Rejecting Rockefeller Germ Theory once and for all
by Jon Rappoport March 25, 2021
Note: In a number of articles, I’ve offered compelling evidence that the deaths attributed to COVID-19 can be explained without reference to a virus. Furthermore, whatever merits “alternative treatments” may have, I see no convincing evidence their action has anything to do with “neutralizing a virus.”
The entire tragic, criminal, murderous, stupid, farcical COVID fraud is based on a hundred years of Rockefeller medicine—a pharmaceutical tyranny in which the enduring headline is:
ONE DISEASE, ONE GERM.
That’s the motto engraved on the gate of the medical cartel.
—Thousands of so-called separate diseases, each caused by an individual germ.
“Kill each germ with a toxic drug, prevent each germ with a toxic vaccine.”
In the absence of those hundred years of false science and propaganda, COVID-19 promotion would have gone over like a bad joke. A few sour laughs, and then nothing, except people going on with their lives.
The overall health of an individual human being has to do with factors entirely unrelated to “one disease, one germ.”
As I quoted, for example, at the end of a recent article—
“The combined death rate from scarlet fever, diphtheria, whooping cough and measles among children up to fifteen shows that nearly 90 percent of the total decline in mortality between 1860 and 1965 had occurred before the introduction of antibiotics and widespread immunization. In part, this recession may be attributed to improved housing and to a decrease in the virulence of micro-organisms, but by far the most important factor was a higher host-resistance due to better nutrition.” Ivan Illich, Medical Nemesis, Bantam Books, 1977
And Robert F Kennedy, Jr.: “After extensively studying a century of recorded data, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Johns Hopkins researchers concluded: ‘Thus vaccinations does not account for the impressive declines in mortality from infectious diseases seen in the first half of the twentieth century’.”
“Similarly, in 1977, Boston University epidemiologists (and husband and wife) John and Sonja McKinlay published their seminal work in the Millbank Memorial Fund Quarterly on the role that vaccines (and other medical interventions) played in the massive 74% decline in mortality seen in the twentieth century: ‘The Questionable Contribution of Medical Measures to the Decline of Mortality in the United States in the Twentieth Century’.”
“In this article, which was formerly required reading in U.S. medical schools, the McKinlays pointed out that 92.3% of the mortality rate decline happened between 1900 and 1950, before most vaccines existed, and that all medical measures, including antibiotics and surgeries, ‘appear to have contributed little to the overall decline in mortality in the United States since about 1900 — having in many instances been introduced several decades after a marked decline had already set in and having no detectable influence in most instances’.”
How the immune system (if it is a system) actually operates is beyond current medical hypotheses.
“T-cells, B-cells, neutrophils, monocytes, natural killer cells, proteins,” are welded into a breathless story about a military machine that attacks germ invaders. Push-pull. Search and destroy.
The notion that THIS is what creates health is fatuous.
Positive vitality is what keeps us healthy.
A few factors of positive vitality are on the tyrannical COVID list of what-should-be-squashed: financial survival; open mingling of friends and family; people looking (unmasked) at people; open communication without fear of censorship.
Nutrition and basic sanitation are key vitality factors, of course.
And then we have Purpose in Life: where are people pouring their creative energies?
Obviously, freedom from harmful medical treatment is necessary for vitality to flourish.
Suppression of LIFE, in order to stop a purported germ, is institutionalized death.
Modern medicine is sensationally exposed in a review I’ve mentioned dozens of time over the past 10 years: Authored by the late famous public health doctor at Johns Hopkins, Barbara Starfield, it is titled, “Is US Health Really the Best in the World?” It was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association on July 26, 2000.
It found that, every year in the US, the medical system kills 225,000 people.
Per decade, the death toll would come to 2.25 million people.
You won’t find that in CDC reports.
In 2009, I interviewed Dr. Starfield. I asked her whether the federal government had undertaken a major effort to remedy medically caused death in America, and whether she had been sought to consult with the government in such an effort.
Groundbreaking research indicates that most of what is believed about the purportedly deadly properties of viruses like influenza is, in fact, not evidence-based but myth.
Germ theory is an immensely powerful force on this planet, affecting everyday interactions from a handshake, all the way up the ladder to national vaccination agendas and global eradication campaigns.
