The Arrow #282, Fauci, Gain-of-Function, Pandemic

Greetings everyone.

Other than a few little notes below, this Arrow is going to be different. As are the ones going forward. I kind of sort of did a mini audit of comments and poll responses over the past couple of years. I found a lot (more than I would have expected) of folks remarking, or even complaining, that The Arrow is too long. I didn’t find a single one who said it should be longer. It brought to mind the good Dr. Samuel Johnson’s wonderful remark about reading.

Said he:”Was there ever anything written by mere man that was wished longer by its readers…”

I, myself, subscribe to many, many Substacks. Most of them – at least the ones I subscribe to – are single topic issues. A couple that are more newspaper-like and come out daily contain disparate topics, but the vast majority of them just stick to one.

This is what I’ve resolved to do for the near future at least, just to see how it goes for you and for me.

I’ll continue the poll just so I’ll get a feel for what readers like and what they hate, so I can adjust accordingly. I’ll continue the Odd & Ends if I have enough. I may make an entire issue of the Odd & Ends if I’ve had a particularly voracious period of reading. Same with the video of the week. It won’t be a part of all of them, because my plan is to write more than once a week.

Let me know what you think in the polls and comments.

My medical saga continues. A friend of mine sent me a line someone said to him a while back: “the healthcare system works for everyone except the patients and the doctors.” I tend to agree, though I have some doubts about the doctors in the sentence. I’ll explain when I get through this ordeal. I feel better than I have in years. I’m in way better shape than I have been in ages, thanks to a lot of hard workouts. I’m sleeping better, and by any definition, I’m healthy as can be. But I’ve got a failing kidney thanks to a blockage that occurred as a consequence of my treatment for bladder cancer. It can be fixed, but no one seems to particularly care about it except for me. We’ll get to it when we have time is the basic response I’ve been getting.

MD and I were discussing all the frustration this is causing us, and she nailed it. She said, “Medicine isn’t a calling anymore; it’s just a job.”

I could go on, but don’t get me started.

Today’s topic was inspired by a book I’ve been reading and the commentary of a poll respondent.

Said the poll respondent:

It fair took my breath away. Not just the insolence, but the total lack of understanding of what has happened. Maybe it’s willful blindness. Who knows?

Let’s break down what the reader is saying.

“Covid in the beginning was a super killer.”

That is true. And it continues to kill.

“I lost family and friends. They are dead.”

I have no way to dispute that. And I’m sorry for anyone’s loss.

“Unless Fauci engineered the virus and/or helped release it, why is he so vilified?”

That’s kind of like asking why Stalin is so vilified for the deaths of ~20 million people in the USSR? He didn’t shoot them himself. The last estimate I saw said ~20 million people worldwide died of COVID-19. Did Fauci personally go out and kill these 20 million people? Of course not, but neither did Stalin personally kill 20 million of his subjects, but his decisions, like Fauci's, were responsible for their deaths.

Not only was Fauci probably responsible for the creation of the virus (more about which later), virtually every bad thing about the handling of the COVID-19 pandemic was his doing. He was the face of public health. And he didn’t get forced into the role; he gloried in it. Read his comments in his diary about how wonderful he thought it all was what with all the celebs fawning over him. Given the number of lives Fauci was responsible for destroying, I found reading his diary nauseating.

Fauci wasn’t alone. Francis Collins, who was head of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) was just as bad, but he didn’t crave the attention that Fauci did. Collins is the dolt who raged that Jay Bhattacharya (Stanford), Martin Kulldorf, (Harvard), and Sunetra Gupta (Oxford) were “fringe” epidemiologists and needed to be “taken down.” Because Collins wasn’t the attention whore Fauci was, he didn’t get a lot of publicity. But he was as complicit as Fauci. At least in my opinion. And, unlike Fauci, Collins didn’t get a blanket pardon.

While I’m in a castigating mood, I can’t let Rochelle Walenski, Deborah Birx, and Robert Redfield escape criticism. Walenski (appointed as head of the CDC by Biden) was kind of a go along to get along type, who seemed to parrot Fauci on everything. She didn’t want to rock the boat. Robert Redfield, appointed by Trump, was Walenski’s predecessor at the CDC. Some of the things Redfield has reported since leaving office make a lot of sense, but I have trouble believing him because of his absolutely idiotic message on masks. How can a person with his education make such a stupid statement? Publicly, no less.

