Coronavirus diary – Part 49

We are merely living in the dark until the origin of the coronavirus is known—Akhaine 

I analysed in the last installment the “Wuhan inquiry” and its outcome. In this part, I will further the discussion on the quest to unravel the origin of the virus. Also, I will foreground the Merkovits perspective on the origin of the virus in the Wuham-Fort Detrick perimeter. Then, I will advert to the ongoing “vaccine holocaust,” and underline the hope in the non-vaccine remedies. 

Shortly before the WHO mission to China in the summer of 2020, Sir Richard Dearlove, a former chief of the British Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), warned against dismissing the “lab theory” as a conspiracy theory in the probe for the origin of COVID-19. His opinion as Deborah Haynes, the Foreign Affairs Editor of the Sky News noted contrasted “with a prevailing view among scientific experts as well as the US and British intelligence communities that the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus was not man-made.” Dearlove affirmed his subscription to the theory, “that it’s an engineered escapee from the Wuhan Institute (of Virology).”

He further stressed that he was not “… saying anything other than it was the result of an accident and that the virus is the consequence of gain-of-function experiments that were being conducted in Wuhan, which I don’t think are particularly sinister…There is an accumulation of evidence that this is something that has to be openly discussed in the scientific community.” He believed that the apocryphal in the US intelligence community was borne out of ignorance.

According to him, “I am just staggered. They clearly haven’t read the science. And they haven’t attempted to understand it. The onus is now on the leadership of China to explain why the theory and the hypothesis that it could be engineered is wrong.” Dearlove’s thinking is buoyed by his reading of the work of Professor Angus Dalgleish, a professor of oncology at the Institute for Infection and Immunity at St George’s University London, and Birger Sorensen, chairman of Norwegian company Immunor. The duo emphasised lab meddling than evolution in the origin of the virus. Magdalena Skipper, Editor-in-chief of Nature who joined the debate noted that in matters of science it was crucial to have an open mind. 

Professor Kristian Andersen at the department of immunology and microbiology at Scripps Research, a medical research facility in California, is the lead author of the article titled, “The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2” in Nature Medicine published in March 2020 that argued the natural evolution of the new coronavirus wrote off Sorensen’s proposition, describing it as “complete nonsense, unintelligible, and not even remotely scientific – leading the authors to make unfounded and unsupported conclusions about the origin of SARS-CoV-2”. The latter retorted “What nonsense? He is nonsense. He has no support. He says [originating from a laboratory] cannot happen. Of course this can happen.”  

However, Professor Richard Ebright of the Waksman Institute of Microbiology at Rutgers University in New Jersey pointed to new possibilities in the origin of the virus in a critique of Professor Andersen’s piece in Nature Medicine. 

He observed that: “The op-ed’s conclusion that SARS-CoV-2 genome shows no signatures of purposeful human manipulation is correct.” But “The absence of signatures rules out the possibility the virus was engineered using methods that leave signatures. However, the absence of signatures of manipulation does not rule out the possibility the virus was engineered using widely employed – including at WIV – methods that do not leave signatures. The op-ed does not even address the possibility that an unpublished WIV bat coronavirus… could be the progenitor of SARS-CoV-2.” He went further to note that “By definition, an accident cannot be a ‘conspiracy’…Persons who use term ‘conspiracy theory’ to describe the possibility of accidental release reveal themselves to be unable to read, unable to reason, or uninterested in the truth.” He believed that the truth could only come out from an independent, forensic investigation that would have access to places like the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Professor Nikolai Petrovsky at Flinders University like Skipper preferred an open mind on the matter. He reiterated the well-known view that zoonotic transition takes time to happen. This leads to the question of how that could have occurred. According to him, “One possibility of course is that it was just a massive fluke… The other possibility that you have to consider in terms of where its origins may come from is: Has this virus seen human cells before in a situation we simply weren’t aware of? And so one of those situations would be if the virus had been growing in human cells in the laboratory.” He further noted that politics has often hobbled the scientific. In his words, “It’s always fraught with difficulty when you have a scientific question that runs up against a political issue…I think that COVID-19 and its origins are [are] one of those areas where unfortunately we have an enormous amount of politics overlaid over the science. And so it gets harder to get to the truth in that context.”

