Yes, of course it came from a lab

At this point, I’m assuming most of you have already read this article by Nicholas Wade, where he quite clearly lays out the case that all of the evidence points towards the new coronavirus having escaped from a lab in Wuhan. He mentions a lot of important points, but for whatever reason, Mr. Wade doesn’t mention an important piece of the puzzle, what I would personally consider the most damning piece of evidence.

To avoid detection by the immune system, respiratory viruses tend to evolve to resemble the tissues they infect. After all, producing antibodies that target short chains of amino acids that also occur in our own tissues wouldn’t be healthy for your body, it would lead to autoimmune problems. In other words, the genetic material of a virus that evolved from bats and recently jumped over into humans will tend to have an unusual resemblance to the genetic material found in bats, rather than other species like rabbits or chimpanzees.

An antibody binds to a particular chain of amino acids that we call an epitope. The epitope that the antibody binds to tends to be between 5 and 8 amino acids in length. In other words, to avoid detection by the immune system, the recognizable parts of viruses that antibodies can bind to will change over time, to start resembling the animals they infect.

Imagine you take a respiratory virus that infects mice, you pick a chain of seven amino acids in the receptor binding protein of that virus, you pick another chain of seven amino acids and you do this a couple of times. Now you write down those chains of amino acids and you  start trying to figure out how often these chains occur in the proteome of these animals.

What do you expect to see? You expect that the virus will tend to resemble the proteomes of mice, rather than bats or chimpanzees. So, if the new coronavirus jumped species from bats to pangolins to humans, you will expect it to resemble humans and pangolins and bats, but you don’t expect to see significant similarity to mice.

So, imagine some scientists looked at the coronavirus spike protein and compared chains of six aminoacids (hexapeptide sequences) as well as chains of seven amino acids (heptapeptide sequences). What should they be finding? They should find similarities to particular species of bats (or pangolins I guess), which would then help us figure out where to look for the original host from which this virus jumped over into humans.

But here’s what they found:

Here you can see the six and seven level amino chain similarity between the virus and our human coronaviruses on the one hand and other species on the other hand. The study can be found here. So here’s a question to ask yourself: Why does the virus look so similar to mice? It’s not because humans are closely related to mice, because there’s no real similarity with our own close relatives (chimpanzees).

If it wasn’t obvious enough yet, the authors chillingly mention:

In conclusion, in light of the data exposed in Fig. ​Fig.11 and given the susceptibility parameters such as aging and health status, only aged mice appear to be a correct animal model for testing an anti-SARS-CoV-2 spike glycoprotein vaccine to be used in humans [25, 26].

This is important knowledge for scientists to have, but it’s also of course extremely strange. A virus jumps species from bats to humans, so let’s see if we can find an animal model for treatment. Which species would be useful? Perhaps bats, because the virus jumped from bats to humans? Perhaps chimpanzees, because they’re very genetically similar to us?

No, apparently none of these animals are proper models for the disease this virus causes us. In fact, infecting monkeys seems to lead to no health problems whatsoever for them. It’s only in mice and humans that the virus causes health problems, as the immune system inadvertently attacks our own bodies.

Keep in mind, if this virus recently jumped the species barrier, then it’s also really weird how it fits humans so perfectly without even remotely fitting chimpanzees. Imagine a virus jumped species from bats to humans, what would you expect to be a proper model organism to check how this virus affects us? Perhaps bats or perhaps chimpanzees, but we’re dealing with a situation where aged mice are the best model organism.

So why might that be? If you’re trying to create a new virus in a lab that infects humans, you’re going to need an animal model. That animal model will have to be adjusted, to fit the sort of conditions in which the virus would need to infect humans. Mice are easy to genetically manipulate, because they’re the species that’s typically used as a model animal.

This virus enters cells through the ACE2 receptor, so what you would want is a mouse that has been genetically manipulated to express the human ACE2 receptor. The first humanized mice that express the ACE2 receptor were apparently created by scientists in China back in 2007. Ever since then, scientists have been experimenting on these poor animals, infecting them with coronaviruses.

So imagine you infect such a mouse with a coronavirus. The virus will rapidly mutate, to avoid elimination by the immune system. What’s going to happen? It’s going to resemble the proteome of mice, to avoid elimination. And that’s exactly what we see in this virus right now: It resembles the proteome of mice, as well as that of humans.

You don’t really have to be a genius to figure this one out. I think most virologists know what happened, but they’re not very eager to speak out. The type of personality that makes you a prominent scientist these days is the type of personality that is subservient to authority, hypersocial and willing to adjust to social norms. If you lack those personality traits, then you’re more likely to end up like me instead.

