Tag: science

The Origins of COVID-19

A Modern Day Frankenstein’s Monster?

Like everyone else in the world, we here at The Objective Observer have been interested in this topic for quite some time. It’s only natural. After all, it’s not every day that a novel virus threatens to wipe out humanity in a global pandemic. However, we have specifically avoided this topic because it is a veritable minefield of conspiracy theory.

Side note, if Kamala is reading this article, a minefield is where landmines are located. Landmines are anti-personnel devices designed to blow things up, not land where you mine things like coal. Just here to be helpful.

In any case, the conspiracy theories are all over the place with this whole COVID-19 origin. So, it was with some small interest and a healthy dose of skepticism that a number of us watched a recent Steve Hilton video that seemed to pin the origins of COVID-19 squarely on the shoulders of research funded in part by the United States government and even more specifically by the National Institute of Health (NIH) and Dr. Fauci.

OK Steve, you big, loveable, bald-headed conspiracy nut job you, some interesting facts and evidence for sure but most of that has been out there already as far back as April 2020 and May 2020. And besides, MSN followed up Steve Hilton’s broadcast with it’s own story about what a ridiculous conspiracy theory that is. In it MSN unequivocally states:

“The idea that the virus was somehow man-made has been repeatedly debunked.”

OK, so over hyphenation aside, if the virus is not manmade then the United States and Fauci couldn’t have funded its creation, case closed. And since MSN is the pinnacle of journalistic integrity and the gold standard in unbiased, fact-based reporting… Ahem. Yeah, we’d better click that link for “repeatedly debunked” just to be sure. Huh, imagine that, it would appear that MSN and The Objective Observer have different definitions for the word “debunked”. Turns out that the fact check on claims that COVID-19 virus are manmade is “Partly False” stating:

“We rate the claim that COVID-19 may have originated in a Chinese lab as PARTLY FALSE. Suggestions that the novel coronavirus was manmade or has been engineered for use in bioweapons in a high-security biomedical laboratory in Wuhan, China, are untrue, based on scientific research since the virus began its global spread. Beyond that, however, investigations continue into where COVID-19 began, and no conclusions can be drawn, nor has evidence been presented, that definitively explains the pathogen’s origin. Circumstantial evidence suggests the virus could have escaped from the Wuhan lab due to a lapse in safety measures.”

In short, the manmade claim is discredited based on the assumption that if engineered for military use it would be based on a much more deadly version of the coronavirus. But what if military application was not the origin of the engineered virus?

Shit, here we go.

Turns out that Steve Hilton subsequently released another video with even more interesting facts and information. Crap, we had better go fact check this dude. We start with the research paper on COVID-19, A pneumonia outbreak associated with a new coronavirus of probable bat origin from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) released on January 20th, 2020. This paper says that COVID-19 most closely resembles a sample in their labs, RaTG13:

“—for all sequences—RaTG13 is the closest relative of 2019-nCoV and they form a distinct lineage from other SARSr-CoVs”

OK, so COVID-19 seems to come from bats. But what about this RaTG13, what do we know about it? Well, we can look it up on GenBank. The paper cited above seems to be the first mention of it. However, there is an odd note:

/note=”former lab designation: Bat coronavirus Ra4991″

What about this Ra4991? What do we know about it? Well, it seems to first appear in another WIV paper, Coexistence of multiple coronaviruses in several bat colonies in an abandoned mineshaft from 2016. Apparently, in 2012 six miners from Mojiang County, Yunnan Province, China, were cleaning out a mineshaft of bat droppings and contracted some weird illness. Three of the six died. The illness was not transferred to any of their relatives or acquaintances or to hospital staff that treated them. Meaning that this virus variant was apparently not transmissible between humans. This led to a WIV study of the bats in the mineshaft conducted in 2012-2013 resulting in the research paper, which states:

“From the 138 positive samples, 152 RdRp partial coronavirus sequences (approximately 400 bp) were obtained, indicating co-infections of two viruses. Two sequences (HiBtCoV/3740-2 and RaBtCoV/4991) were homologous to betacoronaviruses, all other 150 sequences were homologous to alphacoronaviruses”

OK, so this RaTG13 virus in the WIV seems to have originally been this RaBtCoV/4991 variant that came from the Yunnan Province of China. For those of you who are a little light on Chinese geography, the distance between Yunnan and Wuhan is about 1,000 miles. Thus, we can conclude that the WIV had this RaTG13 virus in their possession around the 2013/2014 time frame.

