Criminal negligence for four million COVID deaths if it turns out to be a lab leak? I doubt it. Everyone involved has probably already been offered immunity to prosecution, from Dr. Focaccia all the way down the doughy boy who sweeps the humanized-mouse carcasses out of the test cages.
Four million deaths, it’s going to be essentially impossible to claim it was anything other than an accident. I’m sure there are going to be some smarty pants who claim that Big Pharma and thus the genetic research community was not incentivized to keep these human-chimera gain-of-function experiments locked down, because they knew that if they got out and led to a few million deaths, that would be the critical mass for them to finally bypass FDA compliance on getting mRNA drugs onto the market. And not just bypassing the FDA compliance, but also getting people to forget about how much they hate GMOs. There is a clip from Futurama, how Leila was highly concerned about the effects of genetic engineering from MomCorp, until she found out that it could cure her incurable disease, then she says “Okay, I’m in.” As the cured Leila and Fry walk away in happiness, the city is then revealed to have been taken over by MomCorp’s GMO beans, which encase the city like radioactive Kudzu.
Years ago, if you asked just about any Lefty for their opinions on GMOs, at least half or more would have told you how it needs to be controlled for fear of an unexpected disaster. But now, anti-GMOers are being compared to Anti-Vaxxers by those who control the flow of disinformation. It’s a convenient enough trick, or at worst, that those who are concerned about GMOs are essentially old Fuddy Duddys who can’t get with the program. Tell them to “get over it, you old altacocker,” or “we don’t do things your way anymore, you Christian Scientist Ahmish baboon.” Whatever has the right tone to make it sound like concerns about GMOs are “so pre-COVID.” And that works reasonably well. Most people are sufficiently ignorant that actual science might as well be science-fiction. And I’m no better really, back when I lived in Glasgow I used to run numbers for some bookie family there, I saw something that changed my mind of genetic engineering. Before that point, it didn’t concern me much. Here’s what happened … the patriarch of the family, he gets me in his cigar shop, I figured he’s trying to get a bead on my head for his gambling business. They’re legal there, as far as I know, a good 90% of their business was licensed. But these old numbers families, they all want to have at least a little bit of illegal action … not enough do more than buy a few horses, but enough to keep it interesting. Most of those old bookies, they’ll hold action on anything they can. They’re holding action right now on the efforts to get this British export royal family to take off in the USA, how long it’s going to last before those royals move to Canada or maybe France, or even just buy a house on Madonna’s block in Crustyfordshire. Smart money says that most the Yanks are just don’t have the stomach for royalty, nepotism is something that seems to rub American’s fur the wrong way, they’re a nation of Cowboys and Arabs. That’s where the American Royalty is, it’s in whatever they can sell that goes down smooth and rugged. And a bunch of royals can’t kick ass, even when one marries a Black woman, he’s still going to be some pasty-assed candy-sucking cherry boy. And that will move product in Europe a good bit of the time, Asia, it’ll move product in Canada, Australia and country infected with even a bit of Commonwealth, but that doesn’t make the Yanks’ pussies wet … more Marlboro Man, less Marlborough Gentleman. The end result is that royalty is dying out BECAUSE it’s royalty. Now, you have a fine-ass Cherokee or Sioux Nation Princess, America is down with that. But not Brits, they’re too … what’s the word? Punk-ass motherfuckers? Yeah. There isn’t a British Royal on the planet that would be able to pick up a Cherokee Queen in the High Country Lounge, she would laugh their candy-ass onto the pavement. The British Royals are about as sexy as a bag of enriched wheat flour.
So this guy was running action on the British Royals that denounced the Royal Family, and they’re franchising their broken-ass Enriched Wheat Flour show in America. The smart money has them lasting another five years in L.A. doing reality shows, and then they’ll move down the street from Madonna. We already have a family with no actual skills and they’re pulling coin as the Armenian Royalty.
He pulls me into his cigar store, he hands me a half-decent Cuban, the kind where you break the glass. I’m careful, I look on the floor for any chunks of glass, but it breaks clean, I pull out the Cuban, smells good, I trim the ends, which is the way I like it, always has been, and I happen to know for a fact that he only bought the cigar store a few years ago with bookie money. But he does it the fancy way, the way people do it if they didn’t smoke their first cigar when they were fourteen or so. And this guy, he’s putting on a show for me. Yeah, his dad was a bookie, his granddad was a bookie, he knew the business, but he sees the numbers I’m running, and they’re just consistent, so he asks me, twirling that damned cigar like an idiot, “are you a mathematician?”
I tell him “Nah mate, I’m a physicist. And the only reason my games are running even is because I roll the line with logarithms instead of over-and-under.” I tell him “Mate, it ain’t rocket science.” I figured he was going give my games a little more exposure, and then the old bastard starts turning that fucking cigar, he’s hemming and hawing, trying to slow it down. It annoyed me, it was like he was trying to channel his inner Frank Rosenthal. I remember he had a work by George Wylie in the corner of his office, I assumed it was authentic, but with some of these guys, you never know. I figured, okay, this Glasgow after all, everyone fucking knows George Wylie here, there is no way he puts up a fake Wylie.
