The Origins of SARS-CoV-2

Virology is a rogue profession which has killed tens of millions of people and harmed billions

Please see my new page vitamindstopscovid.info/07-origins/ which links to the most significant documents and articles concerning:

• The origins of SARS-CoV-2, the virus which causes COVID-19.

• The fraudulent authorship and corrupted background of the highly influential March 2020 article in Nature Medicine which rules out a lab leak as the source of SARS-CoV-2 and concludes that it most likely arose from zoonotic transfer from bats via an intermediate species at the Wuhan Seafood Market (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huanan_Seafood_Wholesale_Market):
  
  The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2
  Kristian G. Andersen, Andrew Rambaut, W. Ian Lipkin, Edward C. Holmes and Robert F. Garry
  Nature Medicine 2020-03-17  (26, pages 450–452 (2020))
  www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0820-9

The photo above is of ~2500 pages of material about these matters which I have only partly read, all drawn from the items linked to at: vitamindstopscovid.info/07-origins/.

The bottom left stack of A4 sheets is the 300 page April 2023 report on the origins of SARS-CoV-2, prepared by the Republican minority of the Subcommittee on Primary Health & Retirement, one of the subcommittees of the U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions. This is by far the most comprehensive publicly available report on this subject.

Above it are a variety of academic journal articles and others from sites including Brownstone.org, The Intercept and U.S. Right to Know. At the top right are more such articles, including a bunch written since October 2022 by Alex Washburne, only some of which I have read and all of which, I am sure, are highly pertinent to the question at hand.

For a quick overview of the history of gain of function (GoF) research, SARS-CoV-2 and the Proximal Origin article, I recommend his recent article alexwasburne.substack.com/p/the-case-for-a-lab-origin-of-sars:

A short history of SARS-CoV-2 Origins

The hypotheses which might explain the origins of SARS-CoV-2

There is no reason to believe that the three viruses:

• SARS-CoV-1 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SARS in 2002 (when it was known as “SARS” for “Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome”),

• MERS (Middle East Respiratory Syndrome) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MERS in 2012, or

• SARS-CoV-2 (SARS CoronaVirus 2) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SARS-CoV-2 in 2019

jumped directly from bats to humans. All three are within the betacoronavirus en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betacoronavirus genus, with MERS being within the merbecovirus sub-genus and the other two within the sarbecovirus sub-genus. Bats are the natural reservoir for most types betacoranavirus, including these two sub-genera.

Viruses of these sub-genera can infect mammals other than bats, and it is well established that both SARS-CoV-1 and MERS infected humans via a zoonotic transfer route, in which the progenitor viruses jumped from bats to intermediate non-human host animals. The virus was then transmitted between these animals and virus evolved further to the point where it could both infect and be transmitted between humans.

After the detection of human infections, it took 11 months for a peer reviewed article to be published identifying the SARS-CoV-1 intermediate host as Himalayan palm civets - and 15 months for such an article to be published showing camels were the intermediate host for MERS.

To date - July 2023, 44 months after COVID-19 cases were first identified - no intermediate host for SARS-CoV-2 has been identified. The Chinese Communist Party government has covered up its handling of the early stages of the pandemic and the work of the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WiV). It alleges, without evidence, that the virus was imported into China in frozen food from the USA. However, if the CCP did find evidence of zoonotic transfer in Chinese mammals, it would be to its advantage in many ways to make this public. This would be consistent with the CCP’s urgent moves to close the market and sample it for signs of SARS-CoV-2. Solid evidence of zoonotic transfer would disprove the most damaging hypothesis for the reputation of the CCP and for all of China: that the virus was generated in a Chinese laboratory.

Here is an exhaustive list of possible explanations for the origin of the first one or more strains of SARS-CoV-2 to infect humans:

1. Zoonotic transfer via a currently unidentified non-human animal species. This is most likely to have have occurred in the wild, including in farms and urban markets. However, it could, in principle, have occurred if a virus which naturally evolved in an intermediate species was being studied in a lab and the jump to humans occurred in the lab, such as by accidental release or by it infecting one or more lab workers.

2. The virus being previously unknown, jumping from a bat to a human. Such bats are too far away from Wuhan for this to have occurred, but bat and bat viruses were studied at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WiV). This direct path is regarded as impossible since SARS-CoV-2 differs too much from all known bat viruses, in ways which are highly adapted to humans - and there is no known reason for such features to evolve in bats.

