Making Sense of Medical Science (MSMS)

Part 2: Gain-Of-Function Research At The Wuhan Lab—What Exactly Was The Wuhan Lab Doing With Coronaviruses?

August 19, 2023

“I’m just a soul whose intentions are good; Oh Lord, please don’t let me be misunderstood.” —The Animals

In the first part of this two-part blog series, I described what gain-of-function research entails in order to set the stage for this blog post which describes the coronavirus research that went on in the Wuhan labs. So, was it dangerous and risky? Did it likely lead to the release of SARS-CoV-2 that caused COVID? Let me try to clarify all that now.

Coronavirus research at the Wuhan lab: After the first SARS epidemic in China in 2002, the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) had established itself as a world class coronavirus research lab. It was from their diligent work that the world learned that the first SARS virus came from a horseshoe bat via other animals such as civets and raccoon dogs. That was the result of years of arduous research trudging through bat guano muck in hundreds of caves throughout China to collect samples from thousands of bats. They reported their finding 14 years after SARS appeared and shortly after another strange, lethal flu popped up in the Middle East that was soon attributed to yet another bat-borne coronavirus that came via camel intermediate hosts—MERS.

Before these two coronaviruses that jumped from animals to cause significant disease in humans, the viruses were only known to cause mild human maladies; basically, the common cold. Therefore, when it was learned that the deadly SARS and MERS diseases were caused by coronaviruses, it rattled the cages of health experts around the world. This was brand new!

Hence, even before COVID struck, bat-born coronaviruses were hot on the radars of infectious disease nerds and public health worrywarts. The WIV, as one of the world’s preeminent labs for identifying novel coronaviruses was given international funds to continue their efforts to identify and catalog bat coronaviruses. As they did years earlier when they identified the origin of the SARS virus in horseshoe bats, WIV scientists traveled to far-flung Chinese caves to collect bat guano and biological samples (blood, saliva, fecal) from captured bats. The samples were brought back to the lab in Wuhan for analysis.

Since it is exceedingly difficult and potentially very dangerous to grow wild viruses from such samples (failure is the norm even when many viruses are present in the samples) the lab resorted to their previous tried and true methods of searching the samples for viral genome sequences. They found a LOT of new ones!

Their first and primary order of business in this research was the very mundane task to sequence and catalog all the different coronaviruses they found. They then colligated these genomes into trees of different virus families and posted all the data in a vast database for world scientists to use. They were coronavirus genealogists.

The database is an enormously useful research tool for scientists around the world studying the origins and evolution of coronaviruses in animals and humans. (Coronaviruses also cause significant animal disease, so they also are of great agricultural interest around the world.)

The Wuhan lab also was charged with predicting which of the new virus sequences they found might pose future health threats to humans.

This is where all the controversy begins.

Remember that the Wuhan scientists actually did not have these viruses on hand, just their genome sequences. So, without the actual virus, how could they evaluate the ability of new coronaviruses to infect humans? To do this WIV scientist, Zhengli Shi, used a genetic engineering technique first published in 2015 by Univ. of North Carolina Scientist Ralph Baric to study coronaviruses from their genome sequences (she was a collaborator on Baric’s 2015 paper, so was quite familiar with the approach). It was a technique that also was in use at the time by several labs around the world. It is notable that NIH funded this coronavirus research conducted by Baric at UNC well before COVID appeared and didn’t consider it to be GoF research then.

Using Baric’s genetic engineering technique, Shi’s lab at the WIV used as a tool, a benign coronavirus that they could grow in the lab that was only distantly related to the first SARS virus, but was not known to cause human disease. Its genome sequence was not at all related to SARS-CoV-2 that caused COVID, and which had not yet appeared.

Shi’s lab removed the spike protein gene sequence from the genome of this benign lab virus tool and methodically replaced it with spike protein sequences from each new virus they sequenced. They then grew the lab virus tool carrying the new spike protein and tested its ability to infect human cells in tissue culture.

It is the spike protein that determines whether a coronavirus can infect human cells. Therefore, if the chimeric lab virus carrying the new spike gene infected human cells, it would indicate that the virus the spike protein sequence came from was a likely human pathogen and that virus sequence was then listed on the database as a potential human risk. However, if the chimeric test virus failed to infect the human tissue culture cells, that meant that the spike protein from the new virus genome would not support infection of human cells and the new virus sequence was not categorized as a concern for human infection.

This is how newly identified coronavirus sequences were categorized as potential human health threats without ever having to grow or isolate each virus itself.

In other words, this test simply expressed the spike protein of each novel coronavirus on the backbone of the safe lab virus genome in order to see if it could infect human cells. This completely negated the need to grow and handle the potentially much more dangerous wild-type virus.

It is important to notice that this strategy eliminated all risk of a lab leak of any dangerous virus since it was not necessary to grow or handle potentially dangerous wild-type viruses using this technique.

Is this gain-of-function-research? Strictly speaking, no. Remember, this sort of coronavirus engineering research had been done years earlier in Baric’s UNC lab, and was being done in other labs around the world, and it was never regarded as GoF research then by NIH.

NIH considers GoF research on pathogens to be research that either: 1) increases the pathogenicity of a microbe (that is, makes its disease worse), 2) improves its transmissibility or its ability to infect hosts, or 3) alters the host range of a pathogen. Therefore, in the WIV experiments to assess the ability of novel virus genome sequences to infect human cells, the chimeric test viruses that simply expressed new spike proteins on a laboratory virus backbone either retained the ability of the original lab virus to infect human cells, or they lost the ability to infect human cells.

Therefore, the chimeric viruses gained no new function that was tested. They either retained or lost the ability to infect human cells. The experiments were not at all designed to give the test virus any new functions. Furthermore, these experiments could not have led to the development of SARS-CoV-2 that caused the COVID pandemic, even by accident, since the laboratory test virus used to create the chimeric viruses in the experiments was not at all related to the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

There is a devil in the details: But. Notice that one of the the NIH definitions of GoF research is research that alters a pathogen’s host range. For example, take a flu virus that only passes between birds; avian flu. If you make changes in its genome so that the birds can also pass it to humans that mutation alters its host range and is a GoF change.

In the WIV lab, viruses with new spike protein gene sequences were only tested for their ability to infect human cells in a petri dish. The ability of these chimeric viruses with new spike proteins to also infect other animals was not tested. Theoretically, the chimeric test viruses could feasibly also infect, say a water buffalo, or a wart hog, or some other animal that the original lab virus might not have been able to. That would be a technical gain-of-function. But, that begs the question; in such an experiment, how would you know whether or not the host range of the chimeric virus had changed until you possibly had tested its ability to infect every known animal? A logistical impossibility.

