On this site, I wrote several posts where I shared my thoughts about the pandemic, and in particular about the government and medical responses to it. As with other topics on this site, I did not do a lot of research. Most of my thoughts were my reactions to the popular media descriptions of what was happening at the time. Broadly summarized, I was disagreeing with the policies and even with the science.

At the very start, I disagreed with the description of the virus. An RNA virus with a small genome has to be able to build multiple proteins including one that will reproduce copies for the RNA. The process for reproducing the virus is incredible to me, and it is gets even more incredible when I learn more details about it. Even more incredible is th the later announcements of variants that happen to retain the successful reproduction process. The virus genome has to do a lot of things right in order to complete a reproduction cycle. It amazes me that it can mutate in a way that makes the virus more frightening while still retaining all its talents for copying itself.

Also, very early on, the description of the disease was mystifying. While the primary focus was on respiratory distress, there were lots of discussions about other types of complications, especially related to the blood circulatory system. The explanation was that the virus had multiple ways it would attack the body. Typically, viruses are specialized to attack a certain cell type. This would be especially true for small RNA viruses. The concern was that the immune system needed to come up with a separate antibody for each of the attack options available to the virus. I recall expecting that people may need to get sick several times before becoming fully immune.

Another mystifying aspect of the disease came from reports of people whose blood oxygen levels were dropping without their having respiratory distress. Low blood oxygen levels will result in organ damage that will eventually kill the patient so something had to be done. However, the patient was not displaying the usual signs of discomfort or struggling for breath that would be associated with a respiratory problem. Apparently the lungs were working fine enough to expel the carbon dioxide but something was preventing the oxygen to get into the blood.

There was an unusual progression of the disease. The disease started very similar to a normal cold or perhaps a flu. Following that there would be a brief period where it seemed the patient was recovering if not fully recovered. Then there would be rapid deterioration needing intensive care that included invasive ventilators that often failed to save the patient. The second phase involved pneumonia symptoms. During the most severe portion of the disease, studies of the lung fluids and tissues did not show a problem with a the corona type viruses.

The mRNA approach to producing a vaccine was ready for trials immediately after identifying the virus. We learned that it happened so quickly because of recent innovations in the mRNA approach. This approach is cheaper because it gets each person’s cells to produce the antigen instead of making the antigen in a lab. The newness of this approach was scary to me. It seemed there were a lot of ways for there to be long term problems. This approach requires the body’s immune system to react to the body’s cells that are producing a new protein. This might train the immune system to attack normal healthy cells, leading to auto-immune diseases. Alternatively, it may train the immune system to tolerate misbehaving cells, leading a deterioration of the defenses against future cancers.

The government response with restrictions and constantly changing objectives was mystifying in a different way. Different governments had different restriction policies or different timelines. As the data came in, there was no clear relationship between those policies and the changes in the number of cases or deaths. In response, the governments acted in ways to reinforce their policies contrary to the evidence that the policies were not helping. The policies followed the science that reasonably minimizes the opportunities for the virus to spread by keeping distant people distant from each other.

During this entire episode, I regretted not being able to contribute more directly to this effort. Doing so would have required a completely different career path to start preparing for this kind of work decades ago. I only watched the evolution of the pandemic passively. I watch with growing annoyance. So little of this makes sense to me.

Actually, each of the above does make sense. I learned long ago about how viruses operate, and how the mRNA gets transcribed to proteins, and how a disease can cascade to affect different parts of the body. I understand the logic of using policies to slow the spread in order to buy time for a more effective cure or treatment to arrive. In all these areas my understanding is only at an introductory level. For each area, my understanding faltered when I learned more details. As more details emerged, I increasingly doubted my understanding.

Details are like data. It is my experience that increasing the amount and variety of data almost always undermines my confidence in my understanding of the world. I am inclined to believe the data more than I believe my expectations, even when those expectations come from science. In this blog site, I frequently describe this as the conflict between bright and dark data. Bright data is observations. Dark data is computed from science. As suggested by the adjectives, I prefer observations over science.

As more details came to my attention, I discovered new doubts in my understanding. Given my lack of specialized training, perhaps a lot more education can make the data make more sense. I will concede that I need more training. However, the data indicated to me that everyone was missing something.

A big portion of doubt discovery is the realization that we might be missing some important data. There is something going on that we are not yet measuring. That is consistent with my work where I regain confidence by including an additional source of data.

When the pandemic response moved to the vaccination phase, we began to get information about the vaccinated. There are reports of adverse reactions, and of vaccinated patients still ending up in the hospital with the disease that the vaccine was supposed to prevent. This data was consistent with my naïve expectations.

