I'm NOT The Only Cat Seriously Fixated On The Low-Hanging Cornucopia Of SARS-CoV2 Fruit

harvardtothebighouse |  Some of the dystopian carnage creeping across China may be due to the fact that much of China’s population may have already been exposed to coronavirus infection via SARS or other less notorious strains, which would allow the Wuhan Stain COVID-19 to use antibody-dependent enhancement to much more efficiently enter into cells, and then become much more virulent since this enhancement hijacks the body’s preexisting immune response to coronavirus infections and allows easier entry. However whether or not people have been exposed to a coronavirus infection before, once it’s been circulating in a population for long enough the Wuhan Strain may be able to reinfect its own past hosts and use this molecular hijacking on antibodies left from its own previous infection to become far more virulent, regardless of whether or not someone has been exposed to other coronaviruses before COVID-19. And early reporting from Chinese doctors indicates that re-infections of the Wuhan Strain are far more lethal than the first.

– Additionally, although another since-retracted pre-print noted several very short genomic sequences in COVID-19’s spike-protein gene that look far more similar to sequences found in HIV than to other coronaviruses – critics quickly pointed out that the shared homology didn’t reach statistical significance. However a closer look at the data reveals that there were a few small shared genomic segments that, despite being physically separated from each other along each strand of DNA, all worked together to code for the Wuhan Strain’s protein-spike’s crucial receptor binding site. Something that is highly unlikely to have happened by chance. And despite most of its protein-spike being shared with SARS, these substituted segments weren’t shared at all – nor were they found in any other coronavirus. One possible but likely reason for these HIV-like segments is that they were meant to be epitopes, or molecular flags meant to mark intruders for a vaccine to target. It is mathematically possible for this to happen in nature – but only in a ten-thousand bats chained to ten-thousand Petri dishes and given until infinity sense. Alternatively, it could also be produced by infecting a room full of ferrets with a bespoke coronavirus vaccine and sifting through the wreckage for your genomic needle.

– Critics have brushed off the Wuhan Strain’s shared homology with HIV as statistically insignificant, however clinical reporting indicates that the Wuhan Strain may be using this shared HIV homology to attack CD4 immune cells just like HIV does, as an unusually high percentage of patients are showing low white blood cell counts, especially the sickest ones. This pathogenicity may well be due to the unique HIV-live genomics of the Wuhan Strain, as one white-paper by LSU’s professor emeritus of Microbiology, Immunology, and Parasitology who’s also a Harvard-educated virologist with a PhD in Microbiology and Molecular Genetics notes: “This is the first description of a possible immunosuppressive domain in coronaviruses… The three key [mutations] common to the known immunosuppressive domains are also in common with the sequence from [the spike-protein]. While coronaviruses are not known for general immunosuppression of the style shown by HIV-1, this does not rule out immunosuppression at the site of active infection in the lung, which would prolong and potentially worsen infection at that site.” And early research has indicated that this unique region may make COVID-19 up to 1,000 times more likely to bind to human cells than SARS.

– Even more troubling, a peer-reviewed study noted that one particular part of the Wuhan Strain’s spike-protein genome also wasn’t found in any of its relatives, “and may provide a gain-of-function to [COVID-19] for efficient spreading in the human population.”  And according to that paper, this particular type of furin cleavage site makes similar viruses both more pathogenic and more neurotoxic.

– Evidence for the Wuhan Strain’s neurotoxicity arrived in late February, in a published paper which notes that “the most characteristic symptom of COVID‐19 patients is respiratory distress, and most of the patients admitted to the intensive care could not breathe spontaneously.” Combined with the observation that “some COVID‐19 patients also showed neurologic signs such as headache, nausea and vomiting,” this paper asserts that since SARS was found heavily concentrated in the brainstems of its autopsied victims, COVID-19 is also probably crossing the blood-brain barrier and killing its victims not just via pneumonia, but also by causing neurological respiratory failure.

