Covid: Unifying Theory of Everything (part three)
Gain of Function and Daszak's marketing of his pandemic business model
What is Gain of Function for?
What GoF is for is up to those using it, within whatever constraints that apply and can be enforced. If they operate in secret, with zero oversight and interference, there are no constraints.
Gain-of-function research (GoF research or GoFR) is medical research that genetically alters an organism in a way that may enhance the biological functions of gene products. This may include an altered pathogenesis, transmissibility, or host range, i.e. the types of hosts that a microorganism can infect. This research is intended to reveal targets to better predict emerging infectious diseases and to develop vaccines and therapeutics.
Some forms of gain-of-function research (specifically work which involves certain select agent pathogens) carry inherent biosafety and biosecurity risks, and are thus also referred to as dual use research of concern (DURC).[7] To mitigate these risks while allowing the benefits of such research, various governments have mandated that DURC experiments be regulated under additional oversight by institutions (so-called institutional "DURC" committees)[8] and government agencies (such as the NIH's recombinant DNA advisory committee).[9][10][11] A mirrored approach can be seen in the European Union's Dual Use Coordination Group (DUCG).[12][13][14]
GoF is simply a descriptive term for genetic engineering that changes the properties or capabilities of an organism.
GoF is subject to semantic arguments about its purpose. The work to produce a bioweapon is essentially the same as to produce an organism of enhanced virulence in order to then possibly develop a counter to that enhanced organism. If such work is inadequately policed, you can develop a bioweapon and then, if found out, simply claim you were just trying to prevent the next pandemic, rather than start it.
An overseer with sufficient awareness, access and technical capability would then have to examine all of your work and your justifications in order to judge your claim. If you just couch all of your work in the right language and invent justifications, you might be able to completely hide a bioweapon agenda.
If you outsource all of your genetic engineering work (including GoF) to countries where oversight is lax or incapable, you have just freed yourself from the levels of scrutiny that would apply in the EU or US, although you could stand accused of using US government money to fund illegal work elsewhere in the world, if that work can be shown to be illegal, but it won’t be the UN who can or will make that determination.
High Representative Nakamitsu, emphasized that the UN has neither the mandate not [sic] the capacity to investigate such claims, which fall under the auspices of 1972 Biological Weapons Convention.
It is possible for the UN to state that “the UN knows of no bioweapons programmes in Ukraine” while it is also aware of the existence of biolabs that are conducting GoF on plague, tularaemia and other pathogens. This is simply semantics.
Daszak the pandemic peddler
If SC2 is a genetically engineered and GoF-enhanced pathogen that features modifications that were literally impossible via natural evolution, how can that be justified? You just made something that nature would never in a million years have made herself, so why did you make it?
This 35 minute interview with Daszak gives room to conclude that EcoHealth Alliance’s basic business model is this:
Justify your research into new and existing pathogens by telling people they are all huge pandemic risks;
Amplify them with GoF under the pretence that you are identifying the next pandemic in order to head it off;
Produce a narrative that drives the pandemic-vaccine revenue stream;
Acquire a bank of enhanced pathogens that, combined with other work e.g. human genome targeting, has dual use as bioweapons.
Flog those bioweapons back to the US hegemony.
Just look at the claim Daszack makes about Rift Valley fever:
Interviewer: [Rift] is an African disease and I think you mentioned on your website people worry about it spreading elsewhere, right? Is that realistic?
Daszack: Oh yeah because one of the things about Rift is it it once it gets into livestock it can then be transmitted directly from blood and meat into people so it becomes a huge risk for people butchering animals, and that the big event is the Hajj where everybody has to butcher and eat a sheep, you know, lamb, whatever, so there's this, um, high risk around the Hajj. CDC's aware of it, WHO is aware of it and they monitor and Saudi Arabia does a great job monitoring the Hajj but what about these other areas, these other regions and these other risks? It's definitely a pandemic risk for sure.
Interviewer: could it get into the US even?
Daszack: Yeah, through through meat or…
Interviewer: It's coming in?
Daszack: yeah yeah.
According to Statista, African meat and meat product imports topped out at $6.73m in 2017:
That’s not a lot. If rift infection is a risk via this vector, just enforce country of origin and port of entry testing on all African meat, and only allow African meat to enter at one or two ports to avoid the need for every US port to have the testing capability.
