Scientists Believed In Wuhan Lab Leak But Got Shut Down By Lil'Fauci

yahoo  |  Leading British and US scientists thought it was likely that Covid accidentally leaked from a laboratory but were concerned that further debate would harm science in China, emails show.

An email from Sir Jeremy Farrar, director of the Wellcome Trust, on February 2 2020 said that “a likely explanation” was that Covid had rapidly evolved from a Sars-like virus inside human tissue in a low-security lab.

The email, to Dr Anthony Fauci and Dr Francis Collins of the US National Institutes of Health, went on to say that such evolution may have “accidentally created a virus primed for rapid transmission between humans”.

But a leading scientist told Sir Jeremy that “further debate would do unnecessary harm to science in general and science in China in particular”. Dr Collins, the former director of the US National Institutes of Health, warned it could damage “international harmony”.

Viscount Ridley, co-author of Viral: the search for the origin of Covid, said: “These emails show a lamentable lack of openness and transparency among Western scientists who appear to have been more interested in shutting down a hypothesis they thought was very plausible, for political reasons.”

In the emails, Sir Jeremy said that other scientists also believed the virus could not have evolved naturally. One such scientist was Professor Mike Farzan, of Scripps Research, the expert who discovered how the original Sars virus binds to human cells.

Scientists were particularly concerned by a part of Covid-19 called the furin cleavage site, a section of the spike protein which helps it enter cells and makes it so infectious to humans.

Summarising Professor Farzan’s concerns in an email, Sir Jeremy said: “He is bothered by the furin site and has a hard time (to) explain that as an event outside the lab, though there are possible ways in nature but highly unlikely.

“I think this becomes a question of how do you put all this together, whether you believe in this series of coincidences, what you know of the lab in Wuhan, how much could be in nature - accidental release or natural event? I am 70:30 or 60:40.”

Winter Siege Allgemeine Impfpflicht - ISRIB And SIRT6 - But Not For You Pissants....,

consentfactory |  So, GloboCap has crossed the Rubicon. The final phase of its transformation of society into a pathologized-totalitarian dystopia, where mandatory genetic-therapy injections and digital compliance papers are commonplace, is now officially underway.

On November 19, 2021, the government of New Normal Austria decreed that, as of February, experimental mRNA injections will be mandatory for the entire population. This decree comes in the midst of Austria’s official persecution of “the Unvaccinated,” i.e., political dissidents and other persons of conscience who refuse to convert to the new official ideology and submit to a series of mRNA injections, purportedly to combat a virus that causes mild-to-moderate flu-like symptoms (or no symptoms of any kind at all) in about 95% of the infected and the overall infection fatality rate of which is approximately 0.1% to 0.5%.

Austria is just the tip of the New Normal spear. Prominent New-Normal fascists in Germany, like Der Führer of Bavaria, Markus Söder, and Minister of Propaganda Karl Lauterbach, are already calling for an allgemeine Impfpflicht (i.e., “compulsory vaccination requirement”), which should not come as a surprise to anyone. The Germans are not going sit idly by and let the Austrians publicly out-fascist them, are they? They have a reputation to uphold, after all! Italy will probably be next to join in, unless Lithuania or Australia beats them to the punch.

But, seriously, this is just the beginning of the Winter Siege I wrote about recently. The plan seems to be to New-Normalize Europe first — generally speaking, Europeans are more docile, respectful of all authority, and not very well armed — and then use it as leverage to force the new pathologized totalitarianism on the USA, and the UK, and the rest of the world.

I do not believe this plan will succeed. Despite the most intensive propaganda campaign in the history of propaganda campaigns, there remain enough of us who steadfastly refuse to accept the “New Normal” as our new reality.

And a lot of us are angry, extremely angry … militantly, explosively angry.

Parasitic Agents Of Invincibility And Status And An Insidious Social Sickness...,

theatlantic  |  Deep in the forests of Germany, nestled neatly into the hollowed-out shells of acorns, live a smattering of ants who have stumbled upon a fountain of youth. They are born workers, but do not do much work. Their days are spent lollygagging about the nest, where their siblings shower them with gifts of food. They seem to elude the ravages of old age, retaining a durably adolescent physique, their outer shells soft and their hue distinctively tawny. Their scent, too, seems to shift, wafting out an alluring perfume that endears them to others. While their sisters, who have nearly identical genomes, perish within months of being born, these death-defying insects live on for years and years and years.

They are Temnothorax ants, and their elixirs of life are the tapeworms that teem within their bellies—parasites that paradoxically prolong the life of their host at a strange and terrible cost.

A few such life-lengthening partnerships have been documented between microbes and insects such as wasps, beetles, and mosquitoes. But what these ants experience is more extreme than anything that’s come before, says Susanne Foitzik, an entomologist at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, in Germany, who studies the ants and their tapeworms. Infected Temnothorax ants live at least three times longer than their siblings, and perhaps much more, she and her colleagues report in a study published today in Royal Society Open Science. No one is yet sure when the insects’ longevity tops out, but the answer is probably in excess of a decade, approaching or even matching that of ant queens, who can survive up to 20 years.

“Some other parasites do extend life spans,” Shelley Adamo, a parasite expert at Dalhousie University, in Nova Scotia, who was not involved in the study, told me. “But not like this.”

Under typical circumstances, Temnothorax ants live as most other ants do. They reside in communities ruled by a single fertile queen attended by a legion of workers whose professional lives take a predictable trajectory. They first tend the queen’s eggs as nurses, then graduate into foraging roles that take them outside the nest. Apart from the whole freaky parasite thing, “they are pretty boring,” Foitzik told me.

Normalcy goes out the door, however, when Temnothorax larvae ingest tapeworm-egg-infested bird feces trucked in by foragers. The parasites hatch and set up permanent residence in the young ants’ abdomens, where they can access a steady stream of nutrients. In return, they offer their host an unconventional renter’s fee: an extra-long life span that Foitzik and her colleagues managed to record in real time.

What Is Dr. Ron Paul REALLY Saying About The Proven Predilections Of Herr Doktor Fauci???

mises |  If people who torture animals are psychopaths, then what are government officials who use taxpayer dollars to fund animal torture? Many are asking this question in the wake of revelations that the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, headed by Dr. Anthony Fauci—high priest of the COVID cult—funded medical “research” involving the torture of puppies. This led “Fire Fauci” to trend on Twitter, and People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) to call for his resignation.

