THE MAGICAL EMERGENCE OF THE WORST VIRUS EVER

During the past month, I’ve seen three very strange biological developments.

First, I saw a friend I hadn’t seen in six months. He looked ten years younger. The difference was striking. Instead of a paunchy midsection, he has a toned, almost six-pack gut. The lines in his skin and the circles under his eyes have nearly vanished. And his hair has darkened into the varied tones that it had a decade ago. I asked him if he’d been working out. He told me that he hasn’t been doing much exercise but that, for the past four months, has been taking mega-doses of three antioxidant supplements: NAC (N-acetyl-cysteine), Taurine and Pycnogenol, to which he attributed his rejuvenation.

Then, last week, at the gardens that I manage, we had our autumn killing frost. All of the green biomass collapsed overnight. But oddly, one gardener’s plants looked fine. When he arrived, he gave me some of his flavorful post-season tomatoes and cucumbers. He explained that, knowing the frost was coming, he had sprayed a solution of water and cayenne on his plants the night before. The capsaicin-generated heat in the granular, dried peppers was enough to protect his plants.

Weirdest of all, I was over a friend’s house last week. He had an Alaskan Malamute that he had rescued from a shelter. My friend requested his Alexa device to play a series of songs. The dog seemed to recognize each one and, during the choruses, howled along, nearly in-time and on-pitch, to each singer. The dog seemed to especially like Kate Bush. I’ve never seen/heard anything like it.

Taken alone, each of these situations was unexpectedly bizarre. Considered together, they seemed unbelievable.

As they should. Because, for the first time since I’ve posted on Substack, I’ve begun a post with a false story; three of them, all about biological phenomena too strange to believe.

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Typically, I tell true stories from my life experiences to show how I knew, from Day 1, that the “mitigation” and shots were phony and destructive. I told the fake stories above to illustrate a larger, related point about Biology: if you’re over 18 and someone tells you something about living things that flies in the face of what you’ve historically seen, what they’re saying probably isn’t true.

I didn’t buy the Coronavirus fear or interventions for a minute. My life experiences and education had given me an anecdotal and science-based framework that made me disbelieve that a respiratory virus could present a threat so severe that it warranted locking down a series of nations for the first time in history. As athletes, surgeons and fighter pilots say, you have to “trust your training.”

My training had shown me the following foundational principles relevant to the SARS-CoV-2 overreaction:

People, like flowers, grow, thrive, wear out and die at the end of their earthly season. The vast majority of people have immune systems that enable them to survive respiratory viruses. Hiding healthy people from each other won’t make a virus vanish; though doing so is certain to deeply damage the social and economic order and, consequently, billions of lives. Vaccines against coronaviruses had been unsuccessfully sought for decades. Governments and the media often lie or exaggerate. Whether real or contrived, crises typically create both losers and winners.

The Coronavirus overreaction clearly wasn’t driven by public health concerns. If our government was truly focused on public health, they’d have long ago removed half of the items from supermarket shelves. And they wouldn’t have rebranded marijuana as “cannabis” and widened access to it. They would also have pointed out ways to improve immune function. Etc. The Covid interventions couldn’t crush a virus; they were theater. The mitigation’s objectives were social, economic and political control, not public health.

Moreover, given my understanding of how people benefit from in-person interaction and how interwoven and intricate societies and economies were and how these need to function well for people to be healthy, I was certain it was a terrible idea to isolate hundreds of millions of healthy people from each other. Life is hard enough without concocting crises and unnecessarily disrupting the world.

This was plain in mid-March, 2020. It still is.

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OK, here’s my true story of the week:

While riding the Staten Island Ferry as a six-year-old, I went into the men’s room alone. As I looked down at the grated trough into which I was taking a whiz, I could see the New York Harbor water sloshing several feet below the deck. I thought the Ferry would, through that hole, take on Harbor water and sink. I ran out and alarmedly warned my parents and siblings about this impending nautical disaster.

They laughed and assured me that we would remain afloat. On other occasions, my parents calmly assured me that other things that seemed scary, e.g., lightning, snakes or swimming in deep water, weren’t dangerous if you remained calm and took basic precautions. I knew they’d seen/done things that frightened me but had nonetheless survived. So I trusted them and gradually learned a larger lesson about fear and risk management: for most Americans, life isn’t that dangerous.

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Nor are respiratory viruses scary. Given their pre-March, 2020 life experiences, why would anyone who had been around the block a few times cast aside what they knew about respiratory viruses and freak out about the latest microbe?

Mainly, people were conned by the manner of public messaging regarding SARS-CoV-2. In my opening, false stories above, I added some tidbits in order to misleadingly suggest authenticity. I learned this method from a childhood friend named Richie. Over the course of many years, Richie suckered so many people with stories that were completely ridiculous if you thought about them even a little. Aside from including fake details, Richie feigned earnestness very well.

The government and media used The Richie Method. Using credibility-boosting podiums, or news desks and logo-ed websites, they invoked jargon about “mitigation,” “droplets,” “flattening curves,” et al., showed footage of people hooked to ventilators and endlessly displayed graphs and digital tickers showing very dubious case and death counts. They pretended to be seriously concerned about people’s survival.

The con worked. The masses panicked and forgot everything they had seen before.

