The Big COVID Botchulism Roundup, Part 1

Botchulism: /ˈbäCHəˌliz(ə)m/ noun

a little-known mental disease of the ruling intellectual/expert class, characterized by hubris; recklessness; delusions of intellectual and moral superiority; tunnel vision; an inability to self-reflect, acknowledge errors and change course; and belief perseverance even in the presence of countervailing or disconfirming evidence.

Example: "Everything they do makes it worse but they just keep doubling down, so I'm pretty sure they have botchulism."

Natural Origins vs Lab Leak:

In 2018, EcoHealth Alliance, a nonprofit run by British zoologist Peter Daszak, applied for a grant from the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). 

The proposal? Take a coronavirus from a specific colony of bats in Yunnan China, and stick a furin cleavage site on it, along with other modifications that would increase its affiliation for human ACE2 receptors. 

This virus was approximately 25% genetically divergent from the coronavirus responsible for the SARS epidemic of 2002/03, which had a case fatality rate (CFR) of 10%.

FOIAed documents suggest that while they told DARPA the work would be done in North Carolina, supervised by virologist Dr. Ralph Baric under Biosafety Level 4 (BSL-4) conditions, they actually planned to have the work done at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) by Dr. Shi Zhengli.

DARPA wisely rejected the application. Not because they suspected the work would be outsourced to China, but because there's no military application for this kind of research. While I'm sure DARPA is as ruthless as we all assume in terms of developing deadly bioweapons (and potential vaccines to protect against them), a SARS-like coronavirus, even one with a 10% or higher CFR, is a poor bioweapon. More on that in the vaccine section below.

EcoHealth Alliance did manage to secure funding from the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) and its subsidiary agency, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease (NIAID). 

It's unclear at this point whether the funding was specifically earmarked for this particular project, or whether EcoHealth misled NIH the way they attempted to do with DARPA. But as any parent of an addict knows, money is fungible. The kid says he needs it for this, then spends it on that. 

Either way, EcoHealth either never received from the WIV, or never forwarded to the NIH, any of the mandatory progress reports associated with the grant. The money went into a black hole.

In September of 2019, the WIV was taken over by the Chinese People's Liberation Army (PLA), who promptly deleted the WIV's online database. That database contained a full catalog of the WIV's research projects and stored viruses. Within a few days of the takeover, calls were put out for contractor bids to overhaul the ventilation and alarms systems at the lab.

Had their been a leak? Perhaps not yet. But here is what they would have known at that time:

First, a furin cleavage site and the other modifications proposed in the DARPA application would make a coronavirus highly transmissible in humans.

Second, it killed all of their humanized mice. We know this, because that was replicated by researchers in Boston, who took the original SARS-CoV-2 virus and stuck the omicron variant's spike protein on it. They wanted to know why omicron was a kinder, gentler COVID. What they found was that 80% of humanized mice were killed by their hybrid, while 100% were killed by the original gangster.

An insanely transmissible (in humans) airborne virus with a potentially 100% kill rate could trigger the kind of panic response we saw in September 2019, even if it hadn't leaked yet. Send in the military, shred all the evidence in case it's already gotten out, and do everything you can from this point onward to keep it from escaping.

Lucky for us, mice aren't humans, not even when they've been humanized. Also lucky for us, the 25% genetic divergence didn't increase SARS's 10% case fatality rate.

Because SARS-CoV-2? Same bat colony, same bat virus. With the exact same modifications described in the DARPA grant application.

In late January 2020, certain experts associated with NIH looked at the genome of the virus. One was Dr. Kristian Andersen, who emailed colleagues and said the virus's genome was not consistent with evolutionary theory. Another, Dr. Robert Garry, said he couldn't see any way that this virus could have occurred in nature.