The puppy torture story was followed by disclosures that the federal government funded the testing of experimental AIDS vaccines on orphans. Many of the orphans used as human guinea pigs subsequently died, and nurses who assisted in these experiments reported that many children got sick immediately after receiving the vaccines.

Testing dangerous drugs on orphans and torturing puppies in the name of “science” is certainly shocking, but is it really surprising that government would fund these types of activities? What is the difference between using orphans and puppies for cruel experiments in the name of protecting public health and killing innocent children in drone attacks in the name of stopping terrorism?

Ironically, these revelations come when Congress is on the verge of allowing the federal bureaucracy to destroy what remains of our medical privacy. Both the Senate and House versions of the Labor, Education, and Health and Human Services Appropriations bill remove the prohibition on the development of a “unique patient identifier.”

The prohibition on funding for the unique patient identifier, which I sponsored, has been in place since 1998. The push to allow the government to force every American to obtain a unique patient identifier is being justified as a means to efficiently monitor Americans’ “contact and immunization” status.

When I began fighting the unique patient ID in the 1990s, my opponents denied that medical identifiers would make it impossible to ensure confidentiality of medical records. Now, they are saying we should support medical identifiers because they allow government officials, employers, schools, airlines, and even stores and restaurants to discover what, if any, vaccinations or other medical treatments we have or have not received. The result of the identifier will be a medical caste system, where those who refuse to follow the mandates or advice of the “experts” are denied opportunities to work, receive an education, or even go to church or enjoy a night out on the town.

The Vaccine And The Virus Were Made By The Same People

vanityfair  | The disclosures of the last four months—since Vanity Fair was first to detail how conflicts of interest resulting from U.S. government funding of controversial virology research hampered America’s investigation into COVID-19’s origins—present an increasingly disturbing picture.

Early last month, The Intercept published more than 900 pages of documents it obtained through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the NIH, relating to EcoHealth Alliance’s grant research. But there was one document missing, a fifth and final progress report that EcoHealth Alliance had been required to submit at the end of its grant period in 2019.

In its letter Wednesday, NIH included that missing progress report, which was dated August 2021. That report described a “limited experiment,” as the NIH letter phrased it, in which laboratory mice infected with an altered virus became “sicker than those infected with” a naturally occurring one.

The letter did not mention the phrase “gain-of-function research” that has become so central to the bitter clashes over COVID-19’s origins. That type of controversial research—the manipulation of pathogens with the aim of making them more infectious in order to gauge their risk to humans—has divided the virology community. A review system established in 2017 requires federal agencies to particularly scrutinize any research proposals that involve enhancing a pathogen’s infectiousness to humans.

Dr. Fauci’s spokesperson told Vanity Fair that EcoHealth Alliance’s research did not fall under that framework, since the experiments being funded “were not reasonably expected to increase transmissibility or virulence in humans.”

However, Alina Chan, a Boston-based scientist and coauthor of the book Viral: The Search for the Origin of COVID-19, said the NIH was in a “very challenging position. They funded research internationally to help study novel pathogens and prevent against them. But they had no way to know what viruses had been collected, what experiments had been conducted, and what accidents might have occurred.”

As scientists remain in a stalemate over the pandemic’s origins, another disclosure last month made clear that EcoHealth Alliance, in partnership with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, was aiming to do the kind of research that could accidentally have led to the pandemic. On September 20, a group of internet sleuths calling themselves DRASTIC (short for Decentralized Radical Autonomous Search Team Investigating COVID-19) released a leaked $14 million grant proposal that EcoHealth Alliance had submitted in 2018 to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

It proposed partnering with the Wuhan Institute of Virology and constructing SARS-related bat coronaviruses into which they would insert “human-specific cleavage sites” as a way to “evaluate growth potential” of the pathogens. Perhaps not surprisingly, DARPA rejected the proposal, assessing that it failed to fully address the risks of gain-of-function research.

The leaked grant proposal struck a number of scientists and researchers as significant for one reason. One distinctive segment of SARS-CoV-2’s genetic code is a furin cleavage site that makes the virus more infectious by allowing it to efficiently enter human cells. That is just the feature that EcoHealth Alliance and the Wuhan Institute of Virology had proposed to engineer in the 2018 grant proposal. “If I applied for funding to paint Central Park purple and was denied, but then a year later we woke up to find Central Park painted purple, I’d be a prime suspect,” said Jamie Metzl, a former executive vice president of the Asia Society, who sits on the World Health Organization’s advisory committee on human genome editing and has been calling for a transparent investigation into COVID-19’s origins.

Why Did The NIH Just Re-Define Gain Of Function Research?

So to sum it up: 

1. US bans gain-of-function research. 

2. Rogue bureaucrats fund it abroad instead. 

3. Lab leak occurs. Global pandemic ensues. 

4. Scientific leaders lie about it and label dissenters as racists. Want to create a crisis of trust in science? 

That’ll do it.

 

For those that don’t know - this is how the @NIH defined “gain-of-function” on their website until at least October 19th, 2021. Just 3 days ago.

It looks like this section was deleted, and the page was edited, within the last 2-3 days. @R_H_Ebright @RandPaul pic.twitter.com/wZ9Iy5vWaT

— Jeremy Redfern (@JeremyRedfernFL) October 22, 2021

The Future Is Already Here - It's Just Not Evenly Distributed...,

Fukuyama Our Posthuman Future (A Neoconservative Speculation On Biotechnology Governance)

Guardian |  With Fukuyama's move into this territory, it may be that bioethicists are going to be upstaged by political economists. His question is clear: do we really want this post-human future, full of bioengineered cyborgs? Should we just retreat behind the mantra - originated by physicists who worked on the hydrogen bomb - that science is progress, and cannot and will not be halted? Most US free marketeers writing in this area take this view, in contrast to the European tradition of regulating in the public interest. So the major surprise of Fukuyama's book is that, in the field of human biotechnology at least, he favours regulation.

He begins by summarising what he sees as the current state of play in the science and technology of genetic and brain sciences, in terms of their capacity to extend healthy human life, to understand the roots of human behaviour (intelligence, aggression, sexual orientation), and to control and change that behaviour with drugs (Prozac, Ritalin and so on). Although refreshingly sceptical about the claims made for the power and scope of such drugs, he rightly argues that at the least they are harbingers of increasingly effective new generations of psychochemicals.

