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Rampant microbiophobia is out of control! New insights on the true nature of viruses

1. Fullgoldcrown says:

   December 5, 2021 - 7:57 am at 7:57 am

   Do you think the spreading coronavirus escaped from a Wuhan lab? You might have microbiophobia. Do you hope a vaccine will protect you against the coronavirus? You probably have microbiophobia. Do you feel safe from the coronavirus while wearing a mask, sheltering in place, and maintaining social distancing? You definitely have microbiophobia. Rampant microbiophobia—disruption of our lives from irrational fears of microorganisms such as viruses—is out of control in our society! But what exactly are these terrifying microbes called viruses? Where do they come from in nature? What do they do, and where do they go when they’re done doing whatever it is they do? Despite our society’s pandemic-related microbiophobia, all attempts to avoid the one-quadrillion viruses (1,000,000,000,000,000) lurking within and on the human body are futile. Metagenomics and future perspectives in virus discovery – ScienceDirect. How did so many viruses take up residence in areas of our bodies known as viromes, and how can we overcome our irrational, disruptive, and out-of-control microbiophobia of a common cold virus like the coronavirus?

   If you intend to seek answers to these questions by interrogating a coronavirus, you better give yourself plenty of time to track down and haul one in for questioning. They are awfully busy little critters, raising families of progeny, executing daring escapes and getaways from labs, smuggling themselves across borders, wielding razor-sharp spike proteins like swords to slay targeted cells, leaping between close-contact humans in a single bound, maneuvering around face masks, waiting patiently for your scrubbed hands to become dirty again, hijacking the DNA in cells and holding cells ransom, dropping out of view during summer to vacation in undisclosed hideaways, varying their appearance to disguise themselves from vaccines, and of course, making people sick, and committing homicide.

   We know these things are true because people called scientists told us so. Except some of these people really aren’t scientists at all. Take Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, for example, a trained physician and government bureaucrat who rules over the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Dr. Fauci often paints himself into corners by making all sorts of unsupported statements about the coronavirus pandemic. When the data changes and he is forced to reverse his statements, Fauci blames science, apologetically explaining that’s how science works.

   Science doesn’t work that way at all. Most true scientists are experienced enough to avoid making Faucian declarative statements that are not grounded in incontrovertible knowledge and facts. Nevertheless, undeterred by his lack of scientific acumen, Dr. Fauci presses on, declaring all sorts of things about vaccines, masks, lockdowns, and viruses. How much longer should we continue to believe Fauci that viruses are truly evil villains without irrefutable, beyond-reasonable doubt proof? For example, Dr. Fauci declared to U.S. Congress on March 11, 2020 that the coronavirus “IS ten times more deadly than the flu,” not that it MIGHT BE more deadly than the flu. Compared to 80,000 deaths during the 2017-2018 seasonal influenza, annual coronavirus mortality is nowhere near 10 times higher or 800,000 deaths a year, even allowing for mitigation measures to “stop the spread.” Fauci also co-authored an editorial in the New England Journal of Medicine declaring that the case fatality rate of seasonal influenza is 0.1%. In actuality, 0.1% is the many-times lower infection fatality rate of influenza, not the case fatality rate. The influenza case fatality rate in 1918 was 2-3%, same as the coronavirus when it first appeared in China. Public Health Lessons Learned From Biases in Coronavirus Mortality Overestimation (cambridge.org).

   Early Virology
   To uncover the true nature of viruses, and hopefully help us overcome our microbiophobia, we need to listen to real scientists with expertise in virology. Perhaps the world’s first great virologist that you likely never heard of is Dr. Robert Doerr, who edited the Archives of Virology throughout much of the 20th century. (PDF) When did virology start?, ASM News 62 (March) (1996), 142-5 | Ton van Helvoort – Academia.edu. Based on his research with herpes viruses, and using the newly developed electronic microscope in the 1930s, Dr. Doerr established some basic principles of viral properties. Doerr proposed that non-living viruses are created endogenously, within cells, and that viral infections can have non-specific causes without exposure to external viruses. Obviously, Doerr’s views are quite different from today’s prevailing view on the etiology and spread of viral infections. How did that change happen?

   Although never refuted, Doerr’s findings were eventually ignored and cast aside subsequent to the arrival of the central dogma of molecular biology, which asserted that all living organisms replicate life by transferring genetic information through nucleic acids DNA and RNA. 60 years ago, Francis Crick changed the logic of biology (nih.gov). Because viruses contain nucleic acids, the central dogma implies that viruses must replicate, even if they are forced to hijack the genetic replicating mechanisms of a host cell to pull off this feat. Want proof of viral replication? Place some viruses onto living cells in a petri dish, and observe how the viruses mysteriously disappear, eventually re-emerging as hordes of multiplying progeny that soon kill the living cells. Virus Replication – ScienceDirect. A word of caution: this viral replication “proof of concept” experiment has a few serious flaws which we will critically appraise later.

   New Virology Insights
   More recent evidence has discovered that although all living organisms replicate using nucleic acids, not all viruses that contain nucleic acids replicate. For example, non-infectious viruses have been found to contain RNA, yet they do not replicate. Biological activities of ‘noninfectious’ influenza A virus particles (nih.gov). What happens to the RNA in these viruses? Furthermore, why do large numbers of these non-infectious viruses aggregate in viromes within our bodies if the viruses don’t replicate? The answers to these questions can be synthesized from the latest virology research findings combined with a brief review of basic cell biology and immunology.

