Postcards From The Hedge

I've been directed to a rather rambling piece by  Robert Malone , nominally about pseudouridine but it takes a while to get there as the first half is about his favourite subject: Robert Malone. I can see from that segment where the 'inventor calls mRNA gene therapy ' trope probably comes from, because he does discuss the use of nucleic acid delivery systems in gene therapy. But this does not make RNA vaccines gene therapy: gene therapy involves the complementation or repair of defective host DNA genes, and the mRNA vaccines do not contain such genes, nor even any DNA. Malone has legitimate concerns about DNA-based gene therapy's safety, and points out that genotoxicity studies are required by the FDA, as it is potentially carcinogenic. These studies were not required for RNA vaccines because RNA should not affect DNA, and RNA is normally degraded in a matter of hours. Of course, anyone who has been following along will be aware that a Swedish study  has been touted by

A common feature of pseudoscientific discourse is to obsess over definitions - as if what you call something has any bearing on what it is . Two such ideas in particular stand out in the area of nucleic acid-based vaccination: "Experimental gene therapy" and "It's not a vaccine".  Now, though I think these strategies particularly lame, I could also pick a fight with an empty room, so I am happy to tackle them on their own terms! The oddest part of these oft-twinned notions is that the first demands extension of a definition, while the second complains about that very same thing... Experimental gene therapy. Tacking 'experimental' on the front is evidently an attempt to discredit by a pejorative. Yet there is no sense in which these vaccines are still 'experimental'. They have completed Phase lll trials, in which two groups are respectively given the treatment or placebo (or, more generally, 'standard of care'), and relative benefit is as

The sheer determination of people to be confused by the straightforward is quite something to behold. Contrarian Twitter has been beside itself with self-righteous fury because it believes pregnant women have 'quietly' been advised against vaccination by the UK government. But here's the actual timeline. December 2020 - pregnant women were advised against vaccination, other than in cases of significant risk.  April 2021 - pregnant women were now to be invited along with their age group. December 2021 - in view of high numbers of unvaccinated pregnant women in ICU, they were made a priority. Simple, huh? Not if you're a contrarian.  As part of Emergency Authorisation for approval of the Pfizer mRNA vaccine under 'Regulation 174', in December 2020, a report was issued, which included a section on reproductive and developmental toxicity with the following conclusion: The absence of reproductive toxicity data is a reflection of the speed of development to first iden

"Excess deaths" are all over Contrariworld at the moment. Some want to use them to undermine vaccines, others (with overlap to the first group) to undermine lockdowns.  The Daily Telegraph has had the latter in a told-you-so frenzy with a truly awful headline (find the piece yourself!):  " Lockdown feared to be killing more people than Covid" The Twitter version appends 'effects' to 'lockdown', while the piece itself moves rapidly away from lockdown itself to issues related to the effects of the pandemic on healthcare. These would happen, probably more so, in the absence of mitigations, so attributing them to lockdowns is dubious. An inversion of reality, one might say.  The core evidence of a concern is a snippet of the graph of excess deaths - the deaths over and above those expected based upon an average of equivalent recent periods. In this period, the deaths directly attributed to Covid don't account for the whole of the excess. So what is

I wrote recently about the old-new topic of virus denial from a molecular biological perspective. My main thesis there was that the purported non-existence of viruses makes no sense in light of the fact that viruses contributed extensively to the subject of molecular biology. If they did not work in the way 'orthodoxy' would have it, infecting cells from all domains of life and having them copy their genomes and synthesise their proteins, then a great number of landmark experiments would be built on sand. The deep, serially-constructed understanding of molecular biology gained through those experiments would be an extraordinary coincidence, getting the right answers for completely the wrong reasons. Virus denial is a subset of germ theory denial, the strongest form of which would have it that there are no microbial pathogens at all - no viruses, no bacteriophages, no bacteria, no fungi or protists. Even adherents of that view might be forced to concede that the organisms exist

According to Betteridge's Law of Headlines, any headline that ends with a question mark can be answered by the word "no". What, you want more? OK then... A paper  published in February 2022 caused a stir in the anti-vaccine community as it appeared to show a mechanism by which the RNA in certain vaccines might end up in the genomes of vaccinees, potentially even being passed to offspring. The fuss died down somewhat, but has been reamplified by molecular-biology- naïf  (but, I'm sure, great cardiologist) Dr Peter McCullough. Unfortunately, as ever, the scare is easily articulated, the refutation requires lengthy consideration of detailed mechanism.  "Vaccines can turn our cells into eternally spike-producing factories!!! And our babies!!!!".  Tl;dr: No they can't. Here's a basic schematic of the molecular biology of the situation:   1) In the cell nucleus, the organism's DNA contains regions that can be transcribed into the closely related molecu