As I’ve written before, SARS-CoV-2 is an aerosol, which masks are totally worthless against. Same with social distancing, also worthless. Scientists who were sent to Antarctica long before COVID-19 was even known ended up getting the disease from the virus, which had to have traveled through the atmosphere. If it can travel thousands of miles through the air, how can six feet of separation protect anyone? Or masks, for that matter? Or how about masks in a car?

Then we have Deborah Birx, who, in my view anyway, was a total nitwit. Appointed by Trump, Birx was the coordinator of the White House Coronavirus Task Force. All she could think about was PCR testing. And more PCR testing. Test, test, test was her mantra. And to what end?

Fauci was the driving force for all the masking everyone – even little, bitty kids – when masks didn’t do squat except to make it more difficult to breathe. And gather germs. Early on Fauci said masks were worthless, then he changed tack and pronounced them a necessity to prevent COVID. When questioned on his about face, he claimed that his earlier advice about masks being worthless was given in an effort to prevent a run on masks, so there would be plenty for healthcare providers. In other words, he lied and admitted to it.

The mask situation was the least damaging of all of his efforts. He pushed school and business closures, despite no evidence they accomplished anything. According to numerous reports, children are still suffering from the lack of learning during those years. Many family businesses went bankrupt due to mandated closures. These Fauci-recommended mandates were not benign.

Then there were the mRNA vaccines. Fauci pushed them relentlessly. Our family, led by MD and me, did not take the vaccines. But many, many others did. And a lot of them are dead now, as a result. Granted, the jabs may have saved a few lives, mainly of older people with multiple comorbidities. But I doubt they did the young much good at all. They caused serious issues to many young people. And now, as we learn, probably to the unborn whose mothers were told to get the jab in the first trimester.

People lost jobs and careers due to vaccine mandates, which Fauci pushed aggressively.

One of our grandsons, who attends a liberal private school in California, was terrified of COVID. He had drunk the Kool-Aid provided by the faculty. He wore a mask everywhere he went. I talked to him, MD talked to him, his parents talked to him, but the daily barrage of misinformation he got from school outweighed anything any of us said.

Then he got COVID (as did all his immediate family). He felt a little punk for a day or so, and that was it. He couldn’t believe it. He said, “Is this all it is?” The scales fell from his eyes. Thereafter he refused to wear a mask unless he was absolutely forced to.

The most damaging thing Fauci did (along with Francis Collins) was push the gain-of-function (GOF) research that resulted in the SARS-CoV-2 virus that was unleashed on the world. Fauci himself wasn’t responsible for the lab leak that loosed the virus, but he and Collins were both believers in the benefits of GOF research and funded the research both directly and indirectly to the Wuhan Institute of Virology from where the virus escaped.

As I wrote about in the last Arrow, Fauci was being coy about the definition of GOF. He said what he was funding was not GOF. His technical definition of GOF is taking a virus that already infected humans and fiddling with its structure to make it more infectious or virulent to humans. What Fauci funded was taking a virus that does not attack humans and converting it into one that does. Not GOF in is mind.

Back when COVID was really going strong in May of 2021, Nicholas Wade wrote a highly readable, but technical piece in Medium that I read and recommended to Arrow readers. Wade is a science writer of some standing, but the piece was about work done by Steven Quay.

Steven Quay, M.D., PhD. has worked in laboratories since he was an undergraduate. He has taught at both Stanford and Harvard. His postdoctoral research at MIT was with Nobel laureate Gobind Khorana, with whom he studied much of what this book is about. He has founded multiple biotech companies and is the CEO of one now. It would be difficult to find anyone with any better credentials than Dr. Quay to dig in and evaluate the entire COVID fiasco. A fiasco that ended up killing millions of people.

He did just that. And has now published a book on it.

Knowing Dr. Quay by reputation, I couldn’t order his book quickly enough. I hadn’t read any reviews on it, but based on the information he provided for the Medium article linked above, I knew I had to get it.