Therefore, based on this theoretical point, it cannot be definitely stated that the experiments were not GoF experiments. In fact, chances are pretty good that some of the novel spike protein sequences attached to the lab test virus in fact altered its host range and, thus, the experiments would technically be GoF research.

Bottom line: Technically speaking, therefore, these experiments carried out at the WIV probably could be called GoF experiments. By a lawyer. Not by a scientist. That picks the proverbial nit and splits a very fine frog hair, to mix metaphors. The same research had been done ten years earlier in Ralph Baric’s UNC lab and was not considered GoF then. What is important is that the research at the UNC or the WIV never set out to create viruses with enhanced virulence, transmissibility, or altered host range. That was never the intent. The aim of the WIV research was solely to predict the human risk posed by novel coronaviruses without actually having to directly work with the potentially dangerous pathogens. Actually working with the dangerous viruses would have posed a very real risk.

Bottom, bottom line: The research conducted at the WIV was the most safe and responsible way to identify new coronaviruses that could potentially pose future human health risks. It is to the detriment of human health that this research has come under heavy criticism and that such future research has been hampered by criticism from people who fail to understand what the research is about and have, therefore, demonized it and want to prevent it.

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Gain-Of-Function Research At The Wuhan Lab: Part 1

August 14, 2023

“Mater artium necessitas"

A lot of news print, band width, and fevered comment has been bandied about regarding “Gain-of-Function” (GoF) coronavirus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). It usually has been done so with an unspoken insinuation that something was very wrong or careless with that research. People are left with visions that GoF research involves mad scientists creating Franken-viruses and that that perhaps caused the pandemic. Certainly when scientists begin fiddling around with the genomes of nasty pathogens bad things can possibly happen. In fact, bad things can occur simply by growing and culturing dangerous microbes—accidents can happen.

Did we in fact get the SARS-CoV-2 virus, which caused COVID, from scientists in Wuhan playing Russian (or Chinese) roulette with coronaviruses and their genes? Did irresponsible or careless research lead to an intentional, or, more likely, an accidental event that unleashed a virus that devastated the world for two-plus years?

These questions and rumors have floated around long enough that people now believe the premise–say it often enough and people will believe. But, hardly anyone knows what research was being done in the WIV labs. Few people even know what GoF research entails because no one has taken the time to describe it.

Let me give a shot at clarifying all this. I will do this in a two-part blog. The first blog post, which you are now reading, will explain what gain-of-function research is. It will surprise readers to learn that humans have been doing it for thousands of years and that it is going on all around us all the time. In the second blog that I will post in a few days, I will delve into what exactly was going on in the Wuhan labs and try to explain the research so non-scientists can grasp what they were doing.

My aim in these two blog posts is to give readers the ability to parse through the rhetoric and understand the reality. Here we go.

GoF research backstory: Basically, gain-of-function simply is when a mutation in an organism–animal, plant, or microbe–changes some function in it. That is what drives evolution, That is how bacteria acquire resistance to antibiotics, as an example. Microbes and cells do it all on their own via happenstance mutation followed by natural selection in an environment that favors the mutation.

Humans have been purposefully doing GoF research ever since we began farming and raising animals. We just never called it gain-of-function research. The minute we began selectively breeding animals and crops to produce better products, we were doing GoF research. Selective breeding first identifies animals or crops with desired traits that arose by chance genetic mutation and then selectively chooses the animals with those traits to breed. That fixes the genetic mutation and its desired trait into the genome of the plant or animal. Gain-of-function.

Then came recombinant DNA technology in the 1970s. We began cloning and mutating genes in the lab, and inserting the lab-altered genes into animals and plants, thereby speeding up the long, arduous process of selective breeding. We do this all the time now in making genetically engineered crops and animals. It also is how we are now beginning to genetically treat certain diseases in plants, animals and humans. This is all gain-of-function technology. It is happening all around us all the time.

GoF technology also is a very common research tool used in almost every cell biology and microbiology lab in the world. For example, at one point in my own research lab, we studied how a change in a normal human gene might cause what was an untreatable leukemia. We took a cloned version of the normal human gene, mutated it, then put it in a virus to shuttle the mutated gene into bone marrow cells growing in tissue culture. The gene we altered caused normal bone marrow cells to become leukemia. That is how we proved the alteration in the normal human gene was sufficient to cause leukemia. From all the research that followed in many labs using that GoF leukemia model, the leukemia is now mostly curable. That illustrates the value of GoF lab research. It is done all the time in countless labs around the world to understand how genes and cells work.

What about GoF research on dangerous pathogens? Just like in the cell biology experiments above, GoF experiments on pathogens can tell us how certain viruses and bacteria become dangerous. As just one example, in the early 2000s, flu researchers at the University of Wisconsin did experiments to learn what made the 1918 Spanish flu so much more devastating than other seasonal flus. They systematically replaced genes from a mundane cloned laboratory flu strain with genes from the 1918 strain that had been cloned from stored patient samples dating from 1918. The goal was to learn which of the 1918 flu genes increased the transmission and/or virulence of the lab strain. Gain-of-function.

Bottom line: Similar GoF studies are undertaken all the time in many labs around the world that work with many other dangerous pathogens. Information from such studies has been enormously valuable for understanding how dangerous pathogens become dangerous and cause disease, and how to protect us from them. These studies have been conducted without causing major problems for the world.

Sure, GoF research can be used for nefarious purposes. A malevolent actor can use it to make terrible pathogens like anthrax resistant to all antibiotics and turn it into a weapon. It would be simple to do; a college microbiology student in a college lab could do it if he got his hands on the bacteria (which can be easily grown from soil). Ebola is a terribly lethal virus, but it is very difficult to transfer between people, which has limited it to controllable regional epidemics. If a mad scientist manipulated its genome to turn it into an airborne pathogen, it could wreak world-wide havoc, probably worse than COVID or the Spanish flu. And so on.

Therefore GoF research on pathogens can be both beneficial and dangerous. This is called “dual purpose research.” Scientists and government officials are very aware of this dual threat from such research and sometimes science publications purposefully withhold critical data that a bad actor could misuse.

Needless to say, this is a very controversial tightrope science walks when dealing with dual purpose science, such as GoF research on dangerous pathogens. Science is entirely based on disclosing what it discovers, but it can sometimes discover things that, while enormously useful for humans and the world, can also be enormously destructive. What do you do then?

Have you seen the movie, Oppenheimer?