But what if fundamental research on what exactly these ‘pathogens’ are, how they infect us, has not yet even been performed? What if much of what is assumed and believed about the danger of microbes, particularly viruses, has completely been undermined in light of radical new discoveries in microbiology?
The hyperbolic manner in which health policymakers and mainstream media pundits talk about it today, flu virus (or COVID-19) is an inexorably lethal force (note: viruses are obligiate parasites, at worst, with no inner motive force to actively “infect” others), against which all citizens, of all ages 6 months or older, need the annual influenza vaccine to protect themselves against, lest they (it is said) face deadly consequences. Worse, those who hold religious or philosophical objections, or who otherwise conscientiously object to vaccinating, are being characterized as doing harm to others by denying them herd immunity (a concept that has been completely debunked by a careful study of the evidence, or lack thereof). For instance, in the interview below Bill Gates tells Sanjay Gupta that he thinks non-vaccinators “kill children”:
But what if I told you that there isn’t even such a thing as “flu virus,” in the sense of a monolithic, disease vector existing outside of us, conceived as it is as the relationship of predator to prey?
First, consider that the highly authorative Cochrane collaboration acknowledges there are many different flu viruses that are not, in fact, influenza A — against which flu vaccines are targeted — but which nonetheless can contribute to symptoms identical to those attributed to influenza A:
“Over 200 viruses cause influenza and influenza-like illness which produce the same symptoms (fever, headache, aches and pains, cough and runny noses). Without laboratory tests, doctors cannot tell the two illnesses apart. Both last for days and rarely lead to death or serious illness. At best, vaccines might be effective against only Influenza A and B, which represent about 10% of all circulating viruses.” (Source: Cochrane Summaries).” [emphasis added]
This makes for a picture of complexity that powerfully undermines health policies that presuppose vaccination equates to bona fide immunity, and by implication, necessitates the herd collectively participate in the ritual of mass vaccination campaigns as a matter of life-or-death social necessity.
Even the use of the word “immunization” to describe vaccination is highly misleading. The moment the word is used, it already presupposes efficacy, and makes it appear as if non-vaccinators are anti-immunity, instead of what they actually are: pro-immunity (via clean air, food, water, and sunlight), but unwilling to subject themselves or their healthy children to “unavoidably unsafe” medical procedures with only theoretical benefits.
Why Flu Virus Doesn’t Exist (The Way We Were Told)
But the topic gets even more interesting when we consider the findings of a 2015 study entitled “Conserved and host-specific features of influenza virion architecture.” This was the first study ever to plumb the molecular depths of what influenza virus is actually composed of. Amazingly, given the long history of vaccine use and promotion, the full characterization of what proteins it contains, and where they are derived from, was never previously performed. How we invest billions of dollars annually into flu vaccines, and have created a global campaign to countermand a viral enemy, whose basic building blocks were not even known until a few years ago, is hard to understand. But it is true nonetheless.
The study abstract opens with this highly provocative line:
“Viruses use virions to spread between hosts, and virion composition is therefore the primary determinant of viral transmissibility and immunogenicity.” [emphasis added]
Influenza viral particles
Virion are also known as “viral particles,” and they are the means by which viral nucleic acids are able to move and ‘infect’ living organisms. Without the viral particle (taxi) to carry around the virus DNA (passenger), it would be harmless; in fact, viruses are often described as existing somewhere between living and inanimate objects for this reason: they do not produce their own energy, nor are transmissable without a living host. And so, in this first line, the authors are making it clear that virion composition is also the primary determinant in how or whether a virus is infectious (transmits) and what effects it will have in the immune system of the infected host.
This distinction is important because we often think of viruses as simply pathogenic strings of DNA or RNA. The irony, of course, is that the very things we attribute so much lethality to — viral nucleic acids — are not even alive, and can not infect an organism without all the other components (proteins, lipids, extra-viral nucleic acids) which are, technically, not viral in origin, participating in the process. And so, if the components that are non-viral are essential for the virus to cause harm, how can we continue to maintain that we are up against a monolithic disease entity “out there” who “infects” us, a passive victim? It’s fundamentally non-sensical, given these findings. It also clearly undermines the incessant, fear-based rhetoric those beholden to the pro-vaccine stance to coerce the masses into undergoing the largely faith-based rite of vaccination.
