Viruses, Wuhan and Censorship Causing Uncertainty (Part 1)

Viruses, Wuhan and Censorship Causing Uncertainty (Part 1)

A hell of a lot of shady stuff is going on in China, and a lot of conflicting information is coming out. There’s a lot of confusion, even from professionals about the nature of the situation, and how/if the virus is changing in its severity, etc.

I aim to clear up a little bit of information and provide some context for the situation that is currently going on, as well as a few theories as to the real-world situation in China.

As a training biologist, I feel it my duty to tell you a little too about how viruses work, because understanding them is the first step to knowing how to avoid them.

How Do Viruses Work?

Viruses aren’t alive. They’re simply protein coatings with genetic instructions which code for more viruses. Their version of genetic material can either be RNA or DNA based. DNA viruses use the same instructions we do.

RNA viruses are similar, but simpler, they instead use what can basically be called a different programming language to DNA, one that is much more accessible by our body and is read and translated directly, so while RNA has the advantage of being readily readable by a huge range of hosts, DNA viruses are a little more difficult to get off the ground.

In essence, they inject their instructions into our cells and force your cells to manufacture perfect, or at least, enough copies of the same version of the viruses, which I will get onto soon.

Viruses are passed on either through the food we eat, the air or the water. 

How Does the Wuhan Virus Work?

The Wuhan virus works in a slightly different way than many viruses. Instead of just injecting its code into your cells and forcing them to manufacture copies of them, it relies on a system which produces its own copies of DNA extremely rapidly.

This could be a reason why it is so virulent; rather than a critical mass of the virus having to be reached, going from one copy of the virus to thousands, one virus can provide specific, dedicated machinery which allows for the nearly instant creation of many copies of the virus’s instructions, leading to the cells of the body becoming overwhelmed more quickly.

For you to be infected, you need only one complete copy of the virus’s short DNA or RNA sequence.

Mutation

Since so many copies of the virus are produced during replication, mistakes are possible. Viruses have markers on their surfaces, which allow them to be read by the immune system as a threat, but function to interact and trigger their replication inside of our cells.

A mutation of the structure of these proteins would render the virus completely alien to the body. This is how the common cold likely survives, when genes are copied incorrectly, leading to either failure of that particular version of the virus’s RNA. But, as I will talk about more in the Advanced section, this is what viruses rely upon.

Feel free to skip the Advanced section, as this information isn’t needed, and skip to The Wuhan Situation section.

Advanced

So, I’ve tried to simplify a lot of the information, but for people with a greater interest in the subject, I’ll go into more detail here. A lot of scientists don’t know how viruses mutate, aside from the fact that the fact they do.

Well, I think I have an idea. It stems from an idea, or hypothesis I guess, which I came up with. I could be wrong, but the science adds up. What we have in our body during a viral infection is a selective mechanism.

So, say the common cold attacks our body, white blood cells counter the attack, cut it up and store these markers that are on the virus’s surface in our body. Our body remembers what it has fought before, and to some extent it remembers when it fought it too.

So long a complete set of the genetic code of the virus remains in some of your cells though, even in a small amount, you are a carrier. Not only are you a carrier, you’re the engine by which mutation takes place.

A virus which is, say, in a pond or a dead animal, etc. is inactive, but inside of you, it has selective pressures working both for and against it. Variations of the virus that your body remembers, recognises and “sees” as a threat so to say, are quickly destroyed. Variations of the virus that aren’t remembered or have small traits of their structure that is different results in lower rates of detection by the immune system.

So, say virus 1 is wiped out, well its instructions still exist in your cells, being copied over an over again. It gets to go back to the drawing board over and over again, with new errors sometimes cropping up, and sometimes perfect copies are produced. They spread and are wiped out.

Our bodies are, quite by accident, making their predator more deadly by killing that which it recognises and making a less-detectable version more prevalent. This spawns virus 2. Virus 2 then spawns virus three, and before you know it, you go from one virus to many different variations of that one virus, which then battle it out in terms of competition for resources within your cells.

The most virulent, and quickest to spread, as well as the least likely to be detected in your body, wins and is spread via coughing, contact, etc.

We are inadvertently making a machine within our bodies that makes viruses more virulent, but that doesn’t quite mean more deadly.

A good virus doesn’t kill the host, a good virus “tames” the body and finds a balance/stable rate of production to ensure its spread. All viruses thus start out near-lethal and eventually become less and less lethal.

This was the case with rabbits in Australia. Australia has a rabbit problem, they’re non-native and they cause a lot of damage. The Australian government tried releasing a very virulent strain the Myxoma virus, which causes death via massive haemorrhaging.

Over time, they found the virus became less and less lethal, and eventually had to resort to another method of culling. This also happens in humans. Lethality, and also non-lethality isn’t assured. Every virus reacts differently, and that brings us onto the Wuhan Corona virus.

The Wuhan Situation

So, I have given a brief, or not so brief explanation of virality, how viruses reproduce, etc. Well how does this relate to the Wuhan situation.

Well, viruses such as these, with dedicated systems that enable higher infectivity aren’t really that rare, what is rare however is for them to emerge in a country which is actively hiding the number of infected.

What’s also very, very odd is the fact they’re building a hospital designed to house 4,000 people in ten days despite the fact that they’re claiming infection rates are around 2,100 as of writing this.

It means they’re expecting at the very least, a doubling of the number of infected.

There are claims that 90,000 people have been infected. If true, then this virus is in fact far more virulent than others would have you believe, others being the Chinese Government. There are also claims that this virus was in fact infective, and transferable between humans on the 6th (if memory serves correctly) of January this year.

The image we get is patchy. The resolution of the entire situation is marred by the censorious and shady as hell Chinese Government’s Surveillance state.

Many conspiracy theories are coming out about this situation, and with a government as shady as China’s and a situation as bleak as the citizens of China, it’s hard not to come up with conspiracy theories.

I floated one myself, that this is a part of phase one of a mass culling. It would fit the form and trajectory of pretty much all autocratic dictatorships, aka communist societies in history. Am I saying that’s ABSOLUTELY true? No. Not at all.

I just have suspicions that there is something very… not normal about this situation. China is a genocide committing, mass censoring and brutal dictatorship. Never doubt them, or their ability to do truly reprehensible things. They have, are and will continue to do shady shit.

But, we won’t know for sure the cause of the corona virus, where it came from, or whether or not it’s possible to stop the virus before it becomes virulent and incredibly lethal (if it does) and we have very little data about what the hell is going on.

This lack of information, conflicting information, etc. is seriously harmful to truth, to scientists trying to solve the problem, and the true harm this disease could do isn’t known at all.

Anyone saying it’s nothing is lying, it’s a virus that has killed, sure so has the flu but we have shots for that. Imagine having a flu that could, according to sources, infect 90,000 people and cause mass infection. On top of that, imagine that virus had NO cure, and its harm wasn’t known.

So, the situation isn’t exactly nothing, but it also isn’t the end of the world. Stay away from China and Chinese products from China, buy some water and food and be healthy.

If I learn anything else, I’ll produce a part two.

Thanks for listening.