He is on less firm ground when dealing with genetic claims, where he accepts at face value the rather suspect evidence for so-called "smart" or "aggressive" mice engineered by adding or removing DNA from their genomes. And sometimes he is way off course, as when he repeats the once-fashionable 19th-century nostrum that "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny" - ie, that a human foetus relives its evolutionary history in the nine months prior to birth. But for his purposes, such errors in biological understanding aren't important, and his assessment of the direction in which such work is heading seems about right.

That some of us are sceptical about its feasibility should not prevent us from looking hard at its potential consequences. We should be warned by the example of Sir Ernest Rutherford, who knew more about the structure of atoms in the early decades of the past century than anyone else, but still insisted that the prospect of atomic power was "moonshine".

So what should we do about it? The middle section of the book centres on two classical philosophical problems viewed from within this new context: human rights and human nature. The discourse of rights has become very murky in recent years, in part, according to Fukuyama, because of the rejection of naturalism. Naturalism would claim that there is an intrinsic universal human nature, and that therefore ethics, and as a consequence human "rights", can be derived from it.

These assumptions together constitute what has been called the naturalistic fallacy. Critics point out that human nature can be expressed only within the diverse and historically contingent societies that humans create, and therefore cannot be understood a priori. There is no "nature" outside social context, and within the limits of evolved human biology the societies that we have created are extraordinarily diverse.

In any event, as philosophers from Hume onwards have pointed out, one cannot derive an "ought" from an "is". Evolutionary psychologists reject the first criticism, and despite their protestations that they wouldn't dream of doing so, happily spend their time deriving multiple oughts from diverse ises. Fukuyama accepts their claims to universalism in order to build his case that the naturalistic fallacy is itself fallacious. Hence, he argues, there is a human nature on which human rights can be based. And insofar as human biotechnology threatens to interfere with that human nature, it is essential that it be regulated. Sound conclusion, faulty premises.

So, finally, to the tough question: how to bell this particular cat. Most biotech is done in the US, and outside federal laboratories it is largely unregulated. But the situation is paradoxical, as US conservative religious views on, for instance, stem-cell research clash with an otherwise deregulatory agenda. (Legislation to ban so-called therapeutic cloning is currently before Congress, at the same time as the US withdraws from the Kyoto and Start treaties and weakens environmental protection.)

The Nazi Past Shaped Our Dystopian Present

Annie Jacobsen's Operation Paperclip Focused On Chemical, Biological, and Medical Weaponeers

historynewsnetwork |   The journalist Annie Jacobsen recently published Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program that Brought Nazi Scientists to America (Little Brown, 2014). Scouring the archives and unearthing previously undisclosed records as well as drawing on earlier work, Jacobsen recounts in chilling detail a very peculiar effort on the part of the U.S. military to utlize the very scientists who had been essential to Hitler’s war effort. 

As I read your book I started thinking about the various Nazi genre films such as; The Boys from Brazil, The Odessa File, and Marathon Man — they all hold to a similar premise, key Nazi’s escape Germany after the war and plot in various ways to do bad things. Apparently truth is stranger than fiction. What was Operation Paperclip?

Operation Paperclip was a classified program to bring Nazi scientists to America right after World War II. It had, however, a benign public face. The war department had issued a press release saying that good German scientists would be coming to America to help out in our scientific endeavors.

But it was not benign at all, as seen in the character of Otto Ambros, a man, as you explain, was keen on helping U.S. soldiers in matters of hygiene by offering them soap, this soon after they had conquered Germany. Who was Ambros?

Otto Ambros I must say was one of the most dark-hearted characters that I wrote about in this book. He was Hitler’s favorite chemist, and I don’t say that lightly. I found a document in the National Archives, I don’t believe it had ever been revealed before, that showed that during the war Hitler gave Ambros a one million Reichsmark bonus for his scientific acumen. The reason was two-fold. Ambros worked on the Reich’s secret nerve agent program, but he also invented synthetic rubber, that was called buna. The reason rubber was so important — if you think about the Reich’s war-machine and how tanks need treads, aircraft need wheels — the Reich needed rubber. By inventing synthetic rubber, Ambros became Hitler’s favorite chemist.

Not only that when the Reich decided to develop a factory at Auschwitz, — the death camp had a third territory, there was Auschwitz, there was Birkenau — they did it in a third territory called Auschwitz III also known as Monowitvz-Buna. This was where synthetic rubber was going to be manufactured using prisoners who would be spared the gas chamber as they were put to work, and most often worked to death by the Reich war machine. The person, the general manager there at Auschwitz III, was Otto Ambros. Ambros was one of the last individuals to leave Auschwitz, this is in the last days of January 1945 as the Russians are about to liberate the death camp. Ambros is there according to these documents I have located in Germany, destroying evidence right up until the very end.

After the war, Ambros was sought by the Allies and later found, interrogated and put on trial at Nuremberg, where he was convicted of mass-murder and slavery. He was sentenced to prison, but in the early 1950s as the Cold War became elevated he was given clemency by the U.S. High Commissioner John McCloy and released from prison. When he was sentenced, the Nuremberg judges took away all his finances, including that one million Reichsmark bonus from Hitler. When McCloy gave him clemency he also restored Otto Ambros’ finances, so he got back what was left of that money. He was then given a contract with the U.S. Department of Energy.

He actually came to work in the United States?

Otto Ambros remains one of the most difficult cases to crack in terms of Paperclip. While I was able to unearth some new and horrifying information about his postwar life, most of it remains, “lost or missing,” which I take to mean classified. We do know for a fact that Ambros came to the United States two, possibly three times. As a convicted war criminal traveling to the United States he would have needed special papers from the U.S. State Department. The State Department, however, informed me through the Freedom of Information Act that those documents are lost or missing.

By Itself - Mr.NA DOES NOT Vaccinate Against Super-Covid!!! But....,

nature | These jokers created some super-covid from the worst strains of existing covid variants. (Gain of Function Research)  It’s virological and immunological <s>dual use bioweapons</s> research.  Hope none gets out of the NYC lab where they created it over a year ago. 

They then tested antibodies created from a natural Covid-19 infection - and - antibodies created by someone with an mRNA vaccine against this “gain of function” super strain of Covid-19. The super Covid was resistant to both types of antibodies. However, antibodies from someone who both was infected and recovered from a Covid-19 infection AND received an mRNA vaccination defeated the super strain of Covid-19.

