☕️ BIO SHOCKS ☙ Monday, June 5, 2023 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠
A deep-dive into the developing plasmid problem.
JEFF CHILDERS
☕️ Coffee & Covid 2023 🦠
JUN 5, 2023
🗞💬 *THE PLASMID PROBLEM* 💬🗞
🔬 An explosive new development in the world of covid mRNA vaccines began rapidly spreading this weekend. It’s got some scientists saying we should completely halt all mRNA technologies, in humans and veterinary uses, not just for covid, but any mRNA jab, including the new, warp-speed approved ones for RSV and influenza.
But first, a disclaimer. As I am constantly reminded by critics, I am a lawyer, not a microbiologist. Since we are desperately in need of a clear explanation of this developing issue, I will do my best. My explanation will necessarily be generalized to some degree, omitting by necessity some of the more granular detail, and it is always possible that I will mischaracterize one of the finer points here or there, or use a technical term too loosely, in which case I will be grateful to the C&C Army’s scientific/medical team to apply corrections in the comments.
Now. Let’s meet our guest of honor: a tiny, subcellular, microbiological speck of an object called a ‘plasmid.’ Unique to bacteria, plasmids are a special kind of alternative DNA found inside bacterial cells. More complex animals than germs, including humans, don’t have plasmids in their cells. Not normally.
As you can see from the figure above, bacterial genes include both the traditional double-stranded type of DNA (left) plus the frisbee-like, also double-stranded, plasmid form (right). Plasmids have some unique features lacked by traditional DNA. First, plasmids are more stable outside the cell, owing to their circular form. And more importantly — pay attention — plasmids can replicate. They are self-replicating DNA molecules.
Plasmids have become very popular in genetic engineering, and ‘off the shelf’ plasmids that perform various gene editing functions can even be bought online right now, for as little as .45 cents per billion and delivered from at least one supplier within three weeks. For extra clarity, and to quiet the nitpickers, the first paragraph on plasmids from its Wikipedia entry is reproduced in this footnote.1
Molecular biologists often use the little disc-like plasmids as vectors — tiny Trojan horses — to sneak foreign genes into other cells. Genetic engineers use plasmids to multiply copies of certain genes, which lets scientists study those genes in better detail.
In other words, scientists use plasmids to manipulate DNA.
For example, it’s common for scientists studying antibiotic resistance to use plasmids to make a fresh batch of bacteria resistant, by exposing the fresh recruits to genetically-engineered plasmids carrying the resistance genes. Welcome to the resistance, boys! The process of introducing engineered plasmids to naive cells is called, and I am not making this up, “transformation.”
To prepare naive bacterial cells to be transformed, they are first weakened or put under stress. Common ways scientists torture the innocent little bacteria to make them susceptible to gene editing include quickly heating them up (“heat shock”), rapidly cooling them down, or exposing them to environmental challenges like calcium ions.
You can’t easily use heat shock or cold shock on mammals. And it often isn’t convenient to stress their cells out. So genetic engineers need different ways to “transform” more complex living creatures. Scientists developed other ways to transform mammalian cells — pay attention — techniques called lipofection or electroporation. In lipofection, and this should sound a little familiar, the engineered DNA is combined with a special type of fat (lipid), forming ‘liposomes,’ which then stick onto (fuse with) the naive cells’ membranes, delivering the DNA right into the cell, thank you very much.
It’s like the Uber Eats driver coming inside and putting the Whopper and fries right on your TV table.
A ‘liposome’ is a tiny ball of fat with a liquid interior, like one of those ‘pearls’ in the boba tea, except a lot smaller. The liquid in the middle holds the engineered drugs or genes to be delivered to the naive cells. They’ve been used in cancer treatments, where scientists make a special kind of liposome that allegedly delivers cancer drugs straight to cancer cells.
But in genetic therapies, liposomes deliver genetic material into cells, in a process called lipofection.