   Our body cells are in constant need of proteins for growth and maintenance. The blueprint to make a protein needed by a cell is contained in the genes within the DNA stored in the cell nucleus. A copy of the genetic code containing instructions to assemble a protein is transcribed to messenger RNA (mRNA), which delivers the genetic code to the cell ribosomes for translation into a protein. Once the mRNA has finished delivering its transcribed genetic code, it is fragmented into eight segments and packed inside a vesicle within the cell cytoplasm, known as an exosome, for removal from the cell as a waste product. Exosomes secreted by human cells transport largely mRNA fragments that are enriched in the 3?-untranslated regions | Biology Direct | Full Text (biomedcentral.com). Transported through the immune system, exosomes containing mRNA genetic code waste products are cleared from the body mainly through the gastrointestinal tract and nasal mucosal immune system.

   None other than Doctor HIV himself, Robert C. Gallo, co-authored a recent perspective paper describing similarities between viruses and exosomes that contain fragmented mRNA waste products. Extracellular vesicles and viruses: Are they close relatives? (nih.gov). This comparison is strikingly consistent with Robert Doerr’s proposal that viruses are endogenous products of cells. If we hypothetically assume that exosomes, cargo-loaded with genetic waste, are the same as viruses, the scientific paradigm of viral infection shifts dramatically. This new paradigm implies that genetic code stored within a virus is not translated into proteins to replicate the virus itself. Rather, genetic code fragments are simply remnants of discarded code that the cell previously translated during protein biosynthesis to meet normal cellular growth and maintenance needs. Furthermore, the cell synthesizes S proteins needed to encapsulate mRNA fragments within exosomes for removal as waste products. Those spikes on the coronavirus could turn out to function more like handles that facilitate waste handling by the immune system.

   Consider that the human body is made up of approximately 20,000 different kinds of proteins, The Size of the Human Proteome: The Width and Depth (nih.gov), and that mRNA code for each one of these proteins is eventually decomposed into eight fragments which are packed within exosomes in potentially over 40,000 random combinations. Even if the fragments aren’t combined totally by random, the manner in which mRNA fragments are packed together creates a plethora of unique genomic sequences detected in new versions of the virus which are called variants. Mutations or changes in genes are a property of living cells, but most non-living viruses lack genes, so changes in the genetic sequence of a non-infectious virus cannot be said to mutate. Although some variants may be associated with more infections than others, no variant of a non-infectious virus is likely to be any more infectious than any other variant. Furthermore, a toxin that impairs the immune system and slows down or inhibits viral clearance through the nasal mucosa may cause an increased viral load when exosomes accumulate as unexcreted waste products. This is also consistent with Doerr’s proposal that viral infections can have non-specific causes without exposure to external viruses.

   In a stunning example of reverse causality, evidence suggests that viral infections may not directly cause diseases at all. Rather, the association of a viral infection with a disease may be mediated by disease determinants that are toxic to the immune system, which impair immune function, delay viral clearance, and cause viral infections with possible sepsis from retained genetic waste products. Some of these disease determinants could be related to changes in nutritional status, a factor in susceptibility to infection, and could be more common during certain seasons such as in the seasonality of viral respiratory infections. Furthermore, detection of a virus in the nasal mucosa is not sufficient to cause symptoms of infections in asymptomatic cases unless immune function is also significantly impaired. Summing up, instead of replicating, viruses appear to accumulate in viral infections, like garbage accumulates on the sidewalk during a garbage collection strike. You wouldn’t walk down the street during a garbage collection strike and say, “Oh look, Honey, the garbage is replicating!”

   In this new viral paradigm, all of the personified attributes we usually ascribe to viruses to justify our microbiophobia no longer seem valid. But is there any actual clinical evidence to verify this new paradigm? Surprisingly, U.S. Navy experiments in 1918 in Boston and San Francisco confirmed that influenza could not be transmitted to groups of healthy sailors directly exposed to the breath, coughs, and sputum of patients seriously ill with influenza. pubhealthreporig00014-0071.pdf (nih.gov). Findings of the Navy experiments verify that non-infectious fragments of mRNA in exosomes can’t replicate, no matter how many inhaled viruses are transmitted through the air. By themselves, inhaled virions are insufficient to overcome functioning immune system barriers to infection. There is an important distinction between transmitting an inhaled virus and unsupported claims of viral infection spread interpersonally. Remember these findings the next time you blame your children for giving you a cold or the flu, or the next time you put yourself in harm’s way by darting out into heavy traffic to avoid an unmasked pedestrian approaching you on the sidewalk.

   But what about that viral replication “proof of concept” experiment? As an added control to the experiment, place nucleic acids onto living cells in a petri dish. You may observe the nucleic acids disappear as they are engulfed in endosomes and are broken down by the cells’ digestive enzymes from lysosomes for consumption as nutrients. Then observe the excretion of exosomes containing fragmented mRNA into the petri dish, which are normal waste products of genetic translation following protein biosynthesis. If allowed to accumulate without being removed from the petri dish, increased concentrations of these and other cell excretions eventually destroy the cells with retained metabolic waste products.

   In conclusion, the public has been indoctrinated with unfounded fears of viral infections, increasing our microbiophobia and exacerbating damage from punishing infection control measures that continue to disrupt our daily lives during the coronavirus pandemic and future pandemics. Alleviating microbiophobia related to the coronavirus requires further investigations and dissemination of new knowledge grounded in an evidence-based perspective on the true nature of viruses.