words of Malcolm X, “lost its militancy.”

“It ceased to be angry, it ceased to be hot, it ceased to be uncompromising. Why, it even ceased to be a march. It became a picnic.”⁹ The March became so tightly controlled that the blacks who came were instructed “what time to hit town, where to stop, what signs to carry, what song to sing, what speech they could make, and what speech they couldn’t make, and then told them to get out of town by sundown.”¹⁰

Which is just what the blacks did, never laying down across the plush lawns and even runways of Washington and refusing to budge until concrete Civil Rights legislation was passed but instead coming and going in the light of just one day. A March intended to embody the heated black anger which had been stoked in the furnace of white discrimination, white beatings, white segregation, and white bombs instead became a “gentle flood” of integration that had been told “how to arrive, when, where to arrive, where to assemble, when to start marching, the route to march.”¹¹

And it’s telling that it was in this context that Dr. Martin Luther King gave what is far and away his most famous speech, and in the process created what’s been preserved as the most compelling image of the Civil Rights era: standing at a podium framed by the Lincoln Memorial in front of a sea of peaceful and biracial faces, a quarter-million deep, that blanked the National Mall.

Dr. Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech has been recited and memorized by generations of school children and is easily the most celebrated text of the Civil Rights era. But it was given at an event that presented an image of America that had been bought, one that was a lie. Much like the title in front of Dr. King’s name is a lie, and our perception of his character as a godly and moral man is a lie – Martin Luther King Jr. was a prodigious womanizer who cheated on the woman who had borne his children dozens and dozens of times. Even King himself let his dream go and did not carry it to his grave, his final message was a drastically different one.

But we don’t want to remember this, we willfully choose to remember Dr. Martin Luther King as having a wonderful dream that we’re moving closer to each and every day, and to preserve him as the greatest man who lived in the Civil Rights era. And the March on Washington is remembered as one of the great triumphs of the Civil Rights movement, when in fact it was a farce that undermined the true goal of the blacks who started it.

It’s so much easier to accept things as they’re presented to us.

We forget the reality of King’s life and the reality of the context his dream was created in, the March, just as we forget that in the years following his speech America moved farther than ever from the image he presented in it. In the years that followed the March on Washington there were outbreaks of black violence in nearly every part of the country. Out and out riots occurred in Rochester, Jersey City, Chicago, Philadelphia, and numerous other cities.

Stores were looted and firebombed, policemen and National Guardsmen responded to the violence that stretched from coast to coast. By the summer of 1966 looting and fire-bombing in Chicago led to the shooting deaths of a thirteen-year-old boy and a pregnant fourteen-year-old girl by authorities, in Cleveland four blacks were shot after a “commotion.” Then in the summer of ’67 came “the greatest urban riots of American history.” Blacks attacked not only whites themselves, but every local symbol of white society they could get their once-shackled hands on. The National Advisory Commission on Urban Disorders reported eight major uprisings, thirty-three “serious but not major” outbreaks of violence, and 123 smaller riots. Eighty-three civilians, most of them black, died as a result of the violence.¹²

If there ever needs to be a final ruling on whether Malcolm X or Martin Luther King Jr. better embodied and eloquated the black experience of the ’60s and ’70s, it can be found in the anger and destruction of these years. In the reality of their origins, your average African-American from that era shared much more with X’s impoverished and tumultuous upbringing than with King’s privileged and peaceful one.

And so it was Malcolm X who served as the best and most prominent spokesman for Black Power – a call to pride and independence for blacks.

As Malcolm X put it, “you’ll get your freedom by letting your enemy know you’ll do anything to get your freedom; then you’ll get it. When you get that kind of attitude… they’ll call you a ‘crazy nigger’ …or they’ll call you an extremist or a subversive, or seditious, or a red or a radical. But when you stay radical long enough and get enough people to be like you, you’ll get your freedom.” Malcolm X reminded his followers that “you came here on a slave ship. In chains, like a horse, or a cow, or a chicken,” and that “America’s problem is us. We’re her problem. The only reason she has a problem is that she doesn’t want us here.”

While King dreamed of peaceful racial integration, X saw the reality and necessity of violent action against an oppressive white establishment – “a common oppressor, a common exploiter, and a common discriminator.” Malcolm X argued that “any time you live in a society supposedly based upon law, and it doesn’t enforce its own law because the color of a man’s skin happens to be wrong, then I say these people are justified to resort to any means necessary to bring about justice where the government can’t give them justice.”¹³ And he taught that “once we all realize that we have a common enemy, then we unite – on the basis of what we have in common. And what we have foremost in common is that enemy – the white man.”

As a member of the Nation of Islam it was widely said that Malcolm X was the only man in America who “could stop a race riot – or start one.” X had a “ghetto instinct,” could feel the level of tension in a ghetto audience, could understand its language.¹⁴ And he could speak in a language which they understood, a fact well-illustrated as the coming decade played out and urban black America began to revolt against what it saw as an oppressive and unjust white establishment.

As the revolutionary decade of the 1960’s found its stride, urban violence in America grew to new heights. Police were regularly acquitted for killing innocent black students, shooting black rioters in the back, and cases that captured the racist injustice of the time came “randomly but persistently out of a racism deep in the institutions, the mind of the country.”¹⁵ Polls showed that nearly half of America’s blacks under the age of twenty-one had great respect for the militant Black Panther Party, and despite some attempts by the white establishment to integrate blacks and provide economic incentives to them the unemployment, crime, drug addiction, and violence that was destroying the black lower class only continued to grow in force.

Almost fifteen years after the March on Washington, the unemployment rate among black youth had risen to just under thirty-five percent, and blacks were seven times more likely to die of homicide than whites. The next year the New York Times reported on the American racial divide: “the places that experienced urban riots in the 1960’s have, with a few exceptions, changed little, and the conditions of poverty have spread in most cities.”¹⁶

And then – gradually at first, but soon gaining the silent and unstoppable momentum of a giant gear that’s nudged into ever-building motion – the system began to respond.

In one of the more ironic statements in the history of the American Presidency, while running for office in the summer of ’68 Richard Nixon declared that there needed to be a new respect for the law in the USA, that there should be “a new determination that when a man disobeys the law, he pays the penalty for his crime.”¹⁷ This statement was tacitly aimed at the black rioters who were violently protesting across thousands and thousands of miles of inner-city American streets that summer, rising in what was beginning to seem like an inevitable racial insurrection during the long hot summers of the 1960s.

Up until 1970, a year into Richard Nixon’s presidency, the American prison population had been remarkably stable and on-par with other Western democracies – at about one-tenth of one-percent of the population. But then, “at a moment in U.S. history when the Civil Rights movement had faltered,” the population of our prison system began to climb.¹⁸

The same hopelessness and poverty which were fueling the race riots stoked addiction, crime, and violence in America’s inner-cities. And it was addiction, which spun off to cause so much ancillary crime and violence, that Nixon was nominally attempting to combat when he declared a War on Drugs.

The popularly cited motivation for the War on Drugs is that it was a response to the growing numbers of military serviceman who were getting hooked on heroin and other narcotics while serving in the Vietnam War. Although that was a troublesome issue, when you know the reality of all past American drugs laws it quickly becomes apparent that there’s no way in hell that was the only impetus behind this wave of anti-drug legislation, and that Nixon was using soldiers’ addiction as opportunistic displacement.

Following the Civil War the earliest anti-drug laws were passed in some states, banning the consumption of alcohol. Not, of course, for everyone.

Whites could drink as much as they pleased, but if you were a minority in much of antebellum America you were prohibited from imbibing at all.

At the time it was a widely held belief in American politics that some races, bless their brown souls, simply couldn’t control themselves. Furthering the codification of this perception, in 1901 Henry Cabot Lodge spearheaded a law in the U.S. Senate banning the sale of liquor and now opiates as well to all “uncivilized races.”

In this case, “uncivilized” was synonymous with “dark.” At this point in American history, whites could get as drunk, high, or smacked as they wanted – while the brown-skinned members of American society were completely banned from consuming any intoxicant. Throughout the first half of the 20th Century, any violence carried out by a black man against a white could be attributed to the commonly-held caricature of a “cocaine-crazed negro.” Newspaper headlines screamed of coked-up black criminals who were SHOT BUT DON’T DIE!, and policemen claiming that WE NEED BIGGER BULLETS! because their current caliber wasn’t large enough to stop the crack-crazed negroes they routinely came up against in the line of duty.

However blacks weren’t singled out as a racial minority, the first anti-marijuana laws targeted the wave of Mexican immigrants who were spreading across the American South. They were seen, then as now, to be stealing jobs and government resources from resident whites, and so politicians from that region of the country first banned marijuana use by minorities alone, and then eventually altogether.

Leading up to Nixon’s War on Drugs, each and every drug law passed was inextricably bound to racial prejudice. In other words, “all of our drug laws have originally been based on racism… all of these laws are based on the belief that there is a class in society that can control themselves, and there is a class in society which cannot.”¹⁹

Nixon’s public claim that the War on Drugs was primarily a response to the growing number of addicted veterans was at best a lie of omission. Taking into account past legal precedent, and the fact that American urban centers were being wracked by a series of seemingly unending race riots, it becomes self-evident that the War on Drugs was simply another page in a story of American anti-drug laws that has always been rooted in racism.

Then in 1973, with Nixon desperately attempting to spin his way out of Watergate, New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller passed a set of laws that were soon mimicked by several other states and then finally the entire federal government.

They were minimum sentencing laws for drug crimes that, in part because they included a fifteen-year prison term equivalent to what you’d get for second-degree murder for possessing even a small amount of narcotics, were the harshest the country had ever seen. The per-capita prison population of the United States remained constant from 1930 to right around 1973, at which point the graph begins an exponential climb that grows steeper and steeper with every passing year.

These counter-narcotics laws that, both by design and in practice, fueled an explosion in our prison population – a population which started disproportionately black – with 90% of those incarcerated under the Rockefeller laws either Latino or black – and only growing to become more so as the years passed. Between 1979 and 1990 blacks made up a steady percent of our overall population, but between those same years blacks went from making up 39% of our drug-related prison population to 53% of it.²⁰

Today that number’s down to 51.2%. An improvement, but hardly.

Through the 1980s this disparate growth was fueled by the Anti-Drug Abuse Act, one of the hundreds of crime bills passed by state and Congressional legislatures in the 1980s and 1990s. The Anti-Drug Abuse Act imposed the first of the mandatory minimum sentencing laws, here five-years in prison without chance of parole for anyone caught selling a substantial-enough amount of heroin, methamphetamine, marijuana, or cocaine. This last drug, cocaine, had a unique provision.

You’d receive the same unparolable five-year sentence for selling either 5 grams of crack cocaine as you would selling one-hundred times that much – 500 grams – of powder cocaine. Crack and powder cocaine are pharmacologically the exact same drug, there’re only two important differences. One is that crack cocaine is smoked while powder cocaine is snorted. The other is a bit more telling. Powder cocaine was mainly consumed by whites, whereas crack cocaine was the form of choice for innercity blacks.

Critics, for good reason, blasted the law as shamelessly racist.²¹

America introduced a solution to civil disorder and social injustice that wasn’t novel, it’s simply grown to become unmatched in scale. By 2003, the percentage of our population in prison dwarfed England’s level, our international neighbor whose culture and mores are closest to ours. We have, proportionally, six-times our population locked up behind bars as our tea-sipping crumpet-munching cousins across the pond. For France and Germany, the difference approaches ten-times as many.

Our prison population has increased five-fold in just thirty years. In terms of the global population, we have just 5% of that but fully a quarter of the world’s prisoners.²² And these American prisoners have one common and inescapable denominator that you’ve almost certainly already stereotyped them with – but for good reason. The stereotype of the black male American prisoner is, among other things, an accurate reflection of reality.

Although only about 12% of the American population is black, over a third of the two-million Americans locked up in prison are black. And despite the fact that only 14% of all illicit drug users are black, blacks make up over half of those in prison for drug offenses. A black man is eight-times as likely as a white man to be locked up at some point in his life. At any one time in America, almost a third of black American males in their twenties are under some form of “correctional supervision” – if not actually incarcerated, then either on probation or on parole, meaning they’ve recently passed through the American penal system.²³

This means that as of 1996, a sixteen-year-old kid in America would have nearly a one-in-three chance of spending some time behind bars if he was unlucky enough to have been born black. If he happened to be born white, he’d only face a 4% chance of incarceration – a disparity that’s been steadily increasing since then. In Chicago’s home state there’re 10,000 more black prisoners than black college students, and for every two black students enrolled in college there are five elsewhere in the state either locked up or on parole.²⁴

In 2001 a government survey revealed that the per-capita rate of illicit drug use was only point-two of a percent higher for blacks, and yet three-quarters of those arrested for drug possession were black. Nearly half of all drug arrests in America are for simple marijuana offenses. These statistical realities should do much more than stagger you.

If you’re black – they terrify you.

Throughout history, social uprising have coincided with high levels of economic disparity. The American Revolution, the French Revolution, China’s Cultural Revolution, both of Russia’s modern revolutions, and even the ’79 Iranian Revolution all received a heavy push from economic discontent. It seems as if the poor have some unseen threshold, like they can only get so poor before they lash out violently against the system. Like the odds a social uprising will occur increases in tandem with the level of economic disparity.

And for going on two generations now, America’s level of economic disparity has been steadily rising. This ongoing financial crisis may be what finally causes it to crest over. The fact that black males now have twice the unemployment rate of white males barely even begins to explore the issue.

The precise era that saw a drug-law fueled explosion in our prison population, the early 1970s, are the exact same years that the economic situation of blacks began to starkly worsen and that the gap between rich and poor is wrenched wide open. Beginning in those years and continuing into today, “the economic status of black compared to that of whites has, on average, stagnated or deteriorated.”²⁵ Up until 1973, the precise year the Rockefeller drug laws were passed, the difference between black and white median income had been closing. But then that year it changed course, and in “an ominous bellwether… the gap between black and white incomes started to grow wider again, in both absolute and relative terms.”²⁶

In the nearly forty years since America’s modern drug laws were passed, there has been a massive increase in economic inequality by any measure. In the early 1970’s not only did the income gap between black and white begin to widen again, it also becomes much more top-heavily favored to the very rich – who happen to be almost exclusively white as well.

One way to capture it is by examining what portion of America’s total income the top 1% of earners receive. The share of that top 1% has nearly doubled since 1970, and it’s now the same size as the income earned by everyone in the bottom 40% of earners combined.²⁷

So the very few families who make up the top 1% of all earners have a combined income that matches the incomes of all the families in the bottom 40% of earners.

Looking at economic well-being another way, in terms of financial wealth or “stocks, bonds, real estate, businesses, and other financial instruments,” as of 1998 the top 1% of families controlled nearly half of that pie, with the top 20% controlling fully 93% of it. Meanwhile, the bottom 40% of families actually have negative financial wealth – their debts actually surpass their assets.²⁸

And this cavernous gap has only been widening, between 1998 and 2001 the net worth of families in the top 10% of America jumped 69%, significantly more than any other group.²⁹ In the years leading up to that point, between 1988 and 1999, the difference in net worth between black families and white families grew by $16,000 and the gap in net financial assets grew by $20,000. By 2004 white families had an average net worth of $81,000, and black families an average net worth of just $8,000 – roughly a tenth the average white family’s.³⁰

With home equity making up 44% of an average American’s family’s net worth and fully 60% among our middle class,³¹ the statistics around homeownernship further delineate the racial schisms of American wealth. Not only do blacks pay higher interest rates, have higher downpayments, have less access to credit, get turned down more frequently for loans no matter what’s controlled for, and pay what amounts to an 18% “segregation tax” because homes in black neighborhoods have much less equity than homes in white neighborhoods³² – but since 1970 black homes have appreciated in value roughly half as much as white homes.³³ And as the real estate market has crashed blacks have suffered much more severely than whites. As it was stated earlier, even when income and credit are controlled for black families now have their homes foreclosed on and are thrown out into the street three-times as often as white families.

Exactly what impact modern drugs laws had on this growing level of racial economic disparity is impossible to know, however it seems more than a little suspicious that so many economic factors line up so well with the passage of our modern drug laws and the incredibly disproportionate number of blacks who were thrown into prison.

But one thing that’s not tough to figure out, is whether being exposed to the American penal system increases or decreases someone’s propensity for violence.

Getting a man to kill someone right in front of them is surprisingly tough to do. The US Army didn’t get the formula right until Vietnam, when it combined the modern psychological principles of classic and operant conditioning, along with heavy doses of desensitization to violence and the appropriate levels of cultural and moral distance.

Our modern prisons, while not using classic or operant conditioning, appear to be reaching the same ends. Not only does increased incarceration raise the rate of violent crimes at the community level,³⁴ but sticking someone in jail desensitizes them to violence and increases their level of cultural, moral, and social distance from anyone not in their own race.

No where in the modern world is someone more forced to “practice thinking of a particular class as less than human in a socially stratified environment,” a crucial step in becoming prepared to take someone’s life.³⁵ It is impossible to survive in most prisons without at least loosely aligning yourself with whatever gang your race corresponds to, and steering well clear anything beyond cursory or institutionally-forced interaction with members of another race.

Although America’s five-fold per-capita increase in the incarceration rate hasn’t seemed to have increased the overall level of violent crime, a study released in 2002 revealed that without the advances in medical technology that we’ve made since 1970 the murder rate would be between three and four times higher than it is today.³⁶

Numbers aside, there’s absolutely no way spending time in prison pacifies someone. And upon their release, prisoners often become ineligible for public housing and are denied welfare. So getting a job and trying to find a legitimate way to support themselves is far from easy for ex-cons, more often then not they feel forced to go back to a life of crime to support themselves and any family they might have.

Unemployment rates as high as fifty-percent are frequently cited by those who have researched and followed the lives of former prisoners. One recent study put the unemployment rate at 60% in the first year after release, and another survey found that two-thirds of the employers surveyed in five large cities would never hire an ex-con.³⁷ Having to state that you’ve been incarcerated on your job application means that any jobs beyond the most menial and low-paying will likely remain out-of-reach. And in today’s turbulent economic times, when even those with advanced college degrees have trouble finding any kind of paid work, the prospect for an ex-con is even more grim.

Due to the incredibly high concentration of blacks in the American prison population, the hope-numbing impact of being held in prison and then being hard-pressed to find employment afterward enforces “the stigma of race [that] remains the unmeltable condition of the black social and economic situation.”³⁸

Racism is generally understood in America to have fallen to an all-time low. But this is an illusion, created because our prisons and the hundreds of thousands of black men inside of them are built at sites unseen. A “subtler and more covert” racism has been enabled as prison populations artificially bend racially specific underemployment rates as “mass incarceration makes it easier for the majority culture to continue to ignore the urban ghettos that live on beneath official rhetoric.”³⁹

The Civil Rights movement was marked by dozens and dozens of indelible images of racism that were carried in the media each day – black children being marched past an angry white mob into a newly segregated school, police dogs being sicced on peaceful black protesters, burnt-out remains of bombed black churches, one black man behind a pulpit preaching of Christian love and patience and another black man punctuating with his fist the need for angry black action, crowds full of college students both black and white being sprayed at times by firehoses and other times by bullets.

We’ve all seen the living, breathing, killing reality of racism in the 1970s. None of us now are able to see its existence now, because racism no longer lives on the front pages of our newspapers and during our evening news – instead it’s been suffocated inside poured concrete walls which rise and fall in invisible existence, locked safely out of sight.

Until from the barrel of a terrorist’s gun poured a breathe that brought it back to life for all of us.

If you’re looking to get a broad understanding of the once-again ongoing Israel-Palestinian conflict, republished below is a chapter from Tremble the Devil, written about 20 years ago after I walked away from one of the NSA’s counterterrorism offices that was closely monitoring likely conflict with Israel.

Municipal buses have always had an uncanny knack for attracting civil unrest.

Be it in Birmingham, London, Baghdad, or downtown Beirut – public buses often act as giant motorized canaries for the fumes of civil disorder and discontent. Why buses serve this function is a complex issue, it’s likely a combination of the physical role they play packing a large number of people into one uncomfortably close environment, and their role as a vital means of the mass transportation that every modern society relies on.

Whatever the reason, throughout modern history harbingers of civil unrest have been among the city bus’s most important passengers. And on April 13^th 1975 in East Beirut, a city bus would serve – not for the first time and not for the last either – as the point of nucleation for a savage civil conflict.

In retaliation for the deaths of four Christians who were shot leaving a Maronite church earlier that day, Christian militiamen turned their guns on a bus full of Palestinian refugees on the way back to their ramshackle refugee camp located in East Beirut within the Christian neighborhood they were traveling through. The attack killed everyone onboard except one passenger and the driver, leaving 29 dead, and is widely referred to as the massacre that officially marks the start of the Lebanese Civil War.

And so the 1970s weren’t a tumultuous time just for the hemp-weaving free-loving acid-dropping flower-children of America. While our society was slowly rending itself apart along generational and racial cleavages, over in the Middle East an entire culture – a piece of an entire civilization – was consuming itself with much less subtlety.

This societal decay gave way to the broad social forces which tilled and softened the region for the growth of Islamic fundamentalist terror. During the 1970s every single Arab nation in the Middle East was ruled by one autocratic form of government or another, and it was nearly impossible to find a group of citizens who felt empowered to better their situation through means offered by the state.

So they turned to terrorism.

The unrest of the 1970s set the stage for everything from Saddam’s rise to power, the targeting of Israel by generations of suicide bombers, the emergence of an alphabet soup of terrorist groups ranging from AMAL to Zeal, the Iranian revolution and the US Embassy hostage crisis, the events of 9/11, as well as, the emergence of the Islamic State. To understand our current state of affairs, you must first understand Middle Eastern society as it was in the 1970s, and what made it unique. With that, you can then understand the implications of the social decay that was redoubling with every passing year.

There isn’t one instance of Islamic fundamentalist terror that’s occurred since that can’t be tied back to that decade. From founding new techniques and approaches to inspiring the ideology that would drive future groups, the 1970s lay at the crossroads of everything that we’ve come to call terrorism.

It was during this time, that in the words of Fawaz Gerges, who was raised in the midst of the most dramatic and deadly civil war the region has ever hosted: “religious fervor in the Arab world fed into rage over economic social, and political impotence,” and “more and more Muslims turned to religion for spiritual sustenance and as a refuge from and a response to the seemingly unstoppable Westernization of their societies and oppressive political authoritarianism.”¹

One of these Muslims was Osama bin Laden, who came of age during these angry years, and developed his own ideas about Islam because of them. The story of the Middle East is very much the story of Islam. A religion today that is more tightly bound to a distinct people than any other, Islam is the only religion ever to become the sole uncontested basis of an entire civilization.

While the West has social mores and laws that draws from its predominately Judeo-Christian religious heritage -this isn’t the sole source of Western culture. The Western world was built upon the ruins of very pagan Greek and Roman systems of government, art, culture, and ideals – and was further distanced from religion’s influence by the Enlightenment, which promoted rationality and logic well past spiritualism, making them the cornerstones of Western civilization.

On the other hand, within the Arab-Islamic world the tenets of Islam attempt to govern all aspects of life: from art and social mores to law and local elections. So before you can understand the story of the Middle East in the 1970s, a brief foray must be made into the story of Islam.

Unlike any other major world religion, the holy book of Islam, the Koran, managed to codify not only laws, precepts, mores, and traditions – but an entire language. And in the process it would establish the basis for Arab identity, the exact definition of which is open to debate, but is most often defined as being fluent in some form of the Arabic language.

It’s this sense of Arab cum Muslim identity that’s at the crux of the emergence of modern Islamic terror. To have any chance of understanding today’s terrorism, you must first have some idea of when and where the terrorists themselves get their sense of identity. A few hundred years after he explained Mary of Nazareth’s predicament to her, Muslims believe the angel Gabriel appeared to the prophet Muhammad, grabbed him in a holy bear-hug, and related in the most divine language words which would be recorded by Muhammad’s own hand and, over time, be compiled as the Holy Koran.

The divinity of the angel Gabriel’s speech is an important aspect of the early days of Islam and influences its status today. Muslims are certain that the lyrically perfect nature of the language in which the Koran was recorded is proof of its divinity – no fool mortal could’ve concocted words of such eloquence and internal harmony.

And Mohammad isn’t viewed as just another mortal receptacle of Gabriel’s word.

The miraculous nature of the Koran, encoded entirely by Mohammad’s hand, is enforced by the fact Mohammad is believed by some sects of Islam to have been an illiterate before penning Islam’s holiest book. A work with the lyrical symmetry of Shakespeare was penned, Muslims believe, by the hand of an illiterate dune-dwelling desert merchant (peace be upon him) – and therefore can only be the divinely inspired word of Allah.

Today this means that the Koran can only be truly comprehended in its original Arabic, and so part of becoming a devout Muslim is learning the Arabic language. This presents a predicament for the millions of immigrants in the West and others outside the Middle East not fluent in Arabic, a problem which will later be explored. At the time of Islam’s origins, the divinity of Gabriel’s message meant that the language of those who fell under Islam’s sword was grafted onto Arabic because you couldn’t be a proper Muslim without knowing some Arabic

Becoming Muslim wasn’t exactly physically forced on a population, but conversions happened at a high rate in societies conquered by Islam due to the economic and social benefits it would bring – benefits which would remain out of reach without linguistic and religious assimilation. The results of this grafting have persisted, witnessed by the fact that defining Arabic, as a language, presents something of a quandary.

Al-Jazeera is the closest most Americans have come to spoken Arabic, although calling it “spoken” Arabic is a bit of a misnomer. The language spoken by Al-Jazeera anchors is referred to by Americans as either written or Modern Standard Arabic, and called by Arabs themselves fusah, or classical, written Arabic because of its origins in the Arabic of the Koran.

It is the language written and spoken in academia, in governmental settings, and in the media – but oddly to us in the West, spoken conversationally pretty much nowhere else.

As Islam spread across the deserts, peninsulas, coasts and plains of the Middle East the Koran and its language spread with it. When a foreign people had been conquered by early Muslims most of the population became obliged to convert to Islam, and part of that deal was learning the language needed to read and resuscitate the Holy Book of Islam.

And so the Arabic of the Koran became the primary written language of all the lands won by Islam, an influence that bled into the local spoken dialects. The written language of the Koran mixed with every native spoken dialect that it touched – whether Hebraic, Phoenician, Aramaic, or Turkish in origin – as an intrinsic and vital element of Islam is the communal reading of the holy texts aloud. Over the centuries, this mixing resulted in the mutation of a native spoken language into an informal codification of what eventually became each distinct local dialect of spoken “Arabic” that is recorded only on the minds and tongues of those who speak it, from Lebanese to Egyptian to Iraqi.

The intricacies of Written Arabic are taught to Arab students just as we formally learn English grammar here, and Arabs the world over all read and write this common script. But there are no official grammar books – taught in Arabic at least, Westerners have made some effort to create them – written to teach the localized spoken dialects. Each dialect is simply learned as a child grows up within the society, and is much more a distinct language than dialects of Spanish or French. Linguistically, every dialect of Arabic is best considered a language unto itself and not a regional vernacular.

Today there are overarching Gulf, Levantine, and North African dialect sets – separate groups of languages really – which have in each of them a general consensus about conjugation, prepositions, and other syntactical rules. But within each of these sets there are many different accents and idioms that vary from country to country, and within North Africa there’s a Moroccan dialect that Arabs elsewhere only grudgingly refer to as Arabic at all.

And each dialect set is mutually incomprehensible to the other unless one has traveled or otherwise encountered those who speak it, although in recent years wide exposure to other dialects via programming on satellite television has started to change this by giving speakers of one dialect an idea of what someone who speaks another dialect will and won’t understand.

The relationship between fusah, or Written Arabic, and each local dialect is softly analogous to the relationship between Latin and modern French, German, or English. Common etymological roots are shared, and just as those Western languages fall within an Indo-European family, all of the Arabic dialects belong to the Semitic family. And yet an Arab running around speaking fusah on the streets of any Arab city would be greeted by the same sorts of looks as an American speaking Shakespearean English in Cincinnati.

So a Westerner stating that they speak Arabic is a rather vague statement, whether they mean the written fusah derived from the Koran or one or many dialects would remain unclear. But among Arabs there is still a feeling of shared identity from a shared mother-tongue that is rooted in a sacred text. So long as you grew up speaking one of the Arabic dialects and learning fusah in school chances are those around you will consider you an Arab, and share a sense of community with you. And, much more often than not, this coincides with a shared religion.

This mother-tongue is rooted in the Koran and on some level Arab identity is too – the vast majority of Arabs are Muslim. But it’s important to remember that not all Muslims are Arab, as Muslims with Southeast-Asian and Persian roots play important roles in the fomentation of Islamic extremism, and Arab-Muslims actually make up a minority of the world’s total Muslim population today.

Islam and Arabness are more patently intertwined than any other religious-culture pair, hence the term “Arab-Islamic,” which could refer to one of the Prophet Mohammad’s original followers as much as an Israeli citizen who practices Islam, a Japanese-speaking Muslim in Indonesia, or a Tagalong-speaking Filipino child who practices Islam at home but studies with Christian missionaries. So the term used by Arabs to describe their community and identity as a whole, the ummah, has an inescapable connotation of a confessional society but also highly flexible rules for membership.

Although who exactly falls within the ummah is highly mercurial, it’s a sense of shared-identity only as consistent as the literally unwritten rules governing the disparate dialects spoken by Arabs across the world.

And due to the close link between Islam and Arabness, citizens in many nations – including Indonesia, which hosts the largest population of Muslims on the planet – who aren’t necessarily fluent in any dialect of Arabic can still feel as if they’re a part of the same confessional community as an Arab who can trace his bloodline directly to the prophet Mohammad.

Arab identity, its current state and its past permutations, is a concept large enough to fill dozens and dozens of books. And for the most part Arab identity has remained a largely benign abstraction. But then in the 1970s, horrible conflict tore across Lebanon and then spread into the rest of the region.

Horrible enough to charge communal Arab identity with the power needed to foment blasts of extremism that sought to level the entrenched institutions of the land. With Arab identity imbued with a new sense of power, novel groups emerged which offered organizational reinforcement to the growing and mutational force of communal Arab identity.

This force, which drew power from dramatic violence and the strength of a shared heritage soon helped foment new groups attempting to take the place of the institutions and bureaucracies they’d destroyed, groups that splashed like embers from the fires of martyrdom and revolution. Although it was Palestinians who were killed by Lebanese in the aforementioned bus bombing, Lebanon’s Civil War wasn’t between Palestinians and Lebanese.

It was between Lebanon’s Christian and Muslim sects – with the Palestinians belonging as minority immigrant members of the latter group who were killed by Christian Lebanese. But understanding what Palestinian immigrants were doing in Lebanon in the first place and why the Christian and Muslim sects were so easily cleaved apart and then set at each other’s throats requires some knowledge of Lebanon’s history and the international forces acting on the region at the time.