Let’s dive deeper into the study’s findings.
The next line of the abstract addresses the fact we opened this article with: namely, that there is great complexity involved at the level of the profound variability in virion composition:
“However, the virions of many viruses are complex and pleomorphic, making them difficult to analyze in detail”
But this problem of the great variability in the virion composition of influenza is exactly why the study was conducted. They explain:
“Here we address this by identifying and quantifying viral proteins with mass spectrometry, producing a complete and quantifiable model of the hundreds of viral and host-encoded proteins that make up the pleomorphic virions of influenza virus. We show that a conserved influenza virion architecture, which includes substantial quantities of host proteins as well as the viral protein NSI, is elaborated with abundant host-dependent features. As a result, influenza virions produced by mammalian and avian hosts have distinct protein compositions.”
In other words, they found that the flu virus is as much comprised of biological material from the host the virus ‘infects,’ as the viral genetic material of the virus per se.
How then, do we differentiate influenza virus as fully “other”? Given that it would not exist without “self” proteins, or those of other host animals like birds (avian) or insects, this would be impossible to do with any intellectual honesty intact.
There’s also the significant problem presented by flu vaccine production. Presently, human flu vaccine antigen is produced via insects and chicken eggs. This means that the virus particles extracted from these hosts would contain foreign proteins, and would therefore produce different and/or unpredictable immunological responses in humans than would be expected from human influenza viral particles. One possibility is that the dozens of foreign proteins found within avian influenza could theoretically produce antigens in humans that cross-react with self-structures resulting in autoimmunity. Safety testing, presently, does not test for these cross reactions. Clearly, this discovery opens up a pandora’s box of potential problems that have never sufficiently been analyzed, since it was never understood until now that “influenza” is so thoroughly dependent upon a host for its transmissability and immunogenecity.
Are Flu Viruses Really “Hijacked” Exosomes?
Lastly, the study identified something even more amazing:
“Finally, we note that influenza virions share an underlying protein composition with exosomes, suggesting that influenza virions form by subverting micro vesicle” production.”
What these researchers are talking about is the discovery that virion particles share stunning similarities to naturally occurring virus-like particles produced by all living cells called exosomes. Exosomes, like many viruses (i.e. enveloped viruses) are enclosed in a membrane, and are within the 50-100 nanometer size range that viruses are (20-400 nm). They also contain biologically active molecules, such as proteins and lipids, as well as information-containing ones like RNAs — exactly, or very similar, to the types of contents you find in viral particles.
Watch this basic video on exosomes to get a primer:
In light of this post-Germ Theory perspective, viruses could be described as pieces of information in search of chromosomes; not inherently “bad,” but, in fact, essential for mediating the genotype/phenotype relationship within organisms, who must adapt to ever-shifting environmental conditions in real-time in order to survive; something the glacial pace of genetic changes within the primary nucleotide sequences of our DNA cannot do (for instance, it may take ~ 100,000 years for a protein-coding gene sequence to change versus seconds for a protein-coding gene’s expression to be altered via modulation via viral or exosomal RNAs).
This does not mean they are “all good”, either. Sometimes, given many conditions outside their control, their messages could present challenges or misinformation to the cells to which they are exposed, which could result in a “disease symptom.” These disease symptoms are often if not invariably attempts by the body to self-regulate and ultimately improve and heal itself.
In other words, the virion composition of viruses appears to be the byproduct of the cell’s normal exosome (also known as microvesicle) production machinery and trafficking, albeit being influenced by influenza DNA. And like exosomes, viruses may be a means of extracellular communication between cells, instead of simply a pathological disease entity. This could explain why an accumulating body of research on the role of the virome in human health indicates that so-called infectious agents, including viruses like measles, confer significant health benefits. [see: the Health Benefits of Measles and The Healing Power of Germs?].
Other researchers have come to similar discoveries about the relationship between exosomes and viruses, sometimes describing viral hijacking of exosome pathways as a “Trojan horse” hypothesis. HIV may provide such an example.
Concluding Remarks
The remarkably recent discovery of the host-dependent nature of the influenza virus’ virion composition is really just the tip of an intellectual iceberg that has yet to fully emerge into the light of day, but is already “sinking” ships; paradigm ships, if you will.