He finally tells me what’s up. Some nephew of his is working on his Ph.D. in applied physics, he’s into robotic arms for disabled veterans or something, he’s across the pond at Columbia, this punk kid has already failed his qualifier once, then he failed it a second time, but he supposedly showed enough forward progress that they give him one more shot … I’m not sure if they even know this kid is Scottish, I found out when I met him that he speaks posh, they might have assumed he was from Kent or maybe some financial family in London … but definitely not the nephew of some bookie with a cigar store just fish distance from the Clyde.
And that’s how I got back to the USA after Scotland. He didn’t need my numbers too much, but he needed me to get his nephew past his qualifier. He has no idea that it’s essentially impossible to cheat on them if the qualifier committee keeps their damn yaps shut to their students, which a lot of them don’t. I cut a deal with the old guy … one way ticket to JFK, four weeks salary regardless, if he passes the qualifier, I get twelve more weeks salary, if he fails, I pay him back one week’s salary. He agrees to that, next thing I realize, I wake up drunk inside the plane, halfway over the Atlantic, I had finished most of a bottle of Oban from the Duty Free in the airport, I mixed it with at least a dozen bottles of Irn Bru from the airport shop. I wake up on this plane, middle seat center aisle, best way to keep from getting woken up when you pass out on Oban and Irn Bru, because you don’t have anyone asking you to get up so they can take a shit, or ask you raise or lower your window shade. And you’re going to say I’m a damned liar, but it was true, all around me, second time, it was another woman’s sports team of some kind … lots of tattoos, I figured Roller Derby again, but this time I just kept my mouth shut, I had smuggled just enough cocaine onto that flight to get me to Kennedy, I didn’t need to share it with a Roller Derby team again like that flight from L.A.. I make it to Manhattan, I head up to NASA GISS, say hi to some friends, the Scottish kid meets me in the Seinfeld diner on the ground floor of the NASA GISS building. Nice kid, speaks posh, but he’s really into his idea of helping veterans who get their limbs blown off by IEDs. The kid was genuinely a good kid. But this kid, dumb as a box of rocks. There is no way he passes the qualifier fairly, and there is no way this kid is dirty enough to bug his advisor for “preparation advice” like most of the other candidates. I get a bead on this, we have six weeks until his qualifier, so it’s four weeks paid, two weeks unpaid, I decide right then to gamble that the extra two weeks will win me the twelve weeks and that I can get him to pass. But it’s not easy, this kid tells me he has to go to class and work in the lab. I tell the little fuck that he’s going to the Plaza Hotel with me, where his uncle got us a single room with two beds until the qualifier test. The Plaza is pretty nice, but he didn’t get the room service on barter, just the room itself, for six weeks. I didn’t need room service, I could live on those street chicken kebab sandwiches they have up near Central Park. (It’s why those asshole television chefs have such a tough time figuring out New York City, they can’t wrap their heads around the reality that the best food in the city comes out of those food carts.) He tells me we have to go to his apartment to get his books and he has to at least leave his lab notebook up at the lab so his research partners can get his data if they need it. My friend at GISS makes a few calls for me, they get me a colloquia for one of the nonplanar research groups, honorarium is $260, which was the most they could go without running it past the department chair and the colloquia committee, but it gets me a day-badge to get in the door. I figured I could get some intelligence about the test by what cartoons the professors tape to their doors … lots of Far Sides, it’s going to have minimal approximation techniques, mostly straight-up Jackson, Pathria, and Landau. Anything with Star Trek, it’s going to be more analytical problems. Pin-ups of fractals, no way to guess. I get there and poke around, lots of Far Side panels, we’re good, I can train him in the regular topics in six weeks. And then there’s the point of this whole story, thanks for waiting for it.
I go with the kid to his lab, turns out the principal investigator is in the ante-room, he running some density functional analysis on an Amazon mainframe. I get to talking with this guy, I have a little more coke from Scotland, so I offer him a bump, he and I both do a decent-sized bump. Now this guy is on a roll, I figured I might have hit pay-dirt, maybe he’s on the qualifier committee, I get some intel from this guy … cool guy by the way, he explained what he’s doing. The kid is in the back pulling data for his notebook. I catch a glimpse of him, he might not have the bones for theory, but he’ll make a good lab man. This associate professor, he asks me if I smoke, I ask him “cigarettes or weed?” He says “I have both.” We head down a back stairway, walk around the block,turns out he doesn’t have any weed, he has one of the vape pens. I’m not a fan, but whatever it takes, I noticed that a lot of the associate professors use the vapes now because they don’t want to smell like sativa flower for their students. And this is where shit gets weird, it’s the point of this whole story. That vape works fast, I’m high as fuck, we do another bump, and we’re walking back, he asks me, “you know why I picked prions? It’s the smallest organism I can model with the Amazon mainframes, and then I can build them with the STM we have the in the lab.”
