The Silent Editor

First of all, Mark Ellott’s new book, Reiver, is up on Amazon and Smashwords. I have a couple more to deal with but the backlog is gradually declining and the 14th Anthology will be open for short stories on March 1st regardless.

That’s the advertisement done (if it’s good enough for You Tube, it’s good enough for me) so on with the post…

A long time ago, I wrote a story called ‘The Gene Genie’, about a research student who worked out how to turn on archaic genes in the human genome, and gave herself gills and a tail. It’s in ‘Fears of the Old and the New‘ and I thought I had posted it on the blog, but it seems not.

Anyway. The information I had on the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine for Covid suggested that it was an adenovirus manipulated to express coronavirus spike protein. I was corrected on this recently and it seems it’s actually worse than I thought. It’s not using standard vaccine methods at all. The Johnson and Johnson and the Novavax ones use dead coronaviruses or the spike protein alone. You can’t catch anything from them, they just show your immune system the dead virus proteins so it can get ready for a real infection.

There is still the issue of antibody-dependent enhancement which has plagued attempts at coronavirus vaccines for fifty years. Basically, the vaccine makes subsequent infection far worse. I have no idea whether this has been solved, nor if it ever can be.

Today I received more information by eMail and obviously I’m not going to say who sent it. So there is more information available now.

Pfizer and Moderna vaccines use mRNA in little blobs of fat. They’ll get into your cells because your cell membranes are made of fat and the little blobs will merge with them. The mRNA will cause your body cells to produce the spike protein, your immune system will recognise it as ‘wrong’ and kill the cells expressing it. This has never been tried in humans before and it does risk setting up an autoimmune disease, but it will not change your DNA. It will also not infect you with Covid, there are no intact viral particles in there.

A couple of points – mRNA is ‘messenger RNA’. In normal cells, DNA is never used directly to make proteins. DNA is the master copy of the plan. mRNA is a photocopy of DNA that’s used to make proteins. It wears out so you don’t keep making the same proteins over and over. If you need more of that protein, another photocopy is made of the original plan and sent to the ribosomes (the things that read mRNA and build proteins). This process does not go in reverse. mRNA is not turned into DNA. An extra mRNA can cause problems but it is not getting inserted into DNA. That doesn’t happen.

The mRNA also should not be able to replicate itself unless if contains the genes to do it – I don’t know which genes are included in these vaccine mRNAs so can’t comment on that.

The second point concerns an enzyme called ‘reverse transcriptase’ which does indeed make a DNA copy of RNA. It is only found in retroviruses. These viruses contain RNA and the reverse transcriptase enzyme. They get into your cells and make a DNA copy of their RNA, which your cell’s ‘photocopier’ then uses to make many mRNA copies which are sent out to make many copies of the virus. It’s much more efficient than just having the one bit of mRNA in the cell. HIV is one such virus. And yes, HIV does insert itself into your own DNA where it can lie dormant for many years.

The Oxford vaccine has used reverse transcriptase to make a DNA copy of the viral RNA. It does not have reverse transcriptase in the vaccine, no need, the adenovirus is already carrying DNA. They will have done this because DNA is much more stable than RNA so it doesn’t have to be deep frozen. I had the impression they had engineered an adenovirus to express coronavirus spike protein itself, but this seems to be not the case. Instead it does the same thing as the mRNA versions, except it inserts DNA rather than RNA.

Well, while the mRNA will gradually break down so the dose you get is all you get, the DNA version will produce multiple copies of mRNA within the cell. What matters here is what happens to that DNA. Does it eventually fall apart or not?

If not, you’ll have cells producing spike proteins continuously until the T cells take them out.

Will it get inserted into host DNA? That’s a long shot but it’s much more possible than with the mRNA versions. Absolute worst case scenario – it inserts into the genome and goes dormant. So it replicates when the cell replicates, like HIV. Some years down the line, something, perhaps an infection, triggers it and now you have quite a mass of cells producing spike protein. You’re going to get very sick indeed.

I must stress that this is an absolute worst case scenario and there is absolutely no evidence that it will happen. However, it is a long term issue and since all these vaccines are new, experimental and released under emergency licences, there is no evidence for or against long term effects for any of them. The NHS is putting out adverts saying that the vaccines have undergone stringent safety tests. This is not true. None of them have completed the full range of tests, they are all under emergency licence. Long term effects? Nobody has a clue. This is the experiment.

My biggest concern remains the antibody-dependent enhancement that every single previous coronavirus vaccine has caused. This makes subsequent infection with the virus very much worse. I don’t see anything that gives me any confidence that this issue has even been addressed, much less solved, by any of the vaccine producers.

So I’m not going to take it. Whether you do is up to you.