Now that we have established grounding in what gain-of-function research entails, the next blog post, will describe the coronavirus research that went on in the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Hopefully, these blogs will give you a clearer understanding of whether or not the lab was responsible for the virus that caused the COVID pandemic.
While SARS-CoV-2 And Our Immune Systems Do A Dance, We Get Re-Infected

July 7, 2023

Note: Artificial intelligence wrote nary a word of the following article, which was fully composed by the natural intelligence of a certain human.

Your sometimes humble blogger remembers how immunology science first beguiled him. It was during senior year in high school in the Virginia suburbs of Washington, DC. More specifically it was during a lunch break while working at a People’s Drug Store that had a lunch counter. Your then nascent blogger grabbed the recent issue of Scientific American from the magazine rack and opened it to an article that was way above his green scientific understanding but, he, nevertheless, gleaned from the article that the immune system could make antibodies to just about any molecule in the universe, even ones newly created in a lab that the universe had never seen. Amazing!

Your immune system would also make antibodies against the cells and tissues of your best friend and everyone else in the world, and vice versa, but you and your best friend, et al., would not make antibodies against the same cells and molecules in your own bodies! What?

“Holy cow!” I thought. How in the world can the immune system do all that? How can it respond to something the world had never seen and secern friend from foe? At that moment, at that lunch counter over a burger, Coke and an article I barely understood, an immunologist was made. And I did indeed go on to earn a PhD in immunology and I indeed have studied how the immune system recognizes viruses and have done vaccine research. What a pivotal lunch break that was for me.

The question about antibody discrimination clearly fascinated me. That mystery has been solved and a few Nobel prizes awarded for its elegant solution, but related spin-off questions about how antibodies protect us keep coming up in different ways. It did so most recently during the COVID pandemic. Why weren’t the antibodies we generated via vaccination or via natural infection more protective against subsequent infection? In a twist in the plot of biology, it turns out that we have learned that the answers to these questions center around a complicated dance performed between both the virus and immune biological systems.

Biology is so doggone interesting!!

COVID Vaccine generated immunity: The several vaccines we now have against the SARS-CoV-2 virus are effective and provide examples of how vaccines are very good at getting the immune system to respond to what it detects as foreign invaders. But the vaccines are just designed to tell our immune systems to make antibodies against just a very small fragment of the spike protein. In contrast, the virus is constructed of several large proteins each of which has many different regions that the immune system can separately recognize as foreign. In other words, if the virus is like a brick building, your system theoretically can make a different antibody that specifically recognizes each brick of the building. So, the vaccine is like exposing the immune system to about 2-3 bricks of the whole building and trusting the resulting immune response against those few bricks to bring the whole building down.

The immune system was very good in generating antibodies to a small portion of the virus, yet many vaccinated people still were infected and caught COVID. Does that mean, as many vax naysayers claim that the vaccines were ineffective? Not at all, as I have discussed here before. While the CoV-2 vaccines did a good job at protecting against serious disease and death they were not very good at preventing the spread of the virus. These vaccines effectively generated a systemic immune response, meaning that you had anti-viral antibodies circulating in your blood, which did do a very good job preventing serious disease once the virus got inside you. But, it still got inside. You still got infected and got mildly sick.

We now know that the virus enters via mucous membranes in your nose, sinuses, mouth, throat and eyes. It has to first cross mucous membranes in order to infect you and that is where it needs to be stopped in order to actually prevent infection and further spread to others. The problem is that mucosal immunity is caused by a different type of antibody than what circulates in the blood and by what is generated by a typical vaccine that is given by an injection in the arm. To generate mucosal immunity, you need a vaccine that you spray in your mouth or nose, which then should generate the type of antibodies that provide mucosal protection and better protect you from infection via that route and better prevent the virus from spreading through a population.

At the beginning of the pandemic, we were faced with a brand new pathogen for which we knew nothing about how it behaved or how it infected and spread between people. At that point, we reasonably chose to quickly make the most common type of vaccine–a shot. While it didn’t fully protect against getting infected, it nevertheless was very effective at protecting against serious disease. So, it did a good job. Current efforts are underway to develop a mucosal vaccine. But, we must also deal with other complications we have learned about the dance between the virus and the immune system to make sure that vaccine will be maximally effective at preventing infection. Read on.

“Natural” COVID immunity: As it became clear that vaccinated people were still getting infected, the vaccine dissenters and dissemblers proclaimed loudly, and still do, that the vaxes failed miserably. They ignored the survival data and only focused on the infection data. They then began touting “natural immunity,” which is the immunity one usually gains after being naturally infected. But, that can be uncertain given the fact that the route of infection and the dose of virus can vary wildly and confer different levels of protection, as I reported earlier. Plus, with natural infection, one runs the risk of serious disease and death from the disease.

Then, to the chagrin of the “natural immunity” enthusiasts it turned out that they also were getting re-infected! And this re-infection occurs despite the fact that natural immunity occurs after infection across the mucous membranes that should, as discussed above, generate an immune response that would stop an infection! This is the dance.

Therefore, we now know that neither vaccine immunity, nor infection immunity fully protects against future infection with the CoV-2 virus (there is partial protection, but I won’t go into that here).

As we learned as recently as last April, from a Harvard study published in the journal Science, despite the fact that a natural infection presents the immune system with the full viral “building and all its bricks” potentially recognizable by antibodies, it turns out that only a few of the “bricks” are in fact actively “seen” at any time by the immune system.

This immuno-dominance of a small part of a larger pathogen that has thousands of sites or bricks the immune system can recognize is not unusual. It is like a large building consisting of thousands of bricks, but having a very attractive window that draws your attention. While you know an entire building is there, your attention is mostly drawn to the window. So can the focus of the immune system be preferentially drawn to a small part of a larger edifice. The immune system is perfectly capable of seeing the rest of the “building,” but it prefers to direct its attention to a small part of it. However, if you take away the part it prefers to focus on, the immune system will easily recognize something else. This immuno-dominance in what the immune system “sees” has several causes that are way too complicated to go into here without writing a textbook (an interested reader might try Paul’s Fundamental Immunology. My rather old edition of that book runs about 1500 pages!). Suffice it to just know that this sort of immuno-dominance often happens where only a small part of a large pathogen is preferentially recognized by the immune system.

Thus, the immunity developed after a natural infection is mostly only directed at a small portion of the virus, much like the antibody response after vaccination with just a small part of the virus. The natural immune response, like the vaccine immune response, is robust and effective, yet both are only directed against a very small portion of a big pathogen, and both are very leaky in that one can still get infected again! What gives?

Mutation gives.

How the virus escapes immunity: The SARS-CoV-2 virus is highly mutable unlike the other viruses like polio and small pox we vaccinate against and maintain long term immunity against. Thus, the virus quickly mutated, or changed, the “bricks” against which the vaccines were made rendering the immune response less and less effective over time as new viral iterations appeared. That is why the many boosters we got were necessary to keep vaccination immunity up with viral changes.