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Measured against the average human’s life span, natural phenomena and life forms are characteristically stable. Every day’s sunrises and sunsets, lunar phases and tides follow cycles that can be predicted far in advance. Birds and other animals migrate on well-known routes and intervals. Day length and vegetation dormancy and growth in any given location reliably follow annual patterns. You can set your clocks and calendar by these. Despite the furor about climate change, temperature and precipitation have, longitudinally, changed very slightly and gradually. Summer is still hot and winter is still cold. (FWIW, this New Jersey summer seemed pleasingly cooler and rainier than normal).

Changes to animals and plant species occur over unimaginably long periods of thousands or millions of years. Burning forests or massive meteors striking the Yucatan can cause animals and plants to become extinct. And plants and animals can be hybridized by breeders or by genetic engineers. But despite Stephen Jay Gould’s theory of punctuated equilibrium, radically new animal or plant species very seldom suddenly develop on their own. While viruses and bacteria evolve more quickly than do macro-biota, how often do microbes transform into distinctly more lethal forms?

Super respiratory viruses that wipe out vast numbers of healthy people are sci-fi constructs; such bugs don’t spontaneously materialize out of the blue. Pre-March, 2020, deaths among the remotely healthy from human-to-human transmission of a respiratory virus had not occurred during any of our lifetimes. Immune systems typically vanquish “new” viruses because new viruses resemble prior viruses and because our immune systems can mount both specific and general responses.

For maximum scare value, the government and media likened SAR-CoV-2 to the Spanish Flu of over 100 years ago. For multiple reasons, this comparison is inapt. First, the death stats regarding that outbreak vary widely. Second, human living conditions have changed dramatically since 1918. People consume much more fortifying protein and cleaner water than they did over a century ago. And today’s antibiotics to combat secondary bacterial infections that are common sequelae to respiratory viruses didn’t then exist. Further, and importantly, aspirin—then new—was used in wildly excessive, lethal amounts. As during Coronamania, with its reliance on ventilators and Remdesivir, and the suppression of inexpensive, off-label medications, there were many avoidable, iatrogenic deaths during the Spanish Flu wave.

How could the SARS-CoV-2 virus have been so much more deadly than any other such that, after millennia of human civilization, healthy people should be quarantined for the first time? Few asked this, or other, basic Biology questions. And fewer still thought of this major, practical constraint on Covid lethality: any virus strong enough to kill healthy hosts wouldn’t continue to spread.

Coronamania also reflected self-importance or a deeply unrealistic sense of unfairness regarding our place in history. Viruses have always inhabited human settings and have surrounded and colonized everyone. Probabilistically, why would anyone expect or believe that the worst virus in human history would suddenly emerge during his/her own lifetime? And wasn’t it a big coincidence that the most virulent virus ever, triggering mass social and economic disruption, would arrive during an election year involving a polarizing candidate? Was living at a time of the worst “Pandemic(!)” ever just some sort of very bad cosmic/historical, wrong-place-at-the-wrong-time luck?

Highly unlikely.

No one among the many people I know was dying from this “terrible” virus in March, 2020. Forty-four months later, I still don’t know anyone thusly killed; though I know of some nonagenarians and Stage IV cancer patients said to have been. My unmasked, unvaxxed wife and I and billions of others are still waiting to get sick.

The widespread 2020-21 fear of Covid can’t be justified by arguing that this virus was engineered, not natural. During those two years, none of the haughty lockdown supporters thought that the virus was cooked up in a lab. They couldn’t have believed that their beloved expert, Dr. Fauci, would sponsor such bioterror; to them, he was a secular saint. Anyone who didn’t agree that this virus evolved naturally was labeled a tin-hatted conspiracy theorist.

During Peak Coronamania, 2020-21, the mainstream narrative was that the “novel” virus was released by a bat or pangolin in a Chinese “wet market.” Until then, most people had never heard of wet markets. But because wet things are yicky, wet markets connoted uncleanliness that made gullible people believe that these settings could host some kind of “novel” virus and, thus, launch a viral epidemic. Further, bats and pangolins looked sufficiently creepy to make people think that these creatures could exude some exotic and dangerous germs. If the WHO had tried to blame Golden Retrievers for the outbreak, people would have laughed them off.

As time has passed, more people have come to believe that SARS-CoV-2 originated in a lab. Even if, as seems likely, this virus had been engineered into some more transmissible form, if it were truly mega-lethal, a larger percentage of those infected in characteristically elderly Italy and Spain and on cruise ships would have died. Instead, even nearly all the old folks survived. If, by comparison, a random sample of people were exposed to some lethal chemical, a large percentage of those exposed—of all ages—would be killed by such exposure. And if this worst-virus-ever was engineered, people couldn’t have hidden from it anyway; there were simply too many essential workers sharing air as they navigated the germy world to grow, sell and deliver food, water and potable alcohol and to supply electricity to the Covophobic recluses who surfed the Net and worked-from-home on laptops.

Besides, even if the vaunted virus was engineered, and even though the mRNA shots have killed many thousands of people, there are hundreds of millions more humans alive today than in March, 2020. This virus was never nearly so bad that it warranted anything remotely resembling like the governmental and societal overreaction that ensued. The remedy was clearly far worse than the disease.

Why would people expect that microbial life would radically, suddenly change in 2020? They forgot their training. They naively thought they were bio-historically unlucky. But it made no sense to believe that some new virus was far more dangerous than those that had existed at all other times of their lives.