SARS-CoV-2 is the Most Dangerous Virus to Ever Exist
Why downplaying the severity of the COVID-19 Pandemic only happens due to Hollywood’s sensationalized depiction of viral outbreaks, and the hidden history of live-attenuated vaccine trials gone-wrong.
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 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 when our bereft hero, Gilgamesh, has to say goodbye to his beloved Enkidu. And the 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:
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 in 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 - tried to warn of the coming apocalypses and 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 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 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.
But 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 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 an apocalyptic viral escape would have the kinds of dramatic Hollywood deaths that involved 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 various films 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 days or weeks 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 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, 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 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 from their host population in a highly pathogenic state into a new species and immediately establish 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 species it has ongoing direct contact with, but it never manages to spread head-to-head among that new host 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.
If that was something viruses could do, establish a lethal highly-pathogenic state in one species and then jump into a new species and establish head-to-head transmission in a lethal and highly-pathogenic state - there would be no higher-order animals alive, viruses would’ve killed them all off long ago. Viruses don’t hold master keys to mammalian or any other kingdom’s transmission, and it takes decades if not centuries for a virus to mutate and adapt enough to any one species’ 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 genomes 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. Something that’s happened so much throughout human 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 in an actively infectious state, not even to their spouses - demonstrating the inability of a bird virus to establish head-to-head transmission in a totally different kingdom of animal, which is how the genetics tell us things should go.
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 whats 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 go anywhere.
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 the 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 species 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 although they might not make it, at least they won’t infect their entire communities.
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 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 forces an artificial zoonosis in the lab, and weakens the virus by making it interact with new host species’ cells that it’s not totally acclimated to, a phenomenon that’s worked for virus 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 innoculate 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.
And so things didn’t go exactly as planned 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.
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 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 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 all of Polio’s important epitopes 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 that 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. So even by the time it hit America’s shores in early 1978, there was plenty of alarm but very little death. 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 tried out in 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 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 isolated and officially recognized. Since unlike the sensationalized Hollywood version of a 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 is a miracle of modern medicine. 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 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 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.
…continue on to Part II here.