These forces can trace their lineage back first to the carving of the Middle East into the political borders of the present, and then to the violence that subsequently transpired due to the instability of a region whose sense of national identity was determined not by political will, but imperialist edict.

Lebanon and the rest of the nations in what is today called the Middle East were born in a unique fashion. Following the close of World War I, under the auspices of the Treaty of Versailles the victorious Allies went about carving up what had for centuries been the Ottoman Empire. Today’s Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, and Israel were all part of that once cohesive Empire. Each of the Allied powers had been promised spheres of influence in the Middle East and so – paying little attention to geographic or societal realities – the region was dissected into discrete states where none had previously been.

This process seemed so haphazard and random that a chip in Jordan’s eastern border is cheekily referred to as Churchill’s hiccup, as if the only possible reason for the indentation’s existence is that Britain’s Prime Minister, perhaps chugging a pint of bitter, must’ve belched and jerked his pen while he was drawing that particular border.

Because the construction of these nations was so obtuse in terms of the forces that make a nation cohesive, a fair amount of blame has been heaped on the British and the West in general for imbuing the region with an inherent instability. Today this lackadaisical cartography is seen as the beginning of imperialist interference in the matters of Middle Eastern society, and has fueled the rhetoric of Islamic extremists ever since.

And imperialist interference is exactly what it was: the Allied Powers fully intended to create manageable chunks of resource-rich land in the form of discrete nations. The Allies weren’t attempting to create the violent instability that has persisted in the region, and those who chose to do the shooting and fighting are complicit in the magnificent death-toll racked up in the region. However, from the perspective of the imperialized, strife was written onto the region by the exploitative pens of Empire.

This instability played itself out in the 1950s and ’60s as, inspired by Nasser’s coup of Egypt’s constitutional government, military coups followed in rapid succession in Syria, Iraq, Sudan, Algeria, and Libya. A few generations later, another chain of uprisings would domino across the region, but with rather different underpinnings. Because Nasser “popularized and institutionalized militarism in Arab politics,” dictatorships became commonplace and the resulting “militarism and authoritarianism have grown into cancers”² which thrived in the region.

But no matter where the fault lies, the fault lines created in the Middle East would again and again rock the region’s residents with conflict and death in the years to come. This happened nowhere more famously than a land known today as either Israel, Palestine, the Occupied Territories, or as the Zionist Entity – depending on who you ask.

Give or take a few generations, the Biblical Promised Land has been through a nearly endless series of small- and large-scale conflicts.

In 1967 one of the larger conflicts, the Six Day War between Israel and five of her neighbors, resulted in a windfall of land for the inchoate Israeli state, which incorporated land from the defeated Egyptians, Syrians, and Jordanians into its own borders. In doing so Israel displaced the thousands who had been living on the land, thousands who had no place to go. Their ethnic identity as Palestinian precluded almost all of them from citizenship in any of the other neighboring Arab countries and so refugee camps were eventually constructed both within the new borders of Israel, and within some of the neighboring Arab countries.

Blame for their fate has since been placed both on the unwavering shoulders of the conquering Israelis and on the proud shoulders of the neighboring Arabs who refused to incorporate their own kinsmen into their societies. It is a problem that has no solution in sight and which has only been exacerbated by even more dire refugee crises in recent years, but which does give hints about the innerworkings of the nations affected by it. Lebanon, with its close proximity to the conquered lands, was a prime area for the construction of refugee camps for the homeless Palestinians. Its unique political structure also created a pliable state, primed for the introduction of refugees and terrorism.

Created by the same flurry of lines drawn in the sand that yielded Churchill’s hiccup in the aftermath of World War I, Lebanon’s odd political underpinnings are those of a consociational democracy: a system of nominally democratic rule which is based on decision-making that is done via shady backroom dealings between discrete parties who represent each of the state’s minority groups. Since Lebanon’s Christian, Sunni, and Shi’ia populations were close enough in size to preclude any of them from establishing majority-rule, Lebanon turned to a consociational democracy in an ultimately futile attempt to establish a fully-functional national government.

The French colonialists created a framework of rule that was fleshed-out by a census taken in 1932, controversial at the time and never accurately updated since. The results of the census created a carefully balanced formalized system of power-sharing between Lebanon’s three main sects: Shi’ia, Sunni, and Christian – with the Druze and other sects thrown a bone here and there.

This loosely knit polity became a cosmopolitan hotbed of trade, enterprise, and tolerance from its inception until the fateful 1970s. At that point the neighboring conflicts reached into Lebanon and shook loose the stability that had once precariously held the country together.

Lebanon’s tendency towards instability was also written onto the state because during its construction the founding fathers of Lebanon “neglected the sine qua non of all nation building, namely an effective military.” The lack of security and stability that resulted from this would soon come to haunt Lebanon, whose people considered their military a joke. It was better trained, they said, “at ballroom dancing than at fighting.”³

By the 1970s this inherent instability was beginning to show, and the start of that decade marks the birthday of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, more commonly known as the PLO. With the relocation of hundreds of thousands of refugees into Lebanon from the lands won as spoils by Israel, came the formation of an organization dedicated to the restoration of the Palestinian lands to their rightful Arab owners.

This relocation came after the Palestinians’ brief stay in Jordan was ended when a wary King Hussein gave them the boot after they hijacked three airliners and landed them in the kingdom, and declared a “liberated zone” – an act foreshadowed by the PLO’s refusal to pay taxes or use national license plates, and insistence on creating tolled check-points on royal roads. Yassir Arafat, who championed these refugees cum militants, has since passed away but not without first passing into legend in the eyes of Arab peoples. Before he died in Paris from either Israel assassins, cirrhosis of the liver, AIDS, his wife, polonium poisoning, or simply old age, Arafat was lionized by his people because of his defiance of Israeli and Western will.

Arafat’s defiance, manifested by the PLO, came to be rooted in southern Lebanon because the Lebanese government “was too weak to shoulder its security responsibility and force the PLO to respect the country’s sovereignty,”⁴ and stop the PLO from staging attacks against Israel from within Lebanese borders. Lebanon was not a decisive single-minded monarchy like Jordan.

And for every attack the PLO was able to execute, the Israelis would respond in kind, beginning the cycle of violence that’s still pulling innocents into its deadly vortex today. The PLO was able to exist as “a state within a state”⁵ because Lebanon’s existence as a polity was so inherently flimsy. Lebanon was not founded so much as ordered into existence, with the people encompassed by its edict having no say in how, or why, or by whom they were ruled.

The only alternative to being part of Lebanon was relocating your entire family. In Middle Eastern cultures transplanting your family would often mean uprooting several generations of immediate relatives and many branches of cousins, and leaving the country. Lebanon provided the perfect growth medium for the PLO and the other organizations which would soon sprout as offshoots from it in a state deeply cleaved by religious and ethnic identities. Identities cleaved so deep that they severed any sense of national identity.

These fissures were readily apparent to anyone taking the time to talk to a member of Lebanese society. At one point during the Lebanese Civil War, a sixteen-year-old Christian-Lebanese boy asked a reporter if the reporter wanted to know what he thought of the Palestinians in Lebanon. When the reporter affirmed that he did, the boy replied with a grin and his middle-finger.⁶

As is often the case, “religious difference can inflame nationalist sentiments in ways that encourage mass support for martyrdom and suicide terrorism.”⁷ This was compounded by the state itself being hamstrung by the corruption that’s inescapable within consociational democracies, which are unable to move as one unit against internal uprisings. This indecisiveness presented a vacuum of action and order that other organizations soon coalesced to fill. And so the modern history of Lebanon isn’t so much one of a singular government and people, but one of a rotating and mutating array of “states within a state” hosted within Lebanese borders.

Another term for a “state within a state” is a “State Shell.” State Shells have popped up within and along the borders of weak states throughout history – the PLO being one of many examples – and present unique clues into the political development and formation of modern Islamic extremism.

At the broadest level, State Shells are semi-autonomous polities hosted within a nation that are able to impose their own will and organizational structure on some segment of society beyond the reach of local government regulation.

Strictly speaking, State Shells are cohesive organizations which have “a monopoly on the means of violence; territoriality; taxation; and public bureaucracy”⁸ within their stomping-grounds. The depth and breadth of the will they are able to impose varies greatly from situation to situation, but generally State Shells establish a following in a society by filling gaps left open by the government.

The less able a government is to provide public works and order, from hospitals to courts to support for the needy, the bigger the opportunity a State Shell has to gain credibility and then power within a pocket of that state. A crucial common-denominator among all State Shells is economic independence from the host government – State Shells must be able to raise their own funds, either through their own taxes, outside support, or often via ransoms and the illicit trade of drugs, guns, and plundered resources.

Another characteristic of State Shells is that they rule through an unflinching use of violent coercion, a trait embodied by Arafat. Once after executing a man who refused to preach the PLO’s propaganda he went to the man’s home, found his ten-year-old son, gave the boy a gun and after telling him it was the Israelis who’d shot his father instructed him to “use this to take revenge.”⁹

Many of the world’s most recognizable terrorist groups are prime examples of State Shells filling the gaps created when a government – beset by political violence, incompetence, or upheaval – is unable to fully govern. Within a State Shell there is no such thing as the rule of law, and the exercise of Godfatheresque impersonal power that’s based not on a code of justice but individual whim is paramount over political representation or citizenship. Although they do provide public works, a State Shell’s overall effect is not a positive one on the society that hosts it, as they are by nature exploitative and predatory.¹⁰

Examples of this behavior span numerous continents and countless generations. And in what were supposed to be the waning years of Operation Enduring Freedom, an eduring threat to the freedom of Iraqis and Syrians alike emerged from the ashes of an incompetent occupation and a macabre civil uprising, as the Islamic State declared the establishment of a modern caliphate in the ancient lans of empires gone by.  But understanding the Islamic State, alternatively known as ISIS, ISIL, IS, or transliterated from Arabic as Da’ish – is impossible without first examining State Shells whose existence is already well-established and which have already lasted multiple generations.

In Columbia, the FARC has established a robust State Shell that reaped a stunning toll on the local population since its inception in the 1920s when it rode the revolutionary wave stirred-up by the Russian Revolution into existence.

Today its protection-money fueled income is estimated at $500 million, the majority of funds relying on the large American market for cocaine. The FARC, the Spanish acronym for a group whose name translates as the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Columbia, feeds off the American drug trade, and wouldn’t be able to raise the funds it relies on without America’s vast demand for its product. In 2000, the FARC killed as many as 25,000 people in the countryside, mostly in brutal massacres, often preceded by torture.

The Colombian government – which has never been able to solidify rule because of attempted coups, constant bribery, and virulent corruption – at one point attempted to appease the FARC by giving them uncontested control of a swath of land roughly the size of Switzerland. Within this area people were “treated as commodities” and whoever resisted was simply executed. By the close of the 20th century, The FARC “no longer represented the shaggy-haired university idealists of the Cold War era, but a criminal army built on the forced recruitment of teenage boys and girls.”¹¹

And within this army, desertion doesn’t mean death only for yourself, but also your entire family. Known just as aptly as “narco-terrorists” as a State Shell, the FARC thrives on extortion, murder, smuggling, kidnapping, and all the other means of brutally enforcing control found wherever government regulation and direction lapses. But ironically, the FARC does provide security for those who don’t struggle once they’re caught in its web.

It wins loyalty by implementing programs of social and public works to superficially better the lives of the Colombians whose lives it controls, and so many are willing to pay the FARC off for security and services with their own liberty.

Following in the FARC’s pattern, but demonstrating a more international taste, is a cousin of the PLO. Hamas has expanded from its birth in the Palestinian refugee camps to establish a vast economic web that’s pulled money and resources from neighboring economies into its own domain.

Its name is the phonetic English equivalent of an anagram standing for “The Party of Islamic Resistance” and, appropriately, spells out the Arabic word for “Zeal.” Taking inspiration from the Muslim Brotherhood, a group which plays a key role in the evolution of Islamic extremism, Hamas features an unlikely mix of Islamic fundamentalism balanced by nominally democratic principles.

This rather quirky approach paid off in early 2006, when Hamas won political control of the Occupied Territories from the Palestinian Authority, an offshoot of the PLO.

Earlier, during the Gulf War, Hamas had received a windfall from Saudi Arabia when that monarchy diverted funds earmarked for Arafat’s PLO to Hamas because of Arafat’s support of Saddam Hussein. It used this money to intensify its attacks on Israel from the prior year by over twenty-five percent in 1992, securing its reputation as the prime aggressor against Israel.¹² Hamas’s overt funding is estimated to be eighty-five percent foreign-based, with money pouring in from Saudi and Iranian state donations – on one occasion via a $150 million telethon complete with an enthusiastic charismatic host and burka-clad women fastidiously answering the ever-jingling phones.

1998 saw Hamas’s newly freed spiritual leader, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, pull in over $300 million on a whirlwind tour of Arab capitals. Other private donations from expatriates and businessmen from within the Arab world help fund Hamas’s ends, which aren’t only terrorist attacks against Israelis.

Hamas has won the loyalty of Palestinians by funding “schools, orphanages, mosques, health-care clinics, soup kitchens, and sports leagues in the poorest areas,” and as a result winning support not just from Joe Palestinian but from “trade unions, agricultural cooperatives… and among student unions.” But like the FARC, Hamas is far from entirely benevolent. As the PLO took a more conciliatory approach to Israel, Hamas sought to exploit this and formed “shock committees” which acted as death squads to interrogate via torture and terror suspected collaborators with Israel.¹³

Those are only two examples of State Shells at work. Peru’s Shining Path, Spain’s now-tamed ETA, and Ireland’s IRA circa the 1960s and 1970s are other prime examples of terrorist State Shells. However none of the groups, explored above in detail, ever made a significant attack on American personnel. And although the Islamic State certainly presents a clear and present danger to security in the Middle East, as of the spring of 2015 they hadn’t yet goaded the American military into a full-scale ground engagement.

An attack large enough to affect American foreign policy has only been pulled-off by one State Shells. And so it was a State Shell with a story and strategy all its own that in 1983 strode confidently across the line every other terrorist group had previously only dared to toe. In many ways this attack permanently blurred the lines between terrorism and warfare, lines which fade when you step several thousand years back into history and learn about the man history could consider both our first terrorist and our first commando.

If you’ve spent any significant amount of time traveling in America before, odds are you’ve almost certainly slept right next to him.  Unaware that the example he set would inspire how Ramzi Yousef would kill as much it would inspire millions of others to pray.

Luckily for me, modern catalytic converters don’t pump out enough carbon-monoxide to kill you when you leave your car running in a closed garage. Turns out that over the past few decades they’ve become far more environmentally friendly, which means that although you’d eventually die – it’d be a slow painful death from a toxic cocktail of industrial byproducts that would take hours and hours to absorb into your system, not the relatively quick and painless sleep so often depicted in movies: Suddenly taking hold after you claw pitifully at your windows following one last futile fit of coughing.

And for someone who’s decided on suicide, who wants to exercise control one last time and leave definitively on their own terms, slow and painful doesn’t fit the bill. Plus the asinine melodrama of the whole scenario hits you after about twenty minutes of running your car in a close garage when you turn down the OneRepublic on your radio, and take out your phone wondering why the hell you aren’t dead or even feeling much of anything yet, but then a quick google explains through your tears that you’ve chosen a decidedly outdated and ineffective way of offing yourself.

But this doesn’t mean you’ve given up on the whole idea, because suicide still seems like a much better choice than spending the next decade or so of your life perpetually fighting off gang-rape in silent concrete showers, then at best living on the fringes of society as the lowest sort of social pariah should you manage to make it through that ordeal.

All of this is running through your head in the weeks and months leading up to your sentencing, and several times you’re half a bottle of Aspirin, ten minutes of wind-sprints, and one box-cutter to your neck away from a far more effective suicide. But then, after a few sketchy experiences on your way into the system, when you do actually take your first prison shower in the building where you’ll spend the next two years – a funny thing happens.

Strangely enough, it’s pretty close to the team showers you remember from both of the sports you played in college. Only filled with far more tattoos and missing teeth, and unlike college - off in the corner one guy is fastidiously washing his clothes in the spray. But the patter of friendly banter, the overdone homoeroticism, the pecking order – all of it’s oddly familiar. So the good news is that what makes prison terrible has nothing to do with dropped soap.

The bad news is that prison is terrible for a much more complex, insidious constellation of reasons, and no matter how tough you are they’re not something you can fight – at least not for as long as you would’ve hoped. And the worst news is that the choices that can lead you into prison aren’t the ones that you think. And they are choices that – all this time – you’ve mistakenly been thinking are entirely determined by your own free will.

Long before Mark Walberg starred as a neighborhood hopeful who chased down his NFL dream on the silver screen in Invincible, and years before his depiction as an underdog world champion boxer in The Fighter, Mark Walberg was a deep-sea fisherman alongside George Clooney in the blue-collar blockbuster The Perfect Storm, a harrowing true account of brotherhood and perseverance that was based on the bestselling book by Sebastian Junger.

After his success depicting the bonds between men working one of America’s most dangerous jobs, Junger would become a war correspondent. His award-winning documentary RESTREPO, made during his two years embedded with U.S. troops in the Afghan hinterlands, poignantly captured the indelible damage and extraordinary bonds that can only occur in war-time when young Americans were returned to what Junger described as a tribal existence.

And since modern humans stopped living in what we’d typically consider tribes long ago, Americans have begun to feel disconnected from each other and their communities more today than ever before, as Junger details in his newest book, Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging. Tribal societies are based on the widespread existence of social trust, as everything from food to child-raising duties are shard among members of the group, and so group members have faith in each other, and trust that their interests will be guarded by other members of the group.

With the trust that comes from sharing both resources and responsibilities comes a sense of belonging, a sense of togetherness and connectedness that was lost along the way as society modernized and industrialized. And this disconnectedness contributes to any number of social ills: increasing corporate fraud and theft, a growing number of mass shootings and general gun violence, and an explosion of mental health issues ranging from post-traumatic stress disorder in our veterans to suicides that have only become commonplace as our veterans are told they’re overreacting.

Without a tribal sense of belonging humans seem to lose something primal and fundamental in their lives, something that sets us off-kilter if it’s missing. And it turns out to be something that can actually be measured, as least to some extent, as the burgeoning field of evolutionary anthropology has begun to quantify:

Not only are bad actions punished, but good actions are rewarded. When a person does something for another person – a prosocial act, as it’s called- they are rewarded not only by group approval but also by an increase of dopamine and other pleasurable hormones in their blood. Group cooperation triggers higher levels of oxytocin, for example, which promotes everything from breast-feeding in women to higher levels of trust and group bonding in men. Both reactions impart a powerful sensation of well-being. Oxytocin creates a feedback of good feeling and group loyalty that ultimately leads members to “self-sacrifice to promote group welfare.”

And dopamine and oxytocin are only two of the myriad neurotransmitters which work collectively to regulate complex human behavior. Serotonin, noradrenalin, GABA, acetylcholine, cannabinoids, endorphins and others all weave a phenomenally complex tapestry of brain waves and action potentials within our skulls – dopamine alone has at least a dozen different receptors throughout our brains and plays a role in everything from fine motor control to pleasure seeking to the crystallization of religious beliefs. But it’s not like these neurotransmitters function on a simple full-to-empty gauge, each one has a three-part Goldilocks zone dependent on their rate of production, the rate enzymes break them down, and the number of receptors for each to fit into.

Presently only one of those three factors is commonly controlled at any one time by modern medicine – drugs like Prozac slow the rate at which serotonin is broken-down by enzymes, which can be a good thing if the extra serotonin helps improve your mood but a terrible thing if too much serotonin eventually accumulates since that can make you suicidal or impulsively violent. But since the other two factors – serotonin’s natural rate of production and the number of its receptors – aren’t modulated by Prozac, there’s no way for someone taking it to know if the drug is going to keep them in the Goldilocks zone or eventual push them out of it. So whether your buzz of choice is from caffeine blocking the enzymatic process that makes you feel tired, alcohol causing your brain to surge with GABA, or cocaine revving your dopamine levels through the roof – any substance that alters the delicate balance of neurotransmitters in your brain is in fact a mind-altering drug.

If that seems complex, consider that many of these neurotransmitters are actually synthesized in our guts by the billions and billions of symbiotic critters happily colonizing us, and precisely how they get up into our brains is largely a mystery. This relationship, between brain and intestinal tract, is so profound that baby mice whose guts are cleared of these critters have brains that fail to develop properly – they don’t form the protective insulation, know as myelin, which allows neurons to effectively function and heal.

Clearly having a gut feeling about something is far more than just a metaphor.

Along with dopamine and oxytocin, other neurotransmitters play different, oftentimes overlapping roles regulating human social interaction, whether it’s building feelings of affection and belonging or staying our hand when our impulse is to smack the shit out of someone.

Since oxytocin works to build feelings of social trust and bond us together, and all it takes for its levels to rise is a little bit of sustained eye-contact, it’s been called both the Love Hormone and the Trust Hormone for good reason. But its effects are as nuanced as its underlying tripartite biological mechanism, and like all neurotransmitters more of it isn’t necessarily a good thing. Oxytocin isn’t alone in functioning differently in each gender, but it can have a particularly insidious effect on females: early childhood abuse, either emotional or physical, predisposes young girls to need higher levels of oxytocin to cope with anxiety than girls who grow up in stable environments.

So the stereotype of a stripper with daddy issues may well have a biological origin, and since oxytocin surges in females during sexual contact, the next time you fool around with a girl known for constantly seeking out sexual encounters you may in fact be directly perpetuating the harm caused by a screaming father who pounded dents in her bedroom door, or a family “friend” whose lap she always did her best to avoid.

So the good news, for the most part, is that humans seem to be wired to function as members of a group, and that this membership occurs – in the purest sense of the word – naturally throughout American society. We find it holding our families, surrounded by our friends, laughing in our classrooms, and as athletes huddled together with our teammates and coaches. It’s something instinctual that can actually be seen in black and white too, as neuroimaging has shown that humans have “emotional biases toward cooperation that can only be overcome with effortful cognitive control.” 

And this sense of cooperative belonging permeates everything that is good in our lives, and is all-too easy to take for granted if we never take the time to look at the path we’ve worn and notice how much help – from shoelaces and sandwich-crusts to pep-talks and wind-sprints – we’ve relied upon along the way.

But the bad news is that the communities all too many Americans are born into have a striking dearth of any sort of social trust, and fantastically damaging levels of stress. The vast majority of the men here in prison hail from neighborhoods where school was a sometimes place held together in piecemeal by detentions and exasperation, where parents hollered drug and alcohol-laced threats far more often then they whispered words of comfort or encouragement, where authority figures were to be feared and avoided instead of trusted and relied upon. Their arrival here was largely their fate, dictated in no small part by the world they were born into – a world jam-packed with countless stressors and rampant antisocial behavior. And this contrast can be placed in empirical terms:

“The social class of the family during the child’s first ten to fifteen years predicts the amount of education, scores on tests of reading and mathematics, occupation, income, physical and mental health, longevity, sleep quality, criminal behavior, and a feeling of well-being in the adult. The joint income of the parents of youths who entered college in the fall of 2013 was an excellent predictor of the youth’s score on the Scholastic Aptitude Test. The scores of the seventeen-year-olds from the poorest families were 388 points lower than the scores of those who grew up in the wealthiest families… When children living near a waste dump containing cancer causing chemicals develop leukemia experts acknowledge the causal role of the toxic environment and do not place the origin of the symptom in the patient.

Dr. James Garbarino, the first clinician to serve as a psychological expert witness during the sentencing phase of murder cases, outlines the existence of a “war zone mentality” that permeates many innercities. Its hallmark is the sense that ”violence is a moral imperative when one is threatened, challenged, or disrespected – and that death is morally preferable to dishonor.” As a result “youths act tough to ward off attacks from others (and to enhance their status with peers),” and if they’re threatened they respond aggressively, often ”perceiving even more threat than may be intended,” pumping escalation into the cycle which continues, and as a result “the war zone mentality flourishes.” And inhabitants of neighborhoods with a war-zone mentality are rewired by their environments, as the stress of their surroundings makes them “extra-susceptible to future problems by destroying the very brain pathways that would help [them] stay calm and in control… early stress affects how these circuits are wired as the brain matures, weakening top-down control throughout [their] lives.”

So it shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone that prison is the continual fate for all too many young men from those embattled neighborhoods. The youngest 18-to-24 demographic accounts for just ten-percent of America, but is responsible for over a quarter of our criminal arrests, and more often than not they return as “recidivism rates for offenders aged 18 to 24 are breathtakingly high: 78 percent of 18- to 24-year-olds released from prison are rearrested, and half return to prison again.” And yet this isn’t really even the full picture at all, since the convention when discussing recidivism rates is to quote the three-year rate, so that means 78 percent of that cohort is rearrested and half return to prison within three years of their release, not in their lifetimes.

Sometimes the five-year rate is also given, but when that’s done it’s explicitly stated, and pretty much no one goes anywhere beyond that since lifetime rates are both clumsy to track and quickly become way too depressing.

Over time this cycle becomes a social norm, meaning that “the more the culture surrounding violent communities – and embedded in the consciousness of the parents and kids who live there – validates elements of the war zone mentality, the more likely it is to produce moral damage.” But where exactly does this sense of “moral damage” come from? Or our sense of morality to begin with? Certainly there’s an argument that there’s something celestial or spiritual going on, but emerging research also seems to indicate that there may be a more intrinsic, primatological explanation.

Jean Piaget, widely considered the greatest developmental psychologist of all time, recognized that social ideals such as fairness seemed to be somehow rooted in our biological development: It wasn’t until age five or six that children begin to recognize fairness, as captured by their behavior playing marbles and other games in his lab. Piaget’s experiments and observations introduced the idea that human morality somehow develops alongside our physical body as we get older, since it’s impossible for children to grasp certain moral concepts until they reach a given age.

His research was expanded upon by another giant in the field, Lawrence Kohlberg, who codified Piaget’s insights into a six-stage progression in moral reasoning, stages that could only be reached at discrete ages. So while three-year old humans never grasp the concept of fairness no matter how you try to explain or teach it to them, five and six year-olds readily grasp it after having it explained to them and playing a few games together where they can demonstrate it – illustrating that the human brain has to hit a certain age before its ready to contemplate moral issues.

But maybe more curiously, in recent years careful experimentation has shown that chimps, bonobos, canines, and other mammals even lower on the evolutionary ladder than us seem to display an inherent, biological sense of fairness:

…Primates will happily perform a task for cucumber slices until they see others getting grapes, which taste so much better. The cucumber eaters become agitated, throw down their veggies, and go on strike. A perfectly fine food has become unpalatable as a result of seeing a companion get something better. We labeled it inequity aversion, a topic since investigated in other animals, including dogs. A dog will repeatedly perform a trick without rewards, but refuse as soon as another dog gets a piece of sausage for the same trick.

And as the only primatologist to make Time‘s list of 100 Most Influential People, Frans De Waal, narrates in The Bonobo and the Atheist, moral behavior in lower primates goes far beyond simple fairness. Instances of abundant, soulful altruism abound in primatology. There’s Azalea, a rhesus monkey with the ape equivalent of Down Syndrome who not only spent her entire life being lovingly tended to by her troop but could break about every rhesus rule there was, going as far as clumsily threatening the troop’s alpha male, without any sort of repercussion from her normally highly socially-regimented species.

Then there’s Mozu, a Japanese macaque who was born with neither hands nor feet.

While her troop swung high above her in the branches, Mozu would plod along through the snow below following them. However she was far from left behind by her extended family, as she mothered and raised five offspring – with, of course, a little help from her friends. Chimps have often been observed not only to make tools for their own use, but to make them for friends to use after they’ve eaten their full. And to actively mourn for those friends after they die. So as primates we humans are far less unique than we once thought when it comes to getting by only with a little help from our friends, and looking out for others even when we don’t directly benefit at all from it.

All of this apparent altruism would seem to point to something unique in primate neurology, and in the late nineties that’s precisely what a team of Italian researchers found: Simply watching another monkey perform an action would cause some of the neurons in the observing monkey’s brain responsible for performing that same action to fire, meaning that those brains cells were “adopting the other animal’s point of view … and were for all intents and purposes reading the other monkey’s mind.” So it is these mirror neurons which allow you to place yourself in other’s shoes, and which “enable you to imitate the movements of others, thereby setting the stage for the cultural ‘inheritance’ of skills developed and honed by others.”

These mirror neurons also fire when you, or any other primate, watches something happening to someone else, and it’s only because your brain checks in with nerve cells on that part of your body to make sure no physical contact is actually occurring that you don’t literally feel another’s pain. However as exposure to a home video depicting someone getting drilled in the nuts by a wayward football can illustrate: sometimes that feedback loop is at least partially overridden. And so the implications for empathy and all social behaviors are profound:

Anytime you watch someone doing something, the neurons that your brain would use to do the same thing become active – as if you yourself were doing it. If you see a person being poked with a needle, your pain neurons fire away as though you were being poked. It is utterly fascinating, and it raises some interesting questions. What prevents you from blindly imitating every action you see? Or from literally feeling someone else’s pain? In the case of motor mirror neurons, one answer is that there may be … inhibitory circuits that suppress the automatic mimicry when it is inappropriate. In a delicious paradox, this need to inhibit unwanted or impulsive action may have been a major reason for the evolution of free will. [You] constantly conjure up vivid images of multiple options for actions that are available in any given context, and your frontal cortex suppresses all but one of them. Thus it has been suggested that free won’t may be a better term than free will.

As famed maverick biologist E.O. Wilson first argued a generation ago, even insects can be said to exhibit the same sort of altruistic “eusociality” that binds human and other primate societies together. And yet only humans get to have teachers who at the very least never waver in trying their best to make you feel safe in their classrooms, community leaders who present opportunities for you to learn about yourself and your place in the world through service, and coaches who teach you the value of chasing your dreams as hard as you possibly can – because even if you don’t realize them, you still become shaped into a much better person through your efforts. And in a way every crime, from murder to home invasions to drug-dealing to the gamut of different sex offenses, is a form of betraying the trust that binds all of those relationships together. Sometimes the bonds you break don’t only exist between you and your victim, sometimes you’re also rending bonds that tie your victim to a community you’ve never met by enabling their own self-destruction, and so you can tell yourself that your crime is victimless.

It never is.

