Jumping the Pfizer/ Project Veritas Shark

A few words of caution as to what the Pfizer situation may actually mean.

Let me be clear and start by saying that I rushed to put out my Project Veritas post without spending much time thinking about the situation.

I dove in, head first into the sensationalist story and rushed to write a post.

However, afterwards I was texting a friend who made a comment about how Walker would be privy to all of that information, and that his lack of scientific words or understanding stood out.

This should have been something that made me take pause and realize that there was more to this story.

Brian Mowrey laid much of this out in his post yesterday, which raised some of the skepticisms I should have raised prior to making my post:

Is Gain of Function Real

Now, by all accounts it appears that Walker does work at Pfizer given the background information people have dug up.

However, there’s a difference between someone working at a company and someone actively engaging in the supposed “directed evolution” work that was reported in the video.

If this sounds strange, it’s important to remember that not every employee is going to be aware of all of the stuff that goes on within a company, and that goes for pharmaceutical companies as well.

Even at my old job, in a rather small lab it was quite common for higher ups to ask us what we did, not being aware of some of the methods we were using or some of the processes that went on. I doubt everyone knows everything that goes on at their job, and so this shouldn’t seem unusual with respect to the Walker situation.

In short, Walker may work for Pfizer, but that doesn’t mean what he says would be truthful of what exactly goes down at Pfizer. He may (or may not) know about the specifics of research if he spent time figuring it out or became privy to it, but otherwise we probably shouldn’t have assumed that he would be the go-to person for this information.

Becoming Popular

That begs the question as to why this information was spread around so quickly.

If it looks like a duck…

If my personal account is similar to others, it’s likely due to the information fitting so closely to all of our preconceived notions; that Pfizer is not looking out for our best interests, that SARS-COV2 came from a lab, and that Pfizer would find ways of making even more off of these vaccines.

What better way to make more money than to get ahead of a virus, or even make the virus yourself?

But this also comes with several caveats. As Brian noted, you can’t inherently get ahead of a virus and immediately release a vaccine at the same time the virus supposedly emerges, or even give out a prescient vaccine. Some sort of regulatory procedure, even if catastrophic, would have to come beforehand.

And even if the studies were rushed they still may not catch up to a constantly mutating virus.

Even the bivalent boosters became inherently outdated by the time of their availability. In that regard, every vaccine released would inherently be a case of attempting to catch up, rather than staying ahead.

The fallacy of groupthink

There’s also the fact that we may succumb to groupthink far more often than we would like to admit. What can sometimes be considered consilience and consensus agreement may actually be groupthink at play.

As several people began to post about this video it lends itself a false sense of being true by virtue of being disseminated around.

All of these people can’t be wrong, right?

But this way of thinking is itself entirely detrimental because it relies predominately on trust rather than truth, in that we may trust the reporting to be truthful rather than examine whether the information was truthful on its own.

I wouldn’t take James O’Keefe to be super knowledgeable when it comes to “directed evolution” or anything with respect to mutations, so James O’Keefe can only provide superficial commentary to these revelations.

Now, let me be clear that this isn’t a sting at O’Keefe, but that he can’t provide any additional context or some pushback himself, hence why Dr. Malone was added to provide commentary.

Unfortunately, I would argue that Dr. Malone didn’t add anything additional but instead may have taken the words of Walker at face value—something I noted to my friend when looking back at the video.

Again, no sting at Dr. Malone, but what happens now is that people may mistake the commentary as validating the truthfulness of Walker’s statements, rather than being commentary predicated on the premise that Walker’s comments were actually truthful.

In fact, it was Walker’s comments that should have been brought to question which should have been elaborated on by commentary.

This is one of the biggest issues with my post, as I based my post around the idea that Walker’s comments were inherently truthful, rather than spending time raising questions as to whether his remarks were based on his own knowledge or just falsities intended to swoon his date, which sort of appears to be the case in some regard (the crazy things we do and say for love, am I right?!).

More information continues to come out, but it’s apparent that I jumped the shark without considering some of the holes in Walker’s statements.

In regards to “Gain-of-Function”

In my post I raised a few comments about GOF from the perspective of what exactly GOF means.

This was a post I’ve been thinking of writing for some time, but I’ll provide a quick comment here as Brian described many of my concerns in his post.

It’s fascinating that GOF has been tossed around as a colloquial term used quite often in the public.

However, the way that many people interpret GOF may be different than how scientists or researchers refer to it.

This is a difference in a term being used colloquially or a term being a term of art, as Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying put it in their Darkhorse Podcast.

That is, there are several terms that scientists toss around that refer specifically to the scientific process or mechanisms in question that may differ than how people use the term in their everyday life.

An example of this would be cis or trans isomers, which in science refer to the orientation of functional groups around a double bond. The term is relative, usually comparing similar groups and whether they are on the same side (cis) or on opposite sides (trans) with respect to the double bond.

However, the way that many people use cis and trans colloquially refer to gender, and whether one is considered cisgendered or transgendered.

There’s some arguments as to whether the use of cis and trans for gender identity was a co-opt of the scientific terms, but regardless it’s clear that the way that scientists use cis/trans are different than how most people use it.