One such paradigm is that germs are enemy combatants, and that viruses serve no fundamental role in our health, and should be eradicated from the earth with drugs and vaccines, if possible.
This belief, however, is untenable. With the discovery of the indispensable role of the microbiome, and the subpopulation of viruses within it — the virome — we have entered into an entirely new, ecologically-based view of the body and its environs that are fundamentally inseparable. Ironically, the only thing that influenza may be capable of killing is germ theory itself.
For an in-depth exploration of this, watch the lecture below on the virome. I promise, if you do so, you will no longer be able to uphold germ theory as a monolithic truth any longer. You may even start to understand how we might consider some viruses “our friends,” and why we may need viruses far more than they need us.
Dr Andrew Kaufman says that viruses are not contagious and you can’t catch a virus. Is there any evidence that viruses are contagious and Covid19 is a virus and not an exosome?
The doctor Andrew Kaufman says you can’ t catch a virus , the viruses we’re told about in school don’t really exist , viruses are produced inside of cells to combat toxins and the PCR tests in so-called coronavirus patients are just testing for exosomes produced by cells under stress from toxins .
Is there any evidence that a virus is contagious ?
Germany’s federal government and mainstream media are engaged in damage control after a report that challenges the established Corona narrative leaked from the interior ministry.
Some of the report key passages are:
The dangerousness of Covid-19 was overestimated: probably at no point did the danger posed by the new virus go beyond the normal level.
The people who die from Corona are essentially those who would statistically die this year, because they have reached the end of their lives and their weakened bodies can no longer cope with any random everyday stress (including the approximately 150 viruses currently in circulation).
Worldwide, within a quarter of a year, there has been no more than 250,000 deaths from Covid-19, compared to 1.5 million deaths [25,100 in Germany] during the influenza wave 2017/18.
The danger is obviously no greater than that of many other viruses. There is no evidence that this was more than a false alarm.
A reproach could go along these lines: During the Corona crisis the State has proved itself as one of the biggest producers of Fake News.
So far, so bad. But it gets worse.
The report focuses on the “manifold and heavy consequences of the Corona measures” and warns that these are “grave”.
More people are dying because of state-imposed Corona-measures than they are being killed by the virus.
The reason is a scandal in the making:
A Corona-focused German healthcare system is postponing life-saving surgery and delaying or reducing treatment for non-Corona patients.
Berlin in Denial Mode. The scientists fight back.
Initially, the government tried to dismiss the report as “the work of one employee”, and its contents as “his own opinion” – while the journalists closed ranks, no questions asked, with the politicians.
But the 93-pages report titled “Analysis of the Crisis Management” has been drafted by a scientific panel appointed by the interior ministry and composed by external medical experts from several German universities.
The report was the initiative of a department of the interior ministry called Unit KM4 and in charge with the “Protection of critical infrastructures”.
This is also where the German official turned whistleblower, Stephen Kohn, work(ed), and from where he leaked it to the media.
The authors of the report issued a joint press release already on May 11th, berating the government for ignoring expert advise, and asking for the interior minister to officially comment upon the experts joint statement:
“Therapeutic and preventive measures should never bring more harm than the illness itself. Their aim should be to protect the risk groups, without endangering the availability of medical care and the health of the whole population, as it is unfortunately occurring”
“We in the scientific and medical praxis are experiencing the secondary damages of the Corona-measures on our patients on a dialy basis.”
“We therefore ask the Federal Ministry of the Interior, to comment upon our press release, and we hope for a pertinent discussion regarding the [Corona] measures, one that leads to the best possible solution for the whole population”
At the time of writing, the German government had yet to react.
But the facts are – sadly – vindicating the medical experts’ worries.
On Mai 23 the German newspaper Das Bild titled: “Dramatic consequences of the Corona-Measures: 52,000 Cancer Ops delayed.”
Inside, a a leading medical doctor warns that “we will feel the side-effects of the Corona crisis for years”.
Shooting the Whistleblower. Ignoring the Message.
As Der Spiegel reported on Mai 15th: “Stephen Kohn [the whistleblower] has since been suspended from duty. He was advised to obtain a lawyer and his work laptop was confiscated.”