And sometimes the person you hurt is someone whose protection you’ve been entrusted with, and you don’t so much break a bond as allow it to become something it shouldn’t – but that’s still a betrayal of your community’s trust, still a crime that deserves punishment. The moral codes that regulate social trust aren’t arbitrary constructions of our culture, they’re extraordinarily important guardians rooted in our very biology, not just abstract concepts that society decides to embrace on a whim. They’re meant to protect and nurture the tribal sense of belonging and connectedness that is both incredibly fragile and inexorably woven into our fundamental humanity – crimes don’t just harm your victim, they betray everyone in your life who’s ever tried to guide you, or comfort you, or help you along the way.

So in a sense incarceration is a fitting fate for all of us who’ve broken any of the different bonds which keep a community woven together, because in prison your mirror neurons don’t reflect the laughter and love and support of a community trying to nurture you – instead of subconsciously basking in their joy and concern, behind these walls mirror neurons unavoidably fire as the men around you struggle with the despair caused by wives who wander and parents who pass, and are tormented by the fear of predation or the inevitability of someday dying in here. After a year showering in the same big room as everyone else on your tier you’ll finally think to ask a Lifer why the hooks collapse if you put more than a few pieces of clothing on them, and he’ll look you in the eye and ask, “Son, is there anything heavy in here you can think of that the administration doesn’t want anyone to easily be able to hang?”

Tell yourself their problems are not your own all you want – your neurobiology betrays every attempt at callous indifference. Not a day will pass of your incarceration where you won’t see hunger or anxiety flash across eyes trying their best to be cold and proud.

On the right tier you’ll be able to marvel at the El Salvadorians who go without to make sure one of their countrymen over in another building who they’ve never met before at least has a bar of soap and a pack of noodles. On the wrong tier you’ll hear palms slapping against steel doors and your own voice joining a chorus of cries for help slapping unheard against the Plexiglas that the guards willfully hide behind. After forty-five minutes a man with a heart condition is carried out by his wrists and ankles by guards finally forced to pretend to care. Or maybe it’ll be just your voice pleading and your palms slapping as you implore a guard to let you out of a cell holding someone threatening to kill you in your sleep, and the guard will look you directly in the eyes before he laughs in your face and waddles off down the tier.

It’d probably surprise you to see, for the most part, just how decent inmates can be to each other. You might have to land a few punches in the early days, but we’re all in here together and whether we like it or not through our mirror neurons we all feel each other’s pain. Sure there are isolated acts of incredible cruelty and indifference, however all-in-all guys leave each other to do their time on their own terms if they simply keep to themselves. So long as you say ‘scuse me anytime you pass within eight-inches of anyone and walk around with fuck you written on your face while avoiding eye-contact, by and large you’ll be left alone. Just don’t depend on anyone to have your back or your best interests in mind, you can expect decency or indifference – not kindness. But catch a guard on a bad day and you can have years worth of good conduct days taken away just for missing a single evaluation. Years of your life forfeit in a moment just because you overslept.

On the outside you can trust that those in authority will, for the most part, act transparently and rationally: if you get pulled-over by the cops or scolded by your boss, although they may be a bit priggish about it, you can trust that any punishment will be limited and at least vaguely rational. And you can trust that the friends and loved-ones will be trustworthy and dependable – you aren’t on your own, you have people watching out for you.

But in here the most you can hope for is a sort of tentative, incongruent camaraderie that can emerge temporarily among inmates when we’re pitted against the guards, and you can never be sure if the administration will randomly decide to make their bad day the worst of your life. It’s one thing to be formally sentenced in a marble and mahogany courtroom full of degrees and decades of experience after due process has been followed, it’s quite another to watch vindictive and competitively petty guards with a high school degree and a hangover strip away years of another man’s freedom simply because they can. Which may seem cruel or unusual when you consider that guards have mirror neurons too, until you finally realize that to many of them we’re hardly people so their mirror neurons don’t really come into play.

All of us would like to think that the choices we make are very much our own, that although our moral compass may at least partially be a biological construction, choosing whether or not to follow it is still the reasoned product of our own carefully applied free will and a direct reflection of our unshakable individuality. And yet it turns out that not only are our minds inevitably influenced by the behavior and suffering of those around us, but that Reason has much less than we’d like to think to do with our decisions: our choices are far more tied to the most primitive emotional parts of our brains than our conscious awareness would like us to think.

And perhaps there’s no better way to demonstrate this than by looking at patients with damage to an oblong tangerine-sized region of our brains just behind and above the bridge of our nose, the ventromedial prefrontal cortex. Enough damage to this region can drop your emotional function to zero, meaning you could “look at the most joyous or gruesome photographs and feel nothing.” Which also means that although you’d still be able to answer abstract questions about morality in others’ lives, in the sense of filling in the blank of a social equation, in your own personal life your decisions become so amoral or foolish that you alienate your loved ones, lose your job, and your entire life falls apart.

This, inevitably, led the neuroscientists who noticed these changes to conclude that “gut feelings and bodily reactions were necessary to think rationally” and that without a functioning ventromedial prefrontal cortex it’s impossible for us to integrate these emotional gut feelings with conscious thought. So without this region of the brain working properly “every option at every moment felt as good as every other.” As it turns out, it’s the most primitive, instinctual, split-second region of our brains that leads the charge into decision-making and “moral reasoning is mostly just a post ad hoc search for reasons to justify the judgments people had already made.”  So if you continually put yourself in emotionally-charged situations, it’ll only be a matter of time before this elephant of subconscious emotional desire shifts beneath you and takes a step down a path that can ruin your life and the lives of those around you.

And it’s always this dominating emotional elephant of rapid instinctive moral judgments that’s in control, the best that the contemplative reasoning rider on top of this primal beast can do is to come up with rationalizations after the elephant has sated its desires.

Sometimes these desires are perfectly healthy for ourselves and the society around us, at other times they leave feelings and lives trampled behind. Which means that although the rider can do his best to look into the future in an attempt to steer the elephant down the best path, more often than not he’s left trying to serve as the elephant’s spokesperson without really knowing what the elephant is thinking and “fabricating post ad hoc explanations for whatever the elephant has just done” while justifying whatever course it feels like taking next.

On a social level, “once human beings developed language and began to use it to gossip about each other, it became extremely valuable for elephants to carry around on their backs a full-time public relations firm” to provide an acceptable justification for everything we do. Because after all, “reason is the servant of the intuitions. The rider was put there in the first place to serve the elephant.”

But this elephant isn’t always galloping along blind to everything except its own whims. Since although “we make our first judgments rapidly, and we are dreadful at seeking out evidence that might disconfirm those initial judgments … friends can do for us what we cannot do for ourselves: they can challenge us, giving us reasons and arguments that sometimes trigger new intuitions, thereby making it possible for us to change our minds.” So although “many of us believe that we follow an inner moral compass … the history of social psychology richly demonstrates that other people exert a powerful force, able to make cruelty seem acceptable and altruism seem embarrassing, without giving us any reasons or arguments.”

And of course the converse also holds true: it is often our friends who can bring out the best in us.

Not only that, studies all across the globe have shown that our friends have a dramatic effect on our health: social isolation is at least as harmful as alcohol and tobacco use, and could be worse than obesity and a lack of exercise. In what’s been called one of the most powerful behavioral findings in the world, the friendless trust less, judge others more harshly, get sicker, and are twice as likely to die in any given decade. The findings likely stem from the fact that “chronic loneliness reshapes the brain,”  which makes sense since social pain and emotional pain activate the exact same brain regions as physical pain.

So it is our friends who help shape our lives in a much more profound way than even our most poignant memories of laughter and embraces and wet shoulders might let on. Without noble friends at our side, when after years of incarceration old friendships become only biers for the best of times, those of love and joy and all we hold most dear, we begin to become lost alone with our elephant.

A creature that grows sullen and impatient as it watches and overhears proud stories of its counterparts running rampant without even the barest attempt by their riders to rein them in. For many inmates, for those who have grown-up in urban war­-zones, emotional cues have entirely different neurological responses, since “kids who grow up with violence as a backdrop in their lives don’t show much emotion in their interview responses and, based on MRI scans, have weaker neural connections and less interaction in parts of the brain involved in awareness, judgment, and ethical emotional processing.” The elephants in here will seem like an entirely different species than your own if you don’t come from their neighborhoods.

And so it is to prison that we lose one of the most important parts of ourselves, and finding yourself surrounded by men used to living by utterly alien social norms it soon becomes a constant struggle just to remember who you once were. Friendships fade in prison. Maybe some old friends do their best to stick close by, and maybe you’re lucky enough to find someone inside to help guide you along – but rarely do either of those last for long, as prison life is a place of constant flux. No matter how many hours you spend desperately holding on to what was, there will be addictions you aren’t side-by-side to help fight and marriages you aren’t around to celebrate. Time will pass, and your old place in the world fades away. And yet turning these friendships into husks and losing strands of who you once were in the process is only part of what prison will take away from you.

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Maybe at this point the picture seems a bit unsettling, perhaps free will and reason are more in the backseat than firmly behind the wheel as we’d assumed. But okay, feelings and mirror neurons are important and powerful, maybe respecting their roles in our lives a bit more can only be a good thing. And yet this is only the picture’s foreground, what’s in the background may be even more unsettling.

Although humans share mirror neurons and what’s likely a resultant inborn sense of altruism with our primate cousins, there’s a different associational mechanism that’s in our brains, and our brains alone. No matter how many years of language-training a non-human animal has had, it’ll never pass a simple test human infants instinctively nail every single time. Many creatures – monkeys, dogs, and dolphins among them – can learn to associate a picture of a frog with the printed word Frog, and that same picture with the sound of ribbiting. But this learned associative arrow points in only one direction: from picture to printed word, or from picture to ribbiting.

It’s only humans, with an ability that emerges instinctively in our infancy, who can reverse this associational arrow and then be shown the word Frog or listen to ribbiting and subsequently pick a frog’s picture out of a line-up of other creatures. No other animal can reverse the associative arrow – we’re it. And by ago two, children will spontaneously respond with their own ribbiting when asked, “what does a frog say?” and vice-versa, even though this third relationship – between the word representing the animal and the sound it makes – hasn’t been explicitly taught. Our brains spontaneously make the association. And yet this is only the beginning of an associative story that’s at the very core of our shared humanity.

Long before he won the Nobel Prize in Economics, Daniel Kahneman piled into the back of a military jeep with his friend Amos Tversky and bounced across a Middle Eastern war zone strewn with landmines, sampling soldiers’ performances and impressions of armed combat while also gathering information about which MREs were preferred by sifting through piles of garbage to find out what wasn’t being eaten, an approach that made newspaper headlines. After their teeth were chattered by mortared potholes, they were cut on this early scientific sampling of all-too real human behavior, motivated by the overarching idea that our actions are often quite different from what raw economic theory posits they should be in any given situation. One of their early findings was that soldiers in war-zones aren’t in fact fighting for the abstract ideals they’re often touted to be defending. When it comes down to it each man is fighting for the friends beside him – the first scientific quantification of military squads as bands of brothers.

In the decades that followed, Kahneman and Tversky would make countless contributions to our understanding of human decision-making. One of their earliest discoveries was the availability heuristic, the inevitable tendency for our judgment to be influenced by how easily examples of a given topic come to mind. For instance, media coverage of the fatalities makes tornadoes seem more dangerous than asthma and lightning deadlier than botulism, even though those medical risks respectively kill twenty and fifty-two times more people than the natural disaster they were just paired with.

And yet mental availability doesn’t just affect your thoughts on traumatic events, another well-known study outlines how spouses will have vastly different ideas around who contributes more to household chores due to an availability bias: nearly all of us feel like we pitch-in more than our counterparts since we can remember what we did and the behavior of others is an abstraction. So on a fundamental level, we find it almost impossible to correctly assess someone else’s actions, especially when they’re evaluated against our own. As humans, we see our behavior as far more noble then it actually is, and assume that an outside other wouldn’t live up to the standards we’ve set. But as Kahneman chronicles in the book dedicated to his late friend, Thinking, Fast and Slow, after we take a careful look at just how subject to outside influence our own behaviors and thoughts are, it becomes impossible not to acknowledge just how malleable we really are and how important it is to keep track of the sort of circumstances we place ourselves in.

Maybe it won’t come as a surprise to learn that being prompted with a story about cleaning dirty clothes will make it much more likely for you to complete W __ __ H and S __ __ P as W A S H and S O A P as opposed to W I S H or S O U P. However it should be at least a small surprise to learn that a story about betraying a friend, a “dirty deed,” will have the exact same effect on your word completion as a story about dirty clothes. A phenomenon that’s often played out in prison, as many inmates who committed crimes that earned them decades-long sentences will habitually scrub down the entirety of their cells multiple times a day.

This contextual prompting effect is known as priming, and its implications for human behavior and our own free will go far beyond simple stories and word choice. Priming can escape the page, as students who were asked to unscramble sentences that included words like forgetful, Florida, bald, gray and wrinkle in them and then asked to walk down a hall to another room ended up walking significantly slower than students who weren’t primed with words associated with the elderly, even though the sentences never actually had the word old or any reference to speed in them – only words that would create a subconscious association with oldness. And, maybe even more surprisingly, the converse held true as well: when instructed to first walk at one-third their natural rate, a speed more suitable for a grandparent, students then recognized worlds like forgetful, old, and lonely much more readily, even though their walking instructions were explicitly about speed – not age.

In a related set of experiments, people were told they were testing the quality of new headphones by listening to radio editorials with them. During this supposed testing, to test for sound distortions they were instructed to repeatedly either shake their head from side to side or nod it up and down. Those who had been nodding yes tended to accept the opinion expressed in the editorials they were listening to while those shaking their heads no tended to reject it.

So our physical motions can unconsciously affect our thoughts, and vice-versa, and yet priming goes well beyond physical gestures. Our surroundings will inevitably effect other behaviors too, as studies of voting patterns have shown that support for propositions to increase school funding is far greater when polling stations are located inside schools, and even exposing voters to school-related images cause support for educational initiatives to rise. Maybe that makes it seem like priming mostly has a positive influence, however when it comes to money and priming, its double-edged nature becomes evident.

Experiments which subtly prime participants with anything from financial terms to Monopoly money stacked on the table do make people spend twice as long trying to solve a tough problem instead of giving up on it and show more self-reliance, however they also became more selfish and less helpful to someone in need. And placing a banner with watchful eyes on it above an office “honesty box” designated to take payments for caffeinated drinks will make donations spike significantly when compared to a banner with festive flowers on it being hung – great if you’re collecting the money, costly if you’re giving it.

So at this point, “you have now been introduced to the stranger in you, which may be in control of much of what you do, although you rarely have a glimpse of it.” 

This stranger “contains the model of the world that instantly evaluates events as normal or surprising,” reflexively producing a web of subconscious associations following every stimulus since it’s “the source of your rapid and often precise intuitive judgments. And it does most of this without our conscious awareness of its activities.”  As Dr. Kahneman explains while channeling Dr. Frankenstein:

You did not will it and you could not stop it … ideas that have been evoked trigger many other ideas, in a spreading cascade of activity in your brain. The essential feature of this complex set of mental events is its coherence. Each element is connected, and each supports and strengthens the others. The word evokes memories, which evoke emotions, which in turn evoke facial expressions and other reactions … and the feelings in turn reinforce compatible ideas. All this happens quickly and all at once, yielding a self-reinforcing pattern of cognitive, emotional, and physical responses that is both diverse and integrated. Cognition is embodied; you think with you body, not only with your brain … you know far less about yourself than you feel you do.

And not only does this stranger hold sway over practical matters, he also reaches in to our very sense of good and bad, of right and wrong. Oddly enough, our values can change when there are infections agents around. Students asked to ponder morally hazy behavior – from relatively innocuous things like fudging a resume or returning a lost wallet, to more unpalatable decisions like unethical journalism or eating fellow plane crash survivors – were far more harsh with their moral judgments when seated around food stains or chewed-up pens, or when exposed to fart spray, which is exactly what it sounds like.

When you’re exposed to possible sources of contagion you’ll also be harsher when evaluating behavior that isn’t undoubtedly immoral but just doesn’t sit right, and more negatively judge a man who, for instance, fornicates on his grandmother’s bed – not while she’s there, just while housesitting for her. After disgust’s been elicited you’ll become “more likely to endorse biblical truth than those not subjected to the polluted air.” Standing someone next to a hand-sanitizer dispenser will make their moral, fiscal, and social opinions more conservative.

And this phenomenon applies directly to our criminal-justice system as well, as “a study of people serving as mock jurors found that those highly prone to disgust were most inclined to judge ambiguous evidence as proof of criminal wrongdoing, to impose stiffer sentences, and to see the suspect as wicked.”  But maybe most disconcertingly, this same study was also replicated with law students, police cadets, and veteran forensic experts.

So not only are the choices that can land you in prison subject to influences operate quietly and insidiously beyond the ken of our free will, the choices of those who will decide your fate lay at least partially outside of theirs. But this doesn’t excuse immoral or illegal behavior, it simply means that you have to be aware of the situations you’re putting yourself in and the influence that the seemingly innocuous can have. The lyrics you listen to, the jokes you make, the television shows you watch, the lifestyle you idealize – all of these play a subtle role in swaying your actions, carefully weaving an inescapable diaphanous web around everything you do.

Your choices aren’t made in the moment it seems they are. The circumstances you place yourself in and the context you surround yourself with, the words and symbols and values you make part of your life, combine to begin priming your subconscious and forcing it to continually decide which of the options at hand not to choose, and influence your eventual decisions like implanted hypnotic suggestions – prompting behavior which may well never have happened without their influence. On some level it’s the choice to continually place yourself in a situation where one too many beers, one changed mind, one conflicting story are all it takes to put you behind these bars that matters – not what may or not have actually happened once that story has already begun to be told.

There’s even a theory that culture itself and all the behaviors it encompasses “originated as a behavioral adaptation to an epidemic-filled past.” So from spicing our foods to showing affection to burying the dead – there may not be a single culture touchstone left unmarred by immunology’s influence. And these immune behaviors “once developed, stick around because the people who indulge in them are less vulnerable to infectious diseases. The behaviors, passed down through the generations, become entrenched.” Especially so in prisons.

After a smartly-dressed female administrator walks nearby you’ll hear a particularly greasy inmate leer: oh man, look at that bitch – on the street it would only take me a few hours to fuck her … out of all her credit card numbers. And as you shake your head and everyone else around you chortles you’ll try to put the situation in perspective, and not let it get to you too much. But, before long, you’ll start to wonder if there isn’t some horrible hood-rat version of Sesame Street where Oscar is constantly choking his handler out, Snufflepagus and Big Bird are teaching the kids the best way to light a crack-pipe, and Bert and Ernie have Elmo shorn bare and tied-up in their basement.

And as the months pile up you’ll begin to become inured to the immorality around you, and eventually instead of fighting the misogyny, homophobia, racism, and ignorance that relentlessly weave themselves into your life you’ll have no choice but to simply do as much as you can to block it all out, to lie back and stop thrashing since some of those poisons will inevitably seep into your soul too.

As the space-shuttle Challenger exploded into thousands of shimmering, smoking pieces a few moments after launch a handful of NASA engineers felt their hearts drop to the ground far more swiftly than the debris peacefully arcing its decent through the crisp Florida morning, silently tracing out the last moments of seven astronauts, seven of their friends. These men knew the Challenger disaster was entirely avoidable:

…the NASA contractor charged with engineering the O-rings requested a teleconference on the eve of the fatal Challenger launch. After a previous launch, its engineers had noticed O-ring damage that looked different from damage they’d seen before. Suspecting that cold was a factor, the engineers saw the near-freezing forecast and made a “no launch” recommendation – something they had never done before. But the data they faxed to NASA to buttress their case were the same data they had earlier used to argue that the space-shuttle was safe to fly. NASA pounced on the inconsistency. Embarrassed and unable to overturn the script they themselves had built in the preceding years, [they] buckled. The “no launch” recommendation was reversed to “launch. “

When an institution accepts behavior ranging from morally dubious to blatantly immoral, just about everyone who’s a part of that institution tends to go along with it, a phenomenon that’s been called the normalization of deviance. This results in group members behaving as if nothing is wrong even when cold, hard facts point to extraordinary risk or even explicit harm, “a cultural drift in which circumstances classified as not okay are slowly reclassified as okay.”

This behavior may seem bizarre and inexplicable, but it has a direct counterpart in our individual neurobiology. Patients with a rather peculiar sort of brain damage can produce a particular type of delusion known as a confabulation, they won’t know who they are or where they are or who the president is, but they’ll think they do and “fabricate bogus replies and say them with confidence, repeating those same answers day after day.”

Stuck in a starkly-lit hospital room and surrounded by medical machinery, if you ask a patient who’s confabulating how he could possibly still be at home as he’s insisting when there are elevators outside his room, he’ll respond that you wouldn’t believe how much it cost to have them installed in his house. And he won’t be lying, confabulations aren’t intentional untruths – they’re elements of a necessary story that a brain-damaged patient is clinging to as they try to explain the reality they find themselves in but can’t wrap their heads around. But even without brain damage, social pressure can cause any of us to come up with moral confabulations to explain away our questionable behavior in group settings.

In the Challenger’s case it was O-ring damage, in the case of the Ford Pinto it was the fact that even though when struck from behind the car would explode like a Jerry Bruckheimer prop and incinerate its passengers, recalling it failed a corporate cost-benefit analysis – a moral confabulation that caused over two-dozen people to needlessly burn to death. Both of these cases, and the countless other moral confabulations like them in the corporate world – some involving life-and-death scenarios and others only mortgage defaults and families being thrown out into the street – involve group members “developing a definition of the situation that allowed them to carry on as if nothing was wrong … not merely acting as if nothing was wrong,” but actually believing it, “bringing to mind Orwell’s concept of doublethink, the method by which a bureaucracy conceals evil not only from the public but itself.”

No matter what sort of organization or administration you’re in, these moral confabulations and this doublethink can always emerge. By any measure NASA engineers are incredibly intelligent, all the same that didn’t protect them from those errors any more than Wall Street’s wanton greed causes their morally questionable behaviors. To them, their behavior simply isn’t morally questionable at all. Group members can convince each other that just about anything is okay, it’s simply a part of our humanity, the same biological wiring that leads to cooperation and altruism. And perhaps the only way to prevent it is to never identify too strongly or completely with any one group, to be willing to accept that deviance can be normalized anywhere and to listen to outsiders who are questioning the possible impact of your own group’s behavior.

So it’s fitting that it took outside advocates for criminal justice reform to argue that our prison system is ”cruel and wrong” and that although the intentions behind it are humane and meant to reform, those who have designed our prisons “did not know what it was they were doing.” And given the psychological toll that the grind of prison inflicts, it was this “slow and daily tampering with the mysteries of the brain” which is far worse than any physical effect of incarceration.

Additional investigations have concluded that prisons aren’t even preventing offenders from committing crimes during their stay, stating: ”if the object is to make [an inmate] a better member of society … that purpose cannot be answered by matters as they now stand.” Corruption and  overcrowding run rampant, and minorities make up a highly disproportionate number of inmates.

And sadly, those first two statements were made by Charles Dickens over 150 years ago during his 1852 tour of a Philadelphia prison, and the investigative findings referenced were reported that same year. But despite all the time that’s passed and all the generations who have been lost behind these walls, very little has changed about the American prison system. The following passage from The Oxford History of the Prison references prisons of the late 1800s, but is unfortunately interchangeable with today’s situation over 100 years later:

Guards and wardens inevitably become cynical about the idea of reform, trotting it out only at convenient times and places …. When serious offenders were crowded together within a prison, wardens and guards had the incentive, and in their eyes the justification, to increase again and again the severity of prison discipline. For still another, as legislators and citizens came to understand the nature of the prison population, they became satisfied to let the operation be essentially custodial.

Then as now, “the prison turns out to be an ineffective and undesirable venue for reformative efforts – be they educative, psychological, socially adaptive, or whatever.” As generations of sky-high recidivism rates have borne out, “it is hard to train for freedom in a cage.” For whatever reason, the last time the West bothered to seriously examine its criminal-justice system was roughly 250 years ago when a Jesuit-educated nobleman named Cesare Beccaria made his claim as the most influential Enlightenment writer when it came to criminal­-justice reform.

It’s because of his short treatise, On Crimes and Punishments, that capital punishment has all but disappeared in the West, that psychological reform trumped physical torture as incarceration’s goal, that the rich too are subject to imprisonment and not be able to buy their way out – maybe that one exists more in spirit – and that legal distinctions between the social classes have been eliminated. And perhaps most enduringly, it was Beccaria who first argued for the presumption of innocence instead of guilt and against torture as a valid means of obtaining confessions. But one argument of his that’s been largely forgotten is about the root cause of criminality.

As far back as the Athenians, the West has known that injustice resulted from intolerable levels of inequality. Athenian judicial proceedings relied upon equality among the citizens of their city-state, without that they knew there could be no true justice. So linking inequality and injustice can be traced at least 2,500 years back to the Athenians, who were convinced not only that great inequalities were the source of injustices but that “equality gives birth to friendship,” which then fosters peace. Or as Beccaria described the direct relationship between poverty and crime about 200 years ago:

Who made these laws? Rich and powerful men who have never deigned to visit the squalid hovels of the poor, who have never broken a moldy crust of bread among the innocent cries of their famished children and the tears of their wives. Do you want to prevent crimes? See to it that enlightenment accompanies liberty.

Yet there’s little enlightenment to be found in America’s prisons, as barely a quarter of inmates enter our state prisons with high school diplomas and less than three-percent begin their stay with college degrees. Which doesn’t come as a surprise when poverty’s effects on the brain are examined, and you consider how poverty and its accompanying “violence, excessive noise, chaos at home, pollution, malnutrition, abuse and parents without jobs can affect the interactions, formation, and pruning of connections in the young brain.” Impoverished children have less brain tissue in regions that support information processing, decision making, problem solving, impulse control, judgment, auditory processing, paying attention, and self-awareness – in short, just about every key to academic achievement. And many of the elements that contribute to forming the culture you were used to if you grew up in the suburbs.

As a result, the culture that emerges in prison is a mishmashed pidgin that draws from the various neighborhoods and blocks represented on any given prison tier or pod, and is incredibly stressful and difficult to adjust to if it’s not something you grew up with. At all hours of the day every single half-formed thought is shouted out to join the surging cacophony of clanging doors, blasting televisions, and shouted orders that crashes relentlessly against your skull. Beating the hell out of someone who owes you a few dollars isn’t just accepted, it’s expected – veiled threats and macho posturing aren’t intimidation, they’re basic forms of communication.

After a few weeks behind bars it won’t even be vaguely surprising to learn that although psychopaths make up just one-percent of America’s overall population, they make up sixteen-percent of our prison population. Locked in a six-by-nine foot concrete box with another man you’ll soon forget what privacy ever meant. And while you’re adjusting to all this, the stress will increase your risk of cardiac disease, diabetes, obesity, ulcers, immune disorders, cancer, sleep disorders, and depression. At one point the institution itself provided the punishment, today the soft psychological torture often comes more from other inmates.

But the more you learn about your fellow inmates, the more empathy you’ll develop for them and the more inevitable their fate will seem. After all:

Beyond the life-and-death choices many [felons] have to make, there are the economic choices that confront them because of their position at the bottom of the economic ladder in America. How many of us would choose to forgo making $250 a day by selling drugs when the alternative appeared to be $8 an hour at McDonald’s, if our families were poor and we had never known anyone who held a “real” job? How many of us would choose to risk being beaten up or even killed if we decided not to join the powerful gang that runs our neighborhood, if there were no one in our life powerful enough to protect us? How many of us would choose to work hard to stay in school if we didn’t know anyone who had graduated, if we had lost hope for a positive future in the mainstream American life? Honestly.

So whether you engaged in the inevitably violent black market drug trade, beat the hell out of someone, invaded someone’s privacy and sense of security by breaking into their home, trafficked in services or products whose production or distribution damages society, or in any way broke the trust that keeps a community glued together – their world will become your world.

And because American criminal law is based in part on the concept of mens rea, the knowledge that your act is wrongful, no matter how much your victim meant to you or how unintended the damage you caused was, at your trial prepare for the prosecutor not just to assassinate your character but put it through a sensationalist and hyperbolic meat-grinder. And hopefully your name is fairly common, because if it’s unique then for the rest of your life you’ll walk around with the knowledge that at any point someone you meet could pull the search engine out of their pocket and with a few taps destroy the possibility of ever establishing any trust with them.

After you’re released from prison you nominally get your freedom back, however depending on the particulars of your case and something as simple as how common your name is, the freedom you return to will never be the same as it was before. And so in prison you will lose touch with the tribe that made you who you are, with so much and so many you never even bothered to look around and notice was there. Looking out for you, protecting you, helping you back up, forever reminding you that who you are has as much to do with where you came from as the choices you’ve made. No matter how much you might think you know, no matter how much you might think you have it all figured out – your dreams will be gutted trying to escape these barbwire fences and these penumbral walls will do their best to smother every single hope you have of ever finding redemption.

Serendipity, kismet, coincidence – at some point in our lives each of us has had an experience that, if it doesn’t fully defy rational explanation, it at least challenges it. Maybe it sounds like hippie-dippie bullshit when someone asserts just how much we all need each other or how interconnected we all are to each other, but in just the past few years biologists have begun to turn over some improbable stones and reveal some inalienable truths about how all life functions. Quantum mechanics – a field that explores how the tiniest bits of matter can’t be fully described as only physical particles or waves of energy but must be considered both at once, how a particle can somehow appear to simultaneously be in countless places all at the same time, and how one tiny particle can somehow instantaneously effect another particle – seems to play a role in everything from photosynthesis to avian navigation to the mammalian sense of smell.  That last element of quantum mechanics is known as quantum entanglement, Einstein’s spooky action at a distance, which allows one tiny particle to somehow instantaneously influence another particle no matter how far apart they are.

And this perplexing activity might not just reign over the infinitesimally small, at the interstellar level wormholes may actually be an entanglement between black holes, “the same phenomena described differently.” There’s now speculation that entanglement might not only occur between two tiny particles of the same type of matter, but that entanglement may be far more ubiquitous and flexible than was once assumed. Because it seems as if entanglement may be able to occur between more than two particles at a time and between particles of different types of matter, connecting our world together to form some kind of massive spooky geometric tapestry:

It is as if entanglement can be viewed as a thread connecting two systems. When the amount of entanglement becomes larger, we have lots of threads, and these threads could weave together to form the fabric of space-time. –

And if entanglement forms the fabric of space-time, our entire understanding of the universe – of what space itself is and how time flows – is about to be challenged. Which might not mean too much for your everyday life, but keep in mind that although our brains may seem like only three-pound lumps of flesh and seawater, their complexity – ninety-billion neurons and some ninety-billion other glial cells forming hundreds of trillions of connections modulated by countless different neurotransmitters – puts the old all the grains of sands on all the world’s beaches or all the stars in the universe ideas of complexity entirely to shame, and leaves lots of room for revolutions.