– And it should be noted that SARS – much ballyhooed as a close relative to the Wuhan Strain – didn’t notable effect white blood cell counts.  Additionally, clinical treatment guides published online in late January by established Chinese medical sources note the progressive reduction of white blood cells, as well as the importance of monitoring this decline. And reporting from Thailand indicates that adding a cocktail of two different anti-HIV drugs to the typical flu treatment regime seemed to effectively knock back the Wuhan Strain. Additionally, one of the only autopsies performed outside of China to date found that the deceased had a severely depleted white blood cell count. These lowered counts may come from this shared similarity with HIV, or it could also be the result of antibody-dependent enhancement as well, since this phenomenon primarily targets white blood cells for its hijackings and may help explain why consecutive infections are so lethal.

– In a highly concerning turn, scientists have noted that the Wuhan Strain can have a “striking” short term rate of mutation which doesn’t indicate an artificial origin but captures the unique threat posed by this coronavirus regardless of its providence, since a faster mutation rates makes it more likely this virus can dodge testing and neutralize vaccines. Something there is already early evidence for. Further concerning are reports out of China that even patients who appear cured still harbor COVID-19 in their system, and although the full implications of this are not yet known – none of them are good.

– One of the worst possible scenarios for COVID-19’s mutation rate would be if it falls into the Goldilocks range that would allow it to form mutant viral swarms: too many mutations will cause a virus to eventually implode, not enough allows host immune systems to catch-up, but if things are just right mutant swarms can form and spread across host populations, burrowing into host nervous systems and causing permanent neurological damage. Mutant swarms form when a virus produces mutationally-damaged copies of itself inside a host, some of which aren’t infectious but find their way into the nervous system where they burrow in causing damage, and others that combine with complimentary broken copies inside host cells to produce working infectious copies of the virus. So a host can not only become crippled with neurological issues, but also still be producing infectious copies of the virus. And it seems as if COVID-19 has many characteristics that indicate the potential to form mutant swarms: the “striking” mutation rate mentioned above and the fact a second widespread mutated strain seems to have already emerged in Washington State with many other isolated strains reported elsewhere, crossing between species is another factor and a dog in Hong Kong appears to have tested positive, the fact that the Wuhan Strain can infect not only the respiratory tract but feces as well – multi-organ involvement is an important contributor to viral swarms, and finally the markedly viral load rate of COVID-19 compared to SARS – SARS produced a viral load several times lower which decreased over time, while COVID-19 produces a “very high” viral load that appears to increase over time and can peak several orders of magnitude higher than SARS was measured to reach. And alarming evidence that this phenomenon is occurring emerged from a Chinese pre-print which noted that over one-third of the roughly 200 patients studied has some neurological symptoms, with nearly half of the most severe patients exhibiting neurological issues.

– Another exceptional trait of the Wuhan Strain COVID-19 is that not only does it form its own clade, it’s calculated to have diverged from SARS and its other sister coronaviruses some 260 years ago. And yet in all that time, while it every other branch of the coronavirus tree was busy branching-off into countless variants, if it emerged naturally, COVID-19 somehow spent a quarter of a millennium as the lone known example of its clade, somehow not mutating into related lineages in all that time. Another simpler explanation is that this apparent hereditary distance and genetic uniqueness is the just the result of being altered in a lab. And although two distinct strains of COVID-19 have been identified, there’s no reason to believe this mutational differentiation happened before contact with humans in December of 2019. Additionally, when neutral sites, the specific points in the genome which most reliably show evolutionary change, were examined: COVID-19 looks even more evolutionarily distant from any of its possible relatives.

– Also giving credence to the idea that the Wuhan Strain was bio-engineered is the existence of a patent application registered to a scientist from Wuhan that looks to modulate a coronavirus’ spike-protein genes – the precise region altered by Zhengli Shi at UNC to make a hyper-virulent strain of coronavirus, and whose alteration and adaptation would explain the Wuhan Strain’s unusual behavior as discussed above.