Straight Dope on Medicine: Death Virus 2024

Author

Scott Ganser
January 12, 2024

Genesis 2 ESV

15 The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it. 16 And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, “You may surely eat of every tree of the garden, 17 but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat[d] of it you shall surely die.”

Adam and Eve did eat of the tree and suffered the appropriate consequences. Death was now part of the equation.

When I first heard this story as a child, I thought that if Adam and Eve would get a do-over that they would not make the same mistake again.

Now I don’t think so.

Humans have a remarkable capacity not to learn from their mistakes.

Human ingenuity has advanced to the point that we can now whip up a death virus as easily as we can bake cupcakes. The difference is that the cupcake maker would cease baking his cupcakes if he found out they were killing people. The scientists are not ceasing.

We made a coronavirus that resulted in millions of deaths throughout the world, and now we have one that could wipe out billions. These reprehensible scientists are doing it just because they can. These individuals do not stop to consider that they shouldn’t. In short, they don’t stop to think.

It is ironic that the lesson learned from the first mistake humanity made is lost on the people perched on the cutting edge of science.

C.S. Lewis wrote “Men Without Chests.” The chest is symbolic of manly virtue: honesty, integrity, responsibility, honor and character. Men have lost that.[i]

In his book, The Abolition of Man, Lewis was prophetic in pointing out that relativism—the idea that there are no absolute truths—would lead to the decay of morality and a lack of virtue within society. Without a belief in and the teaching of universal moral laws, we fail to educate the heart and are left with intelligent men who behave like animals or as Lewis puts it, “Men without Chests.” Read slowly to follow Lewis’s apologetic:

It still remains true that no justification of virtue will enable a man to be virtuous. Without the aid of trained emotions the intellect is powerless against the animal organism. I had sooner play cards against a man who was quite skeptical about ethics, but bred to believe that ‘a gentleman does not cheat’, than against an irreproachable moral philosopher who had been brought up among sharpers.

In battle it is not syllogisms (logical arguments) that will keep the reluctant nerves and muscles to their post in the third hour of the bombardment.


The crudest sentimentalism … about a flag or a country or a regiment will be of more use. We were told it all long ago by Plato. As the king governs by his executive, so Reason in man must rule the mere appetites by means of the ‘spirited element’. The head rules the belly through the chest—the seat, as Alanus tells us, of Magnanimity, of emotions organized by trained habit into stable sentiments. The Chest-Magnanimity-Sentiment—these are the indispensable liaison officers between cerebral man and visceral man.

It may even be said that it is by this middle element that man is man: for by his intellect he is mere spirit and by his appetite mere animal. The operation of The Green Book (a book promoting relativism) and its kind is to produce what may be called Men without Chests. … A persevering devotion to truth, a nice sense of intellectual honour, cannot be long maintained without the aid of a sentiment... It is not excess of thought but defect of fertile and generous emotion that marks them out. Their heads are no bigger than the ordinary: it is the atrophy of the chest beneath that makes them seem so.

And all the time—such is the tragi-comedy of our situation—we continue to clamour for those very qualities we are rendering impossible. You can hardly open a periodical without coming across the statement that what our civilization needs is more ‘drive’, or dynamism, or self-sacrifice, or ‘creativity’. In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.1

The Apostle Paul writes, “The aim of our charge is love that issues from a pure heart and a good conscience and a sincere faith (1 Timothy 1:5, ESV).”

What can we expect form such men?

Depravity.

Their ability has not been attenuated or removed. It remains. And in many cases it grows because technology advances. It does not retreat.

Charles Bronson was the protagonist in Death Wish. It was the story of a surgeon who became a vigilante. He was wronged, and he was personally going to enact retribution on his foes. He became judge, jury and executioner. This became a series, and more and more people had to die.

Creating deadly viruses is a death wish.

When they are created, we do not have the remedy. Even if we did, much work would have to be done to mass produce it, make it stable and distribute it. That isn’t even considering the safety profile. Safety requires extensive testing and time.

What have we done this time?