There’s actually one already in progress, as neuroscientists are beginning to realize that glial cells, once thought only to provide support to the electrical-conducting neurons, might actually be central to learning, cognition, memory, and consciousness. It turns out that glia, once thought to be just glue cells, “far exceed neurons in cellular diversity, cell numbers, and functions”  and unlike neurons may be able to account for the large-scale and long-term neural changes necessary for complex cognitive processes like consolidating memory and orchestrating brain functions that occur simultaneously in overlapping brain regions.

Tellingly, although the neurons and the overall architecture of Einstein’s brain is nearly identical to yours, his brain has twice the number of glial cells as the average human brain – with the highest number found “in the brain region where abstract concepts, visual imagery, and complex thinking take place.” And although glial cells can’t communicate using electrical impulses like neurons, they use calcium ions to communicate non-electrically and may eventually “fracture the worn-out electronic metaphor of the brain.”

Since one glial cell can engulf over 100,000 synapses and turn collections of neurons into functional assemblies by coordinating and regulating their signaling, it’s beginning to seem almost self-evident that “much of the intriguing complexity evident in learning and cognition in the human brain” is due to glial cells working communally and collectively inside our skulls using mechanisms we’re only just beginning to discover.

And although there isn’t yet any evidence that entanglement occurs within our brains, or that any of us are entangled to each other in the same demonstrable way that two photons can be to each other, if it turns out that entanglement exists across the millions and millions of light years that separate black holes – than the idea that the people we meet and the lives we touch are all part of something incomprehensible, something that could transcend our everyday understanding of space and time, at least edges its way toward being more than just a metaphor. Either way, you owe an irrepayable debt to the community that shaped you. And whether or not it helps to think of entanglement linking you those who exist alongside you, if only for a moment, as they’re inevitably and forever affected by your each crime and every kindness – your life will never be your own.

Someday this meat-wagon you’re riding will reach the end of its line. And regardless of what comes next for you, the lives of those who will come after you are depending on you to do everything you can to look out for them any way you possibly can. Whether you want to look at our connections to each other and the ways our communities influence us as inescapable biological realities or as something more poetic, as your past is woven into their futures the very next choice you make – the next hand you hold, the next teammate you help up, the next friend you don’t give up on – is going to affect everything that happens next.

Dan Sirotkin is the co-author of the first peer-reviewed paper examining a laboratory origin for SARS-CoV-2, as well as its addendum, which settled a 50-year mystery and formally linked the H1N1 Spanish Flu pandemic strain release of 1977 to gain-of-function research.

Human societies have this pesky habit of repeating the patterns of the past, history repeating or rhyming or however you want to describe it. And so about two-and-a-half years ago after it became clear that SARS-CoV-2 is best described as airborne HIV since it’s another reverting live-attenuated vaccine (LAV), pretty soon I got drawn into all of the history around the Late Bronze Age Collapse of a couple thousand years ago, since it seemed like it might serve as something of a parallel to what’s about to happen to our modern civilization.

Unfortunately for humanity, all of that excitement a couple thousand years ago at best serves as a very quiet prelude for what’s about to happen.

So perhaps it’s not a coincidence that the best way to understand the final act of the Ten Plagues of Egypt, which has long been linked to the Late Bronze Age Collapse, is to see Azrael as the emergence of a highly-pathogenic virus zoonotically jumping out of the herds in the spring after a long winter. And the other side of that is that Passover can then be understood as history’s first LAV, wiping blood on doorframes to weaken the pathogens within and ingesting viral samples damaged by heat and the antiviral properties of hyssop, closely mimicking how Science’s first official LAV was accidentally discovered from chicken blood infected with cholera and left out in the sun.

And so if Yahweh’s oldest and most sacred tradition can be understood as a live-attenuated vaccine protocol meant to defend against a predictable foe, but one which was amplified by the drought conditions of the Late Bronze Age Collapse enough to bring the Pharaoh to his knees and save God’s children, what do you think happens if humanity spits in God’s face and attempts to monetize this sacred ceremony by making a LAV that isn’t needed at all?

Well, for a really long time folks have been interpreting that whole Adam and Eve thing as a prohibition against any genetic engineering at all, with all of the obvious ties to the idea of divine knowledge and “playing God.” And Yahweh seemed a little bit irritated after that prohibition about the apple was violated, so perhaps there aren’t exactly happy times ahead.

Just how unhappy things are going to get for you is going to depend on some combination of luck and how curious you’ve been, but what we’ve known as this modern world can’t possible keep functioning exactly as it has for very much longer, because with the emergence of yet another variant it means SARS-CoV-2’s quasispecies swarm has rebuilt one more limb of its horrible viral Voltron as it reassembles itself back into its original highly-pathogenic form as it works itself back into it’s original V-1000 form.

And yet absolutely none of what’s about to happen should come as even the slightest surprise - since you were warned in very great detail about what was coming and why it would happen over the course of several years. If you haven’t done whatever you can to help spread these warnings around on whatever social media platforms you have access to, now might be a good time to start.

January 31, 2020 - “Logistical and Technical Exploration into the Origins of the Wuhan Strain of Coronavirus (COVID-19)”

“At best, Daszak is perhaps acting as an unwitting agent of the Chinese government, but regardless holds an enormous conflict-of-interest. And if nothing else, it is wildly irresponsible to speak-out against the possibility that the virus got out of a lab when a natural origin has not been conclusively demonstrated. Daszak’s statement in The Lancet is either incompetence, or is meant to be a smokescreen for the wanton hubris and greed that have fueled the dual-use or “gain-of-function” research detailed below: As one possible related project which may have overlapped with this one, coronaviruses have been seen as a viable vector for an HIV vaccine for years – a project with hundreds of millions of dollars dangling over it.”

And unfortunately Daszak is far from alone, there are countless “journalists” mindlessly regurgitating statements from the Chinese government and the WHO with no effort to fact-check whatsoever, as well as “scientists” whose real job is running PR for pharmaceutical and research companies who have spent weeks serving China by making extraordinarily misleading and overconfident statements to the public about the origins and capabilities of this virus. As far back as 2015, Chinese labs were reported to have been involved with dual-use gain-of-function research, mixing and matching viral genomes in the lab, research that accelerated after the Chinese military made a massive push to expand their biotechnological capabilities. And it should be noted that in 2018, the esteemed scientific journal Nature – which has published numerous articles speciously claiming this virus is definitely natural – was revealed to have buckled to censorship demands from the Chinese government, killing over 1,000 articles to placate their Chinese partners.

Many involved in this dissimulation are effectively acting as agents of a foreign government, and they have left most Americans entirely unprepared for the tragedy that’s beginning to occur in our nursing homes and hospitals. If the idea that just maybe this thing came from a lab had been part of the national dialogue from the start – wouldn’t everyone have been much more cautious and open to social distancing and other limitations once the need arose?

Simply and horribly, this is likely to become another Chernobyl or Fukushima – a catastrophic illustration of mankind’s hubris and intransigence clashing with Nature, as fate again reaps a once unimaginably tragic toll.

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An immediate international moratorium on all dual-use gain-of-function research must be instated and all existing experimentation must be autoclaved, only greed and hubris have ever been served by attempting this type of genetic manipulation. Humanity does not need a vaccine against HIV derived from a coronavirus, nor do we need to be tinkering with genetic material that holds the potential to wipe a significant percentage of us off the face of the Earth.

Failure to embrace such a ban may effectively become a death sentence for our species, assuming we aren’t already on our last mile.

March 19, 2020 - “China owns Nature magazine’s ass: Debunking ‘The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2’ claiming COVID-19 definitely wasn’t from a lab.”

Nature magazine has censored over 1,000 articles at the request of the Chinese government over the past several years, and runs columns sponsored by outside interests. And it seems pretty clear that their recent article, “The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2” is just one more example of their influence. China bought off the head of Harvard’s chemistry department, you don’t think they could buy off run-of-the-mill research scientists scrambling for tenure and funding and publication? It’s absolutely horrific that so many scientists and researchers are taking part in what’s really clearly a disinformation campaign orchestrated by the Chinese Communist Party, and willfully spreading a smokescreen about something that’s already killed thousands and is projected to kill millions more across the planet.

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This efficient solution is exactly the kind of thing that would be selected for after passage through animals in lab, which was already done to the Bird Flu that created a horrifically virulent strain. Isn’t it funny that no one’s mentioning that experiment? Or Baric’s work at UNC? How come every single public-facing virologist seems to be leaving these studies out? Are they really unaware of them? That seems exceedingly hard to believe when I was able to find them on the front page of a single google search. Seems a lot more likely everyone’s just covering each other’s asses since they realize the magnitude of what’s happening and how deep into the cover-up they already are.

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As we’ve explained before, there was no trace of this virus before November 2019, and full zoonotic jumps don’t just magically happen, especially not of a virus that’s so incredibly adapted to humans and able to infect us undetected and spread undetected, and then kill us after more than enough time has passed to find multiple new hosts. It’s funny so many virologists are throwing out the book of how zoonotic jumps happen… all that money in dual-use gain-of-function research must be quite blinding. Kind of amazing they don’t care how many thousands of people are dying. As far as the intermediate animal host goes: It might as well be a unicorn at this point. Until someone finds it, it’s just conjecture.

March 23, 2020 - “No monkey ever reheated a frozen burrito” – What The Expanse tells us about the COVID-19 pandemic and serial passage gain-of-function research.”

Over the past several months, thousands of humans have lost their lives since COVID-19 kicked-off its killing spree in Wuhan, and barring an absolute miracle hundreds of thousands more all across the planet will join them in the months to come.

And oddly, even though there is nothing even beginning to approach conclusive evidence that COVID-19 was a naturally emergent strain that made its way out of an intermediate animal host and into humans, the general consensus in the media and the public seems to be that exploring its origins is something only done by people who’ve yet to buy that the Earth is in fact round and that we actually did land on the moon. And everyone seems to be okay with the fact that the scientists crowing the loudest about a natural origin, are the ones directly involved with the type of research that likely spawned this virus: Gain-of-function, or “dual-use” research that meant to push Nature past her limits, so that humans can harness her to create monsters that would never occur naturally.

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If leading up to 1977, the fact that increased research into strains of the flu were seen to increase the odds that an accidental leak would occur, why isn’t the same logic being applied to our pandemic today? Why is almost everyone today assuming that the increased pace of research means scientists in fact anticipated this outbreak instead of causing it?

Wouldn’t an increased pace of research also increase the odds that a leak of a lab-modified coronavirus would occur just like an increased pace of research precipitated the leak of the H1N1 Swine Flu back then?

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And as far back as 2015, Chinese labs were reported to have been involved with dual-use gain-of-function research after the Chinese military made a massive push to expand their biotechnological capabilities, swapping around viral genomes in the lab to try to create the most virulent strain possible. Additionally, studies examining COVID-19’s infectivity in ferrets found that it spreads readily among them, and also appears airborne in that animal model, lending support to the idea that ferrets were used for serial passage.

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Bill Gates might want to be an effective philanthropist really bad, and he may have been amazing at designing computer software and undercutting his competition – however that doesn’t a philanthropist make. After all, beyond the questionable tactics practiced by many of the vaccination programs he’s funded, his very well-intentioned attempt to save lives by providing  insecticidal mosquito-nets was ultimately destructive: many of the villagers provided with the mosquito-nets decided they were better used as fishing-nets, resulting in food shortages due to over-fishing from the fact the nets smaller weave caught far too many juvenile fish, undercutting population growth.

Seemed like a good idea at the time, right? Just like all those untested vaccines that were rushed into distribution?

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Previous research done in the Wuhan lab looking at inserting HIV-like segments into coronaviruses that also target the ACE2 receptor may also have played a role in the creation of COVID-19. One possible reason for these HIV-like segments is that they were meant to be epitopes, or molecular flags meant to mark intruders for a vaccine to target – meaning the Wuhan Strain was built as a monster for a specific vaccine to hunt. It is mathematically possible for this to happen in nature – but only in a ten-thousand bats chained to ten-thousand Petri dishes and given until infinity sense. Alternatively, this pattern could also be produced by infecting a room full of ferrets or tree shrews with a bespoke coronavirus and sifting through the wreckage for your genomic needle.

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The current push to get the economy back on track leads only to human carnage, rushing back into the virus’s maws can’t possibly lead anywhere good. Slowing down to get the full picture of what’s going on is apparently off the table, as is any sort of reasoned discussion about how to save the most lives while still being able to keep the economy in stasis until the pandemic is under control. And so America will be forever changed by this pandemic, as our once-trusted institutions lead us directly to slaughter.

August 12, 2020 - “Might SARS‐CoV‐2 Have Arisen via Serial Passage through an Animal Host or Cell Culture?”

Two additional unique genomic signature are already being researched, as one preprint indicates that SARS‐CoV‐2 possesses a genomic region not found in other coronaviruses that appears to cloak the novel coronavirus from white blood cells, a characteristic also found with HIV.^{[ 52 ]} And the second preprint identifies a region on the spike‐protein gene found in no other bat‐borne coronavirus that is nearly identical to superantigenic and neurotoxic motifs found in some bacteria, which may contribute to the immune overreaction that leads to the Kawasaki‐like multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children, and cytokine storms in adults.

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However, just as an increased pace of research into influenza vaccines increased the odds that a leak would occur leading up to the 1977 release of H1N1 Swine Flu, which is the most often cited as originating from a laboratory leak,^{[ 8 ]} it would follow that an increased pace of research into coronaviruses over the past few years would have increased the odds that a lab leak of one would occur; after all, these viruses were pinpointed back in 2006 as a viable vector for an HIV vaccine^{[ 57 ]} and research into a pan‐coronavirus vaccine has been ongoing for decades.

And whether or not gain‐of‐function research is determined to have played a role in SARS‐CoV‐2's emergence, the fact that it creates opportunities for pandemic viruses to leak out of labs calls for a re‐examination of the moratorium against this practice, because the emergence of this novel coronavirus has demonstrated that the international public health community is not prepared to handle the leak of a pandemic virus.

April 1, 2021 - “Golden Silkworms in Pandora's Box: Why understanding COVID-19 and Seasonal Influenza as Quasispecies Mutant Swarms reveals the Quantum Origins and Cryptic Fates of Human Pandemics.”

SPOILER ALERT: SARS-CoV-2 is a circulating vaccine-derived-coronavirus (cVDCV) borne from work originally done at UNC, the only institution on earth that’s publicly been attempting to design a live-attenuated vaccine for SARS, where they also pioneered engineering the SARS-like chimeric coronaviruses that would be needed as templates for attenuation, and did their best to ignore or circumvent restrictions on gain-of-function research – obfuscation that’s still ongoing as they refuse to disclose genomic details relating to lab accidents that occurred during the above publicly-funded research.

Notorious researchers from the Wuhan Institute of Virology were associated with this controversial work on coronaviruses, and attempted to continue it with an experimental oral live-attenuated SARS-like vaccination program for the Chinese Military without accounting for the quantum nature of the underlying quasispecies behavior – once they realized what was going on and deattenuation was already occurring out-of-control after the Wuhan Military Games, they reopened contact with Dr. Charles Lieber due to his work on virus-distinguishing nanowires, eventually leading to his arrest and the beginning of the largest and most coordinated cover-up in world history.

Carried-out by the pharmaceutical and defense entities involved in this research, both of which want attention pulled away from serial passage and experimental vaccine work, as do the billionaire class that wants to use gain-of-function research for unrestricted tinkering into the human genome at the Broad Institute.  

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And with any virus, but especially with coronaviruses, it’s important to keep in mind that hidden within their large genomes are entire suites of accessory genes which only appear functional while actually living inside their hosts, in vivo, and whose function won’t be observable within the virtual environment in lab Petri dishes, in vitro: “the coronavirus group-specific genes are not essential for growth in cell culture but function in virus-host interactions.”

Incidentally, another paper attempting to immunize against that highly-airborne coronavirus goes on to explain that when an experimental spike-protein only vaccine was tried against a highly-airborne feline coronavirus - immunoglobulin was thrown out of wack and 80% of the kittens it was administered to died inside a month. But don’t worry, Big Pharma has crossed its collective fingers and is hoping really, really hard that this exact same phenomenon doesn’t occur at some point down the road within human populations vaccinated with a spike-protein only vaccine against our novel highly-airborne coronavirus.

But this effect can’t be expected to appear immediately with SARS-CoV-2, since like all deattenuating LAVs it won’t reach full virulence until it’s fully reconstituted itself back to its original full-strength form - an enigmatic process that’s explained below, and which is still ongoing as transmission events occur in their millions all across the Earth.

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And so in the case of COVID-19, its unusual asymptomatic spread made isolating infectious individuals impossible except in the most diligent nations, and so that element of ideal vaccination programs has been impossible for most of the world. But, luckily for humanity, a massive semi-collaborative international effort occurred to produce vaccines, including a brand new class of mRNA vaccine that skipped the final stage of animal testing because it was just so gosh-darn awesome. And so humans responded to a crisis the way we almost always do, applying our ingenuity to push back against yet another threat from nature, determined to impose our indomitable will one more time.

Because certainly, humans are smarter than chickens on poultry farms running around infecting and shitting all over each other, and humanity won’t end up in the same Sisyphean immunological cycle of never-ending illness and death. Weird that poultry farms made Soylent Green come true, and they’re actually fed each other’s carcasses.

Wonder if there’s a message there.  

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And just as the 1977 Longpig Flu endemic was the result of a virus altered by serial passage almost certainly in the attempt to design a live-attenuated military vaccine, an outbreak that served for decades in the literature as a warning against viral gain-of-function research since the risks involved were simply too high - so too was our ongoing COVID-19 Pandemic sparked by a live-attenuated military vaccine program gone-wrong, that was subsequently covered-up by a Communist nation.

After all, as the godfather of gain-of-function ferret-work himself Ron Fouchier noted rather presciently in July of 2019 during the European Congress of Virology, a few months before the start of the Wuhan Military Games:

“That’s what happened in the 70s, people were trying to do live-attenuated vaccines and doing human challenge studies and that might be the way the H1 re-emerged in the 70s. Some people say it was a lab accident. I don’t believe that. I think it was actually human challenge studies and live-attenuated vaccines that reverted that are the likely candidates of the 1970 reemergence of H1. And we need to make sure that doesn’t happen again.”

May 18, 2021 - “The Ex-con Who Kicked the Idiots’ Nest: Court documents indicate Matt Ridley and Alina Chan’s alleged involvement in a corruption and bribery scheme aimed to cover-up the origins of COVID-19.”

Given all that, it’s been sorta just hilarious to have a bunch of folks come along and think they can offer bribes to other scientists to have them remove me and my father from a paper that we worked on covering a laboratory engineered origin of this pandemic - a topic we have been months in front of absolutely everyone publishing about - while running around discussing my case behind my back and slandering me, without there ever being a consequence. 

And beyond that popularized writing, which was featured all over Zero Hedge in the early months of 2020 getting millions of hits, the article we submitted for peer reviewed scientific publication in on April 22nd, 2020 ended up being published in August 2020 - it lays out the long history of engineered viruses escaping from labs, and explains why serial passage almost certainly accounts for the mysterious elements of the COVID-19 Pandemic.

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I am the grandson of an immigrant, who’s starting to think that grandpa should’ve hiked his two-year old britches up and turned right the fuck back around at Ellis Island, given what America has become. And so the thing is, even though a representative of the United States Government conveyed to me that my right to own intellectual property is functionally forfeit: Being a convicted felon does not in fact forfeit my right to my ideas… I mean, at least not anymore than being the President's son forfeits someone's right to snort coke off a Chinese hooker's ass.

Speaking of close and continuing relationships, shouldn’t it raise a few eyebrows that this Administration’s current Secretary of State cofounded a firm that does this kind of thing with the Chinese government and then tried to erase it from the internet?

"U.S. research universities" were among the company’s clients and that the consultancy worked with schools to "remain a trusted partner for DoD-sponsored research grants while expanding foreign research collaboration, accepting foreign donations, and welcoming foreign students in key STEM programs." The company deleted references to such work from its website between July 26 and August 2.”

It’s a little bit unsettling to be told that your criminal past is too “creepy” to allow you to have any public involvement with the work you and your father pioneered and got through peer review in the first place, when there are rampant security risks and conflicts of interest throughout the entire Administration. One of the most powerful Democrats in the entire United States Government is suspected of surreptitiously sticking his dick in Chinese nationals as a hobby, and if nothing else had an undisclosed clear close and continuing relationship with one. 

June 2, 2021 - “Molecular Evidence for COVID-19's Engineered Origins.”

When the live-attenuated polio vaccine is working its way back towards being the full-strength polio virus (deattenuating, the opposite of “attenuating,” or weakening), something that often happens within communities that have poor sanitation, it goes through a series of coordinated changes. These coordinated changes are referred to as “epistatic” when the coordination is happening inside genomes, and it turns out these epistatic genetic changes are predictable, and unnatural when a live-attenuated vaccine (a weakened but not-quite-dead virus) is trying to work its way back to its original form. These mutations occur in a coordinated fashion in this circumstance, a coordination that does not show up in nature - as if the virus has a memory of being at its full strength, and is able to use epistatic mutations to make its way back to its original form far quicker than would occur naturally.

Not only does COVID-19 also display these coordinated, simultaneous, epistatic mutations across many different regions of the globe within human populations, these exact same mutations are also appearing in lab mice as well as on mink farms. There is absolutely nothing even vaguely approaching a natural parallel to this phenomenon, viruses do not use the same mutations to adapt to three different species simultaneously – different species require different mutations to establish active sustainable infections within a population, which is why diseases don’t just jump instantly and randomly between species, even ones living near each other.

So the fact that the exact same mutations which appeared in the UK and South Africa in humans, also appeared within the laboratory as COVID-19 was passaged through laboratory mice, is entirely unprecedented. And in mice, not only did repeated serial passaging make the same epistatic mutations that were seen in humans in the UK and South Africa appear, these mutations gave COVID-19 the ability to transmit through the air between the mice.

This kind of “gain-of-function” from serial passaging is a very direct sign of laboratory engineering, there is no natural way for the same mutations that cause a virus to become airborne between mice would also show up simultaneously in a human population as well as mink, or the population of any other discrete species. Different species require different mutations for a virus to adapt to it and establish active infections, that is why zoonosis is such a big deal.

June 4, 2021 - “The DARPA-taped Letters: Why have several researchers with close ties to the CCP been undermining the dissemination of peer reviewed research which looks at a lab origin of the COVID-19 Pandemic and gain-of-function research?”

However once a bit of time had passed and I thought about it, I wasn’t aware of my dad ever significantly interacting with a former Secretary of the Navy and Obama advisor directly attached to defense work, a federal global technology S&T researcher interested in engaging with China and who it’s hard to imagine hasn’t been extensively involved with defense programs, an MIT artificial intelligence and cyber-security wonk with extensive ties to the defense industry, and a scientist part of another team which denigrated my father’s career and said he never should’ve written a paper like ours also with extensive ties to DARPA and the defense industry.

Even more bizarre, that former Secretary of the Navy spent much of 2020 directly lobbying with the help of Johns Hopkins for more scientific and academic engagement and cooperation with the CCP, alongside the person who was then the head of the CIA and is now the Director of National Intelligence (and soon to be oxymorons), Avril Haines. And so maybe it should raise a few eyebrows that the sitting Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, attempted to scrub existence of his company’s efforts to aid and abet the CCP placing students and researchers into American institutions and especially key STEM programs via multi-million dollar contracts from the internet. 

This company, WestExec Advisors, is also tied to the current Press Secretary, Jen Psaki.

And it was only co-founded by Blinken, its other founder writes whitepapers alongside Avril Haines, since it’s all one big happy not-even-vaguely-corrupt-and-compromised Chinese-controlled mob family.

Oh and Ms. Psaki just spent today telling the American people that there’s no grounds whatsoever that would cause President Biden to fire Tony Fauci. Not even treason? 

In a time of war? Because the punishment for that very clearly isn’t losing your job - it’s losing your life via state execution. And so aiding and abetting the the Chinese Military in covering up the worst war-crime in human history would certainly be nominal groups for a bullet to the head, or however the government is doing it these days. 

And in case any of this sounds a bit outlandish, turns out there’s been a high-level defector from China in America for several months, working alongside the DIA exclusively since “DIA leadership believes there are Chinese spies or sources inside the FBI, CIA, and several other federal agencies."

The idea that there’s even a discussion as to whether or not SARS-CoV-2 was engineered is entirely absurd, the only people acting like this is in doubt at all are looking to cover as many asses as they possibly can while directly aiding and abetting a disinformation campaign being run by the Chinese Military, and simultaneously keep the door open to violate as many Natural Laws as they possibly can.

Most notably, Alina Chan, who’s already designed a protocol to insert freaking Ebola into human cells, and has been falsely presenting herself as some sort of honest actor while literally attempting to bribe other scientists to hide the truth.   

And so as our emails with this giant wildly corrupt and conflicted cabal of DARPA-JHU-WestExec squad of fuckbois below recounts, their contact with us has become even stranger considering what’s happened since... and what hasn’t happened. Instead of our ideas being embraced by the wider scientific community like I would've expected from my childhood, they've been marginalized and our voices largely ignored.

December 3, 2021 - “A Grin Without a Cat - Bottling-Up the Quasispecies Origins of SARS-CoV-2’s Enigmatic Furin-Cleavage Site.” 

Turns out you can’t vaccinate your way out of highly-transmissible RNA viruses in crowded commercial settings, but it also turns out that humans have a little issue trying to play God, and as so here we are. 

Directly supporting this specialized airborne role for the FCS is the apparent reemergence of SARS-CoV-2’s FCS within Calu-3 cells - cells grown from the surface of human lungs - after it falls off in Vero cells. The swarm doesn’t need an FCS to flourish inside monkey kidney cells, inside Vero cells - however once it gets placed into human lung cells, now the chance of airborne transmission is back on the table, and so the FCS quickly returns to dominance inside the swarm, reaching fixation in just a single passage. 

SARS-CoV-2’s affinity for human kidneys - up to 25% of its patients can suffer an acute kidney injury - is likely linked to this past history being passaged through Vero kidney cells during its development as a live-attenuated vaccine (LAV) - a vaccine built from an entire virus that’s supposed to be weakened down to the point where it can never establish symptomatic infections, but still serves as enough of a mock-up to provide our immune systems with the ability to recognize and neutralize the actual live version of that virus. 

…

And it’s almost certainly the past reversions of H1N1 LAVs in 1977 and 2009 that seemed to eventually just melt away, which sociopaths like Richard Ebright and the rest of his sweaty socially-retarded buddies at JASON are using to assure everyone that SARS-CoV-2, another LAV that’s reverting, will just melt away in just a few more months - just like H1N1 seems to have done twice. And since SARS and MERS, artificial coronavirus chimeras that got out before deattenuation all the way down into LAVs, went away on their own - they think all signs point to that happening again.

Unfortunately, unlike their mythical buddy: Each and everyone one of these arrogant old hacks was drawn into the siren song of multi-billion dollar defense and pharmaceutical contracts long ago, and they’re going to remain pushing for a fascist and entirely ineffective vaccination program because they’re rotten, filthy, diseased whores, and that is exactly what they are being paid to do. 

Our novel coronavirus is not a naturally spreading and evolving virus, and it has not become endogenous to human populations after thousands of years of coevolution - it is reverting back towards a highly-pathogenic SARS-like chimera that our immune systems will be entirely helpless against, and is going through the same unexpected epistatic gatekeeping mutations that OPV does on its way back to full virulence as a VDPV, which vaccines are also entirely helpless against

In the case of SARS-CoV-2, this gatekeeping results in the sudden emergence of new strains that appear evolutionarily impossible - like Omicron.  And so long as transmission is ongoing, there is nothing that is going to stop this pandemic except more death, because transmission means more gatekeeping, and gatekeeping means continued steps closer to the original strongest version of this highly-pathogenic virus. 

Being completely and entirely acclimated to the human genome is not at all the case with OPV, a LAV against the Polio virus that’s reverting into VDPV all across the third world and bringing back Polio’s terrible paralytic poliomyelitis. So OPV serves as a much more accurate analogy for SARS-CoV-2 than the H1N1 LAVs.

…

Until SARS-CoV-2 is understood as a LAV that’s deattenuating towards a highly-pathogenic chimeric coronavirus that’s going through gatekeeping mutations and has no intention whatsoever of following the assumptions drawn from observing natural evolution or even the paths of the H1N1 LAVs which melted back into their original endogenous human hosts - humanity is going to continue to be standing on its head as it attempts to battle this pandemic, and misunderstanding the basic fundamental nature of what its up against. 

It’s something we seem to be particularly good at, since all the way back in 1977 when the first H1N1 LAV emerged to a mass global panic, a massive push was made to create and distribute vaccines against what was thought to be a potentially pandemic strain. But it turns out that one of the ways a LAV isn’t a natural virus, is that when you attempt to vaccinate against it, neurological side-effects appear to proliferate among the vaccinated population, as the virus blows through this attempt at protection. 

December 15, 2021 - “The Last Interview the Sirotkins Will Ever Give: After years of theft, misrepresentation, and insults it's become abundantly clear that no one's interested in the Truth, so we're closing up the PR Department.”

And now that it’s had nearly two years of circulation among every modern human society on the planet, and so like the T-1000 rebuilding itself from tiny pieces, it’s now gotten close enough back to its original form for airborne transmission among mice - ubiquitous hitchhikers that infest every single major human city on earth. There is now no way to stop the unchecked reversion of SARS-CoV-2 back to its original full-strength form except for stopping public transmission. Until the rest of the world is ready to accept that and move forward, there’s absolutely nothing at all else to be said.

Just keep talking, and pretend like you can ignore all the dying.

February 2, 2022 - “Burn the Ivory Towers to the Ground: What happens when dangerous and unproven scientific research techniques meet the military-industrial complex? Are modern research scientists still controlled by any code of ethics at all?”

Over the coming months and years more human life is going to be lost than at any other point in history, by a very wide margin. To be fair there are a lot more people, but even proportionally the epic tsunami of death that’s already been triggered will still rival every other cataclysm our species has ever experienced.  

There’s no running. There’s no high ground to escape to. 

SARS-CoV-2 has now thoroughly infected every modern society on Earth, and it’s slow insidious digestion of our brains is going to create a situation far more frightening than instantly mutating new hosts into zombies. Because at least with zombies, the chain of cause-and-effect is straightforward, quick, and relatively avoidable. 

“Don’t get bitten” is a lot different than “Don’t breathe too deep.” 

Not a single person giving public policy advice can describe what this virus actually is, and yet due to the power of social trust - Tens of millions of Americans will be slowly and painfully choking to death on their own juices over the next few years because they’ve been listening to abject morons with billionaires’ arms shoved up their asses, puppetering them around to try and force our economic engine back into motion. 