Lipofection, rhymes with infection, is how scientists modify the target mammal’s DNA. It is literally genetic modification. Liposomal infection.
You could refer to the tiny, plasmid-stuffed fat balls as the liposomal delivery system, kind of like a microscopic Amazon truck, packed up with boxes full of artificial genes. Scientists sometimes call them “lipid nanoproteins,” or LNPs for short. Which, coincidentally, is the exact same delivery system used by Pfizer and Modern to trick naive human cells into taking up the spike protein mRNA payloads.
But more on that later.
🦠 A little over a month ago, a veteran genetic engineer named Kevin McKernan made some shocking and alarming claims about the mRNA vaccines. He’d performed an experiment, a test, that you will rightly think probably should have been done a long time before the FDA even thought about approving the vaccines, even for experimental use.
McKernan, a leading expert in sequencing methods for DNA and RNA, got hold of ten vials of Pfizer and Moderna mRNA vaccine. He ran samples of the jab liquid in the vials through a genetic analyzer, to see what was included in the shots. What he found was completely unexpected.
McKernan’s analysis revealed that up to 30% of the genetic payloads in the vaccines was double-stranded DNA, not single-stranded mRNA, in the form of modified bacterial DNA and bacterial plasmids. Both of these ‘contaminants’ included complete bacterial DNA engineered with spike protein instructions.
Needless to say, the vials should have only held water with nearly 100% mRNA, tidily encased in fatty little LNP delivery trucks.
Instead, up to one third of the samples were complete DNA, and that makes a gigantic difference. If McKernan is right — and nobody’s challenged his conclusions as of today’s date — then DNA contamination could elegantly explain most of the anomalous features we’ve seen from the shots, everything from why spike persists in the body so much longer than advertised, to myocarditis, long covid, and turbo cancers.
If McKernan’s right, then the vaccines are a disaster of epic proportions, the Holopharmakon that many have long have feared.2
To lighten the mood, let’s talk about plasmids in the hit 2007 video game Bioshock for a moment.
🦠 BioShock is a third-person shooter/RPG game set in 1960. The game’s environment is a place called Rapture, an underwater city meant to be an isolated utopia for society’s international élite to flourish outside of pesky laws and national governments keeping away from the vile, vulgar normals like you and me.
Of course, the elites’ carefully-planned utopia quickly turns dystopian, and the game’s hero, Jack, must fight his way out of the collapsing underwater city, beating back hordes of monstrous, genetically-engineered villains, formerly Rapture citizens, now genetically transformed into strange and quite hostile beings variously called things like ‘splicers’ (a reference to spliced DNA), ‘Big Daddies’, and ‘Little Sisters.’
In order to survive, Jack must buy his own genetic modifications, helpfully sold in inconveniently-located vending machines, that grant him various powers through modifying his genes.
Guess what the genetic modifications in the vending machines are called? Plasmids. Here’s how the Bioshock Wiki website defines the game’s version of a ‘plasmid:’
Plasmids are special serums made from processed ADAM that introduce modified stem cells into the body, allowing for genetic modification and mutation, giving the user what some might call “super powers”. Active Plasmids require EVE for use, while passive Plasmids, called Gene Tonics, provide an effect merely by being equipped. Plasmids are powerful, but excessive use of them leads to physical and mental addiction and instability. This was a major factor in the eventual downfall of Rapture society.
Plasmid bio-engineering was central to the game. “Pick your Plasmid and evolve!” reads one mural advertising plasmids in Rapture. “The Amazing Power of Plasmids”, reads another. “Imagine if you could be smarter, stronger, healthier. What if you could even have amazing powers, light fires with your mind… That’s what Plasmids do for a man,” extolled one of Rapture’s characters.
Sadly, real life, non-videogame plasmids don’t grant super powers. It looks like they mostly cause cancer and autoimmune problems. But, like in Bioshock, plasmids DO modify genes. Genetically-modified and even artificial plasmids are commonly used by real life, non-videogame genetic engineers to make permanent genetic modifications to other complex organisms.