At this point, I realized that there is no possible way this box of nutcakes is on the qualifier exam committee … he’s fucking around with prions in a physics lab, no biological containment that I could see. So I ask this guy how he gets research clearance to fuck around with prions. He gets paranoid fast, I could see it. You know that moment when you feel like everyone you talk to is a cop, and it’s best just to spill your guts? This guy is right there, he’s balls-on-the-table spilling the beans. Turns out he doesn’t get prions in at all, he’s pulling carbon nanofibers from a sol-gel coating method. No big deal, but then he drags individual fibers into the scanning tunneling microscope that he mostly built out of surplus from a pharma company. And then he uses the STM to push around the surface molecules and builds these things he calls “pseudo prions.” No functionalization as a prion, he keeps the new structure sufficiently far from the prions that they’re still just nanofibers. But he’ll functionalize one protein group on one size, and then he’ll do the flip side on another. There is no possible way that either of the half-proteins could do what a prion does, that’s his safety interface. But he joins the measured proximity sensing in the computer model and sure enough, he has a prion with the right chirality to damage natural proteins. It’s straight up Frankenstein shit, but nobody expects that out of physics lab. Then he starts to calm down a bit, I lie and tell him that I’m out of coke. He takes me into the lab, tells the Scottish kid to hit the turf, but I tell him that I plan on helping the kid prepare for his qualifier as a favor to his uncle. He looks a little nervous with the kid hanging around so I tell the kid to get his a copy of Cohen-Tennoudji, which I remember I saw in the office he shared with the Chinese, Russian and Indian candidates. I wanted to get rid of the kid, at this point, I’m actually kind of losing my cookies over this research. This guy built protein structures out of nanofibers. It was a big deal.
So he fires up the STM, he has some samples he had already functionalized. First, I guess just for safety, he cut a channel in the fiber between the bottom half that was already functionalized and the blank top half, and then he modulates the tip voltage and current to start shuffling around the molecules on the surface of the fiber. I watch this go down in real time. This fucker literally builds the top half of a prion in his lab. He has these surface molecules popping around like he’s building something out of those magnet balls, just boom, boom, boom, he built an organism with a kind of intelligence built into the surface Coulomb potential … there wasn’t really an intelligence, but in the computer, it could snap proteins at will, just fucking break holes in healthy proteins because of the chirality.
That was the moment that changed me. I learned to fear genetic engineering on that day because I knew there was no way that there was a cell biologist on the planet who could do what that guy did with that STM. That guy knew Kittel’s Solid State like it was the owner’s manual of an Austin Healey. I doubt it one our of five thousand physicists could do what that guy had done. But a cell biologist? No fucking way. They don’t even have the cryogenics to make most of that work, they’re mostly physicians anyway, none of them do poverty, and it’s unlikely they could figure out what that guy had done. If he could do that with an STM, what could a fluke genetically-modified DNA do if the chirality and surface energy found an inflection point? Kill the host, leave them impotent?
But it worked. COVID killed four million people, the lefties got scared, and like magic, suddenly a good 50% of them had lined up to get injected with the stuff. Same people who wouldn’t eat a GMO a couple years earlier, now they’re telling their neighbor that they have an ethical obligation to get the injection for fear of infecting someone.
Yeah, the smarty pants will claim that the Big Pharma wasn’t incentivized to keep the SARS-CoV-2 virus from leaking out of the lab, because it was the only way they could get mRNA into needles. But realistically? No way this turns into anything other than a four million lives accident. The USA and China will dig up some pocket change to pay reparations to the dead, changes in policy will come, there will be scientific review committees to supervise these physicians who have no clue how to safely conduct research on that scale.
So four million lives? That’s a rounding error for the pharma researcher. They had to have expected something like this would happen with a lab leak.
But what if those functionalized mRNAs happen to develop a fucked up chirality the way those nanofibers developed dangerous chirality and surface tension in that lab? Do you remember the last time we had anything like that? Yeah it was Thalidomide.
And that, friend is a whole different kettle of fish.
If these genetically-modified vaccines end up producing misshaped babies, or sterile twenty-somethings? That’s no rounding error. Thalidomide with the reversed chirality didn’t butcher rat babies at first either, because the DNA was sufficiently different. Now they feel confident enough that the mRNA vaccines won’t lead to birth defects, because they were tested on humanized mice. But these humanized mice, they were humanized in the immune response, but were they also humanized in the reproductive response? Sure! And if you believe that the reproductive response can be humanized in mice, then the Albert Bridge is for sale, and I’m the guy to sell it to you, I take Polydragon only, thank you.
The human reproductive response can’t be humanized in mice. But in about eight months, the first batch of the babies born to mRNA immunized mothers will begin. There is no question that some of them will be malformed, because some of them are malformed even without the mRNA vaccine. But if a statistically significant number of them are born malformed, that’s not the kind of human catastrophe that even Pharma can manage, because at that point, an entire generation of ticking timebombs will curse the heaven and earth that they can’t enjoy their pregnancy for fear of being “Thalido-Ma-RiNAted.” The kids will call it “marinaded in GMOs.” They’ll hug their malformed babies, and then they’ll go to war with the industry. We can pay reparations for dead people, but nobody has yet found a reliable way to pay reparations for mangled people.