The emails below outlining the brazen lies and wanton immoral behavior from Alina Chan and Matt Ridley were sent to nearly 300 members of Harvard, MIT, and JHU’s biology departments about a year ago, shockingly not a single soul replied or expressed any concern about the facts laid out within them. 

Dead bodies don’t bother American academics, only their funding and the size of their Twitter followings.

Millions are dead and hundreds of millions of more are set to follow over the coming years, and yet the entirety of America’s academic and scientific communities have absolutely no interest at all in the truth. They do not care about your dead relatives, they aren’t going to care about the empty grocery shelves, and at this point its pretty obvious that the scientific and academic communities are only interested in circling their wagons and counting their dollars.

And so the “scientists” the world has trusted to lead them out of this pandemic are still no closer to having a single useful answer about the nature of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, after being consistently wrong for two years. 

All of which started when Tony Fauci and the rest of NIH’s leadership unilaterally decided to censor any discussion about a lab origin of the virus, singling out “serial passage” as the most likely gain-of-function technique used to create the COVID-19 Pandemic. 

Of course even The Intercept isn’t going to cite the peer-reviewed work at the top of this article which lays out exactly how serial passage was likely used, which is nearly two years old now - because it too is owned by billionaires, and does not employ journalists but instead corporate whores who are far, ffaaaarrrr more interested in who their next expensive brunch if with than silly things like integrity and ethics, or dead strangers. 

America is going to reap what she has sown. 

April 1, 2022 - “Welcome to Mengele’s Laboratory: The Epilogue to Golden Silkworms in Pandora’s Box - One Year Later.”

But then unluckily for all of us, men like Bill Gates didn’t let Tuskegee stop them, and moved on to using Africa as one giant pharmaceutical testing ground in the decades that followed, and so experimental drugs and vaccines were pumped into the continent without anything even vaguely resembling ethical safety controls. And when a company couldn’t afford to get its testing done all the way over in Africa, then there were always plenty of African-Americans and other disenfranchised minorities right at home - slipping through the cracks and just waiting to be double-blinded!

So it within this intersection that our story starts, between the orphans like Charlton who gave his name to the CHAT-OPV live-attenuated vaccine (LAV), and experiments on unwitting Africans that sparked the entire international AIDS Epidemic, as that deattenuating LAV which had been accidentally spiked with the SIV monkey-virus during serial passage and began that terrible plague. 

But hey, turns out that there was nothing to really worry about so long as you weren’t a faggot, right?! Since back in the 1980s bigots like Tony Fauci were already attempting to demonize the gay community with one hand while poisoning them with an experimental drug with the other, in a narrative that has replayed itself again during our ongoing COVID-19 Pandemic without even shuffling in a new cast. 

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“Serial passage” is used as an umbrella term to encompass several different well-established bio-engineering protocols: two of the main ones are passage through cell cultures which is typically done to attenuate a vaccine candidate strain, as well as passage through live host animals to force zoonosis into a new species, or to establish aerosol transmission within a species where direct-contact transmission is already established.

And it turns out that back in the late seventies, “live attenuated influenza virus (LAIV) research was extensive at the time,” research that would’ve used serial passage as it sought to find progressively weaker and weaker strains. In fact there was even a letter from a former director of the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences noting “the introduction of this 1977 virus [as] the result of vaccine trials in the Far East involving the challenge of several thousand military recruits with live H1N1 virus.”

After working real, real hard to whitewash the dangers of gain-of-function research, the paper then concludes that:

“While the use of the 1977 influenza epidemic as a cautionary tale for potential laboratory accidents is expedient, the relevance to GOF research is greatly diminished if the 1977 epidemic was the result of a vaccine trial or vaccine development gone awry; these are both more plausible explanations than a single laboratory accident.” 

Now it’s unclear whether Gigi Kwik-Gronvall or Michelle Rozo wrote that passage back in 2015, downplaying the risks of reverting LAVs - but several years later in the summer of 2020 it would be Gigi Kwik-Gronvall who’d be part of a team who’d write me and my dad - just one more act of hubris in a long list, when the most vile criminals humanity has ever known overplayed their hand one last time, and gave up the game. 

If they’d never contacted us, I never would’ve had any idea that this entire conspiracy goes all the way up to America’s Director of National Intelligence. 

…

And there’d be good reason for Gallo to be on the lookout for anything in the scientific literature relating to serial passage through cell cultures, since a few years earlier in 1978 he’d been a key player in the founding of the Special Virus-Cancer Program, formed in large part because of how often the monkey virus SV-40 was being introduced into human research and vaccine lines especially during serial passage experiments, and there were concerns it might be seeding cancers. 

Then a few years later in 1982, Gallo would receive his first prestigious Lasker Award for being the first to associate a specific retrovirus with cancers, and then two more years later in 1984, his team would publish a series of four papers asserting together that the virus he’d gotten the Lasker for was in fact the cause of AIDS. 

And although there’s nothing in these papers about SIV or the virus’s possible origins, there was probably no one else on the planet more capable and prepared than Gallo to read that Soviet paper about serial passage causing some but not all shared genes to line-up, and realize that the same phenomenon might apply to HIV and SIV, with SIV serving the same role as SV-40, a monkey virus that’d been introduced into human cell lines via vaccine research and gone on to infect humans prior to the emergence of HIV. 

Since when you compare HIV and SIV, you also find that their genes appear to have aged out-of-sync with each other, and so determining when a theoretical evolution from SIV into HIV happened has no good answer. Scientists wave their hands a bunch and offer explanations, but by this measure HIV is just as unnatural as the 1977 H1N1 strain, probably more so since several genes are out of sync instead of just one. 

And so back in the 1980s, Tony Fauci was brought in by Robert Gallo to occlude HIV’s origins in the CHAT-OPV vaccine programs, understanding how the viral contamination across cell-lines happened. But whether or not that’s ever proven - Fauci definitely got installed to push AZT as an unproven but miraculous solution. 

Nearly nothing has changed, except for instead of a virus that only spreads through blood and sexual fluids, ours spreads right through the air. Might be a tiny bit more of a problem. And Tony’s old pal Robert Gallo has become a horcrux for both Joseph Mengele and Joseph Goebbls - first pioneering the military cancer-vaccine research programs that emerged from experiments like the CHAT-OPV and lead to SARS-CoV-2, and now writing propaganda for Time Magazine while trying once again to gaslight the American people into complacency about an incredibly lethal virus whose origins Gallo is helping hide.

But not without some help. 

Robert Gallo, Tony Fauci, Bill Gates, Ralph Baric, Kristian Andersen, Francis Collins, Peter Daszak, Richard Ebright, Alina Chan, Jamie Metzl, Avril Haines, Josh Rogin. 

Dr. Joseph Mengele, who haunted millions during the Holocaust, never died. His corpse may or may not have been found off the coast of Paraguay, but regardless his spirit is still living on - alive and well, inside those empty soulless vessels. They are carrying on his work of making most morally bankrupt research imaginable seem palatable and somehow okay, as Alina Chan splices Ebola into human cells with DARPA funding, and then happily emerges as the locus of a Limited Hangout meant to hide SARS-CoV-2’s obvious origins in the most dangerous vaccine research humanity has ever known - live-attenuated vaccines that have the propensity to revert back to invincible highly-pathogenic chimeras that blow through vaccine-induced and natural immunity alike. 

…

This dynamic has already packed tens of thousands of our societies’ most vulnerable into factories and warehouses during the pandemic, desperate to keep food on their families’ tables and roofs over their heads, and forced to work - not in a camp, at least - but in conditions that are now killing and debilitating endless wave after wave. More literally than we’d like to think, we are now very much all in this together.  

So if you’re wondering why this current Presidential Administration seems to be much more interested in winning elections and vaccine sales than the preservation of human life? That’s because our government is currently owned and operated by Fascism and Big Pharma, which is why it’s been unabashedly gaslighting us all about the nature of reinfections to hide their rampant spread, and attempting to force everyone back into the office so that the commercial real estate market doesn’t collapse.

The pandemic is over, we’ve been told. Back to work, don’t you want to be free?

March 8, 2022 - “What's it like when your government tries to have you murdered?”

At this point it’s abundantly clear western governments are going to ride this denial train past all of our graveyards, and given that it’s been two years since the National Security Council first got my work explaining why COVID was almost certainly engineered via serial passage - seems like I’m never coming in from the cold.

However that’s been a bit of a theme given that I’m an ex-con and on the sex-offender registry for the rest of my life, something Alina Chan has been pointing out from the start - since it’s sorta abundantly obvious that just like DRASTIC, she was mobilized by Fauci and Collins and the rest to distract from the truth I’ve been revealing for the past two years, very much risking my life in the process.

Well done guys, you won. Apparently no one’s running FISA warrants, and both the IC and military are so infested with woke cowards that no one is going to do anything other than sit back and let innocent people continue to drop.

No one notable will touch my work and the entirety of the press - not just the “legacy” press, even the conmen and grifters like the Weinsteins who act like they’re somehow above the same system capture as everyone else and don’t have different billionaires’ arms shoved up their asses, are happy to see my silenced. Maybe my criminal past was the dealbreaker, maybe it wasn’t.

After all, our modern penal system is based on the idea of magical timers which are supposed to somehow rehabilitate people, or otherwise indicate they’ve passed certain legal thresholds. 

November 3, 2022 - “Understanding SARS-CoV-2’s Obviously Engineered Origins: Why, from the very start, there's been very little doubt that this pandemic began in a lab.”

One of the most striking parts of David Asher’s phone call back in the summer of 2021, even more surprising than offering me and my dad $10,000 to walk away from this work and let Jamie Metzl take ownership of it, was thanking me for getting the original whitepaper me and my dad had written in front of the National Security Council (NSC).

That was actually the first confirmation I had that the contact I had on the NSC had in fact gotten that paper in front of everyone back in the middle of January 2020 when I’d passed it along, shortly before we put it up online on January 31st. 

So back when Tony Fauci and the Zooinati crew was scrambling to cover their tracks in those early weeks, the entire NSC was already completely and entirely aware that SARS-CoV-2 might’ve been engineered because they read our initial whitepaper, Logistical and Technical Exploration into the Origins of the Wuhan Strain of Coronavirus, and knew that: 

• Scientists had been splicing and dicing entire viruses for about 20 years, with Baric’s No See ‘Em technology, pioneered at UNC where scientists from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) had learned how to make coronavirus chimeras several years ago, with technology that would make it nearly impossible to tell if the virus had been manipulated. 

• Those scientists returned to the WIV, discovered the first SARS-like virus to use ACE2, and were now pretending like their work couldn’t possible have caused the pandemic - even though there’d been years of reporting about all sorts of safety concerns, and the SARS virus had leaked out of Chinese labs several times. 

• In 2012, scientists had used a technique called “serial passage” to send influenza through multiple sets of ferrets, which closely mimics the natural process of zoonosis and resulted in a virus that suddenly went airborne and became more virulent. 

• SARS-CoV-2 was already leading to depleted white blood cell counts, had notable homologies with HIV, and was creating troubling neurological symptoms. 

…

However Tony Fauci had a job to do, covering all of this up just like he did with the origins of HIV, so in that flurry of phone calls and emails, the absolutely absurd Proximal Origins paper was cobbled together with lies and misdirection, and published on March 17, 2020. In light of the research done to write our initial whitepaper, this was really obviously a bunch of happy horseshit cooked-up to cover-up what was really going on, so just two days later I wrote a response that highlighted China’s long history influencing scientific publications, and then dissembled all of Andersen’s sophomoric science mostly using serial passage.

…

Serial passage is the single most important lynchpin tying the origins of this virus together, it’s one of the hallmarks of creating a live-attenuated vaccine, and historically has almost always used lab ferrets - an overlapping species with the farmed mink that SARS-CoV-2 hopped right into and was vigorously slaughtering across multiple continents. It was immediately able to jump into farmed mink all across the planet because the virus was returning to a very close cousin of its original host, lab ferrets, which it’d recently been passaged through to attenuate it down, weakening it down into a live-attenuated vaccine instead of a virulent virus. 

Which is probably why Tony Fauci was emailing about “serial passage” back in February 2020, pretty strange no one at all has questioned him or anyone else about this technique in the press? 

…

And yet after extensive submissions to the popular press, nothing was getting through. Neither did submissions to pretty much every peer-reviewed scientific publication run out of America, so I went across the pond, and in April 2020 submitted a paper to BioEssays, that they’d publish back in August 2020, Might SARS-CoV-2 Have Arisen via Serial Passage through an Animal Host or Cell Culture? 

This was a technical retelling of everything I’d written up to that point, and with my dad’s help to get the finer points right, I managed to outline the long history of superpowers lying about their leaky laboratories, and tie the recent push for pancoronavirus and HIV vaccines to the genesis of our ongoing pandemic. Peer review was supposed to the litmus for scientific discourse, and so as an ex-con I figured this was simply the hoop I needed to jump through to be taken seriously. 

But maybe I should’ve paid more attention to the fact that shortly after this peer reviewed paper arguing for a laboratory origin of the pandemic was published in August 2020, that contact I’d used to get our original whitepaper in front of the NSC lost his job with the NSC, and was soundly demoted.

…

Because America is a testament to unbound hedonism, that’s almost entirely consumed with experiencing as much unbridled pleasure as possible in lieu of anything else at all, and either all of these journalists are really that bad at their jobs - or they’re simply hiding the origins of this pandemic because that’s precisely what they’re being paid to do. Looking back I can’t say for sure that I wouldn’t have done anything differently, but knowing what I do now - I can at least rest easy, knowing it wouldn’t have mattered at all. 

None of the contacts me and my dad made during these nearly three years has lifted a finger as all the work we did was ripped out from under us, and the nature of this virus was downplayed into a mild nothing, a pandemic that Joe Biden tells us is already over. 

…

At this point it became clear that DRASTIC was simply a Limited Hangout being run to distract from the truth we’d been trying to reveal since January 2020, and everyone involved was either intentionally hiding the truth or just really fucking stupid and arrogant - so I made sure it was clear Golden Silkworms in Pandora’s Box was an independent production. 

…

Me and my dad risked our lives to expose the truth the moment all of this started, and absolutely no one has exhibited the smallest shred of ethics as all the credit for what we’ve done was stolen out from under us.  For whatever reason, a recent preprint about a lab origin can make a massive splash and draw incredible amounts of press, as even its authors pretend like there isn’t a body of peer reviewed literature around a lab origin that exists already, and all of this hasn’t been very thoroughly explained for 18 months and counting. 

Not one single citation of our two peer-reviewed papers, not one mention of “serial passage,” just three more assholes who want to hear themselves talk. 

The time for niceties and etiquette ended millions of innocent deaths ago.

So the bad news is: The scientific community is a death cult, America’s academics, journalists, and politicians are completely and entirely ethically bankrupt - and billions more are going to die before anything changes.

December 14, 2022 - “Weaponizing the Swarm by Weaponizing the Stupid: Why the suppression of ‘serial passage’ as the technique used to craft SARS-CoV-2 depended on the cowardly compliance of morally and ethically bankrupt academic and journalistic worlds.”

Not one single person, calling themselves a “journalist” as they watch tens of millions of people die all around them, has expressed any interest at all in discussing anything that I’ve written. Actually that’s not true, interest was expressed by all of the following folks with very large voices, all of whom went on to subsequently ignore and often plagiarize my work: 

William J. Broad - New York Times

John Mecklin and Nicholson Wade - Bulletin of Atomic Scientists

Nicholson Baker - New York Magazine

Drew Hernandez - CNN

Josh Rogin - The Washington Post

Gary Ruskin - USRTK

David Malone - UK Channel 4

…

There’s very rarely any sort of demonstrated excellence, and in fact Scientific revolutions progress one death at a time largely because of this dynamic: Students are never, ever encouraged to challenge or defeat their teachers - Instead they’re trained to mindless stick their noses as far into their tangy bungholes as they possibly can. 

Because that’s what gets you that A, or the internship, or the overly flattering reference letter that gets you the job you don’t really have the merit for. Looking at you, every single paid “journalist” working for any corporate entity at all in America. 

…

Because like Alina Chan before him, Nicholas Wade was happy to watch tens of millions of innocent strangers die terribly if it meant he got time in front of the cameras. And job number one was to make sure no discussion of serial passage ever surfaced at all, since it’s the hallmark of live-attenuated vaccines, and additionally points very directly back to the 2012 gain-0f-function experiments with ferrets and influenza that held the potential to “make the deadly 1918 pandemic look like a pesky cold.” 

…

Because I had no interest at all in mindlessly echoing Tony Fauci’s horrible murderous bullshit about a natural virus and a magical vaccine, nor did I care about the tide turning with the Proximal Origins paper, nor what anyone thought about an engineered virus being a “conspiracy theory.” Since I learned something very important from Farmer Joe on those wrestling mats - authority figures aren’t meant to be revered nor exalted, they are there for you to defeat them. 

…

America likes to make a big deal about being the land of second-chances and redemption, however there’s another edge to that sword - The only reason redemption is such a big fucking deal in America, is because only in America is such a production made of judging and condemning those who dare stray out of line. There’s no redemption without judgement and condemnation, and it’s that Puritanical urge that arrived with us on these shores, to crush any sort of social dissent, that really drives the ethos of this broken, batshit nation.

Dan Sirotkin is the co-author of the first peer-reviewed paper examining a laboratory origin for SARS-CoV-2, as well as its addendum, which settled a 50-year mystery and formally linked the H1N1 Spanish Flu pandemic strain release of 1977 to gain-of-function research.

Way back over three years ago when I’d only been looking into all this stuff for about six weeks, Nature Magazine published their much-ballyhooed The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2 on March 17, 2020, which has since been cited by over 2,000 news outlets and been accessed nearly six-million times.

Just 48 hours later I’d respond with the article below, which thoroughly eviscerates the idiotic assertions put forth by that article, none of which hold up to even the slightest bit of logical or scientific scrutiny. This article was transparent propaganda from the very start, and yet it’s gone nearly untouched in the press and the academic literature, as the only thing that’s allowed to the surface is the limited hangouts pretending to argue about technical minutiae from over two years ago.

If a scientific outsider and untrained journalist was able to almost instantly point all of this out over three years ago after he’d just been studying all this stuff for a few weeks, to zero in on serial passage as a vital part of the puzzle and tear apart the façade presented by Kristian Andersen, how come the rest of the media - making their six-figure salaries and getting all their fancy awards - has gone along with their charade and is still suppressing the two peer-reviewed papers linked above?

Because after three years, the media and our governments are still determined to pour poison into your ears, since the billionaires who own them all aren’t ever going to admit their roll in the worst crime against humanity in our shared history.

Maybe you shouldn’t blindly believe everything you read? Even if the source has a pretty solid reputation?

Nature magazine has censored over 1,000 articles at the request of the Chinese government over the past several years, and runs columns sponsored by outside interests. And it seems pretty clear that their recent article, “The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2” is just one more example of their influence. China bought off the head of Harvard’s chemistry department, you don’t think they could buy off run-of-the-mill research scientists scrambling for tenure and funding and publication? It’s absolutely horrific that so many scientists and researchers are taking part in what’s really clearly a disinformation campaign orchestrated by the Chinese Communist Party, and willfully spreading a smokescreen about something that’s already killed thousands and is projected to kill millions more across the planet.

And while the mainstream corporate media mindless regurgitates claims from the Chinese government that are falsifiable with the simplest of google searches, allowing the public to be lulled into a false sense of security and complacency, and Reddit rapidly censors and moderates anything that might indicate that this virus leaked from a Chinese lab and so the Chinese government is to blame for this pandemic.

Below is a takedown of that article, and the good news is a much more nuanced and honest look at the origins of COVID-19, the Wuhan Strain of coronavirus is just a click away.

Thus, the high-affinity binding of the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein to human ACE2 is most likely the result of natural selection on a human or human-like ACE2 that permits another optimal binding solution to arise. This is strong evidence that SARS-CoV-2 is not the product of purposeful manipulation.

• As our report mentions right at the start, scientists passed the H5N1 Bird Flu through a series of ferret hosts until it gained ACE2 affinity and then became incredibly virulent, which is what’s seen with COVID-19 since its affinity to ACE2 is orders of magnitude higher than SARS.  It’s also the process used on the H1N1 Bird Flu that either leaked out of a Soviet lab in the 70’s or was introduced as part of a vaccine trial gone awry, it’s considered the product of laboratory manipulation since it was very similar to strains of H1N1 that hadn’t been in circulation for decades, and seemed to be the product of “sequential passage in an animal reservoir” which was determined by its vast genetic distance from any other present strain of flu, just like COVID-19 which also appears so distant from any related coronavirus that it’s been placed in its own clade, an isolated branch way out on its own in the viral family tree – meaning it’s the lone example of its kind, and doesn’t clump together with all the other known coronaviruses. That process of sequential passage through animal hosts leaves a genome that appears “natural” and not purposeful as well since it wouldn’t leave a genomic smoking gun and would simply appear to be the result of “natural” selection. So this is either exquisitely lazy research or dissimulation, the authors are either unaware of the Bird Flu study, which was well covered, especially by the scientific press, or are willfully ignoring it.

Given the level of genetic variation in the spike, it is likely that SARS-CoV-2-like viruses with partial or full polybasic cleavage sites will be discovered in other species.

• This seems like pretty intentional dissimulation. It’s “likely” that other viruses with this cleavage site will be found? What? How likely? 1 in 10? 1 in 10 million? Is it likely that if my aunt grew balls she’d become my uncle? Is it “likely” that a natural intermediate animal vector will be found? Well… likely or not, until it happens it seems incredibly disingenuous to state that “likely” means a damn thing here.

The functional consequence of the polybasic cleavage site in SARS-CoV-2 is unknown, and it will be important to determine its impact on transmissibility and pathogenesis in animal models. Experiments with SARS-CoV have shown that insertion of a furin cleavage site at the S1–S2 junction enhances cell–cell fusion without affecting viral entry.14

• This doesn’t seem to address the virus’s provenance at all, but just as an aside it seems like a lot of the viruses with furin cleavage sites engage in ADE, which COVID-19 appears to be doing from a clinical perspective: neurological damage, the second infection is worse, and areas like Wuhan with extended infections have much higher CFRs as infections overlap.

The acquisition of polybasic cleavage sites by HA has also been observed after repeated passage in cell culture or through animals.17

• Exactly. Passage through a series of ferret hosts in a lab may have given COVID-19 this distinct cleavage site, if it wasn’t simply spliced directly in. Further support for possibility that serial passage through lab animals played a role in the creation of COVID-19 comes from an April 2020 pre-print, which found that coronaviruses that target the ACE2 receptor bind with ferrets cells more tightly than any other species except the tree shrew, which only scored about 2% higher. Tree shrews have also been used for serial viral passage, and were promoted in a 2018 paper out of China as a preferable host for laboratory serial passage since they’re cheaper, smaller, easier to handle, and closer to humans evolutionarily and physiologically than ferrets.  Pangolins however, formed a much weaker bond than either, and were clustered way down on the list along with a handful of other much more unlikely intermediate animal hosts.

It is improbable that SARS-CoV-2 emerged through laboratory manipulation of a related SARS-CoV-like coronavirus. As noted above, the RBD of SARS-CoV-2 is optimized for binding to human ACE2 with an efficient solution different from those previously predicted.7,11.

• Yes, again we aren’t arguing that this thing was built nucleotide-by-nucleotide as the perfect bespoke bio-weapon. This efficient solution is exactly the kind of thing that would be selected for after passage through animals in lab, which was already done to the Bird Flu that created a horrifically virulent strain. Isn’t it funny that no one’s mentioning that experiment? Or Baric’s work at UNC? How come every single public-facing virologist seems to be leaving these studies out? Are they really unaware of them? That seems exceedingly hard to believe when I was able to find them on the front page of a single google search. Seems a lot more likely everyone’s just covering each other’s asses since they realize the magnitude of what’s happening and how deep into the cover-up they already are.

Furthermore, if genetic manipulation had been performed, one of the several reverse-genetic systems available for betacoronaviruses would probably have been used.19

• This is an utterly vacuous statement. Probably doesn’t mean a damn thing in science. “Okay folks, we probably won’t get an earthquake anytime soon, so no reason to prepare for one or try and detect one coming!” Seriously?

Instead, we propose two scenarios that can plausibly explain the origin of SARS-CoV-2: (i) natural selection in an animal host before zoonotic transfer; and (ii) natural selection in humans following zoonotic transfer.

• As we’ve explained before, there was no trace of this virus before November 2019, and full zoonotic jumps don’t just magically happen, especially not of a virus that’s so incredibly adapted to humans and able to infect us undetected and spread undetected, and then kill us after more than enough time has passed to find multiple new hosts. It’s funny so many virologists are throwing out the book of how zoonotic jumps happen… all that money in dual-use gain-of-function research must be quite blinding. Kind of amazing they don’t care how many thousands of people are dying. As far as the intermediate animal host goes: It might as well be a unicorn at this point. Until someone finds it, it’s just conjecture.

Malayan pangolins (Manis javanica) illegally imported into Guangdong province contain coronaviruses similar to SARS-CoV-2.21 Although the RaTG13 bat virus remains the closest to SARS-CoV-2 across the genome1, some pangolin coronaviruses exhibit strong similarity to SARS-CoV-2 in the RBD, including all six key RBD residues.21 (Fig. 1). This clearly shows that the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein optimized for binding to human-like ACE2 is the result of natural selection.

• The most recent study, covered in our article, that examines the neutral sites that are assumed to best show heritage found that pangolins are “very unlikely” to have served as a host at all. Their assertion that natural natural selection is clearly shown is raw steamy bullshit. Serial passage through ferrets or tree shrews fits the overall big picture far better than this pangolin crap.

For a precursor virus to acquire both the polybasic cleavage site and mutations in the spike protein suitable for binding to human ACE2, an animal host would probably have to have a high population density (to allow natural selection to proceed efficiently) and an ACE2-encoding gene that is similar to the human ortholog.

• WAIT WAIT WAIT!! You mean exactly like a bunch of ferrets or tree shrews, both of which have the same ACE2 receptor as humans, all jammed into a bunch of cages together and then infected over and over again in a lab?! That’s crazy talk!! Other than the fact it was exactly the process used to make the Bird Flu into something that “could make the 1918 pandemic look like a pesky cold.”

It is possible that a progenitor of SARS-CoV-2 jumped into humans, acquiring the genomic features described above through adaptation during undetected human-to-human transmission. Once acquired, these adaptations would enable the pandemic to take off and produce a sufficiently large cluster of cases to trigger the surveillance system that detected it.1,2

Hence, this scenario presumes a period of unrecognized transmission in humans between the initial zoonotic event and the acquisition of the polybasic cleavage site. Sufficient opportunity could have arisen if there had been many prior zoonotic events that produced short chains of human-to-human transmission over an extended period.

• Sure this would be plausible… other than the fact that, as we cover in our report, that statistical analysis shows that this thing didn’t hit humans until November of 2019, which this article agrees with. But zoonotic jumps only occur after a genomic trial-and-error process where the virus jumps to one host, spreads to a few new hosts, and then fizzles out. There is absolutely no evidence anywhere of this occurring. Every single data points to this thing hitting humans in November and being immediately adapted and dangerous. There is no trace whatsoever of it creating small clusters of infections and dying out – stating there could have been doesn’t mean it’s been seen. It hasn’t. And as our report covers, this would require sustained interaction with the intermediate host – how does that happen in the middle of a massive modern urban metropolis the size of NYC? And where is this intermediate host anyways? If an intermediate host isn’t needed, is it some magical sleep-flying bat that decided not to hibernate and fight crime in Wuhan when its buddies were all hibernating, creating the sustained interactions with humans as it fought for Justice? Because that’s about as plausible as what’s being proposed here.

The presence in pangolins of an RBD very similar to that of SARS-CoV-2 means that we can infer this was also probably in the virus that jumped to humans.

• Again, analysis of the neutral sites shows that pangolins were almost certainly not in play.

Furthermore, a hypothetical generation of SARS-CoV-2 by cell culture or animal passage would have required prior isolation of a progenitor virus with very high genetic similarity, which has not been described

• This means nothing. There is no open-source shared database of viruses. No one has any idea what viruses are in China’s BSL-4 lab, where they’ve been collecting these viruses for years. As mentioned, one of our persons-of-interest was the very first person to isolate a coronavirus from a bat that uses the ACE2 receptor. He also worked at UNC in Baric’s lab making the hyper-virulent bat coronavirus in 2015. It should also be noted that several years prior to tinkering directly with bat coronavirus spike-proteins, Baric orchestrated research that involved isolating a coronavirus from civets and then passing it through mammalian ACE2 receptor cells that were grown in the lab from kidney and brain samples – serial passage through host cell lines instead of entire hosts, which imparted a strong affinity for ACE2, and presumably created an airborne strain of coronavirus. And if cells derived from kidneys and brains were used for the serial passage development of COVID-19, that might help explain its affinity for attacking the kidneys and brains of its human hosts.

Subsequent generation of a polybasic cleavage site would have then required repeated passage in cell culture or animals with ACE2 receptors similar to those of humans, but such work has also not previously been described.

• The fuck it hasn’t.

Retrospective serological studies could also be informative, and a few such studies have been conducted showing low-level exposures to SARS-CoV-like coronaviruses in certain areas of China.26 Further serological studies should be conducted to determine the extent of prior human exposure to SARS-CoV-2.

• Beyond the statistical analysis that indicates it only hit humans in November in 2019, is the fact that the version of COVID-19 found in the first few dozen hosts was exactly the same – there aren’t any variants whatsoever, just one version. This is not what would be found with the genomic trial-and-error of a full zoonotic jump, which requires sustained human-to-human transmission as different variants of the virus try and fail to adapt to human biology. Here, only one variant was found in all the initial infected humans, instead of the multiple variants that would be expected. But does fit what would happen if a virus that already had high affinity to the ACE2 receptor, which is the comparable in humans, ferrets, and tree shrews, leaked out of a lab. But addressing this point in particular, oh weird, the study they cite from March of 2018 was done mostly on people who live in villages barely a kilometer away from bat caves. A far cry from a massive urban city bout the size of NYC. Oh, and how many of these villagers, who live about a kilometer or less from bat caves, had antibodies indicating exposure to bat coronaviruses? Two-point-seven percent. (There is hand-waving about how long antibodies persist in humans, but I’m pretty sure it’s more than long enough.) That study actually sampled people living in Wuhan too and found… no evidence whatsoever of exposure to “SARS-CoV-like coronaviruses.”  So are these peer-reviewers just straight chugging lead paint, or are they on the take too?

The finding of SARS-CoV-like coronaviruses from pangolins with nearly identical RBDs, however, provides a much stronger and more parsimonious explanation of how SARS-CoV-2 acquired these via recombination or mutation.1

• Again, just demonstrably false.

