Skepticism about SARS-CoV-2 variants' effects — Rosemary Frei

© 2021 Peter Free

 

21 February 2021

 

 

Rosemary Frei holds an MSc in molecular biology

 

She shares the skepticism that I do, regarding the Establishment's fanned flames over the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 variants.

 

Those include the COVID-19 virus variants that you have already heard of — the supposed more contagious "British" one and the allegedly even worse and deadlier "South African" one.

 

And so on for the others.

 

 

A preliminary, ground-laying observation

 

There is always something — usually invented, always inflated — that the Plutocratic Establishment wants the World's Masses to shiver (in their thin cotton undies) about.

 

Power and lucre, for Fat Cats, is — also 'always' — designed to follow on the heels of instilling that fear.

 

 

Let's dig into the SARS-CoV-2 variants issue, just a bit

 

My skepticism, when Government and Lamestream began caterwauling about these variants, was that they had gathered no credible evidence — from anywhere — to legitimately support their hysteria.

 

For instance, I found it laughable, when US "authorities" were trying to finger the British — and later the South African — SARS-CoV-2 variants for very probably laying waste to our American future.

 

That so, because at the time, the United States reportedly had genomically identified only 0.3 percent of its COVID-19 cases.

 

It is pretty difficult to make a blanket statement about which SARS variant is creating which carnage — when we do not know which variant(s) have caused 99.7 percent of our supposed COVID cases. Especially so, when the US still has no established virus-genome-reading and reporting system.

 

I extended my hysteria-squelching mathematical logic to other nations' similarly shared virus-related genomic ignorance — as to what was going on with SARS-CoV-2 variants within their borders.

 

South Africa, for instance — understandably not a powerhouse of investigative medical infrastructure — certainly had no idea (and admitted as much) which variant was doing what do whom — and in what proportions — or with which variations in alleged deadliness.

 

Similarly — at that time COVID-bungling Britain — long having been the world laughingstock of SARS-CoV-2 mismanagement — certainly was not going to demonstrate anything scientifically persuasive about SARS-CoV-2 variants' epidemiology.

 

The only cultures with an arguably persuasive grasp — regarding SARS epidemiologies (both type 1 and 2) — are all Asian.

 

For instance, if Taiwan, Singapore, South Korea or the People's Republic of China (etc, etc) were to posit a relationship between a certain viral variant and ramifications of a certain illness — I might tentatively give them some credence. But certainly not so, with regard to "western" claims for the same thing.

 

 

If COVID has demonstrated anything . . .

 

. . . it is:

 

 

the "west's" weakness in scientific thinking and action,

 

it's disinclination to take service-providing duties of Government seriously,

 

and

 

its murderous adherence to milking its own Publics to benefit power-wielding Elites' profits.

 

 

Enter Rosemary Frei

 

Frei, with her background in molecular biology, was curious about where loosely called 'evidence' for differentiating the effects of various SARS-CoV-2 variants was coming from.

 

She took a look at the pitifully scant literature involved.

 

For those of you with biological training and experience, her article is worth reading.

 

It well written, cites to the 'literature' at issue, and persuasively dissects where the papers do not support what has been made of them.

 

 

The gist of Frei's analysis . . .

 

. . .  based on biomolecular considerations — the details of which I omit here, due to their length — is this:

 

 

It turns out that the case for the variants’ contagiousness and dangerousness centres largely on the theoretical effects of just one change said to stem from a mutation in the virus’s genes.

 

[A]s I’ll show in this article, that case is very shaky.

 

None of the three papers was checked over for accuracy by objective observers – a process called ‘peer review.’

 

Nonetheless, all three were portrayed as solid science by many scientists, politicians, public-health officials and the press.

 

One of those three papers was published Sept. 25, 2020, in Science. It describe[d] experiments involving involving six rounds of division of the virus in mice.

 

The researchers found a large amount of the virus in the mice lungs right from the first round of division. Based on this, they pronounced the virus to have “enhanced infectivity.”

 

However, they didn’t actually test whether the virus is more transmissible/contagious – that is, whether it moves from mouse to mouse more easily.

 

The second paper was posted on bioRχiv on Dec. 21, 2020. It describes an “engineered decoy receptor for SARS-CoV-2.”

 

The complicated series of molecular-biological manoeuvers in vitro were performed that is hard to follow and understand – there is no ‘Methods’ section laying out the details and sequence what they did . . . .

 

The third paper was posted on the website of the online journal bioRχiv on June 17, 2020, and then in Cell on Sept. 3, 2020.

 

[T]he third paper doesn’t even use human or animal cells.

 

It involves a ‘yeast-surface-display platform’ . . . .

 

According to this paper, the N501Y amino-acid change results in stronger binding of the virus to the RBD [receptor binding domain].

 

However, the papers’ authors state in the last section of their paper that . . . . "There are many complexities in the relationship between biochemical phenotypes of yeast-displayed RBD and viral fitness.”

 

 Translation:

 

“Just because our biochemistry experiments showed that the presence of N501Y or other changes in the RBD seems to make the RBD bind tighter to the ACE2 receptor, we don’t know whether any of these changes make the virus more ‘fit’/transmissible.”

 

© 2021 Rosemary Frei, Is it True that the New Variants are Very Dangerous?, rosemaryfrei.ca (03 February 2021)

 

 

Frei's article continues on to show who owns the 'journals' involved

 

Big surprise. They are huge players in the planet's profits-swilling Establishment.

 

 

My added comment — regarding what Frei had to say

 

For many years, I wrote an in-depth, daily review of published papers in science and medicine (in those areas where I had training).

 

I looked at methods, reasoning, evidence in support and conclusions. And then rendered a step-by-step, explicitly reasoned, tentative assessment of how methodologically appropriate and scientifically convincing (or not) the published totality was.

 

What I discovered in doing this, year after year, is what a shocking proportion of unscientifically investigated, statistically distorted, and poorly reasoned garbage makes into (even supposedly respectable) publications.

 

The empty blather phenomenon that Frei points to — with regard to the purported effects of SARS-CoV-2 variants — is what I saw every day in writing that (now defunct) science and medicine blog.

 

In those days — and directly pertinent to our subject today — I came away convinced that statistician John P. A. Ioannidis had been absolutely correct — when he said that the majority of medical research is scientifically flawed. To put it kindly.

 

 

The moral? — The more one knows how to scientifically reason . . .

 

. . . the more skeptical one becomes, with regard to the Oligarchical Establishment's claims about anything.

 

Unfortunately, as I indicated just yesterday, most people lack this critical thinking ability — as well as a pertinent knowledge base upon which to exercise that skill.

 

Those absences are what make defending us from The Grand Plutocracy's lies so difficult.