A quick, cursory check of Rift in Wikipedia shows this:
1931 First outbreak in Kenya in sheep, cattle and humans;[23]
No human deaths stated
1950–1951 Severe outbreak in Kenya
100,000 deaths in livestock, an unrecorded number of humans with fever.[24]
1974–1976 South Africa, more than 500,000 infected animals
First deaths in humans.[25][26]
1977–78 Egypt estimated 200,000 people were infected
In Kenya in 1998, the virus killed more than 400 people.[citation needed]
Since then, there have been outbreaks in Saudi Arabia and Yemen (2000),[citation needed] East Africa (2006–2007),[29] Sudan (2007),[30] South Africa (2010),[31][32] Uganda (2016),[33] Kenya (2018),[34] and Mayotte (2018–2019).[35] 2020–2021 in Kenya,[36] in 2022 an outbreak is ongoing in Burundi.
From the numbers in these citations, less than 1500 human deaths have occurred due to Rift since 1931. Note the frequency of outbreaks changing from once every ~20 years to between three and 6 years with movement from Africa to the Middle East, but no confirmation and scale of the Middle Eastern outbreaks.
What does the CDC say about rift?
Rift Valley fever (RVF) is a viral disease most commonly seen in domesticated animals in sub-Saharan Africa, such as cattle, buffalo, sheep, goats, and camels. People can get RVF through contact with blood, body fluids, or tissues of infected animals, or through bites from infected mosquitoes. Spread from person to person has not been documented.
Although RVF often causes severe illness in animals, most people with RVF have either no symptoms or a mild illness with fever, weakness, back pain, and dizziness. However, a small percentage (8-10%) of people with RVF develop much more severe symptoms, including eye disease, hemorrhage (excessive bleeding), and encephalitis (swelling of the brain).
https://www.cdc.gov/vhf/rvf/index.html
Treatment
There are no FDA-approved treatments for Rift Valley Fever. Because most cases of RVF are mild and self-limiting, a specific treatment for RVF has not been established. Symptoms of mild illness such as fever and body aches can be managed with standard over-the-counter medications. Most of the time, people will get better within 2 days to 1 week after their illness starts. Treatment for more serious cases may require hospitalization and are generally limited to supportive care.
What does WHO say about rift?
The majority of human infections result from direct or indirect contact with the blood or organs of infected animals. The virus can be transmitted to humans through the handling of animal tissue during slaughtering or butchering, assisting with animal births, conducting veterinary procedures, or from the disposal of carcasses or fetuses. Certain occupational groups such as herders, farmers, slaughterhouse workers, and veterinarians are therefore at higher risk of infection.
The virus infects humans through inoculation, for example via a wound from an infected knife or through contact with broken skin, or through inhalation of aerosols produced during the slaughter of infected animals.
There is some evidence that humans may become infected with RVF by ingesting the unpasteurized or uncooked milk of infected animals.
Human infections have also resulted from the bites of infected mosquitoes, most commonly the Aedes and Culex mosquitoes and the transmission of RVF virus by hematophagous (blood-feeding) flies is also possible.
To date, no human-to-human transmission of RVF has been documented, and no transmission of RVF to health care workers has been reported when standard infection control precautions have been put in place.
There has been no evidence of outbreaks of RVF in urban areas.
Deconstructing Daszak’s rift valley fever potential pandemic pitch
A pandemic is defined as “an epidemic occurring over a very wide area, crossing international boundaries, and usually affecting a large number of people” (Porta 2014). Pandemics are, therefore, identified by their geographic scale rather than the severity of illness. For example, in contrast to annual seasonal influenza epidemics, pandemic influenza is defined as “when a new influenza virus emerges and spreads around the world, and most people do not have immunity” (WHO 2010).
Disease Control Priorities: Improving Health and Reducing Poverty. 3rd edition
Daszak: It becomes a huge risk for people butchering animals
If non-symptomatic animals are butchered by people using appropriate levels of hygiene and protection, primary infection risk will be minimised.
Quantify and justify the claim “huge risk”. Factor risk mitigations starting with the butchery of healthy animals through to hygiene, process and protection.
Is the documented scale of rift so far a “huge risk”?