Get the real story here.

Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic:

In late January of 2020 one of my son’s childhood friends, Jason Shell, passed our original whitepaper covering the likely laboratory engineered origins of this pandemic on to the National Security Council. At the time I understood that Jason was the Director of National Intelligence Programs, a rather prestigious title that we knew came with a fair amount of influence, as both my son formerly held TS/SCI clearance while working as a counterterrorism analyst for the NSA, and I previously held a Q clearance. That whitepaper formed the basis of the first peer-reviewed examination of a lab origin for this pandemic, Might SARS-CoV-2 Have Arisen via Serial Passage through an Animal Hose or Cell Culture? which passed peer-review and was published in August 2020, you can find it enclosed. 

Now Jason might have seemed to be going out on a bit of limb since despite his background within the Intelligence Community, my son doesn’t have a formal scientific background. But Jason had very good reason to believe that our arguments were scientifically sound, since he’s known our family since second-grade and he had some idea of my resume, which I’ll summarize below:

Dr. Karl Sirotkin is a 40-year PhD in Microbiology and the architect of dbSNP, and the original databases behind NLM’s GenBank, with nearly 20 years of molecular wet-work experience. He previously taught molecular virology at the University of Tennessee, and worked within the Theoretical Biology Division of the Los Alamos National Laboratory on GenBank when it was managed there, as a component of the Human Genome Project. At the time of his retirement from government service, Dr. Sirotkin had more years working for GenBank than any other staff member - with his 28 years of service on the world’s premiere DNA sequencing database making him one of the most experienced scientists on the planet when it comes to managing and understanding genomic sequences.

We have had absolutely no contact from Jason at all since passing our whitepaper along. This Committee has previously taken testimony from journalists and academics without a single peer-reviewed piece covering a lab origin for this pandemic to their name - we’ve written the first two pieces covering that possibility, after first drawing the NSC’s attention to the possibility in January 2020, why have we been ignored? Have you been listening to academics without anything approaching my experience and background, who have obvious conflicts of interest around funding and research, while pretending our research doesn’t exist at all? 

My son and I are US Citizens, one of whom previously held TS/SCI clearance, the other a Q clearance - why is this Committee seeking the testimony of compromised foreign nationals and scientists with millions of dollars of funding on the line while ignoring us? 

Oddly, Jason was soundly demoted to “Requirements Officer” in August of 2020 right after that peer-reviewed paper was published, but even more oddly, shortly after publication we were contacted by a team including former Secretary of the Navy, Richard Danzig, and Mrs. Gigi Kwik-Gronvell, who’s made extensive public comments about the origins of this pandemic. They emailed us since they noticed we’d missed a citation in our paper. 

Danzig and Kwik-Gronvell contacted us because in the process of compiling our endnotes my son accidentally elided one of the citations around the outbreak of H1N1 in 1977, which made our claim that that virus had in fact been engineered very questionable. So we passed them the paper we’d left out, which did in fact demonstrate that the H1N1 virus of 1977 had in fact been engineered, almost certainly via serial passage given the technology available at the time. Their criticizing our work, as above and in other contexts, is a perfect example of policy folks who do not really have significant biology background in laboratory work and bioinformatics pontificating on a field, and even demeaning those with much more experience. That he bothered to contact us and then Danzig had no interest in any follow up discussion of the science, seems rather odd to me. Excerpts from those emails are within the enclosed article, “The DARPA-taped Letters.”

As we explain our second peer-reviewed paper, a correction to our original which addressed this missing citation and is also enclosed, serial passage is somewhat of an umbrella term that covers multiple different processes. However one of its strongest ties is to the development of live-attenuated vaccines (LAVs), since they are passaged through animals on the way to making a virus weakened enough that it can serve as a vaccine.  However, they can also be used to promote gain of function, depending on the details, as was done with influenza virus and led to the discussion of gain of function virology back in 2012.  

And the animal most commonly used to make these LAVs is a species of ferret that is an overlapping species with the farmed mink that SARS-CoV-2 also exploded through during the genesis of this pandemic, as we point out in our first peer-reviewed paper under the subheading Ferreting out the signs of serial passage. But perhaps the oddest part of all this is that Richard Danzig spent much of 2019 writing whitepapers alongside our esteemed Director of National Intelligence, Avril Haines, arguing for more technological and personnel cooperation with China. All of whom are tied together by WestExec, which seems to have parasitized the Executive Branch, and who David Asher would’ve ultimately been reporting to since he was empowered by Tony Blinken, who’s yet another WestExec alum.

So if the sitting Director of National Intelligence has one of her very recent co-authors reaching out to us, why is it that the certain officials of the United States Government seem to be intent on burying all of our work and acting like none of it exists at all? 

The only explanation that makes even the slightest bit of sense is that elements within the US Government are very intently seeking to bury any mention of “serial passage” which was highlighted in our peer-reviewed paper - and yet our paper and the term “serial passage” is never mentioned once in any government report. That is, except within the FOIAed emails from Tony Fauci et. al. in the early months of 2020, which reveal “serial passage” was extensively discussed in multiple places before being buried:

And finally, words from Dr. Ron Fouchier, of 2012 serial passage infamy:

I imagine some of this Committee are aware, both of my son’s writings on his Substack as well as his unsavory criminal background, since David Asher explicitly told my son that he was not welcome into the discussions around a lab origin because his charges “gave people the creeps.” That email is also included below, since it was one of the most vile and baffling communications I’ve ever heard of in my life, and it’s helped condemn countless millions of innocent lives to horrific deaths. 

And as my son has pointed-out, the entire “giving people the creeps” story seems more like a smokescreen for ignoring our original peer-reviewed article about serial passage and its ties to live-attenuated vaccines, and instead dangling some unseeable “classified” paper from Lawrence Livermore Laboratories, that for some reason no one can see. What possible sources or methods from the Intelligence Community could possibly be involved in a scientific paper about the origins of a pandemic that could justify its censorship?

Finally, David Asher told me that my son’s paper was very useful and that my son would get credit at the right time when discussions of the laboratory origin were open. But it’s become abundantly clear that neither David Asher, Jamie Metzl, Alina Chan, Matt Ridley, Richard Ebright nor anyone else feeding quotes and information to government officials and the legacy media have any intention at all of behaving with the slightest shred of ethics, and are all determined to bury the truth my son uncovered two years ago: This pandemic began with a live-attenuated vaccine-trial gone-wrong. 

The unethical behavior from this cabal pretending to look into a lab leak is entirely consistent with the names in the paragraph above being part of the controlled opposition meant to pretend to look into the truth, while really intending to help bury it. Nothing has stunned and disgusted me as a scientist more than when Chan and Ridley attempted to bribe Rossana Segrteo to have me and my son removed from a scientific paper we were co-authoring:

For over two years my son has been arguing that this pandemic began when a live-attenuated vaccine distributed shortly before the Wuhan Military Games reverted faster than expected, which is also an accepted theory for how the H1N1 outbreak in 1977 began. And although the exact mechanisms around that reversion fifty years ago remain unknown, my son has provided a viable explanation for exactly how this reversion accelerated out-of-control. 

Back in 2012 two teams of scientists subjected the avian flu virus, H5N1, to highly mutagenic processes that created any number of mutations within its genome, and then allowed this mutated virus to have the chance to jump between ferrets. And in both cases, the virus quickly became airborne and jumped between ferret cages. Examining the virus samples that managed to make this airborne journey, both teams found that it was a furin-cleavage site (FCS) that seemed to grant the ability for airborne transmission. 

One of these teams was led by Dr. Ron Fouchier, who made a rather remarkable statement during a conference back in July of 2019, during the European Congress of Virology in Rotterdam, which is available on YouTube under the title “TWiV 557: Congress in Rotterdam” at 23:00 on the playback:

“That’s what happened in the 70s, people were trying to do live-attenuated vaccines and doing human challenge studies and that might be the way the H1 re-emerged in the 70s. Some people say it was a lab accident. I don’t believe that. I think it was actually human challenge studies and live-attenuated vaccines that reverted that are the likely candidates of the 1970 reemergence of H1. And we need to make sure that doesn’t happen again.”

Before giving their mutated H5N1 viruses the chance to jump in the air between caged ferrets, the FCS was hidden and invisible. They had no idea it was there at all because it was only present in an infinitesimally small and so hidden number of samples, until the evolutionary challenge of jumping in the air to a new host was presented, at which point the minute numbers of samples with an FCS were the only ones able to make the airborne trip, and so they quickly proliferated within new hosts after making the airborne trip. 

In the exact same way, scientists trying to attenuate an engineered and mutated chimeric virus via serial passage through ferrets in the attempt to make a live-attenuated vaccine would also want a vaccine-candidate virus without its FCS. However as the enclosed article A Grin Without a Cat explains, virology is far too messy for viruses with stable and unchanging genomes to be isolated in modern scientific settings, and a single genomic sequence does not represent clinical reality for either individuals or populations in any case. 

That’s why the gain-of-function serial passage experiments of 2012 were so startling, the FCS appeared out-of-nowhere and so scientists didn’t know how to prevent it from happening in the first place. And so as my son points out, perhaps it’s more than a coincidence that the only place on earth publicly working on live-attenuated vaccines for SARS-like viruses was Baric’s lab at UNC, with all of its ties to Wuhan. 

Ties that point directly to the collaborative work between Baric’s lab and viral research at the WIV, which of course would’ve been passed along to the PLA’s facilities all throughout China. Collaboration that points directly back to WestExec and its extensive ties to the Chinese government, and WestExec’s current proliferation throughout the Executive Branch, since Biden’s White House has become a satellite office for that lobbying firm. As my son has been explaining for over two years, the overlap between the Wuhan Military Games and Event 201 is the furthest thing from a coincidence, since the overcrowding and poor sanitation of the 250,000 volunteers brought in for the Wuhan Military Games would’ve created the same poor sanitation that’s the spark for other LAVs such as OPV to revert back to virulence - something that typically only happens where there’s third-world sanitation since feces are the most potent vector for viral transmission. 

So the conspiracy to limit any discussion of the likely laboratory origin of COVID19 to an “accident” combined with the above makes it seem that there is either traitorous collaboration with Chinese elements, or at least fear of mutually assured reputational destruction. It seems that at least some officials in both America and China know exactly how this pandemic started because both nations were involved with the research on coronaviruses at the Wuhan labs, and quite possibly the creation of a live-attenuated vaccine that they collaborated on testing. America provided the technological underpinnings, and the PLA spun it out into their novel LAV, which would be rather easy to test on their captive Uighur population - just another example of how captive populations have been used for medical experimentation all the way back to the Nazis.

Daniel, who has studied geopolitics way more than I have, is convinced that nothing will change until our Pacific fleet is devastated by a surprise attack likely spearheaded by the North Koreans, which will give the CCP a bit of strategic plausible deniability, and begin their seizure of Taiwan and America being pushed back out of Guam and Diego Garcia at least to Hawaii.  

I certainly hope he’s wrong, because if that’s what it takes for the truth to come out, given my rather limited understanding of history, what happens next is going to make titles and fancy offices utterly meaningless. Those in charge of media influence and spinning the reaction to COVID were very explicitly warned, many many times, and yet had no interest in the truth. It seems that those burying our reports were only interested in only securing the next round of funding and playing nice with billionaire donors like Bill Gates, who also - oddly enough - have lots of ties to China and vaccine development, and appear to have a stranglehold on the media and most of your pocketbooks. 

My son will be publishing this entire letter on his Substack shortly after it’s sent out in the mail just so there’s never any public confusion about how hard we tried to work with this Committee and the rest of our government. Eventually those responsible for this pandemic will have to answer for what they’ve done, and then there will be a reckoning that will seek to understand why so many millions of innocents had to die, when I helped my son tell the world exactly what was happening over two years ago, after we were the first to cover a lab origin both journalistically and academically.

The triumph of Evil is right at our doorsteps, are each and every one of you really going to continue to do nothing?

X____________________________

 Dr. Karl Sirotkin

Maybe the only thing less surprising than finding out that Tony Fauci, Jeremy Farrar, Kristian Andersen, Edward Holmes, and Ron Fouchier were extensively discussing serial passage as the most likely engineering technique used to create SARS-CoV-2 right at the outset of this pandemic, has been the fact that nobody in the corporate or pseudo-independent media has explored the implications of this technique being used in any way at all in the weeks since it was revealed.

For nearly three years now, I’ve been ignored and plagiarized by the corporate media, and almost entirely ignored by everyone else. 

Not one single person, calling themselves a “journalist” as they watch tens of millions of people die all around them, has expressed any interest at all in discussing anything that I’ve written. Actually that’s not true, interest was expressed by all of the following folks with very large voices, all of whom went on to subsequently ignore and often plagiarize my work: 

William J. Broad - New York Times

John Mecklin and Nicholson Wade - Bulletin of Atomic Scientists

Nicholson Baker - New York Magazine

Drew Hernandez - CNN

Josh Rogin - The Washington Post

Gary Ruskin - USRTK

David Malone - UK Channel 4

Each and every one of you useless, dorky fucking assholes has either spoken with me directly, or cited my work inside your publications and then gone on to act like you don’t need to further cite them each and every time you pull from them. You do, that’s the basis of journalistic integrity, you lazy, idiotic, useless, cock-gargling, fucking fools. 

How much death does it take for any of you to discover ethics? 

Apparently there’s no answer to that, but here’s exactly what each and every one of you does need: To experience pain that you think is utterly limitless and will never stop, and to feel like your soul is drowning beneath a violence that will never end. 

Of course I mean that completely and entirely metaphorically, I’m not really saying that your role in perpetuating this unending wave of death and suffering means that you should literally be tortured to death by an angry mob with nothing on their minds but vengeance - only that your moral and intellectual bankruptcy is a direct result of the soft and easy lives each and every one of you has led. 

There’s a very profound difference between athletic and academic endeavors, probably no better captured than by how each field approaches dealing with the people who trained you. 

After discovering Canadian box lacrosse on a random cable-access channel and then finding out that field lacrosse was the only option in Maryland, and after realizing that as far as making a Varsity team went that I was way too fat and slow for soccer and too fat, slow, and short for basketball - I figured I saw a viable option within the little brother of warfare. I was generally more violent than those sports allowed, so lacrosse seemed to be a happy medium between running and beating people with a stick, but unluckily for my chonky fat ass - I wasn’t really fast enough to start on the high school lacrosse field either. 

If it hadn’t been for facing-off. 

Unlike hockey, where the puck drop happens in an instant, in lacrosse to start each quarter and after every goal, one player from each team would crouch down and fight for the ball like rabid seagulls after the last cracker at the ref’s whistle. Now here, here it didn’t matter how fast you’d been born or how long you’d been playing the sport - your stick started completely on the ground and literally backwards, this was completely and entirely about want to. 

But not just in the moment, it wasn’t enough to be determined and indomitable for those few moments fighting for the ball, the will to win begins with the will to prepare to win. So after touching the ball for maybe two entire minutes and failing to record a single assist or goal throughout my two years of middle school lacrosse at MVSA - incubator to all legendary lacrosse players - shortly before my freshman year of high school, I read online that wrestling gave face-off lacrosse guys a massive advantage, and I knew I’d found the next step. 

Luckily for me, the wrestling team was already training during my freshman JV football season, running literal circles around the bottom floor of our high school - very conveniently arranged into a circular shape that allowed athletes to have an indoor track with lots of very sharp turns. And so it wasn’t hard to find out about the team, and what I might be in for. 

Which is, as they say, a very long story. But after an uneventful freshman year wrestling, highlighted by our eventual state champ brandishing his mottled scrotum in my face and asking if I’d like some gum with hair in it, my sophomore year a new coaching staff showed up: Joe Hawkins and Coach Kim. Both in their mid-twenties and buddies since high school, alongside my wrestling partner, the late, great Greg Fisher, I got to experience something so much better than a storybook. 

Disney movies are fun for a few hours, but imagine sinking countless exhausted evenings at the gym alongside the best friend you’d ever have, and then suddenly those evenings merge into months and years, then in an instant you get to send him out onto the mat against a returning state qualifier two grades ahead of him, tasked by your coaches to get him ready for battle - pressing your foreheads together to scream into his eyes: YOU WIN, WE WIN!!

It was Fish’s first big Varsity match as a sophomore, and knowing I was about to wrestle some absolute turd who’d I was sure to pin and that our heavyweight would be a coin-flip, it was up to Fish to put the match away. And he did, pulling off the improbable victory as time ran out, and shocking everyone in the gym except me. 

Because by then I’d spent enough time watching him train in the gym, and then taking turns kicking his ass or getting my ass kicked in the wrestling room, depending on who was more tired at any particular moment. However when Fish won that huge match, vanquishing a foe two years his senior, neither of us had yet slayed each and every wrestler’s ultimate dragon: Scoring a takedown on one of our coaches. 

Unfortunately for Fred Kim, who’d had both his Achilles tendons severed when a forty-year old weight machine went tumbling over, snapping its cable which whipped across his heels and sliced away his ability to walk six months before the wrestling season, he went down first. But to be fair he hadn’t actually wrestled in college, just high school, and I was like 20 pounds bigger than him. 

So taking him down was a notch in my belt. But it wasn’t what I’d been training for. 

Now Farmer Joe, he’d wrestled at Old Dominion University, and been a state champ at the high school next door, and throughout my sophomore year when he first showed up trying to take him down felt like trying to fight my dad as a toddler. And so it would be many, many months of sweaty ass-whoopings in the wrestling room before I even sniffed grabbing his leg, nonetheless taking him all the way down to the ground. So it took awhile, right before the road to States would begin at the County Tournament a year later during my junior year, after well-over a year of trying - I finally got that takedown on Coach Joe Hawkins, a proud farmer who wasn’t too proud to make sure his athlete had a little confidence boost before the County tournament. 

Because although after I graduated Harvard and came back to work alongside him, he’d swear that takedown was legitimate - I never bought it. 

Since there’s an extraordinarily important and fundamental difference between training an athlete and training an academic, one that the fate of the entire world arguably hinges on. Training an athlete is about conflict, they’re going out to fight with an opponent, so as a coach it’s your job to prepare them for every possible occurrence that might get between them and victory. Coach Hawkins didn’t even have his right ACL anymore, but instead of getting surgery or worrying about his future mobility, he gritted his teeth and spent each and every single day on the mats with me and Fish, helping us chase our impossible dreams.

As a coach, as soon as you can, you teach your athletes each and every unlikely way things can go wrong, all of the possible adversity they might face as they stretch out to embrace their destiny - then as a coach, it’s your job to mimic that adversity in practice. Coaching an athlete in a combat sport is about kicking their ass as much as possible, preferably with your own hands, and hoping the day comes when they’ve got your number, and you have nothing left to give them. 

That’s your job as a coach, to lose, to be surpassed and eclipsed and bettered by someone, because you imparted everything you knew - dirty tricks and all - with the hope they’d use all you had to give on their way to victory against you. 

This dynamic stands in direct opposition to the academic world. 

Unluckily for me, I got to Harvard in the wake of a massive grade inflation scandal, or at least massive as far as the Boston Globe went, since I had no idea at all when I got there. But it turns out that when you take a bunch of students with SAT scores around 1500/1600, it becomes really hard to give anyone anything less than A. Since everyone’s really smart, and they all do good work. 

But as our teaching fellows, Harvard’s bougie name for teaching assistants, explained to us my freshman year, in each reading section of about a dozen students, there’d be one A, one A-minus, and then everything else would be a B or lower. At that point I was on a full-ride from the NSA and just needed to keep a 3.0 for my scholarship, so I didn’t really care all that much at all beyond pride. 

However throughout my time at Harvard an important dynamic would play out: The students that got each A and A- weren’t doing anything different than their classmates beyond brown-nosing way more effectively. Unfortunately for my GPA it took until my sophomore spring until I realized that none of my professors were actually reading my papers or the essays I wrote during finals, instead they were being read by these teaching fellows, almost none of whom were really in no place at all to teach us anything since they were just a couple of years removed from where we were as students - not professors with decades of experience. 

But unlike the world of athletics, the academic world isn’t even vaguely a meritocracy. 

There’s very rarely any sort of demonstrated excellence, and in fact Scientific revolutions progress one death at a time largely because of this dynamic: Students are never, ever encouraged to challenge or defeat their teachers - Instead they’re trained to mindless stick their noses as far into their tangy bungholes as they possibly can. 

Because that’s what gets you that A, or the internship, or the overly flattering reference letter that gets you the job you don’t really have the merit for. Looking at you, every single paid “journalist” working for any corporate entity at all in America. 

And so the world has spent generations and generations in the ignorant mindless agreement of sissy scientists and academics who only ever learned how to snorkel way up inside their supervisors’ buttholes with their noses. But as one of the wisest men ever warned: The state which separates its scholars from its warriors, will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting done by fools.

And so as the Wuhan Strain of Coronavirus emerged in the winter of 2019, humanity was in for a very bad time. Because the decisions, those decisions would very much be made by cowards, and no fighting would happen at all because of those fools. America would decide to lay back, spread wide open like a Kardashian at Cannes, and let a reverting live-attenuated vaccine designed and distributed by China’s PLA infect nearly every citizen alive.

Because Tony Fauci and Jeremy Farrar, the latter being the WHO’s new Chief Scientist, consulted with Ron Fouchier and decided to perpetuate the cover-up that began with HIV, and occlude the origins of yet another live-attenuated vaccine (LAV) that reverted unexpectedly.  

After all, as the worst war criminals humanity will ever know are well-aware, live-attenuated vaccines can revert without too much trouble, as Ron Fouchier himself would explain in July 2019:

“That’s what happened in the 70s, people were trying to do live-attenuated vaccines and doing human challenge studies and that might be the way the H1 re-emerged in the 70s. Some people say it was a lab accident. I don’t believe that. I think it was actually human challenge studies and live-attenuated vaccines that reverted that are the likely candidates of the 1970 reemergence of H1. And we need to make sure that doesn’t happen again.”

However H1N1 is the highly-pathogenic state of human influenza, it is not an alien virus - it is completely and entirely adapted to our genome and has been with us for thousands of years. H1N1 doesn’t create a pandemic by simply by existing in a population, it is the strain that wins out and emerges once there’s enough crowding and transmission events to trick human influenza into thinking that its host population is about to die off completely, and so it goes into a highly-pathogenic state in an attempt to jump into a new host species, in its case from humans and into pigs.  

This is the exact same dynamic that plays out on poultry farms, as in those industrially crowded conditions the same dynamic emerges, and highly-pathogenic avian influenzas will begin to jump into the human workers who are in close and continuous contact with diseased flocks.

So it’s almost certainly the past reversions of H1N1 LAVs in 1977 and 2009 that seemed to eventually just melt away, which sociopaths like Richard Ebright and the rest of his sweaty socially-retarded buddies at JASON are using to assure everyone that SARS-CoV-2, another LAV that’s reverting, will just melt away in just a few more months - just like H1N1 seems to have done twice. And since SARS and MERS, artificial coronavirus chimeras that got out before deattenuation all the way down into LAVs, went away on their own - they think all signs point to that happening again.

Unfortunately, unlike their mythical buddy: Each and everyone one of these arrogant old hacks was drawn into the siren song of multi-billion dollar defense and pharmaceutical contracts long ago, and they’re going to remain pushing for a fascist and entirely ineffective vaccination program because they’re rotten, filthy, diseased whores, and that is exactly what they are being paid to do. 

Our novel coronavirus is not a naturally spreading and evolving virus, and it has not become endogenous to human populations after thousands of years of coevolution - it is reverting back towards a highly-pathogenic SARS-like chimera that our immune systems will be entirely helpless against, and is going through the same unexpected epistatic gatekeeping mutations that OPV does on its way back to full virulence as a VDPV, which vaccines are also entirely helpless against

In the case of SARS-CoV-2, this gatekeeping results in the sudden emergence of new strains that appear evolutionarily impossible - like Omicron.  And so long as transmission is ongoing, there is nothing that is going to stop this pandemic except more death, because transmission means more gatekeeping, and gatekeeping means continued steps closer to the original strongest version of this artificial highly-pathogenic virus. 

Being completely and entirely acclimated to the human genome is not at all the case with OPV, a LAV against the Polio virus that’s reverting into VDPV all across the third world and bringing back Polio’s terrible paralytic poliomyelitis. So OPV serves as a much more accurate analogy for SARS-CoV-2 than the H1N1 LAVs.

Our novel coronavirus is a LAV derived from the work being done at UNC, the only place on earth trying to make a LAV for SARS-like viruses, which are also obviously not going to be fully acclimated to the human genome like the human influenza virus, which seems to have been with us at least since the Trojan War thousands of years ago. 

Until SARS-CoV-2 is understood as a LAV that’s deattenuating towards a highly-pathogenic chimeric coronavirus that’s going through gatekeeping mutations and has no intention whatsoever of following the assumptions drawn from observing natural evolution or even the paths of the H1N1 LAVs which melted back into their original endogenous human hosts - humanity is going to continue to be standing on its head as it attempts to battle this pandemic, and misunderstanding the basic fundamental nature of what its up against. 

And the absolute worst part, is that all of this was totally avoidable and exposed just about in real time as it happened. Because what happened just two days after the absurdly flawed Proximal Origins paper came out back in February 2020? I responded with a takedown that entirely dissembled their paper, mostly using serial passage to poke holes in their absurd arguments. 

Then just a couple months later in April, with my dad’s help to polish the science, we submitted the paper that would pass peer-review and then get published in August 2020, outlining in very specific terms why serial passage could explain all of the anomalies. 

However maybe you’re new here and serial passage seems like somewhat of an esoteric term. So before looking at the newly FOIAed emails, here’s the explanation from our second peer-reviewed paper:

In the context of attenuating a potential vaccine candidate, serial passage refers to the process of allowing the natural and expected mutations that diminish a virus's virulence to occur—although in the unnatural setting of cell cultures, where recombination and other mutations are more likely—as it becomes acclimated to a new host species’ cells, which will have different receptor and backbone requirements than its original host. Once this initial adaptation occurs, initially yielding mutations that can either increase pathogenicity in the new host or be deleterious to it, additional “passages” in the form of the virus naturally passing among new hosts will then slowly lead to a natural attenuation of the virus relative to its old host. This is why passaging can be used to attenuate and weaken a virus in the effort to create vaccine candidates that will elicit immune responses, but less serious infections.

The other nominally related approach is serial passage through entire live hosts in a lab, which leads to a zoonosis that closely mirrors the natural process since the primary unnatural factor is logistical and not biochemical—simply host proximity and population density. This kind of forced zoonosis is not known to leave any signature other than an affinity for its original host; however, serial passage through cellular hosts that lack complete immune systems may leave its own signatures, because this type of passage simply cannot happen in nature. Natural zoonosis means passing the challenges naturally posed by the immune system of a new host species; however, cellular serial passage can bypass these processes and create unique phenomena, possibly like SARS-CoV-2's flat and non-sunken surface of its sialic acid-binding domain, which contrasts with the typical canyon observed in every single other ever observed coronavirus, as well as a lack of non-synonymous substitutions in its RBD, which would be expected to accumulate at some point during a virus's natural evoluation due to challenges from a novel host's complete immune system, but which would not be selected for and then observed to occur at the same frequency during cellular serial passage or during the few generations of whole host passaging required to establish airborne transmission.[2]

It gets a bit wonky at the end there, but the take-away is that even taking serial passage’s pseudo-natural nature into account - there’s a molecular signature of SARS-CoV-2 that indicates that its artificial. 

So with that in mind, maybe you can figure out why this entire section from the early drafts of Proximal Origins revealed in the newly FOIAed emails between Fauci and friends got removed?

Clearly, as Tony Fauci and friends were discussing at length in February 2020, the process of serial passage does in fact explain much of our friendly neighborhood novel coronavirus’s distinctive genome, as the godfather of the 2012 gain-of-function serial passage experiments with influenza and ferrets which also yielded an FCS, Ron Fouchier, who just mentioned that he thought the H1N1 outbreak was from a LAV, noted in those FOIAed emails:

If you’re familiar with our peer-reviewed papers, that will sound really familiar:

Several factors weigh into the probability that coronaviruses can gain furin cleavage sites following serial passage: The frequency of evolutionary motifs meant to deal with virus–host interactions that are often shared between viruses, the observations that when the infectious bronchitis coronavirus (IBV) coronavirus is serially passed through chickens it developed notable mutations along its spike‐protein genes,[ 21 ] and the fact that when a lineage A bovine coronavirus was subject to in vitro serial passage through cell lines, a 12‐nucleotide insert found within only a small minority of the pooled viruses spike‐protein region was strongly selected for and quickly emerged as the dominate strain.[ 22 ] These findings all point to the possibility that SARS‐CoV‐2 may have gained its furin cleavage site the same way influenza viruses do—through the in vivo serial passage between the live hosts that presents the immune challenges and intense selective pressure necessary for the recombination and mutations that lead to its emergence to occur.

SARS‐CoV‐2 has a remarkably strong affinity for spike‐protein binding to ACE2—some 10–20 times higher than SARS‐CoV's.[ 18 ] That affinity may have emerged after mutational events either in an intermediate natural host or after a zoonotic jump into humans that theoretically could have occurred earlier than the first documented infection, which would give it time to increase that significantly. So logically, it could also have emerged via selection after serial passage through laboratory cell cultures or laboratory animals as well.

Although it does not prove a laboratory origin, another gain‐of‐function experiment demonstrates one possible step along the way to engineering SARS‐CoV‐2: the synthetic reconstruction of the SARS coronavirus to impart this virus with a high affinity for ACE2. This involved isolating a progenitor coronavirus from civets and then serially passing it through mammalian ACE2 receptor‐expressing cells—serial passage through host cell lines instead of entire hosts, which imparted a strong affinity for ACE2,[ 35 ] and another novel strain of coronavirus that was also presumably airborne.

Seems a bit uncanny, right? Within those emails, Fouchier also asserts that betacoronaviruses can obtain an FCS from serial passage, something that elicits a lot of surprise from the WHO’s new Chief Scientist, Jeremy Farrar since it hadn’t been published yet:

“It’s what shifted me to thinking that the insert of the furin site is the result of cell culture passage (or less likely intense transmission in a non[-]bat host. Really need to see the data from Ron about generating the furin cleavage site on in vitro passage. Really!

Bottom line - I think if you put selection pressure on a Cov without a furin cleavage site in cell culture you could well generate a furin cleavage site after a number of passages (but let’s see the data Ron!)

So it must’ve been pretty baffling for these pretentious boffins as they watched my reply to their absurd Proximal Origins paper go up just 48 hours later, since I’d already ferreted out that serial passage explained all of this virus’s mysteries. And as the time’s passed I’ve really started to wonder why in the world I’m still alive, for at least the past year I’ve been explaining in very great detail how serial passage explained all of this, and why this technique was being suppressed since it unravels the entire conspiracy. 