And that also is how someone who became immune after natural infection also became re-infected. The virus did a two-step and mutated the small region recognized by the immune system. It was pretty easy for the virus to do since it only had to change a couple of “bricks” in its facade that the antibodies were mostly attacking. That means that upon re-infection with a slightly mutated virus, the immune systems have to be re-educated to recognize a new intruder, and that takes time, which allows a new infection to settle in. Thus, in this dance, the gentleman virus leads and the dame immune system follows.

New vaccines continue to be developed that scientists hope will solve these problems unique to SARS-CoV-2. Most of the new vaccines are being built on the mRNA platform, but using novel approaches to 1) develop vaccines that can be given as a nasal spray in order to generate the mucosal immunity that hopefully would be more effective at actually preventing COVID. If this works, it might even be possible to hinder COVID spread. 2) But in order to block CoV-2 spread on a population level, we need to find other regions of the virus that are not so highly mutable. These would conceivably be regions of COVID proteins critical for viral function that tolerate little change in structure because that change would destroy the proteins' critical function and essentially kill the virus. Alternatively, new vaccines could incorporate multiple "bricksl" from different regions of the edifice assuming that it would be nigh impossible for all those sites to simultaneously mutate. If such regions are accessible to the immune system, then the resulting immunity would be expected to be impervious to viral mutation, thus ending the dance on a sour note.

It is even possible that such a vaccine could protect against a wide range of coronaviruses, thereby preventing future health problems arising from new coronaviruses. Remember SARS that also popped up in China a couple of decades ago? That virus has some genome similarity to the virus that caused the COVID pandemic, and both are distantly related to the virus that caused MERS that arose in the Middle East. If a pan-coronavirus vaccine can be developed, it could feasibly prevent many future epidemics and pandemics.

We shall see.

This is all part of a new biology that I earlier dubbed BioX. Biology is so doggone interesting!!

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Is Intentional COVID Vax Disinformation Criminal?

April 18, 2023
Note: Disinformation is different from misinformation. Disinformation is false information which is deliberately intended to mislead. Misinformation is wrong information spread without malicious intent.

“We have met the enemy and he is us.”

–Pogo Possum

Your humble blogger first wrote about vaccine disinformation way back on March 31, 2021, just over two years ago. That was not long after the vaccines, as well as the lies about them began rolling out. Unfortunately, the fiction continues and it is now necessary to provide an update.

In the first quarter of the Monday Night Football game on January 2, 2023, 24 year old NFL player, Damar Hamlin, made a tackle, got up from the play, took a couple of steps, then fell over backward and didn’t rise. He suffered a cardiac arrest and needed to be resuscitated on the field with a defibrillator.

Almost immediately social media came alive with speculation and even outright claims that Hamlin’s collapse was due to the COVID vaccine. Without knowing whether he had even been vaccinated, conspiracy quacks immediately linked old reports of rare post-vax events of cardiomyopathy in young adults and occasional problems with blood clots with Hamlin’s sudden cardiac arrest. They completely ignored other explanations such as how the blow to Hamlin’s chest during the tackle could have caused his heart to fibrillate.

Your still humble blogger attests that this can be a concern to blows to the chest during sporting events. As a 13 year-old, playing first base in a summer league, I was knocked off balance by a runner scrambling to return to the base as the second baseman zinged a fastball to me to pick off the errant opponent after snaring a line drive. The ball hit me square in the chest over my heart and dropped me to ground. I don't remember anything for a few moments, and I was whisked by ambulance to an ER where my heart function was carefully monitored for a few hours before I was released. It was suspected, but not proven, that I had a brief cardiac event but quickly recovered on my own and I was no worse for the wear. It happens.

That conspiratorial chorus in the ether was soon followed by a similarly crazy cacophony of television and radio talking heads also intimating, again without facts, that Hamlin had suffered a vaccine-related cardiac side effect. These pundits included popular host Tucker Carlson who, on his Fox cable show just two days after the game, while Hamlin was still hospitalized in an induced coma, called medical experts “witch doctors” as if he knew more than they did. Dallas cardiologist and anti-vaccine podcaster, Peter McCullough announced on Carlson’s show that ‘vaccine induced myocarditis” likely caused Hamlin’s episode (I guess McCullough was not a “witch doctor” or a “medical expert” according to Tucker's criteria).

Even the very evening that Hamlin collapsed, Charlie Kirk, a radio talk show host, and COVID vax conspiracist claimed on Twitter that many athletes across the country are suddenly dropping like Hamlin did because of the vaccine. And the same evening there was an Instagram post from bodybuilder Louis Uridel showing a screenshot of a tweet stating that Hamlin's cardiac arrest was caused by the COVID vaccine. "24 year old elite athletes in the NFL don't just have a cardiac arrest in the middle of a prime time game," the tweet read. "This is squarely on the back of every single person who pushed that poison…", meaning the vaccine.

An astonishing statistic is circulating throughout many social media circles claiming that more athletes died suddenly in the last year than have died in the last 38 years, implying that the vaccine is to blame. This originated with the same Peter McCullough who Carlson had on his show right after the football player collapsed. McCullough published a letter on Dec 2022 examining sudden cardiac deaths (SCD) in athletes. The problem, however, is that in his research he did not compare apples to apples. According to an epidemiologist who dug into McCullough’s data, he often compared cardiac events young athletes to events in old athletes(!), he mixed definitions of SCD indiscriminately, he included people who didn’t die of SCD or people who were not even athletes, and he even included people who did not die. But, the damage had been done; McCullough’s letter has spread far and wide and is now conspiracy gospel. Conspiracy buffs don’t really care about data, it is the headlines and talking points confirming their bias that grab and keep their attention. So, the false claim that the vaccine is causing excess deaths in athletes persists.

It is true that most conspiracies are often anchored in some fact, and on that foundation, the rest of the flimsy house of fantasy is constructed with fakery and fraud. Therefore, it is true that some COVID vaccines have been linked to very rare cases of myocarditis in young men. These cases were mostly very mild and were quickly resolved with no medical intervention needed. In fact, many cases were asymptomatic and were only detected because the sufferers participated in the clinical trials of the vaccines. Hence, trial participants were vaccinated and closely followed for adverse effects. This included regular blood draws which revealed that some vaccinated subjects with no physical symptoms at all still showed abnormal levels of a cardiac protein in their blood indicative of myocarditis, which quickly went away. These cases would have been missed completely if they had not been in the vaccine study. After now vaccinating hundreds of millions of people around the world, it is safely concluded that myocarditis following vaccination is very rare (~1 in 100,000) and not a serious problem. In fact, myocarditis following infection occurs seven-times more often than after vaccination, and is more severe. Therefore, it would have been more logical for Tucker Carlson, Charlie Kirk, Peter McCoullugh, et al., to conclude that Hamlin’s problem resulted from a recent infection rather than a vaccination.