OK, that’s all terribly interesting about historical information regarding the closest phylogenic matches to COVID-19 and perhaps lends some credence to the idea that COVID-19 is an escapee of the WIV, but how does the National Institute of Health (NIH) and Dr. Fauci come into the picture?

Well, perhaps coincidently, it turns out that in 2014 the NIH was funding “gain of function” research into bat coronavirus. The project was 1R01AI110964-01. The project’s abstract states the following:

“The three specific aims of this project are to:

  • 1. Assess CoV spillover potential at high risk human-wildlife interfaces in China. This will include quantifying he nature and frequency of contact people have with bats and other wildlife; serological and molecular screening of people working in wet markets and highly exposed to wildlife; screening wild-caught and market sampled bats from 30+ species for CoVs using molecular assays; and genomic characterization and isolation of novel CoVs.
  • 2. Develop predictive models of bat CoV emergence risk and host range. A combined modeling approach will include phylogenetic analyses of host receptors and novel CoV genes (including functional receptor binding domains); a fused ecological and evolutionary model to predict host-range and viral sharing; and mathematical matrix models to examine evolutionary and transmission dynamics.
  • 3. Test predictions of CoV inter-species transmission. Predictive models of host range (i.e. emergence potential) will be tested experimentally using reverse genetics, pseudovirus and receptor binding assays, and virus infection experiments across a range of cell cultures from different species and humanized mice.“

Wait, WTF is gain of function research? Gain of function research is a field of medical research focused on viruses “accelerating mutation processes to adapt their transmissibility, virulence and antigenicity, to better predict emerging infectious diseases and develop vaccines.”.

Essentially, you bioengineer a super bug using genetic engineering or the splicing of two or more viruses together to create a new, novel “chimera” virus, release it in a lab full of mice or human cells and study how things get infected and die in order to learn something about how to combat a global pandemic.

Holy shit, was the WIV really doing that kind of crazy dangerous shit on bat corona viruses? Apparently they were according to the WIV research paper published on November 30th, 2017, Discovery of a rich gene pool of bat SARS-related coronaviruses provides new insights into the origin of SARS coronavirus. The funding for the paper specifically cites NIH project 1R01AI110964-01 and specifically speaks about its successes in using gain of function techniques to adapt bat coronaviruses to be transmissible to and “work” in humans…in the lab.

“Our previous studies demonstrated the capacity of both WIV1 and WIV16 to use ACE2 orthologs for cell entry and to efficiently replicate in human cells [17,18]. In this study, we confirmed the use of human ACE2 as receptor of two novel SARSr-CoVs by using chimeric viruses with the WIV1 backbone replaced with the S gene of the newly identified SARSr-CoVs. Rs7327’s S protein varied from that of WIV1 and WIV16 at three aa residues in the receptor-binding motif, including one contact residue (aa 484) with human ACE2.”

Just so we are clear, a “chimeric virus” is a manmade virus created by combining two or more other viruses together. And the “S protein” is what is called the “spike” protein, and this protein controls what types of cells the virus can invade (only bat cells, only human cells or both human and bat cells for example). But, no way, the NIH didn’t actually fund that shit. Oops, apparently so:

usaspending.gov, Advanced Search, Sub-Awards, Award ID: 1R01AI110964-01

OK, fine, but surely that does not implicate Dr. Fauci. Shit, apparently so:

“In 1968, Fauci joined the National Institutes of Health (NIH) as a clinical associate in the Laboratory of Clinical Investigation (LCI) at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.[12] In 1974, he became head of the Clinical Physiology Section, LCI, and in 1980 was appointed Chief of the Laboratory of Immunoregulation. In 1984, he became director of NIAID, a position he still holds as of 2021.” – Wikipedia, Anthony Fauci

Oh, hmm, apparently Dr. Fauci is a big believer in gain of function research, considering it “worth the risk“.