Luckily for me, Nicholas Wade is a self-important twat who doesn’t know the first thing about opsec even though he’s been whitewashing this sort of virus-enhancing research for the government for literally 50 years. He slipped-up and dropped a very unusual nugget in his featured paper, while he was crediting someone else with being the first to outline why this virus looked engineered, and not mentioning our two peer-reviewed papers nor the fact me and my dad had been writing about this since January 2020 at all:

The first person to take a serious look at the origins of the SARS2 virus was Yuri Deigin, a biotech entrepreneur in Russia and Canada. In a long and brilliant essay, he dissected the molecular biology of the SARS2 virus and raised, without endorsing, the possibility that it had been manipulated. The essay, published on April 22, 2020, provided a roadmap for anyone seeking to understand the virus’s origins. Deigin packed so much information and analysis into his essay that some have doubted it could be the work of a single individual and suggested some intelligence agency must have authored it.

Bolded emphasis added since that essay, published months after I was writing about serial passage and being carried on Zero Hedge multiple times in the early months of 2020, only mentions serial passage once in passing. And it doesn’t echo with anything that’s mentioned in the newly FOIAed emails at all, he explores reverse genetics and waves his hands around as much as possible to distract from serial passage. Wade then goes on to mention a half-dozen other people as pioneering the exploration of a lab-engineered virus, none of them me or my father. 

Now why would that be? 

Because like Alina Chan before him, Nicholas Wade was happy to watch tens of millions of innocent strangers die terribly if it meant he got time in front of the cameras. And job number one was to make sure no discussion of serial passage ever surfaced at all, since it’s the hallmark of live-attenuated vaccines, and additionally points very directly back to the 2012 gain-0f-function experiments with ferrets and influenza that held the potential to “make the deadly 1918 pandemic look like a pesky cold.” 

Luckily for me, one day in March of 2020 I was feeling especially spicy for no particular reason at all, and decided to take a few swings and rattle a few cages. Although I’d been read-out of my TS/SCI clearance decades ago, I still remember all the fine print, and so when I passed all of our early work to my contact at the National Security Council, it was very intentionally through an intermediary. 

Because I didn’t really know what in the fuck was going on, but I’d already had some sockpuppets throw all sorts of weird, nonsensical, amateurish shit about the FBI at me - so I was going to be very careful not to accept nor solicit any sort of sensitive materials that could get me in trouble.

However that didn’t mean I couldn’t run a bluff:

Yeah. About all that. I’ve never had any contacts at the NSA looking into anything, and just about all of my contacts in the DC area treated me like I was dead when I was arrested, intelligence community or otherwise. 

No one other than my blood and a few former athletes looked me in the eye and welcomed me home after my release. 

So that entire thing was totally made up, but I’m pretty sure I made Andersen poop his lederhosen just a bit. And luckily for me and my dad, I’m sure it served as a red herring to get a whole bunch of idiots chasing someone leaking to me, since I’m just a criminal - HOW IN THE FUCK ELSE WOULD I BE CALLING ALL THEIR BULLSHIT BASICALLY IN REAL FUCKING TIME, HUH? 

Maybe because despite their prestigious offices, all of their fancy degrees and credentials and millions in stocks and royalties mean less than dust when it’s all said and done. All anyone had to do was read, simply read, and it’s all right there. From a word to a word, you’ll be led to a word. I haven’t formally studied biology since AP Bio over two decades ago, where I mostly remember trying to throw turtle testicles into my classmates’ mouths during dissections, but with my dad to guide me along I was able to pick all of this apart. 

Because I had no interest at all in mindlessly echoing Tony Fauci’s horrible murderous bullshit about a natural virus and a magical vaccine, nor did I care about the tide turning with the Proximal Origins paper, nor what anyone thought about an engineered virus being a “conspiracy theory.” Since I learned something very important from Farmer Joe on those wrestling mats - authority figures aren’t meant to be revered nor exalted, they are there for you to defeat them. 

Modern academia stultifies because all anyone gets rewarded for is upholding the status quo, and it’s populated by a bunch of conflict-avoidant dorks who can’t handle confrontation, and so they hide behind their obscure vocabularies and expensive degrees. And they continue to hide as tens of millions die all around them, and squeal and wave their hands when you point out their role in upholding the illusion allowing all of it to happen. 

Maybe there’s something to be said for the fact that if you locked me in a room with the roughly two-dozen pretentious fucks coordinating all of this while all of us were in our athletic primes, I’d systematically cut through all them inside about 15 minutes, killing or crippling all of them fairly easily. Maybe that sounds like a stretch, but in addition to writing most of this Wikipedia article, I spent two years training Kyle year-round and then spearheaded the effort to get him to the Olympic Training Center for his senior year of high school. And prior to that, after graduating college where I spent two years on the boxing club and before going back to coach wrestling at my old high school, I spent several months sparring with Darnell “Ding-a-Ling” Wilson, who would later go on to land what Teddy Atlas would call the most devastating knock-out in ESPN boxing history, who would’ve murdered me inside 45 seconds within a full fight, but who I learned enormously from within the limited sparring rules.

So please, please send someone after my person - hire some junkie to come after me and see what fucking happens.

You silly fucks think that hiding HIV fifty years ago means you can run the same playbook now and have it go off without a hitch, because all you’re used to is a bunch of pseudo-intellectual fuck-wits sucking you off and then snowballing your bullshit back onto the general public. 

Well, it worked until it didn’t. More FOIAs are coming, and hospitals in northern latitudes are already bursting at the seams. The truth is on it’s way out one way or another, and given what’s coming you’ve got to be doing the math and realizing that there are some little fish under you that you can sell on down the river to buy yourself some time. 

There’s already been an experimental finding dug-up that illustrates everything me and my dad got in the peer-reviewed literature regarding serial passage and FCS emergence was remarkably prescient:

Here we report that among spike protein sequences of genus Betacoronavirus and outside of the SARS-CoV-2 clade an analogous polyfunctional domain was found in only one other virus: an artificial MERS infectious clone, described already in 2017, which constitutes an adapted genotype from serial passage in genetically humanized mice. In contrast to this artificial MERS coronavirus, which has no natural primary host and which during passage acquired the full pat7 motif, S protein sequences from all other betacoronaviruses did not present a polyfunctional S1/S2 junction domain analogous to SARS-CoV-2. As the evolutionarily closest betacoronaviruses outside of the SARS-CoV-2 clade lack all its three functional features, this critical S1/S2 polyfunctional domain becomes an unlikely product of natural evolution alone.

Which is mirrored pretty uncannily by our August 2020 paper, that highlights the use of both humanized mice and ferrets for serial passage, and how convergent evolution meant one would likely emerge in betacoronaviruses with the proper evolutionary pressure. So going forward, it’s going to be pretty much impossible to publish either journalistically or academically without acknowledging that all of this was explained over two years ago in our peer-reviewed papers, and then further here. 

Impossible at least without really hilariously plagiarizing from this work even more, so feel free to have at it. But keep in mind, that America is already passed the event horizon of what used to be, and once the survivors understand what’s been so very preventably done to them, no one is going to be kept alive long enough to die of old age in a prison cell. 

Because this pandemic is very much just beginning, as I outlined in the whitepaper below, which was sent to every single government entity I’ve been in contact with since this started, and ignored by each and every one of them, from David Asher to the Chamber of Commerce and plenty in between. 

I am so very sorry to everyone that’s had to say goodbye, but I got buried a few years ago without even realizing it, by a community that decided that I no longer deserved any sort of a voice at all.

America likes to make a big deal about being the land of second-chances and redemption, however there’s another edge to that sword - The only reason redemption is such a big fucking deal in America, is because only in America is such a production made of judging and condemning those who dare stray out of line. There’s no redemption without judgement and condemnation, and it’s that Puritanical urge that arrived with us on these shores, to crush any sort of social dissent, that really drives the ethos of this broken, batshit nation.

WEAPONIZING THE SWARM:

The Threat Posed by the Intentional Release of Targeted SARS-CoV-2 Variants

Although China’s insistence on anal swabs may seem puzzling to outsiders, because anal swabs are the only reliable way to monitor the full clearance of SARS-CoV-2 from hospital patients,[i] this allows the CCP to far more granularly monitor their infected communities. In addition to being the most accurate way to measure whether or not COVID-19 has cleared from a patient, anal swabs also show a much broader range of mutations and hence possible variants than nasal or pulmonary testing,[ii] each of which only reliably catch the variants acclimated to and living in those organ systems.

So by taking anal swabs, China has a much more granular picture of any infected communities, while nations predominately using nasal swabs will only be finding active nasal infections, since without an anal swab it is impossible to know if someone has truly cleared an infection. Additionally, nasal swabs give many false negatives for infections that anal swabs catch, since anal swabs catch both very weak infections, as well as display the full scope of variants that exist in any given host.

In January 2020, Dr. Charles Lieber was arrested for undisclosed financial arrangements with the CCP, and in addition to being the head of Harvard’s Chemistry Department, Dr. Lieber also pioneered the most sensitive viral variant technology systems every designed, much of which has been left unpublished for over a decade – however based on his charging documents, it can be surmised that nanotechnology was likely involved. It also follows that the initial ability to tell the difference between just broad classes of virus has likely become much more refined, and can likely detect individual SARS-CoV-2 variants, something that would explain whatever high-risk interaction led to his arrest, an odd moment at the start of the pandemic.

Another even more puzzling aspect of the genesis of this pandemic is the discrepancy between when the measurement of genetic change seems to indicate it started, roughly October 2019, and the fact that there was a happening around the WIV in December 2019. These two competing timelines are anchored by their assumed starting points, with the official reports from the data first released by China which is centered around the WIV and wetmarket representing December 2019 as the start of the outbreak.

However there is a second timeline, which is hinted at by the phylogenetic analysis which indicates that the outbreak actually started several months before, which meshes with the observation that the first patients actually appear to be at military hospitals farther north, and all anchoring on a subway line and the concomitant dense commercial setting.[iii] This timeline is also supported by evidence released by the State Department indicting a mysterious illness in and around Wuhan several months before December 2019.

One parsimonious explanation for this discrepancy would be if SARS-CoV-2 did in fact emerge in a diffuse manner throughout the commercial heart of Wuhan and not from any acute contact at all. Especially given how stealthily SARS-CoV-2 still spreads throughout new populations, largely asymptomatically and highly airborne, it seems reasonable to imagine that its initial emergence mirrored this diffuse and largely silent spread.

And so discovering a novel airborne RNA virus, the CCP may have applied some of the lessons learned attempting to vaccinate against another airborne coronavirus, Feline Infection Peritonitis Virus (FIPV), and attempted design a vaccine by removing select groups of genes. The authors of the paper explaining the approach observed that it “may allow the development of vaccines against infections with other pathogenic coronaviruses, including that causing severe acute respiratory syndrome in humans.”[iv]

However, the delicacy of vaccinating against airborne RNA viruses is also borne out by FIPV, since attempts to use vaccines only targeting the spike-protein can lead to early death syndrome in kittens. In fact, researchers have warned that:

“Since ADE in vitro has recently been described for human immunodeficiency virus type 1, current vaccination trials, particularly those aimed at raising an immune response against the [spike]-protein, should be reconsidered until more is known about the role of ADE in vivo.”[v]

So to avoid this phenomenon, instead of designing a vaccine that only targets the spike-protein, by deleting entire genes researchers hoped to created vaccines without any possible chance of increasing the virulence of an infection. However even here: “The accelerated development of disease in some of the animals suggested that the vaccination with this attenuated virus was detrimental rather than protective.” [vi]

Both of these well-established vaccination phenomena represent scenarios where the purported December 2019 outbreak localized around the WIV was not the start of China’s pandemic, but only the result of a vaccination trial with one of the two above strategies which backfired, resulting in the drastic measures taken by the CCP across Wuhan to enforce an extraordinary lockdown eventually encompassing tens of millions of its citizens.

If this is the case, then the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic deep within Wuhan’s metropolis may not in fact have been natural, and may have been the result of the deattenuation of an experimental vaccine. In this scenario, the CCP knows exactly where SARS-CoV-2’s ongoing mutations are headed, which theoretically allows them to design attenuated variants that would mimic the unintentionally-lethal vaccine trials gone wrong.

And since America is only using nasal swabs to test and is not utilizing anal swabs, it would be impossible to detect the intentional release of these strains, designed to look natural but actually leading to increased-community wide lethality and death. Only anal swabs reveal the full extent of the variants within a population, and would allow for the detection of mathematically impossible mutations that these variants would have. And as Executive Orders warned: It is exceedingly easy to hide disguised aerosol dispersal devices in high-traffic commercial buildings, and now with WiFi ubiquitous the ability for targeted dispersal is even higher.   

Without anal swab data from some cross-section of the American population, it will be completely impossible to detect the release of such a weapon in an American urban center. And so long as policymakers are pushing for blanket vaccination programs which are not complimented by the data provided by anal swabs, our vaccination programs are at risk of eventually backfiring and leading to nearly instant death across wide swaths of the American population:

“The postmortem examination showed that the vFS-immunized kittens had suffered from a form of FIP much more severe than naturally occurring FIP, even though no gross changes were observed. The presence of multiple lesions in several organs is atypical of naturally occurring FIP and indicates a rapid dissemination. The relatively small size of the lesions is probably due to the short incubation period.” [vii]

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[i] Sun, Mei, et al. “Anal Swab as a Potentially Optimal Specimen for SARS-CoV-2 Detection to Evaluate Hospital Discharge of COVID-19 Patients.” Future Microbiology, Future Medicine Ltd, Aug. 2020, www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7493721/.

[ii] Sun, Fengming, et al. “SARS-CoV-2 Quasispecies Provides Insight into Its Genetic Dynamics during Infection.” BioRxiv, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, 1 Jan. 2020, www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.08.20.258376v1.full.

[iii] Quay, Dr. Steven. New Study By Dr. Steven Quay Concludes That SARS-CoV-2 Came from a Laboratory, 29 Jan. 2021, www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/new-study-by-dr-steven-quay-concludes-that-sars-cov-2-came-from-a-laboratory-301217952.html.

[iv] Haijema, Bert Jan, et al. “Live, Attenuated Coronavirus Vaccines through the Directed Deletion of Group-Specific Genes Provide Protection against Feline Infectious Peritonitis.” Journal of Virology, American Society for Microbiology Journals, 15 Apr. 2004, jvi.asm.org/content/78/8/3863.

[v] Vennema, H, et al. “Early Death after Feline Infectious Peritonitis Virus Challenge Due to Recombinant Vaccinia Virus Immunization.” Journal of Virology, American Society for Microbiology Journals, 1 Mar. 1990, jvi.asm.org/content/64/3/1407?ijkey=da9a99e3f31bfbf7a42a83a4667f4a339e333058&keytype2=tf_ipsecsha.

[vi] Haijema, Bert Jan, et al. “Live, Attenuated Coronavirus Vaccines through the Directed Deletion of Group-Specific Genes Provide Protection against Feline Infectious Peritonitis.” Journal of Virology, American Society for Microbiology Journals, 15 Apr. 2004, jvi.asm.org/content/78/8/3863.

[vii] Vennema, H, et al. “Early Death after Feline Infectious Peritonitis Virus Challenge Due to Recombinant Vaccinia Virus Immunization.” Journal of Virology, American Society for Microbiology Journals, 1 Mar. 1990, jvi.asm.org/content/64/3/1407?ijkey=da9a99e3f31bfbf7a42a83a4667f4a339e333058&keytype2=tf_ipsecsha.

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Dan Sirotkin is the co-author of the first peer-reviewed paper examining a laboratory origin for SARS-CoV-2, as well as its addendum, which settled a 50-year mystery and formally linked the H1N1 Spanish Flu pandemic strain release of 1977 to gain-of-function research.

“You can tell you’ve found a really interesting question when no one wants you to answer it.”  

Thousands of humans have lost their lives since COVID-19 kicked-off its killing spree in Wuhan several months ago, and barring an absolute miracle hundreds of thousands more all across the planet will join them in the months to come.

Comparisons to the pandemic caused by the Spanish Flu earlier in the twentieth century abound, however one thing is clear: Whether due to globalization or to internal differences between the viruses, while the Spanish Flu was a slow-moving miasma that took years to unfurl across the globe, the Wuhan strain of coronavirus, COVID-19, has blanketed the entire planet in just a few months.

Factories all across the planet have ground to a halt, stores are shuttered, tens of millions are quarantined across multiple continents, and supply chains are straining.

And oddly, even though there is nothing even beginning to approach conclusive evidence that COVID-19 was a naturally emergent strain that made its way out of an intermediate animal host and into humans, the general consensus in the media and the public seems to be that exploring its origins is something only done by people who’ve yet to buy that the Earth is in fact round and that we actually did land on the moon. And everyone seems to be okay with the fact that the scientists crowing the loudest about a natural origin, are the ones directly involved with the type of research that likely spawned this virus: Gain-of-function, or “dual-use” research that meant to push Nature past her limits, so that humans can harness her to create monsters that would never occur naturally.

Why the concentrated push to marginalize anyone asking for conclusive proof about where COVID-19 came from? Who benefits?

“We modified our science team to remove ethical restraints.”

Back in 1977 a very peculiar disease began to sweep across Russia, and once scientists had isolated it they discovered it was a rather unique strain of the H1N1 Swine Flu. In the years that followed genetic analysis looking to determine where it might’ve come from found something rather odd: It was very similar to strains of H1N1 that hadn’t been in circulation for decades, and seemed to be the product of “sequential passage in an animal reservoir” which was determined by its vast genetic distance from any other present strain of flu, just like COVID-19 which also appears so distant from any related coronavirus that it’s been placed in its own clade, an isolated branch way out on its own in the viral family tree – meaning it’s the lone example of its kind, and doesn’t clump together with all the other known coronaviruses. This finding has lead scientists to conclude that it wasn’t a natural virus, and either leaked out or was released as part of a vaccine trial gone awry.

At the time, the Soviet Union was employing tens of thousands of scientists designing every possible flavor of biological weapon, a rabidly immoral weapons program with a spotty safety record – pathogens were known to leak out of Soviet labs almost regularly. Which has happened at plenty of biological weapons labs since, but especially China’s, which have leaked the SARS virus four times just in recent years. And Soviet scientists were reported to bring dead research animals home for dinner, meat wasn’t exactly readily available in the USSR at that time, which parallels the reports of scientists in Wuhan smuggling dead lab animals out to sell for a few extra bucks on the street.

Earlier in the 70’s prior to the release of that virus, “the swine flu scare… [had] prompted the international community to reexamine their stocks of the latest previously circulating H1N1 strains to attempt to develop a vaccine,” which was seen to have increased the odds that someone, somewhere would make a mistake and leak an altered strain of the flu out of their lab. This increased pace of research mirrors recent times, when scientists have been investigating and trying to understand the supposedly impending threat posed by coronaviruses for years, capturing as many unique strains from the wild as they could, and mixing and matching their genomes in the lab.

And so increased research into the H1N1 Swine Flu back in the 70’s eventually increased the odds that a mistake would happen enough that one did, and a leak may have occurred. Just as our current pandemic was preceded not only by years of research into coronaviruses everywhere from UNC to the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s Disease Engineering Technical Research Center, and have been accelerated by a massive international conference meant to study a potential pandemic caused by a hyper-virulent strain of coronavirus, Johns Hopkins’ Event 201. This was funded primarily by the World Economic Forum as well as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and notably occurred in October 2019, just weeks before the start of this outbreak of COVID-19.

If leading up to 1977, the fact that increased research into strains of the flu were seen to increase the odds that an accidental leak would occur, why isn’t the same logic being applied to our pandemic today? Why is almost everyone today assuming that the increased pace of research means scientists in fact anticipated this outbreak instead of causing it?

Wouldn’t an increased pace of research also increase the odds that a leak of a lab-modified coronavirus would occur just like an increased pace of research precipitated the leak of the H1N1 Swine Flu back then?

“You give a monkey a stick, inevitably he’ll beat another monkey to death with it”

Scientists have been directly altering and modifying viral genomes for at least the past twenty years, doing everything from building complete viruses from scratch, to tweaking them and then passing them through series of animal hosts to artificially speed selection and evolution along so that they’re able have as many different strains of virus with as many novel features as possible to tinker with.

However most of this work didn’t really raise too many eyebrows, until about ten years ago when scientists including some in Stony Brook, NY – not coincidentally also the first place to build a DNA-virus from scratch – took the H5N1 Bird Flu, tweaked its genome in two places, and then passed it through a series of ferret hosts in the lab until it became airborne. This sort of research, a minor alteration and then passage through ferrets, did two things: Resulted in a virus that would look natural and wouldn’t appear to have been directly genetically altered, and also created a virus that was way out on its own branch of the viral family tree since those sequential passages added generations far faster than they’d naturally occur in the wild. If that sounds familiar, maybe that’s because those traits are also exactly what’s found with COVID-19.

And as far back as 2015, Chinese labs were reported to have been involved with dual-use gain-of-function research after the Chinese military made a massive push to expand their biotechnological capabilities, swapping around viral genomes in the lab to try to create the most virulent strain possible. Additionally, studies examining COVID-19’s infectivity in ferrets found that it spreads readily among them, and also appears airborne in that animal model, lending support to the idea that ferrets were used for serial passage. Further support for possibility that serial passage through lab animals played a role in the creation of COVID-19 comes from an April 2020 pre-print, which found that coronaviruses that target the ACE2 receptor bind with ferrets cells more tightly than any other species except the tree shrew, which only scored about 2% higher. Tree shrews have also been used for serial viral passage, and were promoted in a 2018 paper out of China as a preferable host for laboratory serial passage since they’re cheaper, smaller, easier to handle, and closer to humans evolutionarily and physiologically than ferrets.  Pangolins however, formed a much weaker bond than either, and were clustered way down on the list along with a handful of other much more unlikely intermediate animal hosts.

Quite curiously, one of the scientists supporting this troubling research in an article that noted the virus “could change history if it was ever set free” appeared on Joe Rogan’s podcast in 2020 a few weeks into the current pandemic, claiming that COVID-19 was definitely natural and making no mention of this animal-based dual-use gain-of-function research at all. Odd, right? It’s almost like Michael Osterholm, whose entire career rests on advancing gain-of-function of research, might want to whitewash what’s really going on? Did that sunshine tickle when it was being blown up your ass, Joe?

Osterholm failed to tell the story of this genetically modified H5N1 Bird Flu, which was turned into a virus that “could make the deadly 1918 pandemic look like a pesky cold.” This result was so troubling that the NIH, which had funded the research, tried to make sure that the it would only be published after enough details were taken out to make replication of the experiment tough to perform. However one of the virologists involved in the research thought these restrictions were a bit silly, since the gist of the experiment was enough to allow anyone with enough money to replicate them without a problem. Especially researchers who were already familiar with manipulating bat coronaviruses, two of whom learned how to do exactly that at UNC in 2015 before returning to Wuhan to continue their work.

A few years later the NIH would ban this dual-use “gain-of-function” research, a ban that would remain in place from 2014 until 2017, when it was lifted. And what was the reasoning behind lifting the ban? To allow for research on flu viruses, as well as SARS and MERS – coronaviruses just like our new friend, COVID-19. And so hundreds of millions of dollars of funding poured into research on these viruses, supposedly with oversight meant to reduce “the potential to create, transfer, or use an enhanced potential pandemic pathogen.”

Turns out, that oversight might not have worked out too well, witnessed by the thousands who have already died from COVID-19.

“But it is only a machine. It doesn’t think. It follows instructions. If we learn how to alter that programming, then we become the architects of that change.”

And so since 2017 the floodgates have been opened, and money has poured in to fund gain-of-function research on coronaviruses, and they’ve been seen as everything from a potential base to create an HIV-vaccine from, to being able to help scientists in their mission to create a universal vaccine against the flu and common cold. Unsurprisingly, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which helped bankroll Event 201, has also poured millions and millions of dollars into the search for a vaccine against HIV, much of which is centered around harnessing coronaviruses.

Gate’s previous forays into vaccination programs haven’t always gone so well, in 2009 a Gates-sponsored HPV vaccine from Merck caused severe side effects among hundreds of the girls it was administered to, ultimately killing seven of them. In addition to the faulty science behind this vaccine program, was evidence that the majority of patients had no idea what they were signing up for, but were pushed through into treatment anyways. More unethical behavior was reported in the Gates-funded MenAfriVac campaign in Chad, which between 50 and 500 children vaccinated for meningitis were reported to develop paralysis, leading a South African newspaper to announce that “we are guinea pigs for the drug-makers.” If you’re skeptical about those claims and the sourcing, a peer-reviewed look at the DTP and polio vaccine found that it caused much more harm than good during a huge vaccine campaign in urban Africa. And there are a scattershot of other accounts covering possible malfeasance by Gates-funded vaccination programs all across the globe. So not that Bill Gates is personally punching little kids in the face, but that his well-meaning funding may end up in a lot of the wrong places in the blind pursuit for results, providing financing for very shady and not-entirely ethical practices.

Pointing out the funding from their foundation isn’t meant to demonize the Gates family, only to begin to build the idea that accountability does’t lie with the scientists in Wuhan alone, or the Chinese Communist Party for trying to cover-up the beginning of the pandemic. And to point out that nothing about being a computer scientist or a businessman has anything to do with public health policy, or the scientific and social implications around gain-of-function research. Why the NIH allowed this really obvious Pandora’s Box to be reopened in the first place deserves to be answered, and the organizations funding this research should carry much of the blame as well – the NIH included, which has provided the Wuhan Institute of virology with a $3.7 million grant.

Bill Gates might want to be an effective philanthropist really bad, and he may have been amazing at designing computer software and undercutting his competition – however that doesn’t a philanthropist make. After all, beyond the questionable tactics practiced by many of the vaccination programs he’s funded, his very well-intentioned attempt to save lives by providing  insecticidal mosquito-nets was ultimately destructive: many of the villagers provided with the mosquito-nets decided they were better used as fishing-nets, resulting in food shortages due to over-fishing from the fact the nets smaller weave caught far too many juvenile fish, undercutting population growth.

Seemed like a good idea at the time, right? Just like all those untested vaccines that were rushed into distribution?

“Distributed responsibility is the problem. One person gives the order, another carries it out. One can say they didn’t pull the trigger, the other that they were just doing what they were told, and everyone lets themselves off the hook.”

Far more sinister than the Gates Foundation funding dual-use gain-of-function research is the involvement of scientists hoping exclusively to bankroll their own companies through this kind of work. 

While The Expanse had Jules-Pierre Mao, a scientist-CEO who used his private company to hybridize the protomolecule – a mysterious alien substance that seems to have a mind of its own – with humans to create unstoppable biological weapons to auction off to the highest bidder, today we have Peter Daszak.  His company, EcoHealth Alliance, which is a non-profit that depends largely on multi-hundred million dollar government grants to function, has been partnering with Chinese researchers for years in an attempt to secure funding for more and more research into coronaviruses. And Daszak has been at the forefront as painting a lab escape as a dangerous conspiracy theory that was somehow impeding research into the pandemic, seemingly giving as many interviews as he can without disclosing the glaring conflict of interest that he’s been the PI on these research grants and netting himself a six-figure salary for years, and hailing virologists as the only thing between humanity and catastrophe – a job they now calculate will run humanity over $22 billion a year.

And in one of the more transparent attempts at blatant PR-spin, Daszak was featured alongside one of the researchers who learned how to create hyper-virulent bat coronaviruses at UNC back in 2015, Zhengli Shi. Their article insists we should take Zhengli at her word when she claims to have not found a match after she checked COVID-19’s genome against everything in all the various labs in Wuhan. As if someone responsible for releasing the most virulent pathogen to hit humanity in modern history, one that’s already killed thousands and is projected to kill millions more all across the globe, would simply fess-up to it, torpedoing her career and the years of research performed by her and her colleagues? And possibly opening all of them up to legal and other repercussions?

If you still aren’t sure whether the scientists involved with kind of research are being forthright, there’s Dr. Ralph Baric. It was in his lab at UNC that a hyper-virulent bat Franken-virus was created by splicing a new protein-spike on an existing coronavirus, creating a monster so vicious that a virologist with the Louis Pasteur Institute of Paris warned: “If the [new] virus escaped, nobody could predict the trajectory.” It should also be noted that several years prior to tinkering directly with bat coronavirus spike-proteins, Baric orchestrated research that involved isolating a coronavirus from civets and then passing it through mammalian ACE2 receptor cells that were grown in the lab from kidney and brain samples – serial passage through host cell lines instead of entire hosts, which imparted a strong affinity for ACE2, and presumably created an airborne strain of coronavirus. And if cells derived from kidneys and brains were used for the serial passage development of COVID-19, that might help explain its affinity for attacking the kidneys and brains of its human hosts.

Previous research done in the Wuhan lab looking at inserting HIV-like segments into coronaviruses that also target the ACE2 receptor may also have played a role in the creation of COVID-19. One possible reason for these HIV-like segments is that they were meant to be epitopes, or molecular flags meant to mark intruders for a vaccine to target – meaning the Wuhan Strain was built as a monster for a specific vaccine to hunt. It is mathematically possible for this to happen in nature – but only in a ten-thousand bats chained to ten-thousand Petri dishes and given until infinity sense. Alternatively, this pattern could also be produced by infecting a room full of ferrets or tree shrews with a bespoke coronavirus and sifting through the wreckage for your genomic needle.

So if he was being honest, you might expect Baric to warn the public about the pandemic potential coronaviruses pose during our current outbreak. However, when he was asked if the public should be worried about COVID-19 he said that people should be more worried about the seasonal flu. Pretty bizarre statement from a scientist who knew full well how dangerous coronaviruses could be and would have had no way of knowing back in January how virulent COVID-19 would or wouldn’t be, especially given the fact that not only was Zhengli Shi working in his lab on that project in 2015, but Xing-Yi Ge was too. Both of whom returned to Wuhan where they’ve continued their work for years. However one possible explanation is the fact that COVID-19 does only present as a light flu in the mink farms its infested, and with minks being a subspecies of ferrets – if ferrets were used for serial passage experiments and the virologists working with them noticed the novel coronavirus only presented as a mild flu in the lab ferrets, this information could have made its way out into their community and fueled the preposterous assertions that COVID-19 is anything like a mild flu.