Kohn had originally leaked the report on May 9th to the liberal-conservative magazine Tichys Einblick one of Germany’s most popular alternative media outlets.
News of the report went mainstream in Germany during the second week of May – but already in the third week media and politicians alike stopped discussing the issue by refusing to comment upon it.
Emblematic was the approach taken by Günter Krings, the representative for Interior Minister Horst Seehofer – the whistleblower’s boss:
Asked it he would treat the document seriously, Krings replied:
“If you start analyzing papers like that, then pretty soon you’ll be inviting the guys with the tin foil hats to parliamentary hearings.”
Men in tin foil hats – Aluhut in German – is a term used to describe people who believe in conspiracy theories.
Indeed one article by Der Spiegel adressing the Corona protest movement and the consequences of the leaked report contained the word “conspiracy” no fewer than 17 times!
And no discussions of the issues raised by the report itself.
Outside Germany the news has virtually gone unreported.
The Protest Movement – or “Corona-Rebellen”.
Germans begun demonstrating against Lockdowns as early as April.
And thousands of citizens keep showing up at demonstrations every week-end, even as the government is easing the restrictions.
The demonstrations are not merely against restrictions, which have actually been comparatively mild compared to many other Western countries.
The demos question the entire Corona Narrative, and even more its principals, especially the role Bill Gates is playing, as the WHO’s second biggest donor (the first one since Trump suspended U.S. contribution).
Indeed the biggest such demonstrations took place in Stuttgart on May 9th, where tens of thousands people assembled to say no – to the NWO.
Germans are saying no to any Orwellian solution the government might one day impose out of a questionable “emergency status”, from mass surveillance Apps to mandatory vaccinations.
The leaked report has proved their fears to be well founded.
At least as far as the fake nature of the “Corona pandemic” is concerned.
Woman running through the mud at the Woodstock Music Festival, New York, US, 17th August 1969. (Photo by Owen Franken/Corbis via Getty Images))
In my lifetime, there was another deadly flu epidemic in the United States. The flu spread from Hong Kong to the United States, arriving December 1968 and peaking a year later. It ultimately killed 100,000 people in the U.S., mostly over the age of 65, and one million worldwide.
Lifespan in the US in those days was 70 whereas it is 78 today. Population was 200 million as compared with 328 million today. It was also a healthier population with low obesity. If it would be possible to extrapolate the death data based on population and demographics, we might be looking at a quarter million deaths today from this virus. So in terms of lethality, it was as deadly and scary as COVID-19 if not more so, though we shall have to wait to see.
“In 1968,” says Nathaniel L. Moir in National Interest, “the H3N2 pandemic killed more individuals in the U.S. than the combined total number of American fatalities during both the Vietnam and Korean Wars.”
And this happened in the lifetimes of every American over 52 years of age.
I was 5 years old and have no memory of this at all. My mother vaguely remembers being careful and washing surfaces, and encouraging her mom and dad to be careful. Otherwise, it’s mostly forgotten today. Why is that?
Nothing closed. Schools stayed open. All businesses did too. You could go to the movies. You could go to bars and restaurants. John Fund has a friend who reports having attended a Grateful Dead concert. In fact, people have no memory or awareness that the famous Woodstock concert of August 1969 – planned in January during the worse period of death – actually occurred during a deadly American flu pandemic that only peaked globally six months later. There was no thought given to the virus which, like ours today, was dangerous mainly for a non-concert-going demographic.
Stock markets didn’t crash. Congress passed no legislation. The Federal Reserve did nothing. Not a single governor acted to enforce social distancing, curve flattening (even though hundreds of thousands of people were hospitalized), or banning of crowds. No mothers were arrested for taking their kids to other homes. No surfers were arrested. No daycares were shut even though there were more infant deaths with this virus than the one we are experiencing now. There were no suicides, no unemployment, no drug overdoses.
Media covered the pandemic but it never became a big issue.
As Bojan Pancevski in the Wall Street Journalpoints out, “In 1968-70, news outlets devoted cursory attention to the virus while training their lenses on other events such as the moon landing and the Vietnam War, and the cultural upheaval of the civil-rights movements, student protests and the sexual revolution.”