I was champing at the bit to get my hands on the book, and, of course, Amazon delivered it two days later than promised when I ordered it.

Titled The Code As Witness: How the COVID Genome Reveals Its Origins and How to Prevent Future Outbreaks, the book is a masterpiece. I did a fair amount of reviewing virology when COVID struck, and I was compelled to write about it. But nothing I read came anywhere close to the information in Dr. Quay’s book. I have learned way, way more than I ever thought I would from this book, and I’m only about 60 percent of the way through it.

The material is highly technical, but Dr. Quay writes with the style of a novelist. It is a difficult book to put down. For me, at least.

I don’t usually recommend books I haven’t read all the way through, but this one is different. Of the 198 pages I have read so far, I don’t think there is a single page without at least one of my marks or marginalia.

The author, like a detective tracking a case, starts out methodically gathering evidence. Each piece he finds leads to another. The pile of clues builds until the evidence can’t be refuted. There is no doubt SARS-CoV-2 was an engineered virus that escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The evidence is simply overwhelming.

Granted, I have more technical knowledge of virology than the average non-doc, but by the way it is written, I think most anyone can understand the information Dr. Quay is revealing.

Back during COVID I got a handful of emails from people who for whatever reason refused to believe viruses exist. One reader sent me the link to a book on Amazon about how the whole concept of viruses is made up. The notion that viruses don’t exist flew in the face of everything I thought I knew, so I decided to take a look. I got the book from Amazon, and it was filled with testimonials from famous doctors from Harvard and other institutions. When I looked them up, most of them were elite docs from prestigious institutions, but they lived in the early 1800s long before the germ theory was discovered first by Robert Koch, then by Louis Pasteur.

Reading Dr. Quay’s book should disabuse anyone of the notion that viruses don’t exist.

I’m going to include a short segment of the book just so you’ll get a feel for it, but before I do I want to spend a few words on the idiocy of Fauci, Collins, and others who are all in on GOF research.

According to Dr. Quay, the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) wasn’t really built in a way that a BSL-4 laboratory facility should be built. The Chinese collaborated with France – which is where Zhengli Shi, the infamous Bat Woman, got her PhD – to build and operate a BSL-4 lab in Wuhan. After all the papers were signed and toasts given, the Chinese took over the construction and refused to let the French be involved. After many years of dealing with China myself, I can assure you they cut every corner they can in everything they do. And they never cut those who are paying the bill in for any savings.

The upshot was that the WIV had all kinds of construction problems not common to BSL-4 labs, which are the most secure labs of all. Dr. Quay says that instead of operating as a BSL-4 lab, the WIV operated sometimes like a BSL-3 lab and even more often like a BSL-2 lab, which has about the same security set up as a dentist’s office.

In other words, he makes the case that due to the shoddy construction and the sloppy attention to lab security an accident at the WVI would not be unlikely.

Given the highly infective and disastrously virulence of many of these lab wrought Frankenviruses he describes, it’s a wonder any governmental agency anywhere would countenance their development. But governments do, which is scary as hell. And Fauci and Collins were in there figuring out how to fund them despite the moratorium put in place in 2014 by President Obama. Sadly, in 2017, President Trump removed the moratorium (doubtless thanks to Fauci’s lobbying.

As I mentioned before, Fauci has his own definition of GOF. In his mind, if you take a virus and make it more infective, that is GOF. But if you create a dangerous virus in a lab from scratch, well, that isn’t gain-of-function. The NIAID under Fauci’s leadership did just that with SARS-CoV-2.

Reading the book made me realize just how easy it is to create a horribly virulent virus in a lab. Research institues all over the place are doing it. If one of these gets unleashed by some kind of lab accident, then humanity could be in for a modern plague much like the Black Death that wiped out 25 percent of the European population centuries ago.

That people are doing this is terrifying.

And it’s not as if there haven’t already been accidents at top notch labs. Dr. Quay writes of several.

If this mouse escaped in 2014, then it is undoubtedly dead by now. But still…

UNC is where Ralph Baric’s lab is located. Fauci funded Baric and the WIV through Peter Dasak’s company EcoHealth Alliance, which I’m sure you’ve heard of. One wonders about the lack of NIAID oversight and due diligence involved.