Xing-Yi Ge is especially notable since in 2013 he became the very first scientist to isolate a bat coronavirus from nature that uses the ACE2 receptor, which is found in human, tree shrew, and ferret lungs and allows coronaviruses to become airborne. And as you might have learned by now, that’s the exact receptor used by COVID-19 to enter human cells – if anyone would know how to finagle that part of the coronavirus genome, it’d be him. So both Xing-Yi Ge and Zhengli Shi were part of the research team that created this hybridized hyper-virulent bat coronavirus under Baric, who’s actively downplayed the risk posed by COVID-19, and then returned to work in Wuhan, where funding provided in part by Daszak’s company allowed them to continue their work on coronaviruses with plenty of research to cut-and-paste into their work at the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s Disease Engineering Technical Research Center.

And as Dr. Ian Malcolm puts it in Jurassic Park, it is never a good idea to futz around with science and research when you don’t fully understand it, nor its possible implications.

However it wasn’t just Daszak funding their work, Zhengli also secured millions of dollars in grant money from various American institutions including our Department of Defense as well as the U.S. Biological Defense Research Directorate, and millions more from other foreign governments.

So although the Chinese Communist Party deserves its share of the blame for attempting to cover the outbreak up, arresting the heroic scientists trying to warn us and issuing gag-orders and the destruction of evidence, this research likely wouldn’t have occurred at all if the NIH hadn’t lifted the ban on gain-of-function research in the first place. And it was funded directly by American tax dollars, by government officials willing to let others play god at their behest.

But now that the virus is out of the lab, are the private entities responsible for its creation going to bear any of the blame at all? Or will America and China continue to point fingers at each other until the worst happens?

“Mars will accuse Earth of using a bio-weapon. Earth will claim it was Mars. The Belt will blame the other two. It’s a good way to start a war and cover it up.”

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One last spoiler warning… okay, so in The Expanse the central plot device pushing things forward is the discovery of a mysterious substance dubbed the protomolecule, which seems to have a mind of its own and seek out radiation as sustenance before then beginning “the Work,” a mysterious intergalactic goal that isn’t revealed until later seasons.

And it’s not individual nations who first attempt to harness the protomolecule, but their Peter Daszak, the aforementioned scientist and CEO named Jules-Pierre Mao, who attempts to weave it into the genomes of immuno-compromised children to create hybridized super-soldiers. Not for his own private army, but as a game-changing bio-weapon he’ll sell to whichever government is willing to pay the most for it. So in The Expanse, it takes amoral scientists as well as the collusion of officials affiliated with both governments for this research to happen and be hidden, and when these Hybrids are eventually dropped between both armies the carnage is immense.

Luckily, we haven’t gotten that far on earth yet, but the rhetoric between America and China has been heading in that direction – it’s been growing increasingly hostile as each blames the other for starting the pandemic and covering it up, with China even going so far as to threaten to cut off our supply of antibiotics and other life-saving medical goods.  Meanwhile Daszak, Baric, Zhengli, and others sit back counting their lucky stars and their money, since both governments and the public at large seem to have bought their story that there’s no way this virus leaked out of one of their labs, and every government on earth now wants to harness their research to help create vaccines and treatments.

And these researchers have been assisted by scientifically spurious and journalistically vacuous articles which mindlessly regurgitate claims from the Chinese government, and its scientific propaganda arm, the WHO, about how bad the outbreak was in the past and how contained it is now. As the Chinese government arrested whistle-blowers and sent agents out into the street in bio-hazard gear while carrying automatic weapons to detain anyone suspected of breaking quarantine, while literally welding apartment buildings shut, the American media fawned over China’s “decisive and heroic” actions.

Please take a moment to consider the fact that almost everyone reading the news to you on television was selected due to their connections or how photogenic they are, not because of any actual journalistic chops or ability to think critically.

So as two superpowers are pushed closer and closer to conflict, the research that’s almost certainly the source of COVID-19 not only continues unabated, but if anything talk of more funding to stop this sort of supposedly natural pandemic from happening again is pouring into the pockets of the people who, if they weren’t directly responsible, should certainly have been at the forefront of warning the world about the risks posed by lab-altered coronaviruses, and been disclosing the existence of this sort of research in the first place.

Oddly, each and everyone one of them is pretending that viral dual-use gain-of-function research has never occurred at all. Or not so oddly, when you stop and think about how much they have to lose if their role in this pandemic is revealed.

“The hardest part of this game is figuring out who the enemy really is.”

Other than the fact it doesn’t bear the direct marks of genetic tampering, just like the engineered hyper-virulent H5N1 Bird Flu, there’s just about nothing natural about COVID-19’s behavior or clinical presentation. And hauntingly, peer-reviewed research has noted that a crucial region of its genome “may provide a gain-of-function… for efficient spreading in the human population.”

Not only is it so distant from any other coronavirus that it forms its own clade, but there isn’t even a natural path for it to have emerged through – assertions about pangolins have always been dubious at best, but were even further debunked when analysis of COVID-19’s genome at the regions that most accurately show heritage made it “very unlikely” that pangolins had ever been involved at all.

Beyond that is the fact that its affinity for the ACE2 receptor is somewhere between 10 and 20 times higher than SARS, and it also creates viral loads thousands of times higher than SARS. These two characteristics point towards COVID-19 using antibody-dependent enhancement, or ADE, to enter human cells. This is when the virus is able to hijack white blood cells or other antiviral proteins to more easily enter into the rest of our body’s cells, allowing it to seep deep into its hosts’ nervous systems, creating permanent neurological damage in the hosts it doesn’t kill outright. More supporting evidence that ADE is occurring with COVID-19 arrived in a paper from April 2020, which indicated that the novel coronavirus is targeting two different types white blood cells incredibly efficiently, especially compared to SARS which hardly binds to white blood cells at all in comparison. Since those types of cells have almost no ACE2 receptors, it appears that COVID-19 is using another method to efficiently enter those cells – with ADE at the top of the list of possibilities, although it’s not demonstrated here.

ADE could also explain why between 5% and 10% of once “recovered” patients in Wuhan have been showing up with fresh infections and nearly 100 once-cured patients in South Korea have also had their infections return, since ADE allows a virus to hijack the antibodies created by a previous infection to re-attack an old host. And curiously Zhengli Shi, of UNC and Wuhan fame, co-authored a 2019 paper which used inert viral shells to figure out exactly how SARS, with its affinity to the ACE2 receptor just like COVID-19, was able to harness ADE to hijack white blood cells for enhanced cell entry. A gain-of-function extension of this research would be exactly the kind of experiment that could’ve given birth to COVID-19, especially considering that 2019 paper managed to fine-tune the exact concentration of antibodies that would best facilitate ADE.

And alarming evidence that this phenomenon is occurring emerged from a Chinese pre-print which noted that over one-third of the roughly 200 patients studied has some neurological symptoms, with nearly half of the most severe patients exhibiting neurological issues. And further evidence for the possibility of ADE is witnessed by a study published in Lancet, which notes that the case fatality rate in Wuhan could actually be as high as 20% – the outbreak’s epicenter would be expected to have the highest rates of ADE as different variants of the Wuhan Strain infected and reinfected overlapping hosts.

Both HIV and Dengue Fever use antibody-dependent enhancement to boost their virulence, however it’s generally a phenomenon that takes a long time to occur when it happens in nature. However COVID-19 looks like it may have had its ADE jacked into hyper-drive as it was passed between a series of animal hosts, since it has the aforementioned much stronger ability to bind to host cells and creates viral loads orders of magnitude higher, and also appears to immediately be able to enter its hosts’ nervous systems, killing many of its victims by attacking the region of the brain that controls breathing, drastically lowering white blood cell counts early on in infections, and apparently re-infecting individuals who had already appeared to clear their infection.

Little about COVID-19’s clinical presentation is typical, including the fact that in many patients the first sign of infection seems to be losing your senses of smell and taste without any other symptoms, something no other virus on earth is known to do to otherwise asymptomatic patients – but which could possibly be due to artificially enhanced ADE immediately gaining entry into those nerve cells and frying them. Further increasing the possibility that COVID-19’s unique clinical presentation may be due to its ADE being juiced by laboratory engineering, are the observations from an ER doctor who’s stated that “I have seen things that I have never seen before… I have witnessed medical phenomenon that just don’t make sense in the context of treating a disease that is supposed to be viral pneumonia.” In an interview with Medscape, Dr. Cameron Kyle-Sidell went on to say that the closest thing to the symptoms he was witnessing in his emergency room were those created by altitude sickness.

This condition occurs when the organs that sense the level of oxygen concentration in the air you breathe notice that level decreasing, and begin a cascade of physiological changes that, as the COVID-19 patients horrifically showcase, can quickly turn deadly when they throw your body’s balance out of wack. And since these organs are found in your neck right next to your carotid arteries, it is well within the realm of possibility that after frying the nerve cells that control smell and taste, that if the viral load becomes large enough, that the infection may eventually move into these organs and fry them too – tricking your nervous system into miscommunicating the concentration of oxygen in the environment, and scrambling the same system that’s used when your body is subjected to the lowered oxygen levels that occur at high altitude and possibly tricking your body into reducing the number of red blood cells it produces, as well as initiating the entire suite of physiological changes that occurs at elevation - which may be one of the defining aspects of our shared humanity.

And it turns out that the receptor targeted when COVID-19 targets white blood cells, Basign or CD147, is also the same receptor targeted by the malarial parasite to bind to red blood cells. Which is especially notable since hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine, both antimalarial drugs, are involved in a roiling debate about their efficacy and safety to treat COVID-19 infections. However one thing is becoming clear: this novel coronavirus is creating clotting issues in many of its patients, indicating along with the appearance of altitude sickness that COVID-19 may be able to attack our red blood cells as well as our white blood cells, since its spike-protein does bind with white blood cells through Basign, which is also found on red blood cells – opening the door for ADE to enhance this effect on both types of cell. And with COVID-19’s remarkably high affinity for white blood cells compared to other coronaviruses, if ADE is occurring its effects could be creating a devastating physiological cascade.

Additionally, an unnaturally juiced-up ability to use ADE would also explain much of what other front-line medical workers are observing in their patients: “I’m seeing people who look relatively healthy with a minimal health history, and they are completely wiped out, like they’ve been hit by a truck. This is knocking out what should be perfectly fit, healthy people. Patients will be on minimal support, on a little bit of oxygen, and then all of a sudden, they go into complete respiratory arrest, shut down and can’t breathe at all… That seems to be what happens to a lot of these patients: They suddenly become unresponsive or go into respiratory failure.” This sort of sudden precipitous decline is exactly what would be expected if COVID-19’s ability to use ADE had been accentuated in the lab, and would also explain the clinical observations that “this severity of [acute respiratory distress] is usually more typical of someone who has a near drowning experience — they have a bunch of dirty water in their lungs — or people who inhale caustic gas. Especially for it to have such an acute onset like that. I’ve never seen a microorganism or an infectious process cause such acute damage to the lungs so rapidly. That was what really shocked me.”

And also the following horrific account: “Holy shit, this is not the flu. Watching this relatively young guy, gasping for air, pink frothy secretions coming out of his tube and out of his mouth. The ventilator should have been doing the work of breathing but he was still gasping for air, moving his mouth, moving his body, struggling. We had to restrain him. With all the coronavirus patients, we’ve had to restrain them. They really hyperventilate, really struggle to breathe. When you’re in that mindstate of struggling to breathe and delirious with fever, you don’t know when someone is trying to help you, so you’ll try to rip the breathing tube out because you feel it is choking you, but you are drowning.”

Given everything else we know about COVID-19’s unusual and atypical genome, the fact that its clinical presentation sure doesn’t appear to follow the course of a natural viral infection should only raise our collective eyebrows further when “experts” insist there’s no indication that it leaked out of lab.

“I thought if you told people facts, they’d draw their own conclusions, and because the facts were true, the conclusions mostly would be too. But we don’t run on facts. We run on stories about things. About people.”

In ancient China there was a tradition of developing a special poison called Gu by throwing as many venomous creatures as you could find into a jar and sealing them in until only one was left. Also known as a “golden-silkworm,” this victorious creature was then thought to host a “demonic poison” since every other creature’s venom was thought to concentrate within it. According to Chinese folklore, this golden-silkworm could then mutate itself into any number of other animals – retaining its lethal ability no matter what form it took.

Turns out that manipulating nature in an attempt to create unpredictable and  unnaturally powerful weapons is nothing new.

No one knows exactly how many people have died in Wuhan, where in January and February crematoriums were running 24/7 when they’d typically only be operational for four hours a day and five days a week, but one apparent pattern is that the longer the virus was allowed to circulate and spit off new variants, the more lethal it became as new saves used ADE to dig into their hosts’ immune systems. Further evidence that far more lives were lost in Wuhan than the Chinese government is disclosing is provided by the fact that some 21 million cell phone users have somehow fallen of the map in China, as well as the long lines witnessed to collect loved ones’ ashes in Wuhan, which alone is reported to have had some 45,000 cremations. So this high lethality may be due in part to the multiple variants that had time to circulate in Wuhan, a hallmark of ADE since each subsequent variant is able to escape detection by our immune systems while still hijacking our white blood cells to increase its virulence.

And unsurprisingly, neither ADE nor the possibility that COVID-19 could be a product of dual-use gain-of-function serial animal passage has been mentioned on television by the virologists most likely to be able to identify these phenomena, meaning our front-line medical responders are being blindsided by a virus that’s not behaving like anything natural, like anything they’ve ever seen.

Even more indicative of an unnatural origin is the fact that the process of a virus transferring from one species to another, called a zoonotic jump, follows a well-established pattern in the literature. For a virus to fully jump into a new species, several months if not years are required for the process to complete. First a variant of the virus infects one new host, an infection that will fizzle out the first time it happens since there’s no way for a virus to be immediately adapted to a novel host species. But with continued exposure, more individual infections occur, some of which produce slightly mutated variants more adapted to the biology of the new host species, until eventually a variant wins the selective virulent lottery and is able to spread easily among its new host population, killing and reproducing as it goes.

And yet research published in 2018 found that only two-point-seven percent of villagers living about a kilometer from local bat-caves carried any evidence of past bat coronavirus infections. That study happened to examine people living in Wuhan as well, and found absolutely zero evidence of previous bat coronavirus infection at all there, making it all-but-impossible that zoonotic jumping occurred since earlier less-lethal variants of the virus would have left a wide signature in its new host population. Instead, COVID-19 emerged out of nowhere, or more likely just out of a local lab, and was immediately extraordinarily well-adapted to humans – spreading through the air with ease, killing as it went. Plus there’s the fact that all the initial victims were infected with the same variant, if a natural zoonotic jump had occurred, multiple different variants would inevitably have been found at the start of an outbreak.

And so as our titular quote alludes to, although its certainly possible to train a monkey to warm up a frozen burrito in a microwave, it’s pretty damn unlikely that a wild monkey that’d never been in contact with humans before could be presented with a frozen burrito and a microwave, and figure out to heat up a snack.

In the same way, everything about the way COVID-19 interacts with its human hosts and spreads among them indicates that it’s been artificially trained to be familiar with human biology – bizarrely blocking our senses of smell and taste before doing anything else, spreading readily among asymptomatic patients and then infecting and killing us with far more efficiency than any natural emergent virus at the start of its outbreak, and first emerging without taking any of the steps necessary to naturally perform a zoonotic jump into humans.

And while the people on your television will be parroting whatever their corporate parents tell them to, and while the scientists intimately involved in this kind of research preen as “having told you so” about the threat coronaviruses pose instead of informing the public about how truly grave the threat we face is – hundreds of thousands will die, and the work that caused this pandemic will continue at an accelerating pace as funding for gain-of-function research pours in.

“Nothing ever killed more people than being afraid to look like a sissy.”

As we’re quite fond of saying, America is a free country. And without sensible federal guidance, and with our pandemic response team being undermined by economic advisers and relatives with only the vaguest grasp of how science works, let alone epidemiology, we are very quickly approaching what might be our last inflection point.

While the Olympics have been postponed for the first time in modern history and other nations from New Zealand to France lock-down entirely for at least the coming several weeks, Americans haven’t been convinced not to crowd into public places and public transportation. Supposedly, prayer, toughness, and the American Spirit are going to work as effective anti-viral treatments.

So by the time the public and our officials collectively realize that COVID-19 has no intention of behaving anything close to like the flu does, or like any natural virus ever has, and that our front-line healthcare workers have been effectively battling a biological weapon for weeks, the deaths of hundreds of thousands more Americans will already be inevitable.

The current push to get the economy back on track leads only to human carnage, rushing back into the virus’s maws can’t possibly lead anywhere good. Slowing down to get the full picture of what’s going on is apparently off the table, as is any sort of reasoned discussion about how to save the most lives while still being able to keep the economy in stasis until the pandemic is under control. And so America will be forever changed by this pandemic, as our once-trusted institutions lead us directly to slaughter.

Rushing into danger has never ended well. After all, it’s always the doors and corners where they get you.

“Sometimes it takes a few monsters to get back on track.”

Dan Sirotkin is the co-author of the first peer-reviewed paper examining a laboratory origin for SARS-CoV-2, as well as its addendum, which formally linked the H1N1 Spanish Flu pandemic strain release of 1977 to gain-of-function research.

One of the most striking parts of David Asher’s phone call back in the summer of 2021, even more surprising than offering me and my dad $10,000 to walk away from this work and let Jamie Metzl take ownership of it, was thanking me for getting the original whitepaper me and my dad had written in front of the National Security Council (NSC).

That was actually the first confirmation I had that the contact I had on the NSC had in fact gotten that paper in front of everyone back in the middle of January 2020 when I’d passed it along, shortly before we put it up online on January 31st. 

So back when Tony Fauci and the Zooinati crew was scrambling to cover their tracks in those early weeks, the entire NSC was already completely and entirely aware that SARS-CoV-2 might’ve been engineered because they read our initial whitepaper, Logistical and Technical Exploration into the Origins of the Wuhan Strain of Coronavirus, and knew that: 

• Scientists had been splicing and dicing entire viruses for about 20 years, with Baric’s No See ‘Em technology, pioneered at UNC where scientists from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) had learned how to make coronavirus chimeras several years ago, with technology that would make it nearly impossible to tell if the virus had been manipulated. 

• Those scientists returned to the WIV, discovered the first SARS-like virus to use ACE2, and were now pretending like their work couldn’t possible have caused the pandemic - even though there’d been years of reporting about all sorts of safety concerns, and the SARS virus had leaked out of Chinese labs several times. 

• In 2012, scientists had used a technique called “serial passage” to send influenza through multiple sets of ferrets, which closely mimics the natural process of zoonosis and resulted in a virus that suddenly went airborne and became more virulent. 

• SARS-CoV-2 was already leading to depleted white blood cell counts, had notable homologies with HIV, and was creating troubling neurological symptoms. 

So as that initial paper from way back in January 2020 concluded, and which America’s National Security Council learned, there were only two possibilities:

– A coronavirus spontaneously mutated and jumped to humans at a wet market or deep in some random bat cave which just so happened to be 20 miles from China’s only BSL-4 virology lab, a virus with an unusually slippery never-before-seen genome that’s evading zoological classification, that may be as much as twenty-times more contagious than SARS and whose spike-protein region which allows it to enter host cells holds an unique HIV-like signature with the concomitant clinical response, that somehow managed to infect its patient zero who had no connection to this market, and then be so fined-tuned to humans that it’s gone on to create the single greatest public health crisis in Chinese history with approaching 100 million citizens locked-down or quarantined – also causing Mongolia to close its border with its largest trading partner for the first time in modern history and Russia to ban Chinese citizens from entry into their country.

– Or, Chinese scientists failed to follow correct sanitation protocols possibly while in a rush leading up to an international virological conference and during their boisterous holiday season, something that had been anticipated since the opening of the BSL-4 lab and has happened at least four times previously, and accidentally released this bio-engineered Wuhan Strain – likely created by scientists researching immunotherapy regimes against bat coronaviruses, who’ve already demonstrated the ability to perform every step necessary to bio-engineer the Wuhan Strain COVID-19 – into their population, and now the world. As would be expected, this virus appears to have been bio-engineered at the spike-protein genes which was already done at UNC to make an extraordinarily virulent coronavirus. Chinese efforts to prevent the full story about what’s going on from getting out are because they want the scales to be even since they’re now facing a severe pandemic and depopulation event. No facts point against this conclusion.

However Tony Fauci had a job to do, covering all of this up just like he did with the origins of HIV, so in that flurry of phone calls and emails, the absolutely absurd Proximal Origins paper was cobbled together with lies and misdirection, and published on March 17, 2020. In light of the research done to write our initial whitepaper, this was really obviously a bunch of happy horseshit cooked-up to cover-up what was really going on, so just two days later I wrote a response that highlighted China’s long history influencing scientific publications, and then dissembled all of Andersen’s sophomoric science mostly using serial passage:

• SARS-CoV-2’s high binding affinity for ACE2 was the result of “natural” selection, but not in the wild as their paper implied: It screamed of serial passage, the same technique used with highly-pathogenic avian influenza back in 2012 that led to a temporary ban on gain-of-function research. Ferrets could provide the “human-like ACE2” that was being hinted at in their paper, so although forcing this to occur in a lab created a virus that looked almost entirely natural, of course serial passage is in fact “purposeful manipulation” even though the virus itself doesn’t seem to have been changed by an unnatural process, since the natural process is accelerated inside a lab. 

• Andersen directly argued that the consequences of the FCS would be unknown and its origins always a mystery, when dozens of papers highlighted the incredibly virulent effects of an FCS on most viruses, and its emergence during serial passage experiments back in 2012 was one of virology’s watershed moments. 

• And probably the most telling and direct lie: “Subsequent generation of a polybasic cleavage site [FCS] would have then required repeated passage in cell culture or animals with ACE2 receptors similar to those of humans, but such work has also not previously been described.” As if the serial passage experiments from 2012 with ferrets and influenza, which led to the emergence of an FCS and an airborne highly-pathogenic flu virus that could infect humans, had never happened at all. 

Serial passage is the single most important lynchpin tying the origins of this virus together, it’s one of the hallmarks of creating a live-attenuated vaccine, and historically has almost always used lab ferrets - an overlapping species with the farmed mink that SARS-CoV-2 hopped right into and was vigorously slaughtering across multiple continents. It was immediately able to jump into farmed mink all across the planet because the virus was returning to a very close cousin of its original host, lab ferrets, which it’d recently been passaged through to attenuate it down, weakening it down into a live-attenuated vaccine instead of a virulent virus. 

Which is probably why Tony Fauci was emailing about “serial passage” back in February 2020, pretty strange no one at all has questioned him or anyone else about this technique in the press? 

But since that takedown of the Proximal Origins paper was pretty wonky, a few days later on March 23rd 2020, I wrote up an article that used The Expanse as a touchstone to understand what was going on, and how serial passage closely mimics a natural process: 

• The history of manipulated viruses getting out and killing goes back to at least 1977, when an unnatural strain of H1N1 emerged and spread across the globe. And although there wasn’t a consensus on its exact origins, I found an old Soviet paper that demonstrated it’d been manipulated in the lab, showing genetic alterations that only could’ve happened due to serial passage during that era. 

• This 1977 pandemic occurred in the midst of vaccine work on influenza all across the globe, and now in recent years gain-of-function vaccine work had been ongoing both for pancoronavirus vaccines as well as against HIV, both of which presented viable avenues for SARS-CoV-2’s creation.

• Peter Daszak was openly lying about the work that’d been done at the WIV, and Ralph Baric was at best dissembling about the implications of what he’d done at UNC. 

• Almost none of the villagers near batcaves in rural China showed antibodies for SARS-like viruses, so if the people close to bats weren’t contracting their diseases, how did zoonosis - a process that requires extensive interactions with a new host as the virus goes through the trial-and-error of selection - happen in the middle of urban Wuhan? 

And yet after extensive submissions to the popular press, nothing was getting through. Neither did submissions to pretty much every peer-reviewed scientific publication run out of America, so I went across the pond, and in April 2020 submitted a paper to BioEssays, that they’d publish back in August 2020, Might SARS-CoV-2 Have Arisen via Serial Passage through an Animal Host or Cell Culture? 

This was a technical retelling of everything I’d written up to that point, and with my dad’s help to get the finer points right, I managed to outline the long history of superpowers lying about their leaky laboratories, and tie the recent push for pancoronavirus and HIV vaccines to the genesis of our ongoing pandemic. Peer review was supposed to the litmus for scientific discourse, and so as an ex-con I figured this was simply the hoop I needed to jump through to be taken seriously. 

But maybe I should’ve paid more attention to the fact that shortly after this peer reviewed paper arguing for a laboratory origin of the pandemic was published in August 2020, that contact I’d used to get our original whitepaper in front of the NSC lost his job with the NSC, and was soundly demoted.

However sure enough, it brought a few more journalists out of the woodwork. William J. Broad with the New York Times had reached out and then ghosted me back in February 2020, and that peer-reviewed article brought out Drew Griffin with CNN, Josh Rogin with The Washington Post, and then Nicholson Baker with New York Magazine. 

None of them would ever publicly acknowledge that our paper existed at all, and would go out of their ways to write their articles about the origins of the pandemic around it - instead platforming pretty idiots with empty smiles, none of whom had gotten anything past peer review regarding the origins of this pandemic. 

Because America is a testament to unbound hedonism, that’s almost entirely consumed with experiencing as much unbridled pleasure as possible in lieu of anything else at all, and either all of these journalists are really that bad at their jobs - or they’re simply hiding the origins of this pandemic because that’s precisely what they’re being paid to do. Looking back I can’t say for sure that I wouldn’t have done anything differently, but knowing what I do now - I can at least rest easy, knowing it wouldn’t have mattered at all. 

None of the contacts me and my dad made during these nearly three years has lifted a finger as all the work we did was ripped out from under us, and the nature of this virus was downplayed into a mild nothing, a pandemic that Joe Biden tells us is already over. 

But at least passing peer review brought the Deep State entirely out of the woodwork, as a former Secretary of the Navy, who’d recently written whitepapers about collaborating as much as possible with China alongside the person who was then the head of the CIA and is now our Director of National Intelligence, Avril Haines, reached out to try and get our paper retracted. That led to the peer-reviewed clarification that came out in February 2021, that added the footnote to the Soviet paper mentioned above, and further highlighted the importance of serial passage in the genesis of our friendly neighborhood coronavirus. 

At this point it became clear that DRASTIC was simply a Limited Hangout being run to distract from the truth we’d been trying to reveal since January 2020, and everyone involved was either intentionally hiding the truth or just really fucking stupid and arrogant - so I made sure it was clear Golden Silkworms in Pandora’s Box was an independent production. 

It’s long and fairly technically though, so a few months later in the spring of 2021, I wrote an article that used one of the oldest and ubiquitous stories we know, the Ten Plagues of Egypt, to explain how and why the quasispecies model does what it does as an embodiment of the Angel of Death. This was followed by another shorter piece summarizing why using the quasispecies model makes it so incredibly obvious that SARS-CoV-2 was engineered in a lab: 

• When the live-attenuated vaccine for polio, OPV, reverts back to virulence it goes through a series of mutations with a specific pattern, known as “gatekeeping” mutations. These mutations are exquisitely convergent and seem to take shortcuts that natural evolution doesn’t, something that was ignored with SARS-CoV-2 until very late in 2022 when all of a sudden the rest of the world woke up to the convergence that’d been ongoing from the start. Also in OPV, these gatekeeping mutations have only been observed inside Petri dishes or human hosts, whereas with SARS-CoV-2 the same sets of gatekeeping mutations were emerging simultaneous within ferrets and lab mice, as well as us humans, emphasizing that what’s being witnessed isn’t natural evolution, but a live-attenuated vaccine working its way back to its original form like thousands of flecks of T-1000 mercury reassembling back into the Terminator. A natural virus wouldn’t exhibit the same sets of mutations in three totally different sets of hosts, the fact it was happening with SARS-CoV-2 was the slam-dunk for a gatekeeping deattenuating live-attenuated vaccine.

Then a few months later, I’d finally solve the riddle of the FCS, and explain that much like a literary grinning feline - some things are there without seeming to be there at all. A conclusion that made the link back to the 2012 serial passage experiments with ferrets and influenza even more telling.

And finally, for the one-year anniversary of Golden Silkworms, I published an epilogue that confirmed everyone on the planet is heading down a very dark, but well-trodden path, due to the unbound genetic experimentations of morally bankrupt monsters like Joseph Mengele, Bill Gates, Tony Fauci, Alina Chan, Ralph Baric, and Richard Ebright.

All of whom have had countless features and interviews in the mainstream media, while the truth me and my dad uncovered all the way back in January 2020 gets buried. And so without anyone at all interested in helping, since no one can even be bothered to make a Twitter thread about the nearly three years of writing I’ve done - Don’t expect any more clarifications. 

 Me and my dad risked our lives to expose the truth the moment all of this started, and absolutely no one has exhibited the smallest shred of ethics as all the credit for what we’ve done was stolen out from under us.  For whatever reason, a recent preprint about a lab origin can make a massive splash and draw incredible amounts of press, as even its authors pretend like there isn’t a body of peer reviewed literature around a lab origin that exists already, and all of this hasn’t been very thoroughly explained for 18 months and counting. 

Not one single citation of our two peer-reviewed papers, not one mention of “serial passage,” just three more assholes who want to hear themselves talk. 

The time for niceties and etiquette ended millions of innocent deaths ago.

So the bad news is: The scientific community is a death cult, America’s academics, journalists, and politicians are completely and entirely ethically bankrupt - and billions more are going to die before anything changes.

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It's funny the things I remember from these past twelve months. How easily my belt slipped out of my suit-pants in court as I took it off and passed all my personal belongings to my parents - despite all the weight I'd gained the belt had still somehow sausaged me into my suit, and in taking it off there was a bit of a reassurance: Well, at least fitting into nice clothes is one thing you won't have to stress about anytime soon.

I remember how puzzled I was at how friendly the sheriffs deputies were in the holding pens in the basement of the courthouse. "Looks like we got an offensive lineman coming through, just hang tight for a few minutes Big Guy and we'll get you processed into the system," as I sat in a hard plastic chair and handcuffs clicked into place around my right wrist.

They didn't look at me with disgust or hatred or revulsion, they simply seemed curious. I realize now where that comes from now - there aren't too many bespectacled clean-cut un-tattooed white guys in our state prison system. All in all I haven't seen any evidence at all of Zimbardo's notorious Prison Experiment, where mild-mannered college students were turned into cruel and hateful guards in a matter of weeks. The guards here are largely just bored, and once they decide an inmate isn't perpetually trying to bullshit them or angle-shoot, they're surprisingly reasonable and respectful - at times even apologetic if the system screws you over somehow.

Waiting to be moved from my first stop after the courthouse, the Seven Locks Detention Center, some of us were on our way into the system and others were on our way out. A funny sort of camaraderie was palpable, we only got zo minutes for meals and an hour of TV-time out of the cells each day so everyone sought to socialize as hard as they could for what little time we got to feel human - and all of us heading into the system sought as much information as we could about what spending time in prison would be like.

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