Alright, we need to cut this out, we are clearly falling down a rabbit hole filled with conspiratorial landmines, let’s put together a timeline of everything so that we can disprove this whole conspiracy notion once and for all.

God damnit.

OK, so if we are looking at this objectively, we can’t really rule out that the virus was manmade after all. We certainly wouldn’t call the virus being manmade “debunked”. That said, we also can’t definitively say that it is manmade either. And, the only way to tie COVID-19’s creation to funding from the NIH and Dr. Fauci would be if Ra4991/RaTG13 really is the progenitor of COVID-19 and underwent gain of function research at WIV as part of the 1R01AI110964-01 project and this ended up creating COVID-19 and subsequently escaping the lab. Let’s be absolutely crystal clear, that’s a lot of hoops to jump through in order to arrive at that conclusion. See, this is the minefield of conjecture that is the origins of COVID-19.

Perhaps one day we will learn the truth about the origins of COVID-19. The World Health Organization (WHO) is in Wuhan right now and one of the WHO investigators, Peter Daszak, clearly states that there is no evidence of the virus coming from the WIV. Wait a minute, Peter Daszak? Where have we seen that name before? Oh yeah, Peter Daszak was the project leader for project 1R01AI110964-01. Jesus H. Christ, this rabbit hole runs deep! Can you say “conflict of interest”?!? OK, well the odds of us ever learning the true origins of COVID-19 pretty much just flew right out the window.

Well, we here at The Objective Observer have had enough of rabbit holes filled with conspiratorial landmines for one day. We will close with pondering the lesson of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, a novel that warns of the dangers of science pushing the limits in order to achieve fantastic results without fully thinking through the consequences. Perhaps one day Dr. Frankenstein’s monster will finally be given a name, COVID-19.

When Science is Wrong

The Political Weaponization of Science Itself

OK, so we here at The Objective Observer are still on this King Biden divine proclamation to “follow the science”. If you haven’t been paying attention, King Biden‘s proclamation states the following:

“science, facts, and evidence are vital to addressing policy and programmatic issues across the Federal Government monarchy.”

But we have some problems with the ordained king’s proclamation here at The Objective Observer. It’s not that we do not believe in science, but rather that we don’t believe in blindly following the science. But before we get to that, perhaps more importantly, the proclamation as stated is a complete and utter fraud. A more accurate proclamation would read:

“science, facts, and evidence that we agree with and support our pre-determined views are vital to addressing policy and programmatic issues across the Federal Government monarchy.”

As we pointed out in Following the Science, King Biden is cherry picking science that supports his pre-determined views while ignoring other legitimate science that does not. But that’s not how science is supposed to work. Of course, King Biden will justify his approach by pointing to “consensus” science. The problem with this approach, as we have repeatedly pointed out in The Climate Change Heresies, Higgs Bozos, There Are No Climate Change Deniers and even Flying Spaghetti Monster Theory, is that “consensus” science, and in particular “consensus” science in young fields of study, tends to get things wrong. And not just wrong, but spectacularly wrong. Consider that the following have all been “consensus” science until relatively recently:

  • Until the 1890’s consensus science was that atoms were indivisible. The atomic bomb tells us otherwise.
  • Until 1911, consensus science was that atoms adhered to a “plum pudding model” versus a nuclear model. Incorrect, it’s the nuclear model.
  • Prior to Einstein’s general theory of relativity in 1915, a magical “luminiferous aether” was considered by scientific consensus as the medium for the propagation of light. Einstein was actually still trying to work the aether into the theory of relativity as late as 1924.
  • Prior to the 1970’s, the scientific consensus for macro geologic processes was not plate tectonics. Guess what? It’s plate tectonics.
  • Prior to the 1980’s, scientific consensus would tell you that sauropods lived in lakes and that dinosaurs were cold blooded and extinct. We now understand these things to be entirely false.
  • Up until 1982 consensus science was that crystalline solids could only be composed of repeating blocks. This was disproved by the discovery of Quasicrystals.
  • Until May 17th, 1990 the consensus science from the American Psychiatric Association and the World Health Organization (WHO) classified homosexuality as a “mental illness”. Clearly, that is not the case.

So had King Biden ascended to the throne the first time he tried in 1988, would King Biden have institutionalized homosexuals because he was “following the science”? Aren’t homosexuals lucky that unscientific “buffoons” like Reagan and Bush were ruling instead.

But surely, these are all “old” examples from at least 30 years ago. Surely “modern” science never gets things wrong. Well, actually, it is well understood that science gets things wrong all the time. In fact, a statistician has recently demonstrated that most published research findings are false. And, even more recently we have the following:

That’s right, those last two articles are from January 6th and January 7th, 2021. And yet for at least the last 30 years “consensus” science was that 85% of the universe was made up of “dark matter”. So, if King Biden was planning on basing any policy decisions on dark matter “consensus” science, he would be basing policy on something that likely doesn’t even exist.

The point of all of this is that proclaiming that one’s administration will be based on science, facts and evidence runs the real risk of basing policy on things that are 100% incorrect and wrong. But declaring the monarchy to be “science based” was really never the purpose of that proclamation. The real purpose of that proclamation was to silence critics of King Biden‘s already pre-determined policies which were never really based upon all of the science to begin with. The proclamation is really intended to be used as a cudgel to beat critics of the current monarchy’s policies over the head and brand them “science deniers” the same way climate change proponents denounce critics as “climate change deniers”. And no, the phrasing to evoke the idea of a “Holocaust denier” is no accident. The move is so chilling and diabolical that every scientist in the country should be outraged and crying out at the top of their lungs to denounce that proclamation, denounce the political weaponization of science itself.

Following the Science

Why Are We Trying to Stop Global Warming Again?

For years climate change proponents have been decrying those questioning climate change and its impacts as “science deniers”. King Biden has taken both climate change and science seriously by declaring climate change as central to the United States’ new National Defense Strategy as well as endorsing science via a proclamation that states:

“science, facts, and evidence are vital to addressing policy and programmatic issues across the Federal Government monarchy.”

In effect, King Biden has made the divine decree that everyone must “follow the science”. We’re big on science here at The Objective Observer so, let’s follow the science on climate change. We start with the oft cited premise that climate change in the form of global warming caused by increased CO2 (carbon dioxide) levels resulting from the activities of human beings will have a catastrophic impact on the Earth and the ability for humans to survive.

So, what exactly does science say on this topic? Well, for starters, the science says that during the time that dinosaurs lived in the Jurassic Period there was 5 times the level of CO2 than the present day. Five times. First, let that sink in. This means that the air was 0.2% CO2 versus today’s 0.04%. Furthermore, as climate change proponents will be sure to cheer, the average global temperature during the Jurassic Period was up to 8 degrees Celsius warmer than it is today.

Now consider that the current goals of the Paris Climate Accord and climate change proponents is to prevent a mere 1.5 degree Celsius increase in global temperatures and to essentially keep the level of CO2 concentration in the atmosphere roughly the same. Surely, if going above a 2 degrees Celsius increase in global temperatures and a corresponding increase in CO2 in the atmosphere will have such a cataclysmic impact as to threaten life on Earth for humans, then surely 5 times today’s CO2 levels and 8 degrees Celsius warmer would mean certain annihilation for not only humans but all life on Earth. Right?