Then there is the blatantly dishonest video documentary, Died Suddenly, that is wildly popular in the anti-vax sector. It was made by Stew Peters and it asserts that people are dying in droves due to the vaccine, which itself was supposedly engineered by an elite cabal to depopulate the planet (seriously!). This video flashes through many alarming news headlines of people dying and shows videos of people collapsing, supposedly after receiving a vaccine. Whole essays have been written rebutting this video (you can read one here), but here are some quick take away points:
- Google the news headlines shown in the video and you will learn that many incidents were not caused by the vaccine. In one headline, the person died in a car accident not from the vaccine. Another died before the vaccines were even available! Yet another collapsed during a basketball game, also before the vaccines, but never died. How inconvenient.
- The video alleges that mRNA vaccines are killing people via blood clots. As “evidence” it simply shows images of blood clots being removed from the blood vessels of cadavers. However, it fails to mention that blood normally clots after death! Ooops. No other evidence for vaccine-induced clots causing widespread death is offered.
- The video also showed images of a huge blood clot (a pulmonary embolism) being surgically removed from a lung vessel, letting viewers assume the clot was caused by the vaccine. However, the footage was from a 2019 medical education video, that was made, once again, before vaccines were available!
The Died Suddenly documentary is dishonest to say the least, yet it is regularly trotted out as prime evidence for the danger of the vaccines.

If the vaccines are so dangerous, one wonders why the evidence needs to be fabricated!

In the end, COVID vaccines prevented 18.5 million additional hospitalizations and 3.2 million additional deaths in the US. Prevented not caused.

Spreading vaccine disinformation can be very lucrative. It can bring in advertising revenue, attract subscribers, and help sell supplements and nostrums.

Twelve people are responsible for 65% of the vaccine disinformation on social media in the US, and they do so for profit. Their impact is mostly seen on Facebook, but there is plenty of vaccine disinformation on Instagram and Twitter as well. Here are some notable examples.
- A scientific study published in the science journal, Nature, reported that by far most (25%) of the COVID vaccine disinformation posts come from the organization, Children’s Health Defense, an anti-vaccine organization owned by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr, the 69 year old son of the late Senator, and recently declared Democratic candidate for US president. RFK, Jr., is a long-time opponent of vaccines. Any vaccine. He gained more than 1 million new paying subscribers in 2020 and traffic to his website rose sharply in March 2021 with 2.35 new million visits in response to his anti-COVID vaccine efforts.
- Joseph Mercola, DO actually claims in hundreds of Facebook articles that the vaccines will alter your DNA and turn you into a viral protein factory. He does this in order to promote the sale of supplements, books, and health food. During the height of the pandemic, he promoted a new website designed to prevent or treat COVID with his alternative remedies. His business has a net worth of $100 million! As I explained earlier in these pages, it is biologically impossible for the mRNA vaccines to affect your cellular DNA in any way. Mercola is selling a flat lie for profit.
- Steve Hotze, MD a Houston based doctor who used social media to unabashedly tell people to not vaccinate, but rather buy his vitamin and mineral concoctions, which, he claims was all one needed to fight the virus and many other diseases. In his case, the FDA found the products and marketing to be misleading and issued a cease and desist order.
Bottom line. The insidiousness of these charlatans is that while they claim to be saving peoples’ lives, they are causing deaths. The Kaiser Family Foundation found that between June 2021 and March 2022, 234,000 deaths could have been prevented in the US with COVID vaccinations. Vaccine disinformation that convinces people to avoid being immunized against the virus that causes COVID, undoubtedly caused many of these deaths.

How is a death caused by these deceitful claims about vaccines different from a death caused by criminally refusing to give insulin to a diabetic in crises?

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The Virus Came From Wuhan Lab DOE Now Says…..Sort Of

March 12, 2023

“Where’s the beef?” Clara Peller in a 1984 Wendy’s commercial

So, the world has been abuzz since the Department of Energy recently reported that it decided, albeit with low confidence, that the SARS-CoV-2 virus might have leaked by accident from the virology lab in Wuhan. Across cable television and the internet, including sources such as Fox, Breitbart, Joe Rogan, gossip lines, et al., are full of “I knew it all along,” and “I told you so’s.” Never have so many virology experts suddenly been spawned on Facebook. And most of them could not tell you whether a coronavirus is an RNA or DNA virus, let alone the difference between RNA and DNA.

But let’s slow down a bit. Have you even wondered why the Department of Energy is releasing an assessment about a virus? And did you wonder what data they based their assessment on? I did and I explain it here. What I learned tells a much more complete, and less compelling story than what most of the priests of the press, Junior virologists, and other rumor mongers have reported. What has been reported has been woefully inadequate and vastly misleading.

The DOE report was based on intelligence data that remains classified, and is not a science report. Apparently intel spooks weigh science information much differently than scientists do, and often put less credibility in published science because the information usually does not come from “trusted” sources that an spook has history with (their version of "peer review" I guess). The US intelligence community is distributed between 18 agencies, including Energy, State, Treasury, and others including, of course, the CIA, FBI, and DOD. Eight of these entities have been involved in reviewing the COVID-origins issue.

In 2121, the Energy Department, which oversees 17 national laboratories, several of which study SARS-CoV-2 and its origins, reported it was undecided on how the virus emerged. What caused DOE to recently change their assessment is not known. They are not releasing the classified data. Therefore, their information appears not to be scientific data, which is usually published. Four other unnamed agencies, along with a national intelligence panel, still judge that the virus was likely the result of a natural transmission from an animal to humans, and two other agencies are undecided. Only the FBI agrees with DOE in thinking that the virus leaked from the lab. Notably, the CIA also remains undecided. In other words, the DOE’s opinion is a minority opinion of low confidence in the intel community. It is hardly worth all the breathless excitement it elicited from Tucker Carlson and other bloviators who now dishonestly insinuate that it has now been proven the virus came from the lab. That is far from decided.

The intel community’s definition of low confidence intelligence is “that the information’s credibility and/or plausibility is uncertain, that the information is too fragmented or poorly corroborated to make solid analytical inferences, or that reliability of the sources is questionable.” Someone should send that to Tucker.