Although we have been unable to prize the seal on the origin of COVID-19, there is now a vaccine zeitgeist. Johnson and Johnson’s vaccine has come to boost the vaccine boom even though the vaccine is only 60 percent effective and clinical trials are ongoing. With emergency use authorisation from FDA, the vaccine has gained inroad into the vaccine market. This seems to push back on the deleterious effect with a significant dimension in Israel. According to some statistics, “Israel has vaccinated over 53% of their population, twice the percentage of the next closest nation, Britain, with 26.9%.” In the revelation published in the Nakim Website and subsequently published by FranceSoir newspaper, experts have pointed to vaccine-induced mortality in ways that belie the news of effectiveness in the corporate media. With the insight from data drawn from Israeli news site Ynet, the Israeli Health Ministry database, and the U.S. federal Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) database, Dr. Hervé Seligmann and Engineer Haim Yativ of Aix-Marseille University Faculty of Medicine Emerging Infectious and Tropical Diseases Unit noted that in January 2021, there were 3,000 records of vaccine adverse events, including 2,900 for mRNA vaccines. According to the duo, “We took the data by looking at mortality during the vaccination period, which spans 5 weeks. By analyzing these data, we arrived at startling figures that attribute significant mortality to the vaccine.”   The authors argued that “vaccinations have caused more deaths than the coronavirus would have caused during the same period.” This for them is “a new holocaust”, and perhaps an indication of things to come globally. 

Covax is making good its promise for equitable distribution of vaccines. In West Africa, Ghana and Nigeria, have just received their consignment. In a sheer display of elite backwardness, the Nigerian Presidential Task Force on COVId-19 made a ceremony of it, while relying on a three-day test by National Agency for Food and Drug Administration and Control (NAFDAC) to certify a vaccine whose clinical trial is ongoing and whose long term effect is unknown.

Nevertheless, of interest is the news of a new apartheid policy engendered by the “vaccine fever” in Israel. According to the Jerusalem Post on February 28, 2021, it is to the effect of the commencement of a “Green Pass” programme that requires people to show proof of COVID-19 vaccination to gain entrance to “registered” places of business. This perhaps could become the new playbook for the world in the next few months. The question is where are the human rights in all this?

As I have always indicated in this serial, our hope for vanquishing this mysterious virus lies in non-vaccine remedies. The EXO-CD24 developed by Israeli researchers from Tel Aviv’s Ichilov Medical Center, Israel, perhaps could help mediate the vaccine craze. The drug claimed to have cured most volunteers who received it between three and five days in the Phase 1trial. EXO-CD24 is a medication delivered directly to the lungs, to help prevent the immune system dealing with COVID-19 from overreacting and causing complications.

The drug uses exosomes, tiny carrier sacs that shuttle materials between cells, to deliver a protein called CD24 to the lungs, and it is inhaled once a day for a few minutes, for five days. Importantly, the medication prevents cytokine storm that extreme reaction in COVID-19 that results in multiple organ failure and death. 

In Nigeria, the Ooni of Ife, Oba Adeyeye Ogunwusi, on March 2021, made public Verozil – an immune booster, among other products. Verozil boosts the human’s immune system against infectious diseases such as COVID-19. This is a product of a partnership between Herbal Remedies International chaired by the Ooni in partnership with Dr. Akintunde Ayeni, the chair of YEMKEM International limited. The first-class traditional ruler frowned on the import of medicines and other medical ingredients by Africans from developed countries when the continent harbours the best herbs, which could be used for vaccine production and other therapeutics. The new product has been certified by (NAFDAC). In my examination of local remedies, I had noted Ooni’s desire and conviction that local remedies for COVID-19 were possible. These efforts do underline the hope in non-vaccine remedies for COVID-19. Next week I shall discuss the dangers of biotechnology to the human race.

Akhaine is a Professor of Political Science at the Lagos State University.