3. The virus was created in the lab by serial passaging, and then infected humans inside and/or outside the lab. Serial passage is a common technique by which laboratory workers infect a set of animals or animal cells in a tissue culture with an initial, presumably naturally occurring, bat or intermediate animal virus and then select some viruses from the infected cells to repeat the process in the next of a potentially large number of such cycles.
   
   Serial passaging is a form of accelerated, human-directed evolution, with the conditions accidentally and/or deliberately creating selection pressures which favour the survival and replication of viruses with mutations which alter their behaviour. The conditions may increase the rate of mutations above that found in Nature. This is easy to perform and can generate a variety of strains of the original viruses with generally small, incremental, alterations to the genome - and occasionally with large changes.
   
   The question of whether a bat virus could acquire a furin cleavage site (which enables the human furin enzyme to break the spike protein in two as part of its actions to enter a cell, in a way which facilitate this entry) via serial passaging arose during the writing of Proximal Origin and in the recent congressional hearing (below). While this is not impossible, it is generally thought to be extremely unlikely.
   
   Serial passaging is gain of function (GoF) research, in that it may - by accident or design - lead to the generation of novel viral genomes which causes the virus to be more transmissible and/or more virulent (stronger symptoms) than the initial virus. At least one Proximal Origin author - Kristian Andersen - did not consider this to be “engineering”. However, I believe it is reasonable to consider this kind of research as engineering - even though it is not as specific or directed as the approaches discussed next, which are always regarded as genetic engineering.

4. There are a variety of techniques, including “chimeric” approaches, which I lack the expertise to describe in detail.
   
   The production of a chimera of two related virus strains involves breaking the genomes (as RNA) into half a dozen or so pieces, at particular points, and then taking segments from both viruses and reassembling them to form a new genome with one or more segments from one virus and the rest from the other. Some or all of this work may process the genetic information encoded in DNA, rather than the normal RNA contained in the virus, because DNA is more stable and easier to work with and alter.
   
   For instance, it is possible to replace the spike protein gene from one virus with the spike protein gene from another virus. Chimeric genomes typically contain patterns resulting from the restriction sites, where the DNA version of the genome was cut by specific bacterial enzymes. Such patterns have been found in SARS-CoV-2, according to this preprint, co-authored by Alex Washburne, which is currently undergoing peer review prior to publication:
   

   Endonuclease fingerprint indicates a synthetic origin of SARS-CoV-2, Valentin Bruttel, Alex Washburne and Antonius VanDongen, bioRxiv preprint 2023-04-11
   www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.10.18.512756v2.
   
   It is also possible to introduce specifically crafted sequences of nucleotides into the finally assembled genome, where these sequences nave a maximum practical length of 100 to 200 nucleotides en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nucleotide, also known as base pairs en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_pair. It takes three base pairs, each with one of the four combinations of the four different nucleotides, to form a codon - of which there are 64 possible combinations. Each codon can specify a single amino acid to be built into the gene’s final protein. These DNA oligos are made to order and are too short to build a complete viral genome, of 30,000 or so base pairs, except with extreme effort and expense, since the error rate of these short pieces of DNA rises according to their length. However, it is relatively easy to use short synthetic pieces of DNA to insert specific new sections into the final genome, such as to build a protein with a specific sequence of amino acids which furin binds to, and so cleaves the protein.
   
   This only requires 12 base pairs: CCT CGG CGG GCA, which is one way of encoding the amino acids Proline Arginine Arginine Analine, which form the furin cleavage site. The CGG CGG pattern is highly unusual and suggests that these 4 codons were inserted by genetic engineers. I will write more about this once I have figured out the state of the debate about this.
   
   Such work may be referred to as a reverse genetic system www.nature.com/articles/s41596-021-00491-8 in which the RNA viral genome is copied into DNA, which is then manipulated. The resulting DNA is transcribed back into RNA, which is forced into a susceptible cell where it programs the cell to generate whole, infectious, viruses with the new genetic design.
   
   Modifications to a previously established “backbone” genome (see MA15 in the slides below) can be made with relative ease, such as by introducing one or more genes from a similar virus in place of the matching gene(s) in the backbone genome.