The origin of the virus has been actively investigated over the last couple of years and your sometimes humble correspondent has reported previously on those investigations in these pages (it is worth reading for background). These blog posts have favored the natural origin of the virus, because that is what the preponderance of data have suggested. There have been no published data supporting a lab leak hypothesis. None. Also, recent science reports in top-flight science journals continue to conclude that the virus had a natural origin. A paper just published in 2023 in Cell reported that SARS-CoV-2 is the ninth known coronavirus to have jumped from an animal into humans. Two earlier reports in Science, and also summarized in these pages last March, agreed that the virus originated in the Wuhan wet market not just once, but twice. These studies included genetic evidence and epidemiological tracing showing that the early cases of COVID all centered around the Wuhan wet market and not around the lab eight miles away.

Furthermore, back in 2020, I also wrote a summary of how the earliest events of the pandemic unfolded. Here is a synopsis of the first few days: On December 31, 2019, Chinese officials informed the WHO about a cluster of 41 patients with a mysterious pneumonia in the city of Wuhan associated with a new coronavirus. Then, in the middle of that night a Chinese CDC team from Beijing arrived and collected 585 “environment” samples from a garbage truck, drains and sewers in the wet market. Thirty-three of the samples tested positive for the new coronavirus. Fourteen of the positive samples were from the area of the market where wildlife was traded. At the same time, Wuhan officials quietly began disinfecting the market, and it was closed.

It is interesting that the immediate focus was on the market and not the lab.

Keep in mind that we have very many examples of viruses, including several other coronaviruses similar to SARS-CoV-2, spontaneously passing from animals to cause disease in humans. This includes the first example of SARS-CoV-1 that came from a food market in China in 2002, and then MERS, which passed from a camel to humans. It was natural for medical scientists to first think that SARS-CoV-2 arose similarly. So far, the evidence is not convincing that it did not. The fact that we have not yet convincingly identified an animal source for the virus is not surprising. It took 30 years to establish the source of the HIV virus, and we still do not know the source of the Ebola virus.

So far, despite the very weak statement from the DOE, the preponderance of data still favors a natural origin of the virus, not a lab origin. But, that still is far from definitive. That “preponderance” of evidence, can change in a hurry with new data. Therefore, it remains worth further investigation. But until the Chinese government allows outside scientists to review lab data books and interview scientists from the Wuhan labs, the investigation will proceed with one hand tied behind its back. It remains remotely possible that an animal carrying the ancestral coronavirus will be caught confirming that it did come from an animal. Yet, even if we did find an animal source for the virus, it may not tell us about the path it took to get into humans. We might never know that to the delight of the conspiracy nuts and fabulists out there who have never weaned off the teat of fantasy.

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Vaccine Mandates Have Long Passed Constitutional Muster

February 20, 2023

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

Here is a bit of history for those who think that vaccine mandates are an infringement of their liberty. I apologize to you in advance because it will be inconvenient, to conjure Al Gore.

Today, February 20, in 1905, the US Supreme Court ruled in Jacobson v Massachusetts that states have the authority to enforce compulsory vaccination laws, and that remains the law of the land. That Court opined that individual liberties under the Constitution and Bill of Rights are not absolute and can be suspended for a greater good. Jacobson has since been invoked in numerous other court cases as an example of a baseline exercise of collective rights over individual rights.

At the time of the decision Massachusetts was one of 11 states that had compulsory vaccination laws. The State’s law empowered the health departments of cities and towns to enforce mandatory, free vaccinations for adults over 21 years old if it was determined necessary for public health or safety of the community. In 1902, faced with an outbreak of smallpox, Cambridge ordered the immunization, or re-vaccination of all its inhabitants.

A Cambridge pastor, Henning Jacobson, had lived through earlier mandatory vaccinations in his home, Sweden. Although, the vaccination efforts in Sweden successfully eradicated smallpox in that country, Jacobson, had a bad reaction to that vaccine. The vaccine was crude by today’s standards, and often had adverse side effects, but was quite effective. Because of his personal experience, Jacobson refused to be re-vaccinated and was slapped with a $5 fine. He fought the penalty in courts over the next three years all the way to the Supreme Court. He, argued that the law was "unreasonable, arbitrary and oppressive", and that one should not be subjected to the law if he or she objected to vaccination, no matter the reason.

In the end he lost in a 7-2 SCOTUS decision. The Court held that "in every well ordered society charged with the duty of conserving the safety of its members the rights of the individual in respect of his liberty may at times, under the pressure of great dangers, be subjected to such restraint, to be enforced by reasonable regulations, as the safety of the general public may demand" and that "[r]eal liberty for all could not exist under the operation of a principle which recognizes the right of each individual person to use his own [liberty], whether in respect of his person or his property, regardless of the injury that may be done to others."

In other words, as pastor and prolific author, Tim Keller has written, you cannot have absolute individual freedom and live in community with others at the same time.

Furthermore, the Court held that mandatory vaccinations are neither arbitrary nor oppressive so long as they do not "go so far beyond what was reasonably required for the safety of the public". In Massachusetts, with smallpox being "prevalent and increasing in Cambridge", the regulation in question was "necessary in order to protect the public health and secure the public safety". The Court noted that Jacobson had offered proof that there were many in the medical community who believed that the smallpox vaccine would not stop the spread of the disease and, in fact, may cause other diseases of the body. However, the opinions offered by Jacobson were "more formidable by their number than by their inherent value" and "[w]hat everybody knows, … [the] opposite theory accords with the common belief and is maintained by high medical authority."

SCOTUS saw through Jacobson's specious medical science arguments, and ignored it in favor of empirical evidence presented by the other side–evidence such as that seen by the eradication of small pox in Sweden.

The Supreme Court reaffirmed its earlier Jacobson decision in Zucht v. King (1922), which held that a school system could refuse admission to a student who failed to receive a required vaccination. Jacobson was also a precedent case in justifying the constitutionality of government face mask orders and stay-at-home orders throughout the COVID-19 pandemic.

The closest COVID-19-related challenge to Jacobson was Does v. Mills, which questioned Maine's vaccine mandate for health care workers. By a 6–3 vote, the Supreme Court in 2021 denied relief to those who were seeking an injunction on the mandate.

Your humble correspondent, vaccine enthusiast, and left-handed chess player (it confuses the opponent), finds interesting, even sadly amusing, the similarities of some of the poor medical science arguments used by Jacobson and the spurious science often resorted to by the anti-vaxers today.

Sadly, the more things change, the more many things remain the same.
Three Years Ago Today

December 31, 2022

Yup. This is the three year anniversary of the COVID pandemic. On December 31 2019, the health commission of the city of Wuhan announced that they were investigating an outbreak of an unusual respiratory illness. The statement said that most of the afflicted had visited a food market in the city and that 27 people had contracted an unusual viral pneumonia. Seven were in serious condition. Things went down hill from there. China shut down and the rest of the world vaccinated.