 

The number and variability of the neutralizing epitopes targeted by polyclonal antibodies in SARS-CoV-2 convalescent and vaccinated individuals are key determinants of neutralization breadth and the genetic barrier to viral escape^1–4. Using HIV-1 pseudotypes and plasma-selection experiments with vesicular stomatitis virus/SARS-CoV-2 chimeras⁵, we show that multiple neutralizing epitopes, within and outside the receptor binding domain (RBD), are variably targeted by human polyclonal antibodies. Antibody targets coincide with spike sequences that are enriched for diversity in natural SARS-CoV-2 populations. By combining plasma-selected spike substitutions, we generated synthetic ‘polymutant’ spike protein pseudotypes that resisted polyclonal antibody neutralization to a similar degree as circulating variants of concern (VOC). By aggregating VOC-associated and antibody-selected spike substitutions into a single polymutant spike protein, we show that 20 naturally occurring mutations in SARS-CoV-2 spike are sufficient to generate pseudotypes with near-complete resistance to the polyclonal neutralizing antibodies generated by convalescents or mRNA vaccine recipients. Strikingly, however, plasma from individuals who had been infected and subsequently received mRNA vaccination, neutralized pseudotypes bearing this highly resistant SARS-CoV-2 polymutant spike, or diverse sarbecovirus spike proteins. Thus, optimally elicited human polyclonal antibodies against SARS-CoV-2 should be resilient to substantial future SARS-CoV-2 variation and may confer protection against potential future sarbecovirus pandemics.

Authoriteh's Restive About What You Peasants Get Up To With Synthetic Biology

FT  |  Paul Dabrowa does not know if it is illegal to genetically modify beer at home in a way that makes it glow. The process involves taking DNA information from jellyfish and applying it to yeast cells, then using traditional fermenting methods to turn it into alcohol. But he is worried that it could be against the law given that it involves manipulating genetic material. “This stuff can be dangerous in the wrong hands, so I did that in an accredited lab,” he says, adding that he himself has only got as far as making yeast cells glow in a Petri dish. For the most part Dabrowa, a 41-year old Melbourne-based Australian who styles himself as a bit of an expert on most things, prefers to conduct his biohacking experiments in his kitchen. He does this mostly to find cures for his own health issues. Other times just for fun.

In recent years the community of hobbyists and amateurs Dabrowa considers his kin has been energised by the falling cost and growing accessibility to gene-editing tools such as Crispr. This has led to an explosion of unchecked experimentation in self-constructed labs or community facilities focused on biological self-improvement.

Despite a lack of formal microbiological training, Dabrowa has successfully used faecal transplants and machine learning to genetically modify his own gut bacteria to lose weight without having to change his daily regime. The positive results he’s seen on himself have encouraged him to try to commercialise the process with the help of an angel investor. He hopes one day to collect as many as 3,000 faecal samples from donors and share the findings publicly.

Much of his knowledge — including the complex bits related to gene-editing — was gleaned straight from the internet or through sheer strength of will by directly lobbying those who have the answers he seeks. “Whenever I was bored, I went on YouTube and watched physics and biology lectures from MIT [Massachusetts Institute of Technology],” he explains. “I tried the experiments at home, then realised I needed help and reached out to professors at MIT and Harvard. They were more than happy to do so.”

At the more radical end of the community are experimentalists such as Josiah Zayner, a former Nasa bioscientist, who became infamous online after performing gene therapy on himself in front of a live audience. Zayner’s start-up, The Odin — to which Crispr pioneer and professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School George Church is an adviser — has stubbornly resisted attempts to regulate its capacity to sell gene-editing kits online in the idealistic belief that everyone should be able to manage their own DNA.

These garage scientists might seem like a quirky new subculture but their rogue mindset is starting to generate consternation among those who specialise in managing biological threats in governments and international bodies.

In 2018 the states that are signatories to the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) identified gene editing, gene synthesis, gene drives and metabolic pathway engineering as research that qualifies as “dual use”, meaning it is as easy to deploy for harmful purposes as it is for good.
 

Meanwhile, Back At The Ranch - Nerds Done Nerded Up An RNA Editing CRISPR CAS-7-11

phys.org  |  Researchers at MIT's McGovern Institute for Brain Research have discovered a bacterial enzyme that they say could expand scientists' CRISPR toolkit, making it easy to cut and edit RNA with the kind of precision that, until now, has only been available for DNA editing. The enzyme, called Cas7-11, modifies RNA targets without harming cells, suggesting that in addition to being a valuable research tool, it provides a fertile platform for therapeutic applications.

"This new enzyme is like the Cas9 of RNA," says McGovern Fellow Omar Abudayyeh, referring to the DNA-cutting CRISPR enzyme that has revolutionized modern biology by making DNA editing fast, inexpensive, and exact. "It creates two precise cuts and doesn't destroy the cell in the process, like other enzymes," he adds.

Up until now, only one other family of RNA-targeting enzymes, Cas13, has extensively been developed for RNA targeting applications. However, when Cas13 recognizes its target, it shreds any RNAs in the cell, destroying the cell along the way. Like Cas9, Cas7-11 is part of a programmable system; it can be directed at specific RNA targets using a CRISPR guide. Abudayyeh, McGovern Fellow Jonathan Gootenberg, and their colleagues discovered Cas7-11 through a deep exploration of the CRISPR systems found in the microbial world. Their findings were recently reported in the journal Nature.

Exploring natural diversity

Like other CRISPR proteins, Cas7-11 is used by bacteria as a defense mechanism against viruses. After encountering a new virus, bacteria that employ the CRISPR system keep a record of the infection in the form of a small snippet of the pathogen's genetic material. Should that virus reappear, the CRISPR system is activated, guided by a small piece of RNA to destroy the viral genome and eliminate the infection.

These ancient immune systems are widespread and diverse, with different bacteria deploying different proteins to counter their viral invaders.

"Some target DNA, some target RNA. Some are very efficient in cleaving the target but have some toxicity, and others do not. They introduce different types of cuts, they can differ in specificity—and so on," says Eugene Koonin, an evolutionary biologist at the National Center for Biotechnology Information.

