Propagandized "new strains" of SARS-CoV-2 — no wonder that people stopped paying attention

30 December 2020

Difficulty with bobble-headed fools?

I imagine that y'all have been reading and hearing about new strain(s) of SARS-CoV-2.

The repetitive "new strains" news cycle is — apparently intentionally — stupid at its fearmongering core. For one thing, virtually no one ever attaches a scientific designation to the emerging varieties.

This unscientific sloppiness allows us to imagine all sorts of horror from the unknown. We are, I assume, to infer that Viral Godzilla is undergoing a sequence of escalating morphs into every more deadly and rapidly spreading versions of itself:

Run for your lives.

Cower in your basement.

Cover yourselves with dead leaves and needles in a distant boreal forest.

Then — our propagandizing Lamestream pretends to diligently track . . .

. . . the new strain's progress around the world.

As if this spread denotes some new phenomenon, as opposed to what SARS-CoV-2 has already done — what with its already early developed four main, world-traveling strains from springtime 2020.

Media and Government claims are always the same — "it's worse!"

Take mid-2020's SARS-CoV-2 variant 614g.

It substituted glycine for aspartic acid at position 614 in the previous 614d configuration.

And (of course!) the associated news was that 614g transmitted more rapidly and widely than the original aspartic acid version.

How anyone could determine this added "awfulness" with any degree of reliability — especially given the developed planet's shared aversion to doing any real science regarding tracking COVID at all — is never answered.

In vitro ("test tube") experiments mean virtually nothing, when it comes to how microbes epidemiologically operate in the allegedly real world.

And now . . .

. . . we have at least two more SARS-CoV-2 strains to bunch our undies.

The first of these is B.1.1.7 — or VUI-202012/01

The American Lamestream — comprised almost exclusively of reliably obtuse and untrainable dullards — insists on calling the "United Kingdom" variant, rather than by its scientific name.

This imprecise name-shortcutting occurs because Americans are — we can infer, based upon our Lamestream's overly lax communication demeanor — too stupid to recognize scientific jargon as being an appropriate way to accurately address complicated realities.

Why be specific, when we can implicate all of the United Kingdom in spawning a demon virus of unknown makeup? Gotta be gentle with those American muttonheads.

And naturally — given our cultural penchant for shared Hysteria, writ large — B.1.1.7 is claimed to spread faster than its predecessors. Holy moley, it's already in Colorado, USA:

“There are about 23 genetic changes in this strain,” [Robert] Bollinger [MD, MPH] says.

“There’s some preliminary suggestion that it’s more [contagious], and, although that’s not proven, scientists are noticing a surge of cases in areas where the new strain is appearing, and there could be a connection.”

As long as the coronavirus spreads through the population, mutations will continue to happen. Ray notes that in 2020, several mutations caught researchers’ attention and raised concern, but further study revealed no major changes in how the coronavirus behaves.

“New strains of the SARS-CoV-2 virus are detected every week,” [Stuart] Ray [MD] says.

“Most come and go — some persist but don’t become more common; some increase in the population for a while, and then fizzle out. When a change in the infection pattern first pops up, it can be very hard to tell what’s driving the trend: changes to the virus, or changes in human behavior.”

The second "new" strain of SARS-CoV-2 — is 501.V2 . . .

. . . attributed first to South Africa.

It, too, is hinted to have demon-spread qualities.

According to Dr Julian Tang — Honorary Associate Professor and Clinical Virologist, University of Leicester:

“A new virus variant ‘501.V2’ from South Africa has been identified in some COVID-19 cases in the UK recently. This new South African variant is described in this presentation: https://www.scribd.com/document/488618010/Full-Presentation-by-SSAK-18-Dec, which cites a paper in Cell (Tyler N et al. 2020).

“The South African variant ‘501.V2’ is characterised by N501Y, E484K and K417N mutations in the S protein – so it shares the N501Y mutation with the UK variant, but the other two mutations are not found in the UK variant.

"Similarly, the South African variant does not contain the 69-70del mutation that is found in the UK variant.

“The spread of this variant also seems to be focused in the south and southeast regions of South Africa, and also exhibits higher viral loads diagnostic swabs – which may make it more transmissible via aerosols produced during breathing and talking, etc.

“Ongoing studies in South Africa are being conducted to assess whether it causes more severe disease, whether it targets young people specifically (or whether this is a behavioural effect), and whether the COVID-19 vaccines in development will be effective against it.

“There is some suggestion that this South African variant may be driving a faster spreading second wave in South Africa that may be bigger than the first wave.”

A thoughtful person's takeaway?

What is striking about all of the above is its epidemiological ordinariness.

Viruses mutate, one way or another — at one rate or another — in a variety of concerning (or not) directions. Nothing unusual here with SARS-CoV-2. Except, of course, the near certainty — among those of us with backgrounds in molecular biology — that it was originally, partially human-enhanced.

What is also characteristic of the above news potage is (a) the media's predictable hysteria and (b) medical personnel's paralleling alertness regarding the emergence of potentially bad health possibilities.

Nothing new in either of those trends.

The moral? — As I have said before, a scared public works to totalitarian-wannabe Oligarchy's advantage

Gotta keep the sheep's wolf-fearing juices circulating on a hyped adrenalin base.

California, for instance, just did this:

Sweeping stay-at-home orders have been extended in Southern California and the San Joaquin Valley, state officials announced, as a COVID-19 surge continues to push hospitals to the breaking point.

The extended restrictions include reduced capacity at retail stores; the closure of some businesses including hair salons, nail salons, card rooms, museums, zoos and aquariums; and a prohibition on most gatherings, hotel stays for tourism and outdoor restaurant dining.

Notice that this kind of news regularly fails to mention that California — by far the most populous and economically richest state in the United States — has proportionately the third-to-least (among all 50 states) ICU beds.

California's is an artificially concocted crisis by any rational measure. Yet, we are imprisoning most of the state's population to deal with it.

In truth, daily doses of Government and Media-sponsored fear are intended to mask the real causes of Oligarchic America's problems.

What we do not recognize, we cannot fix.

Last, also culturally indicative — get your minds' jaws around this tidbit:

One country that does not have a coordinated [virus] sequencing system is the United States.

Some research institutions have been studying genetic data and submitting them to a national database, but there is not a federal effort to ensure that viral samples are being collected and sequenced from groups of patients in a way that’s representative of geography and demographics.

Marvel about that.

The richest nation in the world is too cheap to appropriately track and identify infectious disease — or, for that matter, the comparative quality of any medical intervention and outcome — because there is no money for our Plutocracy's oligarchs to make in the process.

Do you perceive a theme?

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Propagandized "new strains" of SARS-CoV-2 — no wonder that people stopped paying attention