It is well known that the WiV was using serial passaging and other techniques to research bat coronaviruses. They may have been doing this for their own reasons, but they certainly had been doing this as part of United States funded research, channeled through the EcoHealth Alliance, using techniques developed by, and transferred to the WiV by, the acknowledged world leader of coronarvirus genetic engineering, Professor Ralph Baric.

The banal evil of Gain of Function virology

Here is a video of Ralph Baric, on 2018-04-06, at his University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, describing an experiment in which he and his colleagues infected mice, which had been genetically engineered to express human ACE2 receptors, with several novel viruses which they deliberately engineered. This is described, at least in part in SARS-like WIV1-CoV poised for human emergence, Meachery et al. PNAS 2016-03-14: www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1517719113.

The generation of these mice should raise significant concerns. If such mice escaped the lab, or were spirited away as pets, then populations of such mice might develop and so provide an ideal population of zoonotic transfer intermediate host animals for the evolution of bat or other viruses into strains which would infect humans.

At 11:52 he is discussing six viruses, all but the first of which were chimerically engineered by inserting the spike protein gene from one of six bat coronavirus in place of the spike gene from five preexisting viruses. Viruses 3 and 4, which contained the spike genes from WIV1 and SHC014 bat viruses, were moderately virulent in normal mice, but were lethal (underlined, below) in the humanized mice.

He is describing novel viruses, deliberately engineered using chimeric techniques, to more rapidly gain entry to (and so to infect) cells with human ACE2 receptors than they gain entry to cells with mouse or bat ACE2 receptors. (The exact molecular structure of the ACE2 receptor en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angiotensin-converting_enzyme_2 varies from one species to the next, and can vary somewhat within a single species.)

This would likely make the new chimeric viruses more transmissible and/or virulent in humans than the original SARS-like backbone virus they started with: MA15, which had been engineered to better infect mice.

If these viruses escaped confinement they could have started a new pandemic. They would not necessarily have been as transmissible and virulent as SARS-CoV-2, which has a spike proteins with a furin cleavage site and changes to the receptor binding domain (the part which closely matches and binds to the target cell’s ACE2 receptor). Both such changes are crucial to SARS-CoV-2’s transmisibility and virulence in humans.

If this had been part of a commercially produced horror movie, the score would have been increasingly menacing to this point and would have darkened and convulsed with portent as he pointed to the slide, below:

and uttered these words in bold:

If the parental strain is virulent and you drop these bat [bat coronavirus spike protein] genes in, [here is is referring to wild-type experimental mice as hosts, with the original virus perhaps having been deliberately fine-tuned to infect such mice] they attenuate virulence - that's good news.

But if you take a mouse which has a human [ACE2] receptor in it . . . 

Here is is referring to the "Transgenic hACE2 Gene" column where it intersects with the columns for the WIV1 and SHC014 bat virus spike protein genes, where the two cells are "Lethal".

" . . . these viruses are lethal.

Ralph Baric is the world’s foremost expert in coronavirus genetic engineering. Please do play the video to 11:53.

This is a horror video.

He clearly described GoF research which could have started a pandemic in humans and killed millions of people.

His tone of voice was entirely routine.

This exemplifies the principle that evil can be banal.

It was a crime against humanity to perform the genetic engineering which resulted in the presumably accidental escape of SARS-CoV-2. It certainly was made in a lab, probably in Wuhan, on the basis of American information, training and prior funding. There is no direct evidence for it arising from zoonotic transfer.

The United Nations definition of a crime against humanity does not require that there be any specific intent: nutritionmatters.substack.com/p/the-covid-19-pandemic-response-killed.

I want to give some background to the the abovementioned experiments, since I argue that the researchers committed a heinous crime. In this instance the chimeric viruses have not caused human disease, as far as we know, but they might have if they had escaped confinement. Beyond that, the acceptance of such research, and the knowledge and confidence gained from this specific research, likely emboldened these and other researchers to conduct further such GoF experiments, possibly including the researchers in Wuhan and/or the USA who created what we now know as the initial strain of SARS-CoV-2.

At 10:48, Dr Baric points to the spike gene part of a viral genome depicted in a slide which closely resembles slide 16 in his February 2020 PDF: https://www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/nvac_feb2020_day1_panel2.pdf:

This slide depicts Gain of Function research: chimeric engineering in which the spike gene of a mouse-adapted version of epidemic SARS virus is replaced with the spike gene from each of five wild bat viruses.