Abudayyeh, Gootenberg, and Koonin have been scouring genome sequences to learn about the natural diversity of CRISPR systems—and to mine them for potential tools. The idea, Abudayyeh says, is to take advantage of the work that evolution has already done in engineering protein machines.

"We don't know what we'll find," Abudayyeh says, "but let's just explore and see what's out there."

The Tangled History Of Mr.NA Neo-Vaccinoidal Therapeutics

nature |  By the late 2000s, several big pharmaceutical companies were entering the mRNA field. In 2008, for example, both Novartis and Shire established mRNA research units — the former (led by Geall) focused on vaccines, the latter (led by Heartlein) on therapeutics. BioNTech launched that year, and other start-ups soon entered the fray, bolstered by a 2012 decision by the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to start funding industry researchers to study RNA vaccines and drugs. Moderna was one of the companies that built on this work and, by 2015, it had raised more than $1 billion on the promise of harnessing mRNA to induce cells in the body to make their own medicines — thereby fixing diseases caused by missing or defective proteins. When that plan faltered, Moderna, led by chief executive Stéphane Bancel, chose to prioritize a less ambitious target: making vaccines.

That initially disappointed many investors and onlookers, because a vaccine platform seemed to be less transformative and lucrative. By the beginning of 2020, Moderna had advanced nine mRNA vaccine candidates for infectious diseases into people for testing. None was a slam-dunk success. Just one had progressed to a larger-phase trial.

But when COVID-19 struck, Moderna was quick off the mark, creating a prototype vaccine within days of the virus’s genome sequence becoming available online. The company then collaborated with the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) to conduct mouse studies and launch human trials, all within less than ten weeks.

BioNTech, too, took an all-hands-on-deck approach. In March 2020, it partnered with New York-based drug company Pfizer, and clinical trials then moved at a record pace, going from first-in-human testing to emergency approval in less than eight months.

Both authorized vaccines use modified mRNA formulated in LNPs. Both also contain sequences that encode a form of the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein that adopts a shape more amenable to inducing protective immunity. Many experts say that the protein tweak, devised by NIAID vaccinologist Barney Graham and structural biologists Jason McLellan at the University of Texas at Austin and Andrew Ward at Scripps, is also a prize-worthy contribution, albeit one that is specific to coronavirus vaccines, not mRNA vaccination as a general platform.

Some of the furore in discussions of credit for mRNA discoveries relates to who holds lucrative patents. But much of the foundational intellectual property dates back to claims made in 1989 by Felgner, Malone and their colleagues at Vical (and in 1990 by Liljeström). These had only a 17-year term from the date of issue and so are now in the public domain.

Even the Karikó–Weissman patents, licensed to Cellscript and filed in 2006, will expire in the next five years. Industry insiders say this means that it will soon become very hard to patent broad claims about delivering mRNAs in lipid nanoparticles, although companies can reasonably patent particular sequences of mRNA — a form of the spike protein, say — or proprietary lipid formulations.

Firms are trying. Moderna, the dominant player in the mRNA vaccine field, which has experimental shots in clinical testing for influenza, cytomegalovirus and a range of other infectious diseases, got two patents last year covering the broad use of mRNA to produce secreted proteins. But multiple industry insiders told Nature they think these could be challengeable.

“We don’t feel there’s a lot that is patentable, and certainly not enforceable,” says Eric Marcusson, chief scientific officer of Providence Therapeutics, an mRNA vaccines company in Calgary, Canada.

 

lil'Fauci And Francis Collins Both Lied About Funding Wuhan Gain Of Function Research

Now, thanks to materials (here and here) released through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit by The Intercept against the National Institutes of Health (which were unredacted enough to toss Fauci under the bus), we now know that Fauci-funded EcoHealth Alliance, a New York-based nonprofit headed by Peter Daszak, was absolutely engaged in gain-of-function research to make chimeric SARS-based coronaviruses, which they confirmed could infect human cells.

Ebright summarized The Intercept's reporting in a Monday night Twitter thread:

theintercept |  "The trove of documents includes two previously unpublished grant proposals that were funded by the NIAID, as well as project updates relating to the EcoHealth Alliance’s research, which has been scrutinized amid increased interest in the origins of the pandemic." 

 

The materials show that the 2014 and 2019 NIH grants to EcoHealth with subcontracts to WIV funded gain-of-function research as defined in federal policies in effect in 2014-2017 and potential pandemic pathogen enhancement as defined in federal policies in effect in 2017-present. 

 

(This had been evident previously from published research papers that credited the 2014 grant and from the publicly available summary of the 2019 grant. But this now can be stated definitively from progress reports of the 2014 grant and the full proposal of the 2017 grant.) 

 

The materials confirm the grants supported the construction--in Wuhan--of novel chimeric SARS-related coronaviruses that combined a spike gene from one coronavirus with genetic information from another coronavirus, and confirmed the resulting viruses could infect human cells. 

 

The materials reveal that the resulting novel, laboratory-generated SARS-related coronaviruses also could infect mice engineered to display human receptors on cells ("humanized mice"). 

 

The materials further reveal for the first time that one of the resulting novel, laboratory-generated SARS-related coronaviruses--one not been previously disclosed publicly--was more pathogenic to humanized mice than the starting virus from which it was constructed... 

 

...and thus not only was reasonably anticipated to exhibit enhanced pathogenicity, but, indeed, was *demonstrated* to exhibit enhanced pathogenicity.

 

The materials further reveal that the the grants also supported the construction--in Wuhan--of novel chimeric MERS-related coronaviruses that combined spike genes from one MERS-related coronavirus with genetic information from another MERS-related coronavirus. 

 

The documents make it clear that assertions by the NIH Director, Francis Collins, and the NIAID Director, Anthony Fauci, that the NIH did not support gain-of-function research or potential pandemic pathogen enhancement at WIV are untruthful.

Exemplary Case Study In The Uselessness Of The mRNA Neo-Vaccinoids

news.com.au |   Israel, the poster child for vaccination, recorded more new Covid-19 infections on Wednesday than at the peak of its second wave when few in the country of nine million were even jabbed.

The nation – wholly dependent on Pfizer – has a rolling average of 9300 daily cases. Where it once broke vaccination records, Israel has now broken a grim new record – the country with the highest seven day average of new cases per million.

Infectious diseases experts have said Israel may prove that the effectiveness of vaccines do indeed wane over time.

