Postcards From The Hedge

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...

Does this even need saying? That I should even feel moved to write this post, in this day and age, seems extraordinary. But an increasing number of people are latching onto the hoary old idea that there is no such thing as a virus - that virologists have been studying an artefact all this time; a product of the organism rather than an entity hijacking host biology in order to spread between hosts. Or, madder still, the whole field is a 130-year fraud, perpetuated by generations of scientists in order to ... ummm ... something something. Like many positions over the last few years, it is driven by Covid denialism taken to extremes - not only does SARS-CoV-2 not exist, none of them do . This seems a somewhat hyperbolic extension - scepticism over SARS-CoV-2 extended to dismissing the entire science of virology! This puts me in mind of the inhabitants of the planet Krikkit in Douglas Adams's Hitchhiker's Guide upon observing the glories of the Universe for the first time above th...