I posted in these pages on those early days of the pandemic here if you want to revisit the beginning of this strange time.

At least I can say, all this has kept me occupied. My blog, going on 160 posts now, has earned me some new friends (I got a very nice message last week from someone in the Phillipines thanking me for "helping humanity." It made my day.) And it has earned me enemies from people who want to believe that Trump botched his response. He didn't. He launched Operation Warp Speed that gave us the vaccine and respirators in record time. On the other side of the political spectrum, I get vitriol from those who think that Tony Fauci is Satan incarnate for shutting down schools. He didn't, since NIH has no authority to do so.But that fact doesn't change anyone's mind.

So, among that cognitive dissonance, I thank my friend in the Phllipines and other readers who fined use in my blog. I write it for you.
Take Your Vaccine Skepticism To A Cemetery

December 30, 2022

“Still a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest”

–Paul Simon, in The Boxer

They say you won’t find an atheist in a foxhole. Well, perhaps you shouldn’t find a vaccine skeptic in a cemetery, either. Bear with me and I will explain.

I have been reading about how vaccine skepticism is growing beyond the COVID vaccine to include other common vaccines against flu, measles, chicken pox, polio, etc. Perhaps this all began with parental resistance to Gardasil, a vaccine against human papillomavirus, or HPV, introduced in 2006. HPV is a sexually transmitted virus that causes genital, anal, and oral cancers. It is the most common cause of cervical cancer. In order to confer maximal and lasting protection, it is recommended that children around 11 and 12 years old be vaccinated. Some parents have railed that this promotes promiscuity. They fret that the vax licenses licentiousness in children, akin to giving them condoms with illustrated instructions in their use. Balderdash!

While that medical insurrection continues to smolder, along came COVID and the anti-COVID mRNA vaccines accompanied by the surprising resistance of many people against the shots. It is a resistance that seems to be growing and spreading to vaccines in general including those listed above that have long been commonly accepted.

This is concerning because it portends that in the near future, kids will begin coming down with diseases that we have pretty well controlled. In fact, in the last year or so, de novo cases of polio have appeared in the US in unvaccinated people. Before this incipient vaccine resistance, polio had been eradicated in North America, thanks to the vaccine.

It is safe to expect that vaccine resistance will persist, and probably increase as new vaccines are developed to treat cancer and better protect against flu. The mRNA vaccine technology is being used to develop new vaccines against the deadly skin cancer melanoma, and research is underway to also develop vaccines to prevent breast, liver, prostate, and other cancers. This use of modern vaccine technology to prevent cancer is a very novel and promising approach to dealing with malignancy. Anti-cancer vaccines are a potentially exciting new weapon in the armamentarium for the war on cancer. Too bad for those who would reject an effective cancer-preventing vaccine. At least they can fall back on the standard harsh radiation and chemo therapies.

mRNA vaccine technology also is being used to try to develop a universal vaccine against the flu. Flu is a highly malleable virus because there are many strains out that that can mix and shuffle their genetic material. This means that every year, it is a guessing game as to which combination of flu we will contend with—hence the changing flu numbers each year– H1N3, H2N4, H3N1, etc. Since the Southern Hemisphere’s flu season precedes ours in the North, flu sleuths follow what goes on down there and track which strains make their way Northward, often via migrating birds, and try to predict what flu strains will be prevalent here each year. Then flu vaccines are made based on the best predictions. Usually, the annual flu vaccine is a mix of 2-3 of the flu strains that we are most likely thought to encounter. Some years we better predict which flu strains to vaccinate against than in other years, hence the efficacy of the vaccine can vary from year to year. Therefore, the advantage of a universal vaccine effective against all strains would be to remove this uncertainty and variability. That is the goal of using mRNA technology to take genetic material that is common to all flu strains and package it into lipid particles as pseudo-viral particles to trick the immune system to make an immune response to these parts of the viruses. If successful, this would protect against all flu strains and eliminate the need to guess which strains to vaccinate against. Theoretically.

The point is, vaccine science is moving forward and continues to offer great promise to prevent diseases that have proven very difficult to treat. The vaccine naysayers will miss the boat if they continue their misguided dissent. I suggest that they test their skepticism in a cemetery.

Go to an old cemetery and find the graves of people who died in the 1950s and earlier. See how many headstones belong to children.

Then go to the part of the cemetery where the grave stones are for people who died in the 60s and later and see how many graves are occupied by children.

The sharp drop in the number of childhood deaths after the 60s can largely be attributed to vaccines. Vaccines prevent serious disease and death in children who used to die from meningitis, pneumonia, dysentery, small pox, flu, and other diseases, but now do not. And to those who think that the vaccines are killing people, where are their headstones?

It is always better to prevent disease than to treat it. Vaccines prevent disease. Avoid vaccines if you wish. Darwin might approve.
The Latest On Long COVID (So Far)

December 23, 2022
“After all, tomorrow is another day.” Gone With the Wind

In these pages, your humble bloggeur (me) has followed the evolution of what we know about the odd condition known as long COVID. You can find seven previous blog posts on the topic here. Because we were just learning what long COVID was all about, many of those posts ended with the disclaimer, “we will see.”

Well, we have seen and continue to see. Here is what we now know after over 2 years of experience with this complication. But, tomorrow is indeed another day.

The risk of death from COVID is now about the same as the risk of death from flu, which can vary from year to year, thanks to vaccines, natural exposure, and developing therapies. One study in Lancet found that people with COVID had a 3-fold greater chance than uninfected people of dying each year. But, as I explained before, mortality is only part of the story. There also is morbidity. Long COVID is "the rest of the story" as Paul Harvey used to drone. Some 54 studies on long COVID, involving 1.2 million people, have been reviewed and it was reported that about 6% of people with symptomatic COVID infection wind up with long COVID. This agreed with a massive Swedish study of COVID patients done between 2020-21. According to the new Census Bureau Household Pulse Survey, some 16 million working age Americans now suffer from long COVID, which creates a huge burden on our health system. Up to 4 million of these are unable to work, which is a major drain on a labor market already short of workers. The annual cost in lost wages is up to $230 billion! The total economic cost of long COVID in the US so far has been an astounding $3.7 trillion!!

And as the virus evolves, reinfections with new CoV-2 variants are becoming more and more common. Unfortunately, a large VA study on reinfections suggests that you want to avoid them. A second or third infection is associated with worse disease and increased chance for long COVID. And a large German study including nearly 12,000 children with COVID concluded that long COVID “cannot be dismissed among children and adolescents.”