In other words, genetically-engineered plasmids are a well-established delivery device for making permanent changes to DNA through transfection by injection. It’s just that you buy them on the Internet instead of from vending machines. Maybe they’ll be in vending machines at some point, who knows.
About this point, I’m sure you’ve recalled that the government PROMISED that there was NO WAY the mRNA shots could change anyone’s DNA. It was hideous disinformation of the most dangerous kind to call the shots “gene therapy.” So you can see the problem, like McKernan did, that there are billions or trillions of genetically-engineered plasmids in the mRNA shots, all of them coded to produce splicers, I mean spike proteins.
If McKernan’s vials are typical of what was injected into billions of people, we are looking at a pharmaceutical blunder millions of times worse than the Tuskegee experiments.
🦠 In a 2022 study involving human liver cells by Alden et al, Pfizer’s mRNA rapidly incorporated into the cells’ DNA within only six hours, through a complicated process called “reverse transcription.” The study didn’t get as much attention as it deserved, since the usual suspects poo-poohed the study, arguing that it was only conducted ‘in vitro,’ meaning in a Petri dish, and didn’t involve tests in living organisms. So just ignore it.
It’s starting to look like the Alden study was just a warm-up act.
McKernan’s discovery, finding complete foreign plasmid DNA and complete foreign bacterial DNA in the shots, and not just the expected strands of partial mRNA, makes incorporation of the spike gene into human DNA much, much easier, if not inevitable.
Other independent researchers have reproduced McKernan’s findings.
https://twitter.com/LetsGoBrando45/status/1662889417487335424
She’s not the only scientist who’s alarmed. She referred to e-coli in particular because the mRNA is manufactured using the fast-growing e-coli bacteria. The contaminant strands of foreign DNA and plasmids are engineered e-coli. Since humans have tons of e-coli living in our digestive systems, it is that much easier for the engineered e-coli DNA and plasmids, helpfully wrapped in lipid nanoprotein fat blobs, to genetically engineer people’s e-coli gut bacteria using the ordinary, everyday, traditional, genetic engineering techniques described above.
Not in the Bioshock way. In the “transfection,” or “transforming infection,” way.
🔥 Retired Thai-German immunologist Sucharit Bhakdi recently presented on this issue to a panel organized by Children’s Health Defense. The HealthCare Channel did a follow-up, interviewing Dr. Bhakdi along with researcher Kevin McKernan.
In the clip below, Dr. Bhakdi begins his discussion around 05:30. His professorial style always makes the material easy to understand, but the clip runs a little long (about 15 minutes). After Dr. Bhakdi, McKernan discusses the technical aspects of his findings. (I’ll summarize the essentials below if you don’t have the time to watch now, but you should take a look when you can.)
https://twitter.com/Kevin_McKernan/status/1664725834349834240
“For this first time in the history of mankind, people have been injected … with packaged DNA, and … it will certainly have entered the cells of the poor recipients.”
— Vaccinologist Sukharit Bhakdi, 2023
You may have wondered just how companies like Pfizer and Moderna (specifically, their various subcontractors) actually make the microscopic fat balls stuffed with specially-constructed mRNA strands. Are there microscopic manufacturing machines running around the clock?
As it turns out, the process is relatively straightforward. It’s a classic dirty job. First they grow tons of genetically engineered e-coli in giant vats. E-coli is perfect for this purpose because it is a staple of genetic engineering and because it grows super fast. Once the vat is full of disgusting, spike-protein-making e-coli, they use chemicals to blow up the otherwise innocent little e-coli bacterias.
In a process sort of like a spaghetti strainer, they strain out the dead e-coli cells’ bodies, letting the smaller, desirable pieces strain through, including the engineered DNA (and the plasmids). Then they use more chemicals to break up the double-stranded e-coli DNA into smaller, single-stranded RNA parts.