This goes the same with, let’s say, the use of the word luciferase which has been assumed to connotate something biblical, or how medicine dropped the nuclear in nuclear magnetic resonance because of people’s perceptions over the word, even if MRIs rely on the orientation of protons within a nucleus to create images (hence, nuclear, which is also what nuclear energy refers to as well).

This dichotomy can create several issues, because the colloquial use of a term may infer something with respect to its scientific nature even if the term is used incorrectly or misappropriated.

In that regard, the widespread use of GOF doesn’t inherently mean that what we are looking at is exactly GOF.

To that, it’s rather easy to see how anything can be considered GOF. In my prior PV post I alluded to the fact that researchers would manipulate SARS-COV2’s spike in order to figure out the behavior of various mutations. For instance, if a researcher wanted to figure out what the N501Y mutation did to the Alpha variant a researcher may use computational evidence to predict the behavior of this mutation, or they may insert the mutation into SARS-COV2’s spike and measure the in vitro activity.

This is why this recent post from Pfizer elaborating on their work with PAXLOVID may not be the bombshell reporting that it may seem (emphasis mine):

In addition, to meet U.S. and global regulatory requirements for our oral treatment, PAXLOVID™, Pfizer undertakes in vitro work (e.g., in a laboratory culture dish) to identify potential resistance mutations to nirmatrelvir, one of PAXLOVID’s two components.  With a naturally evolving virus, it is important to routinely assess the activity of an antiviral.  Most of this work is conducted using computer simulations or mutations of the main protease–a non-infectious part of the virus.  In a limited number of cases when a full virus does not contain any known gain of function mutations, such virus may be engineered to enable the assessment of antiviral activity in cells. In addition, in vitro resistance selection experiments are undertaken in cells incubated with SARS-CoV-2 and nirmatrelvir in our secure Biosafety level 3 (BSL3) laboratory to assess whether the main protease can mutate to yield resistant strains of the virus.  It is important to note that these studies are required by U.S. and global regulators for all antiviral products and are carried out by many companies and academic institutions in the U.S. and around the world.

If we are looking for consistency, wouldn’t any study using PAXLOVID to find resistant strains of the virus be considered GOF based on this metric? The same goes for Remdesivir, Molnupiravir, Ivermectin, HCQ, or really any antiviral that has ever been on the market.

Also, would the use of an immunocompromised individual as a case of viral evolution be considered GOF research, as noted in the South African study I mentioned in a prior post.¹

Once again, it’s interesting that the Omni-S paper was passed around so fervently with respect to GOF research, and yet not much was stated about the South African study that came to similar conclusions (a variant sandwiched between Omicron and Wuhan, albeit in an in vitro way for the South African study). This, of course, is likely just due to selection bias on my part—I can’t assume that studies I notice are ones that others have noticed.

Yet the argument still remains that GOF may not mean much at the end of the day as any tinkering of a virus may inherently be considered GOF.

In Brian’s post he raised some comments that GOF research has been around for a long time, and in his opinion hasn’t led to egregious outbreaks (as far as we are aware).

So similar to other terms that have come about during the COVID, it’s quite possible that GOF has only recently gained traction with everyday language even if the research itself has been around for quite some time.

The problem is that the use of GOF has been argued to suggest that GOF research shouldn’t be conducted, and yet if many of these studies were not conducted then people would argue why no such research was done to see if resistant mutations may arise, or how these variants behave relative to prior variants.

This presents as a problem in which the public wants their cake and eat it too. GOF research, whether nefarious in intent or conducted in a way to gain foresight into the behaviors of a pathogen, are done with a general agreement that such research should provide some information.

Now, it should be known that GOF isn’t inherently safe, nor is it something that we just overlook as we still need answers for SARS-COV2, as well as Omicron in my opinion.

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So at the end of the day does this mean that Pfizer is conducting these GOF studies? This would require us to consider whether Walker’s remarks were true, and that’s something I am (i.e. should have been) skeptical of.

I am also a bit skeptical as to the feasibility of this approach, which is something I should have raised more suspicion of as timing would likely undermine most of that work (by the time you get ahead of the virus the virus would likely have gotten ahead of the researchers).

That’s not to say that the research isn’t being conducted, but that more evidence would be needed than anecdotes and suppositions.

We should also be more skeptical and remind ourselves to not fall into groupthink.

With that, I apologize that I didn’t do my due dilligence and instead rushed to report—something that I have argued against previously and decided to not listen to my own words of advice.

Hypocrite much, right? 🤦‍♂️

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1. SARS-CoV-2 evolves increased infection elicited cell death and fusion in an immunosuppressed individual

Gila Lustig, Yashica Ganga, Hylton Rodel, Houriiyah Tegally, Laurelle Jackson, Sandile Cele, Khadija Khan, Zesuliwe Jule, Kajal Reedoy, Farina Karim, Mallory Bernstein, Mahomed-Yunus S. Moosa, Derseree Archary, Tulio de Oliveira, Richard Lessells, Salim S. Abdool Karim, Alex Sigal

medRxiv 2022.11.23.22282673; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2022.11.23.22282673