The only actions governments took was to collect data, watch and wait, encourage testing and vaccines, and so on. The medical community took the primary responsibility for disease mitigation, as one might expect. It was widely assumed that diseases require medical not political responses.
It’s not as if we had governments unwilling to intervene in other matters. We had the Vietnam War, social welfare, public housing, urban renewal, and the rise of Medicare and Medicaid. We had a president swearing to cure all poverty, illiteracy, and disease. Government was as intrusive as it had ever been in history. But for some reason, there was no thought given to shutdowns.
Which raises the question: why was this different? We will be trying to figure this one out for decades.
Was the difference that we have mass media invading our lives with endless notifications blowing up in our pockets? Was there some change in philosophy such that we now think politics is responsible for all existing aspects of life? Was there a political element here in that the media blew this wildly out of proportion as revenge against Trump and his deplorables? Or did our excessive adoration of predictive modelling get out of control to the point that we let a physicist with ridiculous models frighten the world’s governments into violating the human rights of billions of people?
Maybe all of these were factors. Or maybe there is something darker and nefarious at work, as the conspiracy theorists would have it.
Regardless, they all have some explaining to do.
By way of personal recollection, my own mother and father were part of a generation that believed they had developed sophisticated views of viruses. They understood that less vulnerable people getting them not only strengthened immune systems but contributed to disease mitigation by reaching “herd immunity.” They had a whole protocol to make a child feel better about being sick. I got a “sick toy,” unlimited ice cream, Vicks rub on my chest, a humidifier in my room, and so on.
They would constantly congratulate me on building immunity. They did their very best to be happy about my viruses, while doing their best to get me through them.
If we used government lockdowns then like we use them now, Woodstock (which changed music forever and still resonates today) would never have occurred. How much prosperity, culture, tech, etc. are losing in this calamity?
What happened between then and now? Was there some kind of lost knowledge, as happened with scurvy, when we once had sophistication and then the knowledge was lost and had to be re-found? For COVID-19, we reverted to medieval-style understandings and policies, even in the 21st century. It’s all very strange.
The contrast between 1968 and 2020 couldn’t be more striking. They were smart. We are idiots. Or at least our governments are.
[Note an earlier version of this article featured a photo not from Woodstock 1969. This photo from the montage at the Atlantic.]
A ‘monster’ virus which has lain dormant in the frozen wastelands of northeastern Russia is about to be resurrected by researchers curious of its potential effects.
Scientists anticipate “reanimating” a 30,000-year-old virus to learn more about it and discover if it is harmful to animals or humans. Mollivirus sibericum, which translates to soft Siberian virus, has been dubbed “Frankenvirus” by many who are in opposition of the quest to bring it back to life.
In contrast to other viruses, the soft Siberian bug is a monster. Not only does it have 523 genetic proteins and measures 0.6 microns, it can also be seen using light microscopy.
As BBC News reports, the Mollivirus sibericum virus is the fourth prehistoric virus to have been discovered since 2003, and experts warn climate change and thawing ice could resurrect similar – and perhaps even more dangerous – pathogens.
The French National Center for Scientific Research made the discovery in the Kolyma lowland region of Russia. The soft Siberian virus is the second of its kind to be found by the team. In 2003, researchers discovered the Minivirus, followed by the Pandoraviruses in 2013, and Pithovirus sibericum which was discovered last year.
The saga of giant viruses started in 2003. Two additional types of giant viruses have been discovered [and] we now describe Mollivirus sibericum, a fourth type of giant virus isolated from the same permafrost sample. These four types of giant virus exhibit different structures, sizes, genome length, and replication cycles. Their origin and mode of evolution are the subject of conflicting hypotheses. The fact that two different viruses could be easily revived from prehistoric permafrost should be of concern in a context of global warming.
The regions in which these mega microbes are being discovered are being increasingly exploited for their mineral resources, especially oil. As Upriser shares, the rate at which they are exploited will no doubt increase as the areas become more accessible due to melting ice and climate change.
Said lead researcher Jean-Michel Claverie:
A few viral particles that are still infectious may be enough, in the presence of a vulnerable host, to revive potentially pathogenic viruses. If we are not careful, and we industrialize these areas without putting safeguards in place, we run the risk of one day waking up viruses such as small pox that we thought were eradicated.
That’s definitely concerning.