The resulting viruses were used to infect a tissue culture of human airway epithelial cells in an attempt to predict which of these bat viruses might be able to mutate, naturally, to cause epidemics in humans. However, if the now partly human-adapted experimental viruses infected humans, naturally occurring mutations might enable them to cause the epidemic disease which researchers are supposed to be trying to prevent.

This research is very similar to that which generated SARS-CoV-2, which was most likely a combination of direct addition of novel codons such as those for the furin cleavage site and, as depicted in the slide, chimeric splicing of segments of different viral genomes together in a way I don’t yet clearly understand, involving cuts made by bacterial restriction enzymes at the restriction sites depicted by red asterisks.

Ralph Baric described this work, which is routine for these researchers, in an even tone of voice which gives no indication of its reckless and potentially disastrous nature. At 10:40:

The spike protein gene mediates species specificity.

The exact design of the spike protein affects the degree to which the virus can infect different species, due, in large part, to different details of the design of the ACE2 or other receptor in those different species.

You can actually [pointing to the diagram] remove the spike gene from these epidemic strains [from the genome of the mouse-adapted version of epidemic SARS] and put these bat genes [spike genes from bat viruses such as WIV1] in place of them.  This was done by Vineet D. Menachery and other people in the [Baric] lab.

Of the five we dropped in, three of these could replicate just fine and use human [ACE-2] receptors for entry.

Evil is an important word.

If it is to have any meaning or purpose at all then it must be a valid description for the actions of people who should know better, deliberately taking actions which imperil the lives of others - especially of millions or billions of people, likely including themselves.

Evil need not be deliberate. Here it takes the form of an egregiously incompetent or foolhardy focus on the intriguing business of virological research, conducted in a way which carries a material risk of causing a disastrous pandemic. Likewise, after the event, failing to realise - or realising and hiding - the extreme recklessness of this line of research. Likewise portraying such research as worthy of funding on the basis that it is a proper, or even the best or essential, path which humanity must take in order to protect us all from pandemic disease.

I say this is evil. I have no formal qualifications in any field, so I am not claiming this is a judgment which anyone should accept on the basis that I am some kind of expert.

Still, it is my right - and my duty - to warn others of dangerous behaviour in the past, especially since it is continuing at a greater pace than before the COVID-19 pandemic, precisely because of the pandemic.

Story-tellers, authors and screenwriters craft their material with cues that enable us to clearly identify the evil ones. So it is easy for us to be sure of ourselves when we boo, hiss, curse or throw rotten fruit at the perpetrators - the ones in the black hats, the ones for whom the score turns menacing.

There are no such cues here. We pass people every day with smiling faces much the same as those of Ralph Baric and his colleagues pictured in the slide. We need to pay attention to this banal evil, enacted by people who are entirely confident of their motives and risk assessments, because this kind of egregious failure in virologists is an evil which has killed millions and will kill many more until society properly regulates their activities.

I am not a virologist, but I believe I know enough about this work to be sure that it was potentially disastrous, and that it differs little in process, or likely outcome, from the research which created SARS-CoV-2. It hardly matters whether the SARS-CoV-2 research was motivated by a desire to predict the pandemic potential of wild viruses, to predict the nature of future human pathogens in order to research vaccines and antiviral drugs, or to generate a bioweapon. All such research generates novel infectious viruses which have the potential directly, or with further deliberate or natural mutation, to cause disease in humans, potentially on a scale which harms or kills billions of people. All that stands between such research and such a pandemic is:

• To what degree the new virus or its mutated descendants are transmissible in humans.

• How well the lab’s mechanical and chemical containment systems work, which depends very much on the exact procedures followed by the individual researchers. As Alex Washburn observes, all it takes is a punctured rubber glove for the researcher to become infected.

We accept the need for BLS4 labs, which provide the maximum possible level of containment, for research on naturally occurring pathogens.

Why should the public, or any virologist, think that 100% successful laboratory confinement (which is an ideal never likely to be attained) should be the only substantial barrier to these deliberately created GoF viruses and their mutated descendants harming and killing millions or billions of people?

Most properly informed people, and all virologists should conclude that the potential benefits of such research are completely outweighed by the risks of a human-generated pandemic. Some virologists do take this view, absolutely. However, there are not enough of these highly principled and knowledgeable researchers to steer the majority of virologists to support a ban on all such gain of function research.