Dr. Anthony Fauci (head of NIAID and the most senior official at NIH), a longtime proponent of gain-of-function research, tasked his underling, Francis Collins, to ensure SARS-CoV-2 wasn't connected to the NIH. I'll leave it to others to decide whether that request was for Collins to ensure NIH hadn't funded the creation of SARS-CoV-2, or whether it was for him to ensure that any evidence they had found its way into a burn bag.

Fauci's long-time right-hand man, Dr. David Morens, got to work herding the NIH cats. He instructed anyone involved in the conversations about SARS-CoV-2's potential origins to delete any official emails on the subject, and switch to using their personal email accounts.

I don't know about you all, but that smells pretty illegal to me.

Within a weeks, our NIH coconspirators, including Andersen and Garry, had penned an op-ed for Nature Medicine. "The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2." The paper pooh-poohed the idea that the virus was a product of manipulation in a lab, and implicated the Huanan Seafood Market (HSM), which trafficked in wild meat, in a zoonotic spillover event.

And here's where it gets truly stupid. First, the HSM didn't sell bats. 

Second, even if they did sell bats, no one sells insectivorous bats, the bats that carry the closest relatives at the time to SARS-CoV-2, for food. Why? Because there's no meat on them and they carry rabies.

And third, no intermediary species had been identified yet. Not in the market, not near the market, and nowhere else in the entirety of Wuhan. Or Hubei province. Or China. 

The "proximal origin" paper posits that the intermediary species might be the pangolin. After all, Chinese people love to eat endangered species, and Huanan IS a dirty, filthy wet market. It's possible that a bat with a range of 80km from a cave 1000km away decided to vacation at the HSM, or hitched a ride in a truck full of pangolins. Unfortunately for our coconspirators, no pangolins tested positive for SARS-CoV-2. Neither did any pythons. Or raccoon dogs. Or any other of the 80,000 animals they tested.

And perhaps even more curious, no bats. You heard me.

When swine flu jumps to humans, swine can still catch it. When bird flu jumps to humans, birds can still catch it. When anthrax jumps from cattle to humans, cows can still catch it. When cowpox jumps from cattle to humans, cows can still catch it. When SARS jumped from bats to civet cats to humans, civets and bats could still catch it. When MERS jumped from bats to dromedary camels to humans, camels and bats could still catch it.

SARS-CoV-2 appears to be the very first zoonotic spillover event known to man that completely ditched its original host species. And that emerged, fully "evolved" to be one of the most infectious viruses in human history while completely abandoning its original host species.

It COULD have jumped from bats to pangolins to humans. But it didn't. According to Dr. Steven Quay, a leading expert in genetics, the probability of SARS-CoV-2 occurring in nature was 0.2%. And since there's no evidence that it did, I'm going with the 99.8% probability it was a designer virus, constructed by reckless smooth-brained geniuses for no good reason.

There's no app for that:

Proponents of gain-of-function research justify their support of it by claiming it can help predict zoonotic spillovers or assist in vaccine development. Want to know who knows this is 100% unadulterated bullshit?

DARPA. It's why they rejected the 2018 EcoHealth grant application to create the designer virus that looks exactly like SARS-CoV-2.

First, there is no predictive value in inserting designer features into a virus. It can't tell you anything about how a zoonotic spillover might occur. All it can tell you is what could happen if you fuck with an animal virus by inserting designer features into it that might never occur in nature.

Second, mucosal respiratory viruses can't be contained by ANY vaccine. This has nothing to do with the delivery mechanism of the vaccines, or the potential mutations that occur to escape immunity. It has to do with the mucosal immune compartment being preset for tolerance of infection.

Why? Because there are as many as 499.95 billion proteins on earth that are not part of our bodies. There's bound to be plenty of overlap between the proteins in air we breathe and the food we eat, and the pathogens we encounter. 

Because of this, our mucosal and systemic immune compartments are segregated. The mucosal compartment exists everywhere things from outside (food, O2, water, semen) need to get inside, and things from inside (poop, CO2, urine, babies) need to get outside. 