Daszak: So there's this, um, high risk around the Hajj
The Hajj occurs in Mecca, Saudi Arabia. Search for accounts of the supposed Hajj rift outbreak and you don’t find death counts, and no easily accessible papers on it. But you do find this:
Click that link and you find a deleted page. Use the web archive and you find this published 2006 (after uncited Wikipedia claim dated 2000).
Since the Hajj has existed, it would appear that there may have been one outbreak in Mecca with possibly zero human fatalities and unknown degrees and amounts of infection. Over the history of the Hajj, Hajj butchery standards do not appear to have resulted in more than one rift outbreak that Wikipedia doesn’t have a citation for and The Lancet used to claim hadn’t occurred.
What did people learn from this possible Hajj outbreak? If livestock monitoring and handling standards at the Hajj have improved since that event and over time in general, what’s the big deal?
Daszak: It's definitely a pandemic risk for sure.
Really? Rift doesn’t spread person to person, so it’s limited by people connected to the source of infection i.e. an infected animal. It is also described as self-limiting.
There have been less than 1500 deaths in nearly a century.
Poverty kills 9m+ people a year, and it’s completely preventable.
I’m prepared to label Daszak a rift valley fever disaster capitalist who is knowingly spinning a deliberate line of bullshit for commercial gain.
Ralph Baric on pandemic opportunities
Watch the first 2 minutes of this video to see Baric flagging pandemic money making opportunities.
Good business is where you make it
You get money from government and the private sector to cover your paycheque, using a fear narrative that existing pathogens that aren’t a big deal in the big picture could be because you say to people with no knowledge, “huge risk” without backing up your claim.
You may or may not genetically engineer those pathogens to become more capable, under the pretence of “getting ahead of Mother Nature”.
Meanwhile, you go digging around for new pathogens in the corners of caves where almost no one hangs out, and you GoF them. In fact, you do stuff that’s basically impossible in nature, then you tell people your work is now a potential danger to them all and so you get more money for risks you just created.
That’s a good business model for the benefit of a very small number of people, but it’s junk for the majority of the population because it’s based on false assumptions, fake narrative and exacerbated and manmade circumstances.
Most people don’t hang out in bat caves because they’re full of bats, so the overall global odds of a naturally occurring bat-based pathogenic outbreak is actually very low. How many others have there been? In order for that risk to increase, someone has to:
hang out with a lot more bats, intimately enough to get infected with a cross-species pathogen that can then spread through humans; and
get back into contact with enough humans to initiate multiple infections; and
for enough infections to spread across a large enough area for anyone to classify it as a “pandemic”, which doesn’t have anything to do with fatalities; or
someone has to find pathogens, genetically engineer them and then release them.
Now, according to Daszak's business model, you deliberately go and do any or all of the above in the first place to then justify your primary business, and drive your secondary business interests of pandemic preparedness and management.
The original bat-to-pangolin/wet market origin story of Covid is known to be bullshit, involving Fauci and Daszak. Even if there are elements of a bat-based pathogen that may have come from Peter’s favourite cave, Peter had to make it into a threat.
If you just remove EcoHealth Alliance and its business model, you’ve probably done more for global pandemic risk reduction than anything Peter ever did, because Peter hasn’t eradicated any disease ever, despite all his “hard work”.
“Dear Mr. Daszak and Mr. Baric, please:
Leave bats and other animals alone;
Leave unknown pathogens alone. Let them come to us, don’t go to them;
Cease genetically engineering any pathogens at all. All we need to know is how to treat the strains of pathogens that currently exist in nature. We don’t need you making new and more powerful ones.
Cease making unsubstantiated claims about risk and threat.
Get better at doing cover ups.
Regards,
World”
“Dear World,
Please be aware that bats are a species that can host pathogens that can affect humans to some degree. Please try to avoid direct contact with bats. If you’re hungry, please eat something else. Hanging out in a bat cave is a bad idea because it’s noisy and you’ll get shat on because bats live at the top of the cave and gravity works downwards. Chris Nolan’s Batman trilogy, masterful though it was, grossly misrepresented the practical realities of spending time in bat caves. It’s only good if you’re Bruce Wayne and can afford a cleaner.
Regards,
Safety people"