It is a coronavirus from a pangolin that was modified in a lab. This one generated heavy viral loads in humanized mice and killed 100% of them. The virus destroyed the brain. The worry is that the humanized mice expressed human ACE2, which is the entry point to the cells. That means that this virus would be very efficient gaining entry into human cells.

“This is absolute madness” – John Campbell

Once a diabolical virus is brought into existence, it can get out a number of ways. Carelessness, equipment failure, incompetence or intentional release just to see what it will do will suffice.

We 19 previously reported that the early passaged GX_P2V isolate was actually a cell culture adapted mutant, named GX_P2V(short_3UTR), which possesses a 104-nucleotide deletion at the 3’-UTR. In this study, we cloned this mutant, considering the propensity of coronaviruses to undergo rapid adaptive mutation in cell culture, and assessed its pathogenicity in hACE2 mice.  We found that the GX_P2V(short_3UTR) clone can infect hACE2 mice, with high viral loads detected in both lung and brain 25 tissues. This infection resulted in 100% mortality in the hACE2 mice. We surmise that 26 the cause of death may be linked to the occurrence of late brain infection.

The researches did claim ethical grounds:

ETHICS STATEMENT:  All animals involved in this study were housed and cared for in an AAALAC (Association for Assessment and Accreditation of Laboratory Animal Care) accredited facilities. The procedure for animal experiments (IACUC-2019-0027) was approved by the Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee of the Fifth Medical Center, General Hospital of the Chinese People's Liberation Army, and complied with IACUC standards.[ii]

Accidental release and the eradication of most of humanity was not a consideration.  

It also looks like this was done under the auspices of the Chinese Military. What could an army want with such an entity?

Compared to the original sequence of GX_P2V(short_3UTR), GX_P2V C7 has two amino acid mutations in the spike protein.

To determine the mechanisms underlying GX_P2V C7-induced death in hACE2 83 mice, we examined the pathological changes, presence of viral antigens, and cytokine profiles in the lung and brain tissues of the mice on days 3 and 6 post-infection(Figure 85 1F-G, and Supporting Information, Figure S3 and S4). On both days, compared to those of control mice, the lungs of infected mice showed no significant pathological alterations, with only minor inflammatory responses due to slight granulocyte infiltration (Figure 1F). On day 3 post-infection, shrunken neurons were visible in the cerebral cortex of the mice. By day 6, in addition to the shrunken neurons, there was focal lymphocytic infiltration around the blood vessels, although no conspicuous inflammatory reaction was observed (Figure 1G).

I’ve heard the bad news, any good news?

Yes.

Surprisingly.

We may be able to generate therapeutic antibodies to combat the new death virus, just like Regeneron and Eli Lilly did for SARS-CoV-2.

The caveat being that these would have to be administered quickly because death was achieved in the mice in 3-5 days. It may be longer in humans, but then again it might not. Either the testing would have to be phenomenal or perhaps we administer the antibodies before people get infected.

Additionally, we have had SARS-CoV-2 for about 4 years now. The human population may have some newfound immunity against this new beast by virtue of similarity. And the variant that we now have in circulation also targets the ACE2 receptor. This new brain coronavirus would have to outcompete this highly infectious variant and it may not be able to do so.

Isn’t that comical?

The Wuhan lab leak may have prophylactic power against worse concocted viruses.

That wouldn’t be true for gain of function Ebola or Hantaviruses.

There is also the Geneius off-the-shelf T Cell, which we were too corrupt to pursue the first time around. Pfizer, Gilead, and Regeneron have much more pharmaceutical/political clout than small start-ups. The medical establishment doesn’t select for the best medicine, but who they are chummy with and who might provide a kick-back or lucrative jobs after government work is over. See Scott Gottlieb – the 23rd commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, and now a Pfizer executive.

That’s another story.

Conclusion:

Humanity needs some restraint and self-control. Without it we do ourselves a disservice and injustice. In this case or cases like it, whole populations may taste death. Do we have the will, fortitude and intelligence to put limits on our own behavior? Life hangs in the balance.