But what does science tell us about the Jurassic Period? Well, science tells us that the Jurassic Period was teeming with life both on land and in the oceans and featured lush, green jungles and forests. In point of fact, there is no scientific journal or book or writing that describes the Jurassic Period as “devoid of life” or “inhospitable to life” or any such description at all. Actually, it is well known in scientific circles that during the Jurassic Period some of the largest land and sea animals that ever lived dominated life on Earth.

So exactly where is the scientific evidence that a 1.5 degree increase in temperatures and a commensurate increase in CO2 levels would spell doom for humans? Because the science doesn’t seem to indicate that at all. In fact, if you refer to the image attached to this post, life has thrived on Earth for hundreds of millions of years at temperature levels of 8 degrees Celsius warmer than the present and at CO2 levels up to 17 times those of today. One might also notice from the image that we are living in one of the coldest and least CO2 rich environments in the entire history of the planet. And, every time temperatures and CO2 have dropped to the level of today, temperatures and CO2 levels have subsequently increased exponentially. In fact, science tells us that CO2 levels would need to be 150 times greater than they are today for the air to even be toxic to humans. That’s the science.

So why are we so worried about a 1.5 degree Celsius increase in global temperatures again? Actually, the consensus scientific opinion is that for the next 70 years, increasing temperatures actually benefits humans. Warmer temperatures means fewer winter deaths (mortality from cold is much higher than mortality from heat), more rain, longer growing seasons, better agricultural yield, more plants in general (CO2, it’s what plants crave) and lower energy costs (less winter heating). Against these benefits there are downsides. But, if you read the downsides closely, it’s really about higher ocean levels leading to the loss of current coastal areas and then a tremendous amount of conjecture. Anyone that tells you that they have scientific “proof” of the impacts of global warming on humanity and the Earth is lying. Straight up lying. Why? Because nobody has lived through such an event, collected the data on it and analyzed it scientifically. What they have are models and conjecture only, supported by scientific principles which may or may not pan out. In fact, regarding speculative claims of “extreme weather” brought about by climate change, even a recent report from the International Panel on Climate Change (IPPC), the “gold standard” of climate science, states:

‘no significant observed trends in global tropical cyclone frequency over the past century … lack of evidence and thus low confidence regarding the sign of trend in the magnitude and/or frequency offloads on a global scale … low confidence in observed trends in small-scale severe weather phenomena such as hail and thunderstorms’.

The only, true objective conclusion about climate change is that nobody has any real freaking clue about any of it in terms of its true impacts. And since science almost always gets things wrong; many, many times, before getting it right, most of the “science” out there is likely quite wrong.

So, to any objective observer, one has to seriously question why we are not actually promoting global warming versus discouraging global warming. So what if people on the coasts need to move? There’s plenty of land. In fact, land currently deemed “inhospitable” because of cold will become “hospitable”. They can move there. Requiring people to rent a U-Haul can hardly be deemed “catastrophic”.

To an objective observer, it sure seems like King Biden is only listening to some of the science, not all of the science. And that’s a no no in science. True scientists aren’t allowed to pick and choose their evidence. That is not being “science based”. That is not “following the science”. That is called cherry picking facts and conjecture to support a predetermined theory or position. In other words, the very antithesis of science.

Finally, we have to seriously question King Biden‘s decision to place climate change at the center of United States national defense and security policy. Seriously, how in the hell is a solar panel going to prevent another terrorist attack on New York City? Do wind turbines have some secret military application that could be used to thwart Chinese aggression that nobody is telling us about? Does hydropower somehow shield us from Russian hackers?

To any objective observer, the only thing security or military related to King Biden‘s climate proclamations is that these climate proclamations really just amount to some kind of strange war against plants. Like a weird, absurd attempt to deprive plants of the basic requirements for life. And why would you want to do that? Even children know how useful plants are at staving off a zombie apocalypse, and what greater threat to national security is there than that?