In the lab, Professor Claverie and his team will attempt to resurrect the newly discovered virus by placing it with a single-cell amoeba, which will serve as its host. The virus Pithovirus sibericum was revived in March 2014 using similar techniques.
UPDATE:
Research has been carried out, and according to co-author Dr Chantal Abergel, the virus “comes into the cell, multiplies and finally kills the cell. It is able to kill the amoeba – but it won’t infect a human cell.”
Still, a lot of controversy surrounds the scientists plan to “revive” the Mollivirus sibericum virus. Different than most viruses circulating today, these ancient pathogens are not only bigger, they’re far more complex genetically.
The recently discovered virus has more than 500 genes, and the Pandoravirus found in 2003 has 2,500. Compare that to the Influenza A virus which has eight genes.
Of course, a philosophical debate will not deter scientists from doing their work, but a number of pros and cons deserve to be weighed before further research is conducted.
In 2004, United States scientists resurrected the “Spanish flu” virus, which ended up killing tens of millions of people at the start of the 20th century. The revived the virus to understand why the pathogen was so virulent.
Researchers from the States traveled to Alaska to take frozen lung tissues from a woman who was buried in permafrost, and teased genetic details out of the samples and from autopsy issues stored in formalin. Their work allowed the team to reconstruct the code for the virus’ eight genes – but at what cost? All the work was done in a top-security lab at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), yet still wasn’t contained.
We have to ask ourselves as an informed public – and voice our concerns to those ‘in charge’ – if “reviving” a monster virus and is really in the best interest of the public.
Another Dead Scientist To Add To List! What Did He Know That ‘They’ Don’t Want Us To Know?
By Susan Duclos
Yet another scientists has been found dead after mysteriously disappearing and just happens to have worked at the National Institutes of Health in Maryland, specializing in tropical diseases, particularly malaria. This death alone, despite the mysterious circumstances, normally wouldn’t be of note if it wasn’t for the long… very long list of dead scientists already documented since 2004, found here.
Martin John Rogers was found “near” his wrecked car down in an embankment in western Maryland on Thursday, September 4, 2014, after disappearing on August 21, 2014 when he left home for work at the world-renowned research center near Washington, D.C. No word yet on the cause of death, an autopsy will be performed to determine the manner of death, according to LA Times’ The Baxter Bulletin.
Here is where the mystery comes in. According to the report the search for Rogers didn’t start until a “few days after he failed to show up for work,” but on the day he disappeared he is seen on a surveillance and used a credit card at a Motel 8 a few hours after he left home. Two days later there is a report of a sighting of Rogers on a “local trail,” which authorities have deemed “likely credible.”
“The detective working on the case has found 583 missing people in his career. He told us that why a person leaves often helps them find out where they went,” Conner said. “But when the detective went through all the normal reasons a person leaves — money problems, work problems, trouble at home, a girlfriend — none of that matched John.”
Police said surveillance video captured Martin checking into a hotel in La Valle, Maryland, looking “stressed out.” Last week, police received multiple reports of possible sightings along the C&O Canal towpath, including by Edwards Ferry, near Poolesville, Violettes Lock near Darnestown, and as far away as Cumberland.
Rogers wife is also a scientist with a PhD in molecular biology.
In the video below by They Live You Sleep, the videographer talks about the massive number of scientists that have turned up dead as well as replaying an older Coast to Coast interview where Steve Quayle speaks of the evergrowing list of dead scientists which he has been carefully documenting, which is linked above.
Killer-Flu Debate: Should Mutant H5N1 Have Been Created?
Wynne Parry, LiveScience Senior Writer
Date: 23 December 2011 Time: 10:11 AM ET
Controversial new research found a way to make bird flu spread easily among mammals.
News of two separate research projects that altered the bird-flu virus so it could potentially spread between humans has some experts asking: Should this research have been done at all?
Other scientists, however, are defending the projects as important progress in understanding how the virus, called H5N1, could adapt to cause a devastating pandemic.
“I wouldn’t do it,” said W. Ian Lipkin, director of the Center for Infection and Immunity at Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health. “I think it is one thing to study the pathology of an organism to try to understand ways in which you can reduce the risk to humankind or animals by doing basic research. … This isn’t the case [here]; this virus doesn’t transmit readily to humans.”