Then they hoover out the RNA juice, encase it in trillions of lipid nanoprotein fat sacks in a completely different process, squirt it into vials, and ship it to your doctor. Job well done.
What McKernan found is that it looks like the manufacturing process had a glitch. It didn’t bust up ALL the double-stranded e-coli DNA into single-stranded RNA. So some complete, linear, double-stranded, spike-protein encoded e-coli DNA strands and their self-replicating plasmids were left over and snuck onto the little LNP delivery trucks.
Remember how they kept collecting sewage, supposedly to test for covid? That’s where e-coli can be found too. A weird coincidence.
There isn’t a lot of room for error in a treatment like this. To give you an idea of the scale of the potential problem, there are over 40 trillion mRNA “packages” in each injection. It sounds like a lot, but just how much is that, really? Well, you have about 30 trillion cells in your entire body.
So the jabs contain about ten trillion more plasmid delivery packages than there are cells in your entire body to deliver the plasmids to.
Ten trillion. Trillion with a ’T’.
A trillion is a lot. Even if the per-package probability of unwanted DNA assimilation were super low, say one tenth of one percent, that would still be a lot of transfected cells. Millions and millions of them.
Put a pin in that, we’ll return to it presently.
🦠 Next, let’s return to the mRNA vaccines’ general problem, their inherent design flaw. To my knowledge, none of the usual suspects has ever answered this long-standing objection to the shots. I’ve discussed it before; I will quickly summarize it now.
Your immune system is perfectly designed. It knows the difference between your own cells, called “self,” and cells from hostile invaders, called “alien cells.” From birth, the properly-functioning human immune system elegantly, if not miraculously, identifies and kills alien cells as fast as it can. The body considers cells infected by viruses or anything else as alien cells.
When the body destroys an infected cell, as opposed to a foreign virus particle or something, this is called an “autoimmune” response, an immune response to one’s own self.
Self-destruction. When this process misfires, an autoimmune disease occurs.
Any transfected cell expressing spike protein is identified as an “alien cell,” and the immune system immediately targets that cell for destruction. So an mRNA shot creates a kind of foot race between the LNP delivery packages and a person’s immune system. As the LNP delivery trucks — which the immune system thinks are just innocuous fat while they are driving around — as they race around the body infecting cells, which then start making spike, the immune system follows close behind, killing the transfected self-cells as fast as it can find them.
That’s why Pfizer put so many trillions of mRNA delivery pods in the shots. They’re trying to outrace the immune system by overwhelming it.
🦠 Dr. Bhakdi described the mRNA packages in the shots as “seeds for autoimmune attack.” As an example, he illustrated the problem in a diagram of the super-smooth inner lining of a blood vessel, a lining called the endothelium. The lining of blood vessels must be super smooth to avoid clotting, and normally it IS perfectly smooth, miraculously smooth.
Obviously, anything changing the smoothness of the inner lining of a blood vessel would be a problem.
Dr. Bhakdi’s diagram of a blood vessel’s inner lining shows the eight phases of mRNA transfection. Remember, this is just the normal, advertised mRNA process — it doesn’t even account yet for the complete e-coli DNA or the plasmids.
In phase 1 below (at the 1 o’clock position), the endothelium is normal, smooth, un-transfected. In phase 2, an LNP particle sticks to a cell in the vessel lining and delivers its mRNA package into that cell. In phase 3, the cell starts pushing out spike, which is where the problem starts.
In phase 4, the transfected cell starts growing spike protein on its surface, right on the smooth lining, causing two giant issues and making the immune system freak out. First, the spikes interrupt the smooth flowing of blood and create something for blood cells to clot onto. But it gets worse.