A sobering study of medical records from millions of US military veterans in the VA medical system published in Nature Medicine found that 7% more COVID patients (compared to uninfected veterans) had lasting brain or neurological disorders. This extrapolates into about 6.6 million Americans with long-term brain impairments linked to COVID. Memory impairment was the most common brain malady. But those with a history of COVID also were at greater risk of ischemic stroke, seizures, anxiety and depression, and movement disorders.

The good news is that vaccines reduce the risk of long COVID—how much is still debatable at this point. The anti-COVID medicine, Paxlovid, reduces long COVID risk by 25% according to one study. And the Omicron CoV-2 variant shows a reduced risk of long COVID compared to the more pathogenic Delta variant.

Assessing the risk: How much should the risk of catching long COVID affect one’s daily decisions? Should I go to the concert? Graduation? Grocery store? Wear a mask everywhere? That is hard to say definitively. Perhaps it would help to compare COVID risk to other risks we face every day.
- The annual risk of getting in a car accident is about 1 in 30 per year. Of those, ~43% involved injuries and ~10% of those cause permanent impairment. This makes the annual risk of permanent injury from an auto accident about 1 in 700.
- The annual risk of serious injury in a house fire is ~1 in 20,000.
- The risk of needing reconstructive surgery after a dog bite is 1 in 400 annually.
- The risk of catching the Omicron variant (symptomatic or asymptomatic disease) is ~1 in 2 annually (it was 1 in 4 before Omicron). Say 3% of those get long COVID, and ~18% of them are so sick they are unable to work for an extended period. This makes the annual risk of severe long COVID about 1 in 370.
So, the risk of debilitating long COVID is about twice the risk of serious injury from driving and about the same as getting a serious dog bite. The risk of severe long COVID is much higher than being injured in a house fire. Of course, all of these risks are affected by our personal behaviors. We don’t drive drunk and wear seat belts (hopefully). We replace the batteries in home smoke detectors every year and avoid growling curs. And if we are smart, we vaccinate and stay home when we are not feeling well.

At least those are things that responsible people do to reduce the risks of life.
Are COVID And Cancer Connected?

December 13, 2022

Nothing surprises me, I’m a scientist.”

-Indiana Jones

In 2019, the world was introduced to a brand new pathogen, the SARS-CoV2 coronavirus, that caused a brand new, and very odd disease, COVID-19. Between then and now, your humble bloggeur has penned 153 blog posts, many of which focused on how strange the disease is and describing our learning process as we figured it out on the fly. Many of these posts were necessarily equivocal because we simply did not have enough information to make firm conclusions on how the virus affects different people. Over time, we learned how to better treat the disease, and that learning curve continues. It was necessary to end many blog posts with the weak statement, “We will see.” Well we are still seeing and learning about this odd malady that consists of a melody of symptoms across myriad organs.

Research is now beginning to reveal a possible link between CoV-2 infection and cancer. As before, these observations are preliminary and will be further scrutinized, but they are bolstered by the discovery of a possible mechanism that could explain how the CoV-2 virus might cause cancer.

We know of many different viruses that cause cancer in animals. We also have a good understanding of how the viruses do that. There also are a few viruses, but not many, that cause human cancer, and we also mostly understand how they exert their oncogenic effects. These human cancer viruses include human papilloma virus (HPV), which causes cervical, and head and neck cancers. Hepatitis B virus can lead to liver cancer. Human T cell leukemia virus causes leukemia, and Epstein Barr virus can lead to lymphoma and a few other types of cancers. And so on.

To date, there has been very little association between any coronaviruses and cancer in animals or humans. But, that might be changing.

Several recent papers have revealed a genetic link between COVID-19 and cancer. One paper showed that people with an increased genetic risk of COVID-19, were also at increased genetic risk of developing endometrial cancer. The limitation of this study is that it cannot distinguish between a correlated high risk of COVID and cancer, vs whether COVID causes the cancer. It is the old conundrum of discerning between correlation vs cause-and-effect.

A second study incrementally advanced the above findings. Using a low resolution genetic mapping technique called genome-wide association, it found a positive correlation (there is that “C” word again) between people genetically predisposed to both severe COVID and increased risk for endometrial cancer. While still a correlation, one would predict that if there was a cause-and-effect relationship between COVID and cancer, that the risks for both would be similar. This is what the study showed.

Finally, a third study uncovered a possible mechanism by which SARS-CoV-2 could cause cancer. Having a possible mechanism in hand bolsters the possibility that the theoretical link between COVID and cancer is true. But first, a little back story about cancer genetics.

Cancer genetics. Basically, cancer is a genetic disease. That does not necessarily mean that it is always inherited. Most cancers probably are not. But, when the genetic fidelity of a cell messes up, it can become immortal, can grow in an unregulated fashion, and can become resistant to normal signals that should cause it to die. In a nutshell, that is cancer. Generally speaking, there are two kinds of genes that contribute to this process. 1) Dominant acting oncogenes are aberrant genes that when expressed, drive the above activities. 2) Suppressor genes provide brakes to the above activities, and when absent, the brake is released. In both cases, genetic abnormalities either activate oncogenes to drive cell immortality and growth, or eliminate expression or activity of tumor suppressor genes removing the brakes to cell growth. Usually, cancer is a stepwise process in which cells sequentially accumulate different abnormal oncogenes and suppressor genes. The combination of which leads to full blown cancer.

One of the first tumor suppressor genes to be identified is called P53. In several different tumors, it was noticed that expression of this gene was missing due to DNA mutation. Further research showed that when expressed, P53 provides a brake on cell growth. There are many ways that P53 can be inactivated. Genetic mutation can prevent its expression, or hinder its function. We also know that a few viruses that cause cancer in people, like hepatitis B virus and Epstein-Barr virus, produce proteins that can interact with and inactivate the P53 gene product. A paper published in November, now reports that two CoV-2 proteins interact with cellular proteins to stimulate complex pathways that lead to degradation of the P53 gene product, releasing the anti-cancer brake in infected cells. The research also shows that that P53 activity is lost in patients with severe COVID disease but not in those with less severe illness. P53 loss also correlates with length of COVID symptoms. In other words, the more severe the COVID disease, the greater the chance that the P53 brake is lost.

This observation does not yet prove that inhibition of P53 by the CoV-2 virus causes cancer, but it now presents an important hypothesis that will be given much research attention. Questions remain regarding the association between CoV-2 infection and cancer. Also, since COVID infections are generally relatively short-lived, how long does the loss of P53 function last? Are long-COVID patients at increased risk for chronic loss of P53 and cancer? Is this loss of function sufficient to launch the multistep pathway that leads to cancer?

Once again, we will see.

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