It is this funding that allowed the development of SARS-CoV-2. I doubt Fauci had any hand in the lab leak, but he did have a hand in the making of the virus. And the making of the virus is the proximate cause of the pandemic.

A legal story used to define proximate cause involves a lion in a cage. Someone brings a lion in a cage to the city square of a small town. The lion is caged. The cage has a lock on it. Not only that, the cage has a giant chain around it with locks on that. One night some teenaged boys figure out how to pick the locks on the cage and do so. The next morning people come to the square, one teases the lion, the lion gets pissed and rushes the door to his cage. The teenage boys unlocked the door, so it flies open, the lion escapes, and attacks and kills several people.

Who is at fault here? The teenage boys who unlocked the cage? The guy who teased the lion?

The answer is: the person responsible for bringing the lion to town in the first place. That is the proximate cause. Without that, there would have been no incident. The teenage boys are contributory as is the guy who teased the lion. But if the lion were not there, then there would have been no issue.

Fauci’s funding was what allowed SARS-CoV-2 to be built. He’s not responsible for releasing the lion, but his funding as a consequence of his torturing the definition of GOF is responsible for bringing the lion to town. In my view, anyway.

Which is why he tried so hard to avert everyone’s attention to the wet market, which had nothing to do with SARS-CoV-2. Dr. Quay’s book makes this fact clear over and over and over.

Just to entice you to read the book – or scare you away, depending upon how you find the text – I’m posting below three and a quarter pages I just finished reading. MD made the scans of my own book with my own markings using her beloved TurboScan. These pages may seem conclusive to you, but don’t let that fool you. This is just one small piece of the evidence.The entire book makes case after case in this same way. It shows how SARS-CoV-2 is a unique virus despite its name being very close to SARS-CoV-1. The latter did come from a wet market, but not the former.

And don’t be fooled by the section title “The “Smoking Gun” Evidence.” This isn’t a summary of the book; it’s simply one of the subtitles of this section. The entire book lays out “the smoking gun,” not just this little part, which is most convincing on its own.

I just went back and reread these pages. The author refers to “No See’m” technology. Scientists who work with viruses link different parts of different viruses together to come up with a new virus. The way they do it ends up showing seams where the parts of the virus are combined. These seams are a dead giveaway that a particular virus comes from a lab and not from nature. Ralph Baric figured out a way to shield these seams on homemade viruses so they couldn’t be differentiated from those coming from the wild. He called it “No See’m” technology.

One wonders why he would do such a thing.

You should be able to tell from the above whether or not this is a book you would like to read. I’ve found it truly unputdownable. But that’s just me. I love these kinds of books.

If you do read it, you’ll see what a botch the Fauch made of everything he touched, and how he desperately tried to cover it up. All the while sucking up to celebrities, who somehow thought him the God of doctors.

But it gets even worse.

The COVID pandemic is pretty much over, but there are still a lot of other deadly viruses out there that are much worse. Dr. Quay uses the example of SARS-CoV-2, which had an infection fatality rate of 1 percent. In other words, out of each 100 people who were infected, one died. (The Infection fatality rate was actually more in the 0.2-0.3 percent, but that doesn’t detract from what comes next.)

The Nipah virus comes from a bat, and just as it is, without modification, it has an infection fatality rate ranging from 25 percent to 92 percent. Such an infection fatality rate, even at its lowest 25 percent number, would result in the deaths of one hundred times as many as died from COVID. In the US, where statistics indicate ~ one million people died from the SARS-CoV-2 virus, twenty-five million would die from the Nipah virus. That would be like the entire population of New York state dying plus an extra five million. And that’s just at the low end of the estimated infection fatality rate of the Nipah virus.

It would be vastly more catastrophic than an atomic bomb.

Fortunately, as Dr. Quay points out, the Nipah virus isn’t very contagious. But that could change with some tinkering. Fragments of its sequence were found in early COVID patients, which indicates that it has been fiddled with by the Chinese.

In a sobering short paragraph in the book, the author writes:

You may think, as the poll respondent above did, that COVID is over, so what’s all the hoorah about. Let’s just move on. Well, the above is what it is all about. And Fauci, along with Collins and a few others are responsible.