More recently, new data became available about the toxicity of the spike protein that the vaccines were designed to produce. This data indicates that the disease conditions are related to this protein instead of the virus.

I find this information very satisfying. It explains the odd behavior of the disease that starts off like a regular cold or flu that appears to have a recovery stage before things get worse. It explains why blood oxygen would drop while the patient remains comfortable without struggling for breath. It explains how a simple virus can affect so many different organs or tissues. It explains why the virus appears missing during the most severe periods of the disease.

My new understanding is as follows. The virus itself is a simple cold virus. The patient has the usual cold symptoms for a couple days before the immune system responds. The immune system destroys the virus but it will take longer to fully remove all of the viral debris. Among the debris are the toxic spike proteins that will continue to attach to ACE2 receptors throughout the body. The toxicity of the protein will cause damage to those systems.

The lung problems are a result of the toxic protein causing inflammation and associated conditions. This would occur even when the virus is no longer present in the body. This explains why the virus is not found in the samples of the advanced stages of the disease.

The lack of blood oxygen is the result of the toxic protein affecting the vascular system that carries the blood. The lungs are working well enough. The toxic spike protein is indirectly affecting the blood’s ability to carry oxygen.

The toxicity of the spike protein helps to explain the adverse reactions seen in the vaccinated population. The disease conditions are caused by the spike protein that the vaccine is instructing the body to produce in large quantities. For some people, the excess spike proteins will migrate to other parts of the body and this causes the problems observed, including what appears to be advanced stage COVID19 itself.

COVID19, the disease, is caused by the spike protein. The damage occurs long after the body eliminates the virus, and the exact same damage is possible without the virus in the first place. All that is necessary is to get the bare spike protein to reach the vulnerable and sensitive ACE2 receptors.

The toxicity of the naked spike protein is the data that was missing from the very start. If we knew this earlier, we may have recognized that there probably was very low risk of infection spread among the late stage patients and this would have allowed for more optimal care giving that could have saved more lives. The treatment itself would move toward neutralizing the spike proteins instead of following a virus protocol for a virus that likely is no longer present.

More importantly, if we knew this earlier, we never would have designed an mRNA vaccine to mass produce a toxic spike protein in otherwise healthy people.

The importance of the spike protein to all of the serious aspects of the disease may also explain why therapeutics like ivermectin are so affective across so many conditions. I understand the ivermectin may specifically attack the spike protein itself, and thus neutralizing its toxic effects everywhere.

It may also explain why antivirals like Remdesivir are not very effective in stopping the progression of the disease. It may stop the virus but the virus is not what is causing the advanced problems. There remains the problem of cleaning up the toxic spike proteins.

The entire pandemic scenario would have played out very differently if we recognized that the serious aspects came from a toxic protein instead of a virus. The virus may have been essential to deliver the protein into the body, but attacking the virus does not solve the problem of the toxicity of the toxic protein. The problem is the spike protein. The body is already effectively dealing with the virus. The body needs help with the cleanup of the toxic protein.

Had we known this early on, the government and medical policies would have been very different. The policies we followed were based on the expectation that we have no effective therapeutics for viruses other than vaccines. We have therapeutics to address the serious problem caused by the toxic protein. We happened to have Ivermectin that appears to work well. There are other protocols that have adequate effectiveness. Even if we had no existing therapeutics, designing a new one to target a specific protein is more practical than designing something to disarm an RNA virus.

Attacking the toxic protein therapeutically for the ill is also a lot more preferable to subjecting the healthy to potential harms of a vaccine.

There are still some mysteries about the spread of the disease originally, as well as recent reports of vaccine symptoms appearing in unvaccinated people who happen to spend time near vaccinated people. In either case, the free and bare spike protein may be transferring between people. It may not take much to cause problems when the protein concentrates in certain vulnerable spots in the body. Certainly, I have no idea how this mechanism would work, and it seems the experts dismiss this as impossible. I am merely noticing that the data appears to suggest that this may be happening.

The spread of the extreme disease conditions may be the result of transferring spike proteins, at least for the single hop from an infected person who has lots of spike proteins to one who does not have them. The mask wearing and hand sanitizing would be even less effective against a protein than a virus.

The spike protein is what we should have been focused on from the start. It is also much scarier than the virus in terms of long term health affects. The protein can get to the brain and it may have features such as prion behavior that may start to degrade brain matter in the next couple years. If that is a risk, our vaccination program has maximized the population would may experience this outcome.