The 2023-07-11 Congressional hearing on the Proximal Origin article

Please take some time to review the material linked to at: vitamindstopscovid.info/07-origins/ - especially the video of the 2023-07-11 hearing by the United States Congressional House Oversight and Accountability Committee’s Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, in which two authors of the Proximal Origin article, Dr Kristian Andersen and Dr Robert Gerry, make statements and respond to questioning:

www.c-span.org/video/?529219-1/hearing-origins-covid-19

This has 10 second forwards and backwards navigation buttons. The same video can be found at YouTube www.youtube.com/watch?v=Byz0LFWUH4g - where the Settings icon enables faster playback speeds.

The Republican majority controls the committee. I think the Republican chairman, medical doctor and US Army veteran Brad Wenstrup (Ohio) does a great job. He is at once clear, incisive, passionate and dedicated to the truth. I think we would have to look back to John F. Kennedy to find a U.S. president with such qualities.

After his opening address, the Democrat Ranking Chair Paul Ruiz M.D. speaks and the witnesses make their prepared statements. From 28:54, Brad Wenstrup questions the witnesses. I recommend this section. Most of all, I recommend his closing address, starting at 2:57:14.

All the Republican members and their staff lawyer are acutely interested in how SARS-CoV-2 originated, and in the corrupting, unscientific, pressures which seem to have caused the Proximal Origin authors to rule out a lab leak, despite numerous statements in their correspondence which indicate that they did not believe such a complete rejection was realistic.

None of the Democrat members nor their staff lawyer showed any interest in the origins of the virus, or in the corrupting influences other than to argue that no such problems existed.

There is a stark divide here, between:

• the Democrat-supported position of the witnesses - and so of the other authors and most virologists - that the virus did not arise from human actions, but instead was created by zoonotic transfer, most likely in the Wuhan Seafood Market, and:

• the position of the Republican members and a minority of virologists that the virus must have arisen from lab-based human engineering.

There are no mid-way positions between these two, nor between the inescapable conclusion which the authors and most virologists, worldwide, as evidenced by their general lack of protest against the Proximal Origin article argue for:

• That the ever-present danger of zoonotic transfer means that virologists much continue to perform gain of function research, to aid pandemic preparedness, including the rapid generation of vaccines, quasi-vaccines using mRNA and adenovirus vector gene therapy technologies, antiviral drugs and monoclonal antibodies.

and the inescapable conclusion which arises from recognizing that SARS-CoV-2 was created in the lab:

• That such gain of function research as gave rise to this virus must be banned outright, or at the very least confined and regulated to such an extent that accidental release is actually impossible. (I think this cannot be adequately assured.) Since a release could kill tens of millions of people, it makes no sense for the lives of those people to depend on the effectiveness of an lab’s containment arrangements, and the skills of its researchers, no matter how robust they are supposed to be.

Thus, according to the Proximal Origin authors and the majority of virologists worldwide, virological research, including GoF work, should continue and be expanded, because there is no other way of protecting humanity from future pandemics.

However, since SARS-CoV-2 surely did arise from a lab, one or a few virologists, of their own volition, despite all the concerns expressed in recent decades about GoF experiments, caused the COVID-19 pandemic, which has killed tens of millions of people and blighted the lives of billions.

Virology and other rogue professions

I believe that the majority, consensus, main body of virologists - all those who are not at present urgently calling for a ban on GoF work - constitute the currently dominant core of a deadly, rogue profession. A search for “rogue profession” on Google indicates that the term is most often used regarding computer games. However, I found references to Prof. George DiMartino’s writing, as early as 2011 blog.oup.com/2011/01/economics/ in which he states that economics is a rogue profession.

A profession does not need to do wholly bad work in order to be reasonably regarded as rogue. Nor need a single member of that profession have any malicious intentions. A rogue profession need only generally support and/or routinely carry out a significant subset of its work in a manner which is completely antithetical to public health and/or scientific rigour. This includes failing to treat or advise on diseases in ways which increase the prevalence and/or severity of the disease, when the information on how to do so is available and could be found and used by these professionals if they were working reasonably astutely. It doesn’t matter what the professionals’ intentions are.