Others argue that the two projects addressed questions crucial to averting a global tragedy: Could H5N1 mutate into a form that could spread between humans? And, if so, how
“The bottom line is science has been advanced by this, we know something about the virus that we didn’t know before,” Thomas Daniels, an associate research scientist and co-director of the Vector Ecology Laboratory at Fordham University, told LiveScience. “It could be it’s going to be very, very useful down the road, but right now we have to proceed with caution.”
An unusual exception
The details of the studies aren’t available yet, in fact, the U.S. National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity (NSABB) has asked the researcher and the journals considering publishing their work to withhold details that could provide a blueprint for those seeking to do harm.
In science, experiments and their results are shared so others can reproduce them and advance the field, but this case seems to merit special consideration. Half a dozen scientists interviewed for this article supported withholding details, such as the specific genetic changes in the altered viruses.
Bird flu basics
The bird flu is deadly for birds, only rarely infecting humans who catch it directly from the birds. But when people do catch it the results are often deadly –- since November 2003, nearly 600 human infections have been reported globally, and approximately 60 percent of those have been fatal, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
One of the two groups to have created a more transmissible form of the virus, led by Ron Fouchier from Erasmus Medical Center in the Netherlands, developed a form of H5N1 that ferrets, which are mammals like us, could catch from one another even though they were not in physical contact. In other words, the infection became airborne, according to reports based on Fouchier’s presentation at a meeting in Malta in September.
The other study, led by Yoshihiro Kawaoka at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and the University of Tokyo, also produced a more highly transmissible form of the virus using ferrets, although more details were not available.
A dangerous undertaking
Publishing the specifics of these projects would be the second mistake; the first was conducting these experiments, write biosecurity experts, led by Thomas Ingelsby, CEO and director of the Center for Biosecurity at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center.
This work was conducted by internationally respected scientists working under top-of-the-line biosafety conditions, but “the risk of a person accidentally becoming infected and starting an outbreak with this new strain is low. But it is not zero,” they write in an editorial published on Dec. 15 in the journal Biosecurity and Bioterrorism: Biodefense Strategy, Practice, and Science.They cite the accidental release of an influence strain from a lab in 1977. [Predicting the Next Major Virus]
The potential benefits, such as screening viruses for similar changes or developing a pandemic-preventing vaccine based on the engineered strain, are uncertain and do not outweigh the risks, they write.
Preparing for a crisis
Others say the work isn’t risking catastrophe; it may help prevent one.
“It should not have been done if the final goal is to show you can make a deadly virus,” said Dr. Andrea Gambotto, an associate professor at the University of Pittsburgh, School of Medicine, and director of the university’s Vector Core Facility. “In this case, the goal is different; the goal is to try to predict what can happen, how a virus can mutate.”
Vaccines and antiviral medications effective against H5N1 exist, but these were designed to fight off a virus that has not fully adapted to humans. So, it’s not clear how they would fare against a strain that has made the evolutionary jump and can spread among humans as the Fouchier’s did among ferrets, he said.
The altered viruses developed by Fouchier’s and Kawaoka’s research might give researchers a better idea of how to prepare, Gambotto said.
Vaccine developers could test the existing vaccines against the lab strains to get at least some idea of how effective they might be against the mutant virus. If they don’t prevent infection, then developers know they’ll need something else in order to have a running start, he said.
“By the time we start seeing the first people dying, isolate a virus, generate a vaccine, it is probably one year or eight months if everything goes smoothly,” he said. “But that eight months can be deadly for humanity.”
A wake-up call
The demonstration that bird flu can be coaxed into spreading easily among mammals is a wake-up call to the world that has been tuning out a potential pandemic, Robert Webster, a virologist at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, told LiveScience.
“The virus has been around for 15 years since it appeared in Hong Kong and it first got a lot of attention, then less, and less. Even though it has [caused] 600 cases in humans and killed about 60 percent of people, people were starting to say this is an aberration, so let’s move on to worry about bigger problems,” Webster said. “These two papers make it clear this can happen.”
“People are saying the scientists were irresponsible for doing this; it was not an irresponsible thing to do,” Webster said. “These scientists are the leading scientists in the world in influenza and they made a huge contribution.”