“This is a very clear warning sign for the rest of the world,” Dr Ran Balicer of Clalit Health Services, one of Israel’s main healthcare providers, told Science magazine last month

“If it can happen here, it can probably happen everywhere.”

However, the country’s politicians are insistent no new lockdown will be introduced and have pointed out that despite the surge in cases, serious illness and death among vaccinated Israelis remains low. 

HIGHEST CASES PER MILLION GLOBALLY

On Wednesday, Israel recorded 11,250 new Covid-19 cases with a seven day average of 9308 cases, according to the country’s health ministry.

That’s higher than the seven day average of cases of 8624 cases on January 17, the second wave peak, only a month after the country’s vaccine program began.

Daily fatalities were at 31 on Wednesday with a rolling average of 21 deaths per day.

The country is now recording 1891 cases per million people, according to Oxford University’s Our World in Data project, the most anywhere globally and three times the level in the US, for instance.

 

Covid-21 Continues To Evolve EXACTLY The Way VandenBossche Said It Would...,

geertvandenbossche |  The WHO’s mass vaccination program has been installed in response to a public health emergency of international concern. As of the early days of the mass vaccination campaigns, at least a few experts have been warning against the catastrophic impact such a program could have on global and individual health. Mass vaccination in the middle of a pandemic is prone to promoting selection and adaptation of immune escape variants that are featured by increasing infectiousness and resistance to spike protein (S)-directed antibodies (Abs), thereby diminishing protection in vaccines and threatening the unvaccinated. 

This already explains why the WHO’s mass vaccination program is not only unable to generate herd immunity (HI) but even leads to substantial erosion of the population’s immune protective capacity. As the ongoing universal mass vaccination program will soon promote dominant propagation of highly infectious, neutralization escape mutants (i.e., so-called ‘S Ab-resistant variants’), naturally acquired, or vacinal neutralizing Abs, will, indeed, no longer offer any protection to immunized individuals whereas high infectious pressure will continue to suppress the innate immune defense system of the non-vacinated. This is to say that every further increase in vaccine coverage rates will further contribute to forcing the virus into resistance to neutralizing, S-specific Abs. 

Increased viral infectivity, combined with evasion from antiviral immunity, will inevitably result in an additional toll taken on human health and human lives. Immediate action needs, therefore, to be taken in order to dramatically reduce viral infectivity rates and to prevent selected immune escape variants from rapidly spreading through the entire population, whether vaccinated or not. This first critical step can only be achieved by calling an immediate halt to the mass vaccination program and replacing it by widespread use of antiviral chemoprophylactics while dedicating massive public health resources to scaling early multidrug treatments of Covid-19 disease. 

With $$Billions Allocated To The Task, Why Isn't The CDC Tracking Vaccination Results?

theguardian  |  The Delta variant was first identified in the United States in April and by May it was well onto its exponential growth curve, doubling every 10-12 days, as the basis for Covid infections, now reaching over 96% prevalence. Ironically, on 1 May, the CDC announced it would stop monitoring post-vaccination breakthrough infections unless they led to hospitalizations or deaths. This decision can be seen as exceptionally ill-advised and has led to a country flying blind in its attempt to confront its fourth wave of infections – one that has rapidly led to well over 100,000 new cases per day and more than 60,000 hospitalizations, both higher than the US first and second pandemic waves. It is unfathomable that we do not know how many of these are occurring in people who were vaccinated.

Most people who get Covid infections after being fully vaccinated have mild to moderate symptoms, and generally have been thought to avoid hospitalizations. But that sense of confidence about vaccine protection was built upon the pre-Delta data when the CDC was monitoring breakthroughs. Still being reported by CDC, from their latest website data, and a constant refrain from public health officials, is that “99.99% of people fully vaccinated against Covid-19 have not had a breakthrough case resulting in hospitalization or death.” That could not be further from the truth. In the July Provincetown Delta outbreaks that the CDC reported on the risk of fully vaccinated requiring hospitalization was 1%, not .01%, and that may not be a reliable estimate for the incidence of such infections occurring throughout the country.

Without tracking, we have no idea of the proportion of people fully vaccinated who are getting ill, hospitalized, or dying. There is no question the frequency of requiring hospitalization is increasing, as reflected by data from some counties that are tracking breakthroughs on their own and reporting that 10 to 20% of admissions are in vaccinated individuals. But we have no denominator.

Why is this so critically important? For one, the false sense of security transmitted by CDC’s lack of data in the Delta wave likely fosters complacency and lack of protective measures such as masks and distancing. The mission of the CDC to prevent such illness, and the first step is to collect the relevant data. It would be very simple to know the vaccination status of every American with a breakthrough infection admitted to the hospital with Covid-19, along with key demographics such as age, time from vaccination, which vaccine, and co-existing medical conditions. The PCR diagnostic test for each patient has an accompanying cycle threshold (Ct) value, which is an indicator of viral load, and would be important to track. Moreover, the sample of the virus could undergo genomic sequencing to determine whether there has been further evolution of the virus and blood samples for neutralizing antibody levels that could be obtained in as many patients as possible. Contact tracing of these individuals would help determine the true rate of transmission from other vaccines, something that is pure conjecture. Such systematic collection of data would be the foundation for understanding who is at risk for breakthrough infections, determining the current level of effectiveness of vaccines and whether, when, and in whom, booster shots should be recommended. It is remarkable that none of this is getting done for hospitalized patients, who represent an undetermined fraction of the people who are getting quite ill, some requiring monoclonal antibody infusions to pre-empt getting admitted.

This is not by any means the first breakdown of the CDC in managing and communicating about the pandemic. But with billions of dollars allocated to CDC earlier this year for improved Covid-19 surveillance, this represents a blatant failure that is putting millions of vaccinated Americans at unnecessary risk for breakthrough infections and leaving us without a navigational system for the US Delta wave.

Silly Victim Of mRNA Neo-Vaccinoid Driven ADE Still Out'Chere Repping That Goo...,

HuffPost | As I write this now, I’m midway through my quarantine, still symptomatic and contagious. At first, I was worried that my condition would worsen, but it hasn’t been too bad so far, like a persistent summer cold.

The at-home kit recommended retesting after three days. I waited until Day 5 and tested positive again, which could be a detection of dead virus particles since, according to the CDC, COVID is rarely detectable via the test after six days. 

Slowly, I’m feeling better, although the brain fog, the inability to latch onto a chain of thought long enough to get my day started or get some serious work done, has been the most worrisome.