Their sincere belief in the essentiality of their work is of no importance in the question of whether the profession’s activities harm, rather than help, humanity.

Nor does it matter that some or much of their work succeeds fully in its noble goals.

The doctors and surgeons who routinely perform miracles with eye, hip, knee, heart, brain and other types of surgery contribute to the rogue activities of their profession if they do not also inform patients and the public, as they should, what simple, safe, well-researched, effective, nutritional and other non-medical steps people can take to improve their health and so reduce the risks of acquiring a health condition which might require surgery.

This deadly tendency among the majority of virologists does not occur in a vacuum. It could not persist if other professions, or even a sufficiently bold and influential subset of virologists, worked assiduously to end it.

There is a vast, interlocking, network of corrupted groupthunk ineptitude (my phrase) which afflicts the majorities of a number of crucial professions, worldwide. Any one of these professions, if they collectively eliminated their mistaken habits of thought, could, should and probably would work assiduously to disabuse all the other professions of their mistaken habits as well.

For instance, if the mainstream media was doing its job, none of these professions would be able to get away with such deadly habits - such as the majority of the medical profession, misled by the vast majority of immunologists, being unaware of (and sometimes actively opposed to) the knowledge that people need at least 50 ng/mL circulating 25 hydroxyvitamin D for their immune systems to work properly. This is the central theme of most articles here at Nutrition Matters.

I nominate these professions as being rogue, in addition to economists who generally have taken no interest in the obvious benefits of low cost nutritional supplements to reduce healthcare costs and to boost happiness, health and productivity:

• Immunologists.

• Virologists.

• Vaccinologists.

• Public health academics and administrators.

• Legislators, government leaders and high level staff - who all should be paying more attention to nutrition.

• The mainstream media.

• All social media which has accepted, or of its own volition chosen to, suppress debate on matters of health and other matters which are required in order that the general population and professionals in many fields can develop well-informed understanding of numerous important problems and opportunities for improving human health. See Matt Taibbi’s reporting of the Twitter files and now the Facebook files: racket.news.

• The majority of the medical profession, who accepted and/or encouraged government mandated quasi-vaccination campaigns, suppression of early treatments for COVID-19 and suppression of medical debate and freedom to treat patients.

It doesn’t matter that virologists and leading vaccinologists consider themselves the most significant and perhaps heroic protectors of humanity against the scourge of viral diseases.

They are wrong to think this self-serving, research fund generating, core belief which evidently permeates their profession. Likewise the public, many of whom are happy to fund a bunch of PhDs and professors beavering away in labs worldwide, concocting vaccines which they believe are sophisticated, safe, effective, priest-administered, cleansing rituals all good people accept to protect themselves, their families and all of humanity. “We need you to inject this into your bodies. Its for the Greater . . .”:

These people all seem to be possessed of a fervent and unquestioned belief which I dub The Vaccinophile’s Creed, one expression of which:

The only way to stay ahead of the virus is to continue to update the composition of our vaccines and administer them in a regular cadence.

can be found in this this New England Journal of Medicine article:

Project NextGen - Defeating SARS-CoV-2 and Preparing for the Next Pandemic
Xavier Becarra and Ashish Jha, NEJM 2023-07-26.

This is entirely wrong.

The best and most urgently needed action to improve public health does not involve virology, vaccinology or more research. It requires that governments and healthcare professionals support and encourage, without brow-beating or manipulation, well-informed, unpressured, adoption of vitamin D3 supplementation, for the great majority of the population, to attain at least the 50 ng/mL 125 nmol/L circulating 25-hydroxyvitamin D their immune systems need to function properly. Supplementation is easy and inexpensive. For most people, this is the only safe way to attain this level - which is 2 to 10 times the 25(OH)D level of many people who do not supplement vitamin D at all, and who have not recently exposed their ideally white skin to significant quantities of ultraviolet B light.

Please see the research articles cited and discussed at: vitamindstopscovid.info/00-evi/ and brownstone.org/articles/vitamin-d-everything-you-need-to-know/.

I doubt any author could devise a horror story with such a pervasive enmeshment of intertwined and mutually supportive evil - most of it clueless, tribal and springing from the best of intentions - as the one which must now clearly identify and then dismantle.

I will write more after reading the material listed at vitamindstopscovid.info/07-origins/ - including especially Alex Washburne’s Substack articles: alexwasburne.substack.com.