In phase 5, the innate immune system marks the transfected cell as an ‘alien,’ and attacks and destroys it. In phase 6, the now-dead endothelial cell sloughs off the blood vessel’s inner lining, like a scab breaking apart, creating even more opportunity for clotting, and leaving an ugly scar on the previously-smooth inner surface of the vessel lining.
And if all that weren’t bad enough, in phase 6 the real damage begins. The LNP packages from the destroyed cells leak back out into the bloodstream, transfecting yet more endothelial cells (phase 7) and being carried by the circulating blood into the organs, also turning infected cells in the organs into targets for self-destruction.
Assuming people don’t stroke out or die from clots, all this damage will eventually heal, once the body can purge all the transfected cells, after 40 trillion mRNA packages have been delivered. Well, the damaged tissues will eventually heal up, except for in two little organs.
Injured heart tissues and injured brain tissues do not heal. They just scar over. It’s a permanent injury.
This is the ‘normal’ problem with mRNA in general. It creates autoimmune problems and potentially permanently damages the heart and the brain.
🔥 Now let’s add McKernan’s research back into the mix.
The reason Pfizer used mRNA in the first place is because mRNA is temporary, transient. Each mRNA strand normally gets consumed in the process of creating whatever it’s coded for. So mRNA is safer than DNA, because it’s not permanent, it can’t transfect cells (but it might reverse transcribe into them), and therefore it theoretically comes with a self-destruct timer. You’ll remember that the government originally said the mRNA would be completely cleared from the body in 48 to 72 hours.
Boy, was that wrong.
On the other hand, the LNP-packaged DNA and the engineered plasmids CAN transfect cells, altering their DNA, making them look like self — not alien, and thereby concealing them from the immune system for a time. They could theoretically make spike forever. And more ominously, if DNA modification happens in reproductive tissues, the altered genes could be passed to offspring for generations.
It’s not clear that the immune system won’t eventually catch on to the altered cells, but it will surely take longer once the cells DNA has been changed. Cells that divide quickly, like bone marrow, may be especially susceptible to transfection, creating an auto-immune cascade. Think turbo leukemia.
Finally, the engineered plasmids are reproduction capable. They can copy themselves. In other words, there’s no telling how long the spike could persist in peoples’ bodies.
It could be a very long time indeed.
🦠 There are tons of caveats and unknowns. This analysis presents a sort of ‘worst case scenario.’ There are many reasons things could work out just fine, or at least, not as bad as it might look.
For example, McKernan only tested ten vials from a couple lots. His vials might not have been representative of all lots. And McKernan could be wrong, and somehow contaminated his own samples, mis-read his results, or made some other kind of mistake. That’s why we always wait for confirmation.
And as Dr. Bhakdi pointed out, this is a novel situation. Nothing like this has ever been tried before. They have no idea what they’re playing at, and nobody knows exactly how most people’s immune systems will deal with these problems. There is still a lot we don’t know about the immune system itself.
It could surprise us once again.
For the moment, a more interesting question is: why hasn’t this issue of contaminants from the e-coli batches been detected and studied by the various health agencies before now? And why aren’t they reacting to the news, either by confirming or, hopefully, rebutting McKernan’s findings?
The most parsimonious explanation is that they DO know. They know all about it, but they don’t have any answers, so they are ignoring the problem and hoping it goes away or it can be covered up. Maybe they think that if they tighten up the manufacturing process, they can better filter out the DNA and the plasmids, and then hope to avoid the worst.
Better manufacturing would surely help. But improving the manufacturing process still won’t solve the inherent design defect, that the shots by design create an autoimmune condition, as all the cells that take up mRNA become targets for destruction as aliens by the body’s innate immune system.
So, that’s a lot to take in. But do not worry! The good news is, every day that goes by, we are figuring this thing out more and more. Each new discovery brings us closer to figuring out how to treat or mitigate the problem, and brings us closer to accountability.
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https://www.coffeeandcovid.com/p/bio-shocks-monday-june-5-2023-c-and?utm