“Spike from the virus is like spike from the vaccine”: this is scientific illiteracy

There are substantial differences between “viral spike” and “vaccine spike”. This article explains the science behind the differences.

Republished from Jonathan’s Substack

This is an article we have been meaning to write for some time. It is a response to the claims many people make along the lines of:

Spike from the virus and spike from the vaccine are both harmful.
You get “spikeopathy” from both virus and vaccines.
Adverse effects from the vaccine are just like getting Covid.
The vaccines are harmful and it’s only because they make the worst part of the virus.
Vaccine injury and “Long Covid” have the same cause.

These are scientifically illiterate propositions. Moreover, they potentially aid the people most readers regard as the enemies of humanity.

We shall explain why.

Even if the protein was the same, it’s ridiculous to compare delivery of it via “the virus” to delivery by the vaccine

Saying that the effect of a product is the same regardless of the delivery route is just plain idiotic. It’s like suggesting that eating a steak and fries with a side order of greens is the same as homogenising this combination and injecting it directly into your circulatory system (FOR THE AVOIDANCE OF DOUBT, DO NOT TRY THIS!).

With viral infection:

  • When a respiratory virus infects a healthy person, all the heavy lifting in terms of the immune response takes place in the mucosa lining the respiratory tract.
  • This system is highly evolved and extremely efficient as it needs to act as a barrier between the outside world and our bodies and hence be able to deal with a constant assault by pathogens or toxins.
  • It is capable of destroying infected cells very rapidly, hence limiting viral replication promptly.
  • Our immune system rapidly takes care of any systemic cells infected with virus.
  • The threat is normally neutralised within a few days.
  • Any respiratory mucosal cells destroyed by the immune system are rapidly replaced – sacrificing these cells to protect the rest of the body is part of their function.

With mRNA injection:

  • The lipid nanoparticles carrying the mRNA become rapidly and widely distributed around the body [1] to multiple organ systems.
  • Throughout the body cells then become “transfected” by mRNA, which instructs them to express the spike protein on their surface.
  • The immune system destroys any such cells and, unlike respiratory mucosal cells, not all cell types transfected are able to regenerate (eg myocardial cells of the heart).
  • This happens very rapidly so that a large amount of spike protein is expressed at the same time.
  • This process was meant to last a very short period of time, but there is substantial evidence that it last for months in a significant proportion of people. Nobody knows if there is an off switch.
  • The amount of spike protein created from different injections varies hugely because each of the following stages introduces substantial variability: manufacture, storage, distribution, injection technique, and inherent biological characteristics of the recipient.
  • Hence one injection into one person could produce a thousand fold or more spike protein than another.

It’s not even the same protein though

There are substantial differences between “viral spike” and “vaccine spike”:

  • In the mRNA vaccinal spike, 2 proline molecules have been coded for as described here, with the intention of improving the “stability” of the protein created – this has become known as the “2p substitution” [2].
  • A process called codon [3] optimization has been utilised in the vaccine; this means that the letters in the code have been altered to optimize protein translation in human cells. This is meant to not change the protein being created, but substantial concerns exist around this process.

Of those two changes, codon optimization is by far the better understood; a critique of the dangers (which have been known for a long time) of this can be found here. It is well-established that this process can alter the folding characteristics of the protein created. The effects of these are unknown but what is known is that the way proteins fold is central to their functional characteristics, especially in relation to immunogenicity. Concerningly, “misfolding” of proteins is also a characteristic of “prion” disease such as Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease [4], a signal for which is present in VAERS.

A review of the concerns around codon optimization appeared in Nature as long ago as 2011 (download the PDF).

A key quote from that article from FDA scientist Chava Kimchi-Sarfaty is:

“From our experiments now, we do not believe that you can do that to any protein and have the protein behave as it did in its native form.”

Notably, Kimchi-Sarfaty is still at the FDA, her bio can be found here and includes this:

Her pioneering work that demonstrated that synonymous mutations affect protein folding and function overturned a dogma in biology and has wide ramifications in the basic understanding of biology, drug development, and the practice of medicine. Because synonymous mutations do not alter the amino acid sequence, they were assumed to be innocuous. She was among the first to demonstrate that this assumption is inaccurate.

Kimchi-Sarfaty has stated that:

The changed form could cause immunogenicity, for example, which wouldn’t be seen until late-stage clinical trials or even after approval.

As Ehden Biber pointed out in his Substack on this issue, the phrase “late-stage clinical trials or even after approval” would here refer to the normal timetable for a drug approval pathway, not the accelerated one adopted for the mRNA products, for which the dangers will be greater.

It is striking that the FDA has an employee who appears to be a world expert on a matter pertaining to a relevant critical design issue with these products, yet there seems to be no evidence that this matter has been considered by regulators at all.

Spike protein is probably one of many proteins produced

In the vaccinal version of the coding sequence, uridine has been replaced by N1-methyl-pseudouridine. Amongst other things, this has been shown to cause a problem known as “frameshifting” whereby nonsense proteins are made by the body in addition to the intended spike, as described in this Nature paper (see more on this below). See here for a review of the problem. The artificial durability of the mRNA will be synergistic to this and result in more of these proteins being created.

These proteins would not routinely be found as they wouldn’t have been looked for before – scientific investigations have to date focussed on detecting the presence or otherwise of spike protein.

The effects of these nonsense proteins is unknown, though, as foreign to the body, they are highly likely to be pro-inflammatory.

The above issues have the potential to act synergistically with each other

Note that if harmful nonsense proteins, or proteins which misfold are being created, the characteristics of the mRNA products which make protein translation more “efficient”, and which make the mRNA more durable, will simply result in more of these proteins being made for longer.