The real question

This is the sort of stuff our leaders should have figured out back in March 2020. For whatever reason, they don’t seem to have figured it out yet. The real question that needs to be asked is: Did this happen by accident, or was it intentional?

I’d love to say that it was an accident, but look at the facts as they stand. China was the only major economy to grow in 2020. They told us all to lock ourselves up in our homes to eliminate the virus, but none of their solutions that were apparently so effective in China worked for us. Scientists friendly to the Chinese regime like Ferguson in the UK told us we would all drop dead without a lockdown. Sweden refused to budge to the pressure and deaths turned out to be limited.

Most importantly, China became very eager to help us adjust to our new reality, in which our luxurious economies implode and the government gets to micromanage our lives. China donated drones to the United States in april 2020, to help enforce social distancing. These drones are used to spy on American industry, the data ends up controlled by China.

Why would China be so eager to turn our lives into a living nightmare? Well, think about it this way: If China is an authoritarian dictatorship where Falun Gong practitioners have their organs harvested and Uighur muslims are raped and forcibly sterilized in concentration camps, then Western nations are probably quite likely to impose pressure on China to reform and become less like a Fourth Reich and more like a liberal democracy.

But now imagine that the Western left-liberal establishment suddenly becomes enthusiastic about spying on people with drones, locking people up in their homes and in quarantine camps, forbidding free migration of people (RIP “refugees welcome”), suppressing free speech and demonstrations and eliminating respiratory viruses by prohibiting social interaction. Rather than condemning China for its crimes against humanity, China would start to look more like an example to follow for them.

I don’t know to what degree China is making lemonade out of lemons rather than having planned all of this. So far however, it’s not looking good.

The real solution

Zero COVID is effectively an attempt to impose Chinese style authoritarianism on the Western world. It’s also bound to fail. The first death in the UK was an old man who died in December 2019 without ever having left the country. It was already here throughout Europe and North America, before we knew the virus exists. It was apparently present in Brazil as early as November 2019. We failed to eliminate it with lockdowns, in fact it only seems to have grown more contagious during the lockdowns. You’ll have to learn to live with it.

The only real solution we have is to live out our lives as normal and to figure out prohpylactic treatments that can be given to vulnerable people. Countries that do absolutely nothing against this virus like Belarus and Russia tend to end up with a mortality rate that is about 20% above a normal year. Countries that impose lockdowns seem to end up with a mortality rate that is about 10% above a normal year, followed by a lot of deaths from cancer and other ailments because of surgeries that had to be delayed and the impact of a lack of exercise.

It’s a nasty virus for old people and diabetic people, but it’s not the end of the world. After all, a virus like Smallpox that would be the end of the world isn’t going to be toyed with in a level 2 Chinese lab (hopefully). The virus will mutate, but it can’t continue to mutate forever, because it needs to have a structure that is structurally stable, binds to the ACE2 receptor and resembles our own human genetic material so that our antibodies are not very effective. Eventually it will end up like the common cold, for children it’s already less dangerous than regular influenza.

In the meantime, it would be useful to figure out what makes certain people vulnerable to this virus. All the evidence suggests to me that you can dramatically reduce deaths among the elderly by addressing nutrient deficiencies: Vitamin D, Zinc, Magnesium, Vitamin B12 and Vitamin K2 all seem to help reduce the severity of the infection. You need to make sure that elderly people supplement with these nutrients on a continual basis. If they do end up suffering symptoms, then there are treatments like Ivermectin that seem to be very effective at preventing severe complications.

But I’m an obscure antisocial Dutch guy with a blog instead of a Phd, so none of this will happen. Next winter there will be another wave, the vaccine won’t be effective enough in the elderly anymore, middle-aged white women high in conscientiousness and low in IQ will panic again, virtue-signalers on Twitter will virtue signal again and before you know it you’ll be locked up in your home again, as Xi Jinping rolls around on the floor laughing his lungs out. Xi Jinping right now is like a guy playing Europa Universalis IV and wondering why the AI is so bad. “Why are none of these countries putting up any resistance? Do I really have to edit the game files to stop Western countries from embracing virtue signaling as a National Idea?”

Ultimately, I think this is all to a large degree just an unfortunate historical inevitability. The kind of high tech social media dominated densely populated urbanized landscape we live in today is not really a proper fit for the Western mind. In a lot of ways, the whole world is beginning to resemble China. Chinese people evolved under conditions of high population density, with an authoritarian highly centralized government that had complete control over the population. If all of this ever gets you down, then just remember:

There’s a reason Xi Jinping’s daughter studied abroad.