So far, my other symptoms have included a general achiness and grogginess, head and chest congestion, headaches and, in the first few days, a lot of sneezing. And, just like when I was sick last summer, I haven’t lost my sense of smell or taste, which only reaffirms my belief that I previously had coronavirus.

Thanks to the vaccine, none of my symptoms have been severe, and they weren’t serious for any of my family members either. In fact, my brother, mother and cousin all seemed to make a full recovery within one to two weeks. But if the delta variant infected my whole family, it suggests that we still need to keep masking up in public, maintaining social distance and being cautious socially. 

The federal government only keeps track of these breakthrough cases if they result in death or hospitalization. In fact, the CDC hasn’t been tracking mild breakthroughs since May. That means the number of breakthrough cases throughout the country, the true number of infected people, is likely much higher. 

To think just three weeks ago I flew on an airplane, happily went out to restaurants and bars with my colleagues in Seattle, comfortable enough to sometimes unmask in public. But did I infect more people? Did I feed the deadly surge of this delta variant? 

I feel guilty, but I also feel greatly misled. Our leaders told us vaccinated people could go out in public again without their masks. They told us we would be safe, that others would be safe. That turned out to be false.

None of this should be a surprise to me or to the experts. This is what viruses do: They spread, they evolve, they spread some more. And I’m not knocking the vaccines. Those who haven’t been vaccinated should do so immediately.

Even if you still catch COVID, as I did, it will likely mitigate the symptoms, and it may reduce the spread to others. I’m very grateful for the vaccine, grateful that it protected my family from the worst that COVID can bring.

Yet, if we’re looking at the current infection rates across the country ― which are as bad as they were during this year’s fatal winter surge or in some cases even worse ― then we as a nation need to recognize that just saying “get vaccinated” isn’t going to make the current COVID spike go away tomorrow. 

Tens of millions of inoculations will take weeks to administer and weeks more to take effect. The delta variant is here, and allowing it to spread nearly unabated could create new, potentially more virulent versions of the virus, which (lest we forget) is how this highly contagious variant came to be in the first place.

Vaccine Effectiveness - The Israeli Data Is Ominous At This Time

“Vaccine efficacy and vaccine effectiveness measure the proportionate reduction in cases among vaccinated persons. Vaccine efficacy is used when a study is carried out under ideal conditions, for example, during a clinical trial. Vaccine effectiveness is used when a study is carried out under typical field (that is, less than perfectly controlled) conditions.” according to the CDC.

 

With our warped medical leaders, politicians, pharma-profiteers and big media now feeding us “Delta Variant” swill as if we were caged pigs, a few things may be of use to better frame our perspectives and understandings on this, —the latest CDC etc. Narrative Operation.

 

Israel is now reporting Vaccine Effectiveness for covid shots at 39%-40%.

 

Haaretz, quoting Israel’s director of public health services, Dr. Sharon Alroy-Preis, has her stating [dateline Aug. 1, 2021]: “Previously we thought that fully vaccinated individuals are protected, but we now see that vaccine effectiveness is roughly 40 percent.”

 

Alroy-Preis stated fully half, or 50% of the current infections in Israel are among those fully vaccinated.

 

And she told Haaretz: “we see a drop in the vaccine effectiveness against disease for those who have been vaccinated early on, and we see it for both elderly people over the age of 60 but also for the younger.”

 

This means that the claimed ~40% VE is in fact going down as she speaks.

 

What will the actual VE end up being?

 

During a March 2021 interview with France 24, Alroy-Preis said 80 percent in that country eligible were already vaccinated against Covid-19 — claiming: “You can get to a point in this pandemic where you open sectors and the disease goes down.”

 

Her March claims, along with her credibility have gone up in smoke as the Zionist Entity begins more draconian lockdowns etc. in a matter of days.

 

And we also have more fantasy, masquerading as science from New England Journal of Medicine, dateline July 21, 2021.

 

This NEJM work on behalf of big pharma — and not on our behalf at all — has been recently used to create the illusion that covax VE can do what has never been, regarding influenza vax’.

 

“With the BNT162b2 vaccine, the effectiveness of two doses was 93.7%” NEJM says, and also states: “88.0% (95% CI, 85.3 to 90.1) among those with the delta variant.”

 

This is hyped at top of this paper, in third paragraph under results.

 

Fourth paragraph: “This finding would support efforts to maximize vaccine uptake with two doses among vulnerable populations. (Funded by Public Health England.)”

 

Way down,
27th paragraph: “The numbers of cases and follow-up periods are currently insufficient for the estimation of vaccine effectiveness against severe disease, including hospitalization and death.”

 

Here is the NEJM, publishing a paper titled, “Effectiveness of Covid-19 Vaccines against the B.1.617.2 (Delta) Variant” — and none of the 12 authors, plus “et al.” — none of them had the skill set to recognize they are violating the VE definition!

 

“Vaccine efficacy/effectiveness (VE) is measured by calculating the risk of disease among vaccinated and unvaccinated persons and determining the percentage reduction in risk of disease among vaccinated persons relative to unvaccinated persons.”

 

VE includes measuring against disease — whether mild, moderate, severe, and deadly.

 

And this, published in NEJM!?!

 

Be that as it may, prior to March 2020, it was widely accepted: that 40% VE was “OK” for the CDC — even as they for decades claimed they wanted at least 90%.

 

When the drug pushers claimed with zero evidence in November, in concordance with the Emergency Use Authorizations for Moderna and Pfizer, they were claiming the impossible, at least, what has always been impossible: any VE better than 50% for influenza vaccination’.

 

It was ON PURPOSE the medical charlatans and vaccine fanatics in charge of this criminal operation pretended not to know the obvious about VE.

 

These false expectations of 90% and higher for covid shots — the “experts” all knew all along this was myth, a fairy tale — their science fiction posing as scientific knowledge. . . and the false expectations they created obviously totally inappropriate: and now they are stuck in their own contradictions. [But they got their EUA, and got to pillage the lands far and wide with their experimental poison, now appearing to be creating potential catastrophe. As we will see below, this is exactly what the CDC is now saying; however, they are not stating this obviousness in a rational and coherent manner. Rather, in a way that in effect blames us for it. But what else is new?]

 

The gaslighting continues.

 

This CDC graph shows last 11 years of VE: 43% average VE, for influenza.

