The “fact checkers” will tell you that there are no aborted baby parts being used in the the development or generation of the Covid vaccines.  This is the explanation Reuters gives.

A Facebook video discussing the Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine for COVID-19 has falsely claimed it contains tissue from an aborted human foetus.

The video (here), broadcast live on Nov. 15, first shows a picture on a computer screen of the packaging for the AstraZeneca-developed COVID-19 vaccine ChAdOx1-S, also known as AZD1222. It then changes to a window showing a page of research into AZD1222, which reads: “We used direct RNA sequencing to analyse transcript expression from the ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 genome in human MRC-5 and A549 cell lines that are non-permissive for vector replication alongside the replication permissive cell line, HEK293” (here) .

The user in the video then switches to a Wikipedia page for further research on this mention of MRC-5, which she points out is a cell line “originally developed from research deriving lung tissue of a 14-week-old aborted Caucasian male fetus” (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MRC-5) . Speaking to her audience about the composition of the vaccine, the user says: “one thing it definitely has is the lung tissue of a 14-week-old aborted Caucasian male foetus.”

This is not true. AstraZeneca has confirmed to Reuters via email that AZD1222 was not developed using MRC-5 cell lines. The study, which was published on Research Square and was referred to by the Facebook user, is an independent study led by scientists at the University of Bristol (here, here) to test the efficacy of the potential vaccine prior to human trials. It tested this by observing how AZD1222 gets to work when inserted into a human cell line, ie: MRC-5 cell lines. This is not the same as developing a vaccine whereby MRC-5 is an ingredient in the final product.

AZD1222 (ChAdOx1 nCoV-19) is a weakened and non-replicating version of the common cold virus (adenovirus) taken from chimpanzees, which has been engineered to contain instructions for creating the spike protein of SARS-CoV-2 – the virus that causes COVID-19 (here, here) . An article published in the journal Nature (here) says the vaccine ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 used T-Rex 293 HEK cells in the virus propagation stage. This refers to ‘human embryonic kidney’ cells, which are from a different human cell line.

Dr David Matthews, a reader of virology at Bristol University and co-author on the vaccine study, told Reuters. “Many virus vaccines are made in embryonic/foetal derived cell lines and then the vaccine is purified away from these cells to exceptionally high standards. Most of these cell lines (including MRC-5 cells and 293 cells) were derived from tissue samples taken from foetuses aborted in the 1960s and 1970s and the cells have been grown in laboratories all over the world since then.”

Gary McLean, a professor of molecular immunology at London Metropolitan University, also told Reuters that this vaccine would also be “purified” of any contaminants before being used in humans. He said: “The AstraZeneca vaccine requires the adenoviral vector to be produced in these cells and it is then purified before administering to people.”

It is not accurate to say MRC-5 cell lines are the same cells from an aborted foetus. They are cell lines that have been grown in a laboratory from a primary cell culture originally taken from a foetus. For MRC-5 specifically, this was done on a male Caucasian foetus that was electively aborted in the 1960s (here, here). There is another cell line called WI-38 that was also propagated from a foetus aborted in the 1960s.

Oregon Live answers this way.

A spokesperson for AstraZeneca confirmed to the AP that the company does not use MRC-5 cells in the development of its vaccine.

Researchers at the University of Bristol, who were independent from the vaccine’s development, injected the COVID-19 vaccine into MRC-5 cell lines as part of their own study. MRC-5 cells are what is known as an immortalized cell line, which can reproduce indefinitely.

Such cell lines are used in vaccine production to grow viruses in order to keep them from replicating. The AstraZeneca and Oxford vaccine relies on a harmless chimpanzee cold virus to carry the coronavirus spike protein into the body in order to create an immune response.

AstraZeneca did not use MRC-5 cells, but it did use a different producer cell line to develop it: Human Embryonic Kidney 293 TREX cells.

According to the University of Oxford development team, the original Human Embryonic Kidney 293 cells were taken from the kidney of an aborted fetus in 1973, but the cells used now are clones of the original cells. Dr. Deepak Srivastava, president of Gladstone Institutes and former president of the International Society for Stem Cell Research, said fetal cell lines were critical in developing hepatitis, measles and chickenpox vaccines.

“What’s important for the public to know even if they are opposed to the use of fetal cells for therapies, these medicines that are being made and vaccines do not contain any aspect of the cells in them,” Srivastava said. “The cells are used as factories for production.”

The “Bioethics Observatory” also has an assessment of this.  The discussions above are unnecessarily complicated, because they differentiate between the actual stem cells of the aborted babies, and what they are calling the “immortalized cell lines,” which are not directly of the baby, but rather, are produced by cells from the aborted baby.

At least Roman Catholic churches see the problem (note, I am not Roman Catholic, I am protestant, and more specifically, a traditional Calvinist).

“There’s a lot of concern and interest in this issue — what’s the vaccine going to look like? What kind of moral choices are we going to have before us?” said Greg Schleppenbach, the associate director of Secretariat of Pro-Life Activities with the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.

At issue is the use of cells derived from human fetal tissue to discover, develop and test medical innovation — something scientists agree is often necessary in the most groundbreaking medical advances.

Recent polling reveals a split amongst Americans: roughly 6 in 10 adults say abortion should be legal in all or most cases, while 38% say it should be illegal in all or most cases.

[ … ]

Conservative groups long-opposed to abortion have advocated against what they call “ethically problematic” fetal material — tissue obtained via elected termination of pregnancy, and cell lines descendent from them.

It’s not a simple ask (sic, ‘task’): some of the most commonly used cell lines in medical research originated that way. The experimental antibody treatment from Regeneron that was taken by Trump to treat COVID-19 was developed using cells derived originally from human kidney tissue taken from an aborted fetus in the 1970s. Several of the vaccine candidates for the virus also use that line.

The cells from that tissue, the HEK293T cell line, have continued to divide and grow in a culture, and have been used in scientific discovery, for decades.

Regeneron says it does not consider the treatment to have relied on fetal tissue, since the cells were acquired so long ago.

They “are considered ‘immortalized’ cells (not stem cells) and are a common and widespread tool in research labs,” a Regeneron spokesperson told ABC in a statement. The cell line “wasn’t used in any other way, and fetal tissue was not used in this research.”

The church has for more than 2000 years held that life begins at conception.  This isn’t the first time we’ve faced issues with euthanasia.  Abortifacients (chemical agents) were in use during the days of the Greek empire, as well as the Roman empire at the time of Christ.

Jeremiah 1:5 is important, stating “”Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, And before you were born I consecrated you; I have appointed you a prophet to the nations.”  This should suffice for the reader, but if it doesn’t, another hundred verses, all read perfectly within context, could be produced.

But rather than explain the case against abortion, or trying to convince someone that life begins at conception, the main point is that Christians believe that life begins at conception based on the Scripture, regardless of what anyone else believes.

A simple denial that the cells from aborted babies were used to develop the vaccine isn’t sufficient.  What they are calling the “immortalized cell lines” wouldn’t exist if not for the original cell lines from the aborted baby.

The answers given by the fact checkers are almost amusing in their stupidity.  Answering in the way they do betrays an abject ignorance of classical Christian theology, assuming that a mere reference to the product of a product of an aborted baby removes it from the Biblical considerations that would be applied to the product of an aborted baby.  Such silly mental machinations are sufficient for people who do not believe in anything, but not for committed Christians.

Vaccines were not always developed this way, so it’s possible not to have done this.  That isn’t what they’ve chosen to do.  We shouldn’t claim that someone who gets the vaccine has committed a sin from which God cannot forgive.  God can forgive anyone for anything they’ve done conditioned upon confession to Him and a contrite heart.

This isn’t about that.  For me, this is about me, my faith, what I believe, and what I’m willing to do.  Who am I, what kind of man am I, and what kind of faith do I have, if I claim to believe certain things, and under just a little bit of pressure, jettison those doctrines in favor of what the world is doing?

No, this is about strengthening and displaying my own faith.  It is both a building block, and a test at the same time.  I said earlier that I am a committed Calvinist.  I do not intend to jump off of a building and dare God to catch me.  That would be tempting God, and it is a sin.  But I will not perish one nanosecond before my time is complete, and I will not live one nanosecond after my time on earth is complete.  My days are numbered, just as the hairs on my head (both of which are disappearing).  It is appointed unto man once to die, and then the judgment.  My appointed time was written down before I was ever born.  Nothing can bring it sooner than that, and nothing can delay it.

On a related note, it’s amazing the cavalier nature with which “researchers” today are treating humans (whom they see as animals, not made in God’s image).

Baby Mary might have been born and grown up to become the medical researcher who discovered the cure for cancer, but instead she was aborted in the 18th week of her mother’s pregnancy.

But despite being aborted, Baby Mary today still has a role in medical research. Or at least a piece of her scalp does. When Baby Mary was killed in her mother’s womb and her tiny body dismembered, a piece of her scalp containing hair follicles was sold on the fetal tissue gray market.

As a  result, part of Baby Mary may now be found growing on the body of a laboratory rodent, thanks to researchers at the University of Pittsburgh. Here are photos of some of their work in progress …

There are of course other problems with the Covid vaccine.

• The formation of so-called “non-neutralizing antibodies” can lead to an exaggerated immune reaction, especially when the test person is confronted with the real, “wild” virus after vaccination. This so-called antibody-dependent amplification, ADE, has long been known from experiments with corona vaccines in cats, for example. In the course of these studies all cats that initially tolerated the vaccination well died after catching the wild virus.
• The vaccinations are expected to produce antibodies against spike proteins of SARS-CoV-2. However, spike proteins also contain syncytin-homologous proteins, which are essential for the formation of the placenta in mammals such as humans. It must be absolutely ruled out that a vaccine against SARS-CoV-2 could trigger an immune reaction against syncytin-1, as otherwise infertility of indefinite duration could result in vaccinated women.
• The mRNA vaccines from BioNTech/Pfizer contain polyethylene glycol (PEG). 70% of people develop antibodies against this substance – this means that many people can develop allergic, potentially fatal reactions to the vaccination.

Hospital workers have had allergic reactions to the vaccine, and the Sydney Morning Herald explains why Australia is having problems with its own brand of the vaccine.

A billion-dollar deal for the Morrison government to buy more than 50 million doses of the University of Queensland’s potential coronavirus vaccine has been abruptly terminated after several trial participants returned false positive HIV test results.

UQ, working in partnership with Australian global biotech company CSL, will abandon its current clinical trials following the discovery. It informed the federal government of the initial data on Monday, which was then referred to health authorities for urgent medical advice.

“False” positives, they are claiming.

Sources with knowledge of the current trials said pathology tests had in the past weeks confirmed the positives were in fact false and the health of the participants has not been put at risk.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison said the national security committee of cabinet agreed to terminate the purchasing agreement on Thursday, following expert health advice and fears the revelation would severely damage the Australian public’s confidence in the COVID-19 vaccination program, which is expected to begin early next year.

“We have prepared for this. We have planned for this. And now we’re making decisions in accordance with this,” he said on Friday morning.

He said the government had “spread the risk” by entering into multiple agreements and had secured 20 million new doses from Oxford University-AstraZeneca and another 11 million from Novavax to cover for the 51 million doses the home-grown product was to supply.

“The net out-take of this is we are more likely to have the entire population vaccinated earlier rather than later by the ability to bring this manufacturing capability forward,” Mr Morrison said.

The UQ vaccine candidate used a protein and adjuvant platform, containing the COVID-19 spike protein and a “molecular clamp”. A small component is derived from the human immunodeficiency virus, known as HIV, that is not able to infect people or replicate.

The allergic reactions to the vaccine might be coming from the fact that this is a messenger RNA vaccine (the mRNA tricks the DNA into producing the spike protein of the virus), and to date no article I’ve found explains how this system is turned off rather than cascades and continues.

The article from Australia is noteworthy in its honesty (at least, its partial honesty).  I don’t believe these are necessarily “false” positive tests, but either way, there is HIV in the spike protein.  We’ve known that for a very long time now.  But I challenge readers to find a single article published in America that admits that there is HIV in the spike protein.  Doing so would be tantamount to an admission that this virus isn’t zoonotic, but rather, engineered in a laboratory.  It might also convince the American people not to take the vaccine.

In summary, this all explains why I will not be taking the vaccine.  Every man and woman must make his or her own decisions, but for the Christian, there are special considerations.

Libertas Bella.

But there is scant evidence that masks prevent the transmission of COVID or any other respiratory infection. In every randomized clinical trial ever conducted, there have been inconclusive findings that mask wearing aided in suppressing transmission of respiratory diseases. Studies generally rely upon fitted N95 respirators that must be sterilized after every use or surgical masks that should be thrown away. We have more evidence that typical masks cause headaches than that they prevent against COVID.

[ … ]

This isn’t just a matter of a few people missing out on a few weeks of work. CNBC host Jim Cramer has noted that the Chinese Coronavirus pandemic led to one of the biggest wealth transfers in all of American history. Wall Street cleaned up at the expense of Main Street.

Of course, this was the goal of it all, just as will be the goal of the “Great Reset.”  It is to impoverish the middle class, and enrich the already wealthy.  They hate the middle class.

As for masks, I’ve explain before many times that you may as well try to stop a mosquito with a chain link fence.

The filter fibers leave too much open space to capture a particle the size of a virus (80 – 120 nm) by interception, and the virus is non-polar, so electrostatic attraction to the fibers isn’t an effective means of filtration.

On the other hand, you can certainly deprive your brain of oxygen by wearing a mask.  One other thing that can be accomplished is to make children even more ignorant.

School is out.  If you think learning is happening at home, you’re naive.  Children in my neighborhood are majoring in learning to ride skateboards when they ought to be learning to construct meaningful sentences, calculus and physics.

It’s almost as if they want to create an entire generation of stupid factory workers, perpetually behind the Chinese and Japanese children, yes?

This link at Insty drove me to read the comments.  One in particular by someone named Doctormhl1 states the following.

Face masks offer insufficient protection against Covid-19.infection. It has been demonstrated that the virus can enter the conjunctiva of the eye. Once on the conjunctiva, tears wash the virus into the back of the nasopharynx via the nasal-lacrimal duct. Thus eye protection in the form of tight-fitting goggles is also a necessary requirement. Eyeglasses and facial shields are also inadequate protection because they fail to completely seal off the eyes.

Why has Dr. Fauci failed to warn about proper eye protection in the prevention of Covid-19 infection?

Well, that’s just another means for viruses to enter the human body.  We can’t stop it, whatever it is, and however effective it is against the human body.  We may as well drive through it.  I’ve said that from the beginning.

I’ve already discussed this in detail.  Filters work (primarily) in one of two ways.  (1) particle interception because the filter fibers are closer together than the particle diameter, or (2) electrostatic capture.

The virus is smaller than the distance between the two fibers.  Next, the virus in question (SARS-CoV-2) is non-polar.  You may as well try to capture a mosquito with a chain link fence.

So this doctor’s pathway is just another reason to listen to what I’ve said before.  In order to be effective, you would have to wear an OSHA-approved, fit tested full face respirator, including both a HEPA filter and a charcoal filter.  The HEPA may be good for viruses contained within water droplets (until evaporation by the air stream), but the charcoal is the only real chance of particle interception.

Anything else is a sham.  Anything else is a hoax.  I’ve also told you what I would find necessary to believe that anything else would be a successful strategy: full testing and calculations (to develop models) performed by physicists and engineers, assessing particle sizes and their distribution, filters and their efficiency, retention time, an assessment using CFD (computational fluid dynamics) to assess the diminution of effectiveness due to air flow versus face velocity and benchmarking against empirical data, and full disclosure of mathematical and physics models for public review.

No.  Not by doctors and epidemiologists.  They know nothing about this sort of thing.  By engineers and physicists.

To date, no one has proposed anything even approaching this level of analysis, much less actually done it.

I stand by everything I’ve said.  And by the way, I don’t wear masks.

I linked the video by Tucker Carlson where he interviews Dr. Li-Meng Yan, but didn’t give a lot of thought to it.  I wouldn’t have otherwise revisited this, except that WRSA linked a Zero Hedge article on the same issue.

Well, she’s not all that, regardless of the publicity.  Dr. Paul Cottrell analyzes her statements and she comes up short.  This video is a bit broken up with pauses, and it’s highly technical, but his main point is that she is probably a tool to throw all the blame on the CCP.

She fails to mention that this virus began at Fort Dix as an American program, and was outsourced to Wuhan for further gain-of-function research.  She also fails to mention that this virus includes HIV in the spike protein.

Don’t let her misdirect like this.  The bug is a combination American-CCP bug, with all the bells and whistles Anthony Fauci could give it with your tax dollars through NIAID.

SciTechDaily.

Hospitalized COVID-19 patients who were vitamin D sufficient, with a blood level of 25-hydroxyvitamin D of at least 30 ng/mL (a measure of vitamin D status), had a significant decreased risk for adverse clinical outcomes including becoming unconscious, hypoxia (body starved for oxygen) and death. In addition, they had lower blood levels of an inflammatory marker (C-reactive protein) and higher blood levels of lymphocytes (a type of immune cell to help fight infection).

“This study provides direct evidence that vitamin D sufficiency can reduce the complications, including the cytokine storm (release of too many proteins into the blood too quickly) and ultimately death from COVID-19,” explained corresponding author