And it must also be remembered that this process is happening throughout the body due to the widespread distribution of the product.

It’s not all about spike protein anyway

Drawing parallels between two processes because they happen to have one thing in common is of questionable relevance if that one thing is a tiny constituent part of the whole process.

In terms of viral infection [5]:

It’s not as if the pathogenicity of “SARS-CoV-2” infection (such as it is) is just down to “spike protein”.

As has been noted before, the illness purportedly caused by this virus is clinically indistinguishable from that associated with other viruses which do not have the magical spike protein, so whatever part (if any) it plays in pathogenicity per se is almost certainly a small part of the whole:

Looking at the mRNA injections:

Again the harms we see are broad ranging, and in some cases overlapping with other products called vaccines.

In no particular order, and this is a non-exhaustive list, other harms (proven or potential) of these products include:

  • Class switch towards excessive production of IgG4 (inducing immunological tolerance) over other antibody classes.
  • DNA contamination – to levels far exceeding limits previously imposed by regulators – with unknown effects.
  • Toxicity of the LNPs themselves – especially of an inflammatory nature.
  • Toxicity of other adjuvants.
  • Antigenic fixation from inducing the immune system to focus on one viral antigen which likely adversely affects the flexibility of the immune system to deal with variants of the original virus encountered; linked to more severe illness following repeat infection.
  • Immune exhaustion from dealing with constant and excessive antigen production.
  • Endothelial damage, as that is where most transfection rapidly occurs.
  • Other harms consequent to the immune system rapidly attacking and destroying transfected cells. In this respect it is important to note that this would occur regardless of the actual protein being expressed.

Why is this so important?

The “it’s all about spike” trope serves the perpetrators of the debacle of the past few years in two ways:

  1. It embeds into people’s psyche that any and all the harms now coming to the fore following the ghastly experiments of the last few years could also be from “Covid” (“maybe I had it asymptomatically and it still harmed me?”) rather than from vaccine injury.
  2. It suggests that the mRNA platform can be “fixed” in future simply by having it make a different protein, whereas in fact hijacking cells throughout the body and making them uncontrollably express foreign proteins is quite simply one of the dumbest and most dangerous designs ever. [6]

Isn’t this messing with things we don’t really understand?

That there are so many biological findings only now emerging over the Covid vaccines goes to show that we do not understand anything like what we would need to know to have been sure these products were safe.

Their use induces profound effects on our fundamental biology. Our bodily systems are highly evolved and unimaginably complex. In the field of immunology, to take one – though particularly important – example, new theories of exactly how we fight off pathogens, and the role of immunity in relation to cancer, are regularly being elucidated.

Disrupting complex systems is bound to result in 2nd or 3rd order effects which were never anticipated and, since these systems have evolved towards optimal functional states, are highly likely to be net harmful.

A case for the (relatively minor) role of spike protein

The above is not to be taken as us asserting that spike protein is definitely totally irrelevant as a link between the pathology of both virus and vaccine.

It has long been assumed (from SARS1) that it was the spike protein which was particularly pathogenic with these types of coronaviruses (this is supported by in vitro studies of the effects of spike protein on human tissue), and hence a design which makes uncontrollable amounts of it for an indeterminate time throughout the body seems particularly reckless.

Some doctors are convinced that much of the pathology they see in relation to vaccine injury resembles that associated with severe Covid, though the two authors of this article have different viewpoints on the validity of this [7].

Regardless, we share the thrust of the sentiment expressed in this piece – that conflating virus and vaccine harms by over-emphasising the role of spike protein over all else is wrong and dangerous.


Notes

  1. This is now widely known, and would have been to regulators at all material times, even as they were assuring people that the product was completely broken down in the arm near the injection site.
  2. A codon is a sequence of three nucleotides that corresponds with a specific amino acid or stop signal during protein synthesis.
  3. There’s a summary of the relevance and importance of this here including some useful links, albeit with the gushing praise of someone who is completely “on narrative”.
  4. Jessica Rose has written a lot about this, see here for example.
  5. We are here playing along with conventional narrative. This is to aid communication. We have already expressed doubts about the precise role of viruses in disease, how they are transmitted, why people get ill sometimes and not other times and so on. Suffice it to say what we don’t know is orders of magnitude greater than what we (think) we know about these matters.
  6. It is notable that a Moderna trial for an mRNA Epstein Barr Virus vaccine had to be stopped because a participant developed myocarditis. See here.
  7. Briefly:
    Jonathan Engler sees the fact that “the virus” spread for months before the declaration of the emergency as strong evidence that it was the response to the (incorrect) belief that something novel was in circulation which caused any and all harms in relation to SARS-CoV-2, all of which are iatrogenic; he thinks that all so-called novel elements are explainable by observation and confirmation bias; he thinks that the PCR testing essentially illuminated part of the pre-existing endemic coronavirus swarm; he believes that if we had done nothing and not tested for anything, nothing unusual would have been noticed at all. His thesis can be found here.
    Clare Craig believes “Covid” is a novel and characteristic disease caused by an engineered virus, albeit one the effects of which have been drastically exaggerated, such exaggeration in itself causing nearly all the associated harm; she believes that had we done nothing and not tested for anything, an out-of-season flu spike in influenza-like illness would have been noted.
Authors
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Jonathan started his career in clinical medicine. After a few years, he moved into the Pharma Industry, designing and running an international clinical trial program, before he and a colleague spotted a gap in the market for a company utilising IT to automate several clinical trial processes. The company they founded was sold, it had 6 offices worldwide and 500 employees. Jonathan then retrained as a lawyer, but having missed the commercial world he invested in several Healthcare start-ups, one of which (involved in cancer diagnostics) he now chairs.

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