 

And depending on the type of flu — it was completely worthless during 2018/2019 flu season for those aged 9 – 49 years old: EV = 3%, for H3N2, that season.

 

And those 50-64: zero VE.

 

The 40% VE rate [and dropping] that Israel is now reporting would have been considered normal — unacceptable, yes; normal, also yes.

 

Googling “Vaccine Effectiveness” and covid VE, you won’t find anything, in US, on this essential matter — though our dear CDC Director Rochelle Walensky is ‘weighing in’:

 

“The largest concern that I think we in public health and sciences are worried about is that virus and potential mutations. . . the potential to evade our vaccine in terms of how it protects us from severe disease and death,” Walensky said last week.

 

“Right now, fortunately, we are not there. These vaccines operate really well in protecting us from severe disease and death,” she said. “But the big concern is the next area that might emerge, just a few mutations potentially away, could potentially evade our vaccines,” the CDC director said.

In other words: VE = 0 . . . . Zero vaccine effectiveness. 

 

This is the kernel of the on-purpose-created mass confusion, of which Walensky is directly complicit.

 

Vaccines unable to prevent disease spread are worthless.

 

As Dr. Meryl Nass, MD, put it: “This is called community spread, and when you cannot identify where the virus was picked up, and you refuse to treat contacts with effective post-exposure drugs, then Track and Trace is simply an expensive, bad joke.”

 

And worse, the CDC director is trying to pretend she and her agency don’t know where the spread is originating!

 

“In an unvaccinated person, the virus does not encounter the same evolutionary pressure to mutate into something stronger. So, if SARS-CoV-2 does end up mutating into more lethal strains, then mass vaccination is the most likely driver,” he said.

 

To sum up, what the science fiction likes of Walensky et al. are trying to obscure is that the overall VE for covid shots may end up being as bad as the 2018/2019 influenza season.

 

Overall VE is how the CDC has always reported VE; and they would also break that down to subset by the different influenza strains and clades as need be.

 

“Delta” is part of the “novel” corona subset. We’ll see what the data says — someday.

Fully Vaccinated P-Town Poof-Dahs Done Phukked Up The Whole Elite Vaccine Narrative...,

abcnews  |  A week after the crowds descended upon Provincetown, Massachusetts, to celebrate the Fourth of July -- the holiday President Joe Biden hoped would mark the nation's liberation from COVID-19 -- the manager of the Cape Cod beach town said he was aware of "a handful of positive COVID cases among folks" who spent time there.

"We are in touch with the Health Department and Outer Cape Health Services and are closely monitoring the data," Alex Morse told reporters.

The announcement wasn't unusual with roughly half of the country still unvaccinated and flare-ups of the virus popping up in various states.

But within weeks, health officials seemed to be on to something much bigger. The outbreak quickly grew to the hundreds and most of them appeared to be vaccinated.

As of Thursday, 882 people were tied to the Provincetown outbreak. Among those living in Massachusetts, 74% of them were fully immunized, yet officials said the vast majority were also reporting symptoms. Seven people were reported hospitalized.

The initial findings of the investigation led by the Massachusetts Department of Public Health, in conjunction with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, seemed to have huge implications.

Before Provincetown, health officials had been operating under the assumption that it was extraordinarily rare for a vaccinated person to become infected with the virus. And if they did, they probably wouldn't end up passing it on to others, such as children too young to qualify for the vaccine or people who were medically vulnerable.

The idea that vaccines halt transmission of the virus was largely behind the CDC's decision in May suggesting vaccinated people could safely go without their masks indoors and in crowds, even if others were unvaccinated.But that assumption had been based on studies of earlier versions of the virus. Delta was known for its "hyper-transmissibility," or as one former White House adviser put it "COVID on steroids.

"What has changed is the virus," said Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation's top infectious disease expert and Biden's chief medical adviser.

When a vaccinated person gets infected with delta -- called a "breakthrough infection" -- "the level of virus in their nasopharynx is about 1,000 times higher than with the alpha variant," Fauci said in an interview Wednesday with MSNBC.

All indications now are that the Provincetown outbreak investigation is among the pieces of new evidence behind the CDC's decision to ask Americans to once again put on their masks indoors, even if they are vaccinated.

 

 

Vaccination Breakthrough Cases Resolving Into Long-Covid And Deadlier Variants

npr  |  There's more potentially worrisome news for vaccinated people: In very rare cases, people experiencing breakthrough infections may be at risk for long-COVID symptoms.

That's according to a small new study of fully vaccinated health care workers in Israel, published Wednesday in The New England Journal of Medicine.

Data from Israel pic.twitter.com/Qmu4ZDtN7a

— Irene Tosetti (@itosettiMD_MBA) July 10, 2021

The study confirmed what's already known: That it's very rare for fully vaccinated people to get infected or sick with COVID-19. But it also found lingering COVID symptoms did develop in a handful of breakthrough cases.

Researchers studied 1,497 vaccinated health care workers at the Sheba Medical Center in Israel. Among them, only 39 got infected despite their inoculations. Of those, seven — or about 19% — developed symptoms that lasted at least six weeks, including headaches, muscle pain, loss of taste and smell and fatigue.

"It's really disturbing," says Dr. Gili Regev-Yochay, director of the infection, prevention and control unit with the Sheba Medical Center and an author of the study.

"If this is what we're going to see with all of the even mildly symptomatic infections that we're seeing now, it's definitely worrisome," she says.

New data suggests that fully vaccinated individuals are not just contracting COVID, but could be carrying higher levels of virus than previously understood, facilitating spread, my NBC News colleagues are reporting. New indoor masking guidance expected today.

— Ken Dilanian (@KenDilanianNBC) July 27, 2021

Regev-Yochay and others stress that the results need to be confirmed by additional research involving many more patients who are followed for much longer. It could be a false alarm, the symptoms could be much rarer, or they could resolve far more quickly than the months of symptoms that typically plague those suffering from long COVID.

Experts stress that vaccination remains highly effective at preventing the most severe consequences of infection: hospitalization and death.

Nevertheless, other researchers agree the findings are cause for additional investigation.

"We had hoped that when you get vaccinated and even if you did have a breakthrough infection you would have enough of an immune response that would block this protracted symptom complex now known as long COVID," says Dr. Eric Topol, a professor of molecular medicine at Scripps Research.