Irrespective of what Fauci thinks of himself and what his celebrity pals think of him, he definitely has blood on his hands. I hope he somehow pays for it as a warning to the next Fauci to come along.

In the end, Fauci did what all good bureaucrats do, he rushed off to a lucrative job with a company that he funded. This is the very definition of corporate capture. If you’re a good little bureaucrat working away at the FDA or CDC or NIH or NAIAD, and you don’t make any waves or throw up obstructions to drug approvals or other products of industry, then you can be assured of a cushy job if and when you get fired from your government sinecure or decide to retire.

Here is where Fauci found a home.

Some of you will read this and say, whoa there, this is from a right wing writer. Of course it is. Would you expect the New York Times that has fawned over Fauci for the last six years to investigate him? Or any other trad media, for that matter?

Just to end this on a nauseating note, here is Julia Roberts gushing over actually meeting Fauci over Zoom. And take a gander at the look on Fauci’s face during all this. He presents a little different demeanor than he did during his recent appearance before the Senate.

In full transparency, the overall interview isn’t as nauseating as the beginning. If you want to watch the entire four minute video, click here.

Before we end, take a look at the video below. It was made, surprisingly, by the Wall Street Journal, which has kind of been middle of the road during the whole COVID fiasco. The video reminds us of what the COVID days were like and recounts the founding of the Great Barrington Declaration (which both MD and I signed) and the three “fringe epidemiologists” who brought it about. One of whom now holds Francis Collins former job as the head of the NIH.

The worm has truly turned.

Odds and Ends

• Incredible and breathtaking images of the feathery patterns on the sun's roiling surface. Maybe VanGogh just saw things as they are up there more clearly than the rest of us.

• I confess I'd never even heard of such a thing as a fire rainbow, but this photo of one is stunning. Like the Northern Lights, I guess we'll need to put this celestial phenomenon on the sky watch bucket list.

• The origin of the 'beach read'. When and where did it arise?

• On that topic, I'd be remiss not to mention the three 'beach reads' penned by my favorite romance author -- my Bride. She's hard at work on book 4 in the series, so you've plenty of time to catch up.

• Did you know polar bears' fur is translucent and has no white pigment in it? I confess, I did not know that or several of these other amazing facts about them.

• Did you know PlayDoh was originally developed back in the days of coal fired home heating to clean the soot off wallpaper? Neither did I. Or these other lucrative inventions that started out as something else entirely. 

• A great novel paints a clear picture of locations, but sometimes you'd like to see where it is on a map. And now you can. I found this dive into the places of over 400 famous works fascinating. You could make a great road trip out of this.

• Having spent part of my youth dealing with the pigs on my grandfather's farm, I can attest that pigs do love to wallow in the mud. And here's why.

Newsletter Recommendations

Video of the Week

This VOTW is a little different. It harkens back to a time and place in which I grew up. Most people these days have never heard of the Collins Kids, but they were all over the place where I grew up. They were on every country music TV show there was. They were a couple of kids from Oklahoma who hit the country music big time. Yet almost no one knows of them today.

Lorrie Collins was easy to look at and had a nice country voice. She dated Ricky Nelson and was on the Ozzie and Harriet show way back when. Her little brother Larry was a guitar prodigy, who, I think I remember reading, taught his big sister how to play.

Below is a video of one of their performances. It’s not my favorite song they ever performed, but it’s the one with the best quality video. Lorrie was in her teens, and Larry was nine or ten. If you want to see more, search YouTube for the Collins Kids. You’ll be presented with a host of videos, but most are a bit fuzzy.

Enjoy!

Time for the poll, so you can grade my performance this week.

That’s about it for this week. Keep in good cheer, and I’ll be back soon.

Please help me out by clicking the Like button, assuming, of course, that you like it.

This newsletter is for informational and educational purposes only. It is not, nor is it intended to be, a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment and should never be relied upon for specific medical advice.

Thanks for reading all the way to the end. Really, thanks. If you got something out of it, please consider becoming a paid subscriber if you aren’t yet. I would really appreciate it.

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