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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 2, 2023

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Retroviruses like HIV are able to insert their genomes into the human genome because they're built to do so.

Yes, so what you are saying is that there are a bunch of HIV+ people walking around with reverse transcriptases in some of their cells.

What do reverse transcriptases do? They transcribe RNA into DNA.

They don't care if it's HIV or covid.

It is not built to integrate into the host genome.

If I was masterminding a big conspiracy to sterilize a big part of humanity, this is the part I would be lying about.

Not saying that this is true or not, I'm just saying one possibility is that it is actually packaged in there and nobody has the capacity or will to check.

Heck, they could have been injecting us with reverse transcriptase in a separate instance (food, drinks, other injections), but that's a little bit too convoluted.

The splicing might randomly impact the cell via accidentally inserting itself into a coding sequence, or an intron, or a promoter sequence, or it might integrate into a region of noncoding RNA where it might affect some of the local molecular architecture.

That's the fun experiment part.

Do this to billions of people and a few hundred thousands of them will have a few cells where the spike protein sequence just happens to insert itself in the right area to get translated into a functional protein. And some other hundred thousands will have sequences that do not generate a functional protein, but instead generate something like a prion protein, or turns the cell into a cancerous cell, which would be much worse. And some other thousands or millions will have some other kind of integration that just kills the cell instead and stops the issue...

It would be a really, really stupid way of trying to genetically engineer a population, because it actively wouldn't work on so many different levels.

Well maybe this was all a big test and it failed. Maybe they genuinely tried to engineer something functional to save humanity and they just screwed up big time and then they just kept doubling down on, covering their traces because of the stakes, the outrage, the money, and business as usual with Big Pharma and the people that are loyal to it.

Yes, so what you are saying is that there are a bunch of HIV+ people walking around with reverse transcriptases in some of their cells.

What do reverse transcriptases do? They transcribe RNA into DNA.

They don't care if it's HIV or covid.

So you're positing that the government is doing a massive psyop to...do untold things only to people with an active retrovirus infection (e.g. people with low HIV viral load wouldn't be nearly as susceptible), which might not even work because mRNA vaccines aren't actually using normal nucleosides but instead synthetic, modified nucleosides?

Wouldn't patients with an active HIV infection have, you know, more things to be concerned about, like their active HIV infection?

(Whether they would work would be an open question, but I could - with no knowledge of these particular nucleoside analogues - just as/even more convincingly say that it's protective against genome insertion especially compared to an actual infection, since after all, nucleoside analogues are exactly one of the ways we treat HIV via blocking reverse transcription!)

If I was masterminding a big conspiracy to sterilize a big part of humanity, this is the part I would be lying about.

Not saying that this is true or not, I'm just saying one possibility is that it is actually packaged in there and nobody has the capacity or will to check.

Heck, they could have been injecting us with reverse transcriptase in a separate instance (food, drinks, other injections), but that's a little bit too convoluted.

If they're lying about this, they could be lying about anything, couldn't they? HIV could actually not be a retrovirus and be some sort of coordinated poisoning of homosexuals that accidentally leaked to the heterosexual population. COVID could actually be a retrovirus (despite all 30k bp of the virus being public knowledge), and using an mRNA vaccine with is actually protective because we're reducing the chance of viral integration into the genome!

Especially since the sequences used for the vaccines are public knowledge for ages now! And when international labs sequenced it, they did find something interesting...just not about this particular conspiracy, but the lab leak one!

(Or maybe the entire world's labs are just in on one giant joke?)

As an aside, food and drink would be extremely implausible. It would have to survive heat and cold and digestion, unless you're alleging that government agents are clandestinely spraying synthetic viruses onto masses of foodstuff just before they're served.

That's the fun experiment part.

Do this to billions of people and a few hundred thousands of them will have a few cells where the spike protein sequence just happens to insert itself in the right area to get translated into a functional protein. And some other hundred thousands will have sequences that do not generate a functional protein, but instead generate something like a prion protein, or turns the cell into a cancerous cell, which would be much worse. And some other thousands or millions will have some other kind of integration that just kills the cell instead and stops the issue...

And people would do this in such an obviously stupid way...why? If you wanted to run stupid experiments that are essentially the equivalent of throwing tomatoes into a shredder and seeing if one tomato manages to reconstitute itself perfectly as it falls, you could...use lab animals!

It would also depend on what integration mechanism is used. Retroviral integrases and integration complexes usually preferentially bind to sites of high transcription...which would suggest that you'd have a permanent transcription of spike protein sitting there waiting to be degraded and not doing much else.

If instead your aim was to do the maximum evulz, this is again an extremely expensive and inefficient way to do it, given that most people wouldn't even be susceptible!

(That wouldn't pass any sort of ethics committee, but neither would the human version you're suggesting, so what gives?)

Well maybe this was all a big test and it failed. Maybe they genuinely tried to engineer something functional to save humanity and they just screwed up big time and then they just kept doubling down on, covering their traces because of the stakes, the outrage, the money, and business as usual with Big Pharma and the people that are loyal to it.

The point is that, based on very public knowledge about the vaccine verified by many parties throughout the world, this was very obviously not something meant to gene edit the majority of humanity in any way for any benign or nefarious purpose.

Practically the entire world would have to be lying about the vaccine for this to work, including China, which explicitly has been pushing Sinovac to the exclusion of the mRNA vaccines despite its lower efficacy!

There are concerns regarding such a new technology first applied to humans, true. Some of it even makes sense (e.g. overlapping ORFs being a theoretical risk)! But none of it even remotely approaches what you're alleging.