The mucosal compartment is set for high tolerance of foreign proteins. It has to get good and infected before it will do anything about it, and it will quickly forget what the pathogen looks like because if it didn't, we'd all be on an ever more extreme elimination diet and living in clean rooms with HEPA-filtered air.

Ergo, there's no way vaccination can prevent the spread of mucosal respiratory viruses. But don't take my word for it. Take Fauci's.

"[I]f natural mucosal respiratory virus infections do not elicit complete and long-term protective immunity against reinfection, how can we expect vaccines, especially systemically administered non-replicating vaccines, to do so?"

Also from Fauci: "Although current influenza vaccines reduce the risk of severe disease, hospitalization, and death to some degree, their effectiveness against clinically apparent infection is decidedly suboptimal, ranging from 14% to 60% over the past 15 influenza seasons. Furthermore, the duration of vaccine-elicited immunity is measured only in months."

Again, if it's super contagious and there's no way to protect your own people from it, it's a really shitty bioweapon. 

And if there's no potential for a vaccine, it can't help anyone working on vaccine development.

And if all the changes to the genome are chosen in advance and artificially induced in a lab, it can't tell you anything about how a virus might mutate and evolve naturally.

That's RACIST!

The moment I saw people in the media calling the lab leak theory racist, was the moment I said to myself, "well, that's confirmation it came from the lab."

Bird flu is in the news these days, but there's another bird subject I'd like to discuss. Operation Mockingbird. An illegal CIA program that was exposed by the Church Committee in 1975. The gist of it is that the CIA had agents and assets implanted in newsrooms across the US, unlawfully propagandizing the American public.

While the program was officially dismantled, there's no evidence it ever went away, or that some other federal agency didn't take it over.

When the "lab leak theory is racist" narrative became ubiquitous, I compared the two theories.

Wet market theory: Ordinary Chinese people have culinary preferences westerners find gross, like eating endangered species, vermin that carry disease, and family pets. Also, their markets are unsanitary petri dishes filled with potential plagues. Widespread, disgusting Chinese cultural practices caused this pandemic.

Lab leak theory: A handful of arrogant, reckless scientists who happened to be Chinese fucked with the wrong virus in the wrong way, and ordinary Chinese citizens were the first to pay the price for that hubris. And their despotic government not only failed to protect the Chinese people, it even punished those who saw the danger and spoke out.

Which of these two competing theories would be more likely to incite anti-Asian racism? The one that frames ordinary Chinese people as the cause? Or the one that frames them as fellow innocent victims?

The very idea that ANYONE could view the latter as racist but the former as not racist stretches the bounds of credulity. In fact, the only way it could POSSIBLY happen is if certain actors within the American government were clandestinely wagging the dog, perhaps with the assistance of conflicted special interests and implicated NGOs.

Diagnosis: Botchulism

The COVID-19 pandemic was (99.9% certainty in my mind) caused by a handful of arrogant, boneheaded "experts" doing and funding dangerous, pandemic-potential research that has NO civilian or military value whatsoever. 

That's the definition of botchulism.

The fact that Nature Medicine even published the "Proximal Origin" paper represents an astounding departure from scientific rigor. "It's possible" does not mean "it's likely", let alone "that's what actually happened." The article hasn't been retracted, despite there being (5 years later) NO evidence supporting a natural origin, and a TON of evidence supporting the lab leak hypothesis.

That's the definition of botchulism.

And the news and social media narrative that blaming a handful of individuals (not all Chinese) and perhaps the Chinese government would incite anti-Asian hate, while blaming the cultural practices of the Chinese people at large would not?

That's not just botchulism. That's rampant, systemic botchulism. Galloping botchulism. Septicemic botchulism. Terminal, stage 4 malignant botchulism.

Arrogant assholes played stupid games. We all won the stupid prizes. And then anyone who point it it out? Smeared, maligned and censored.

And this is just Part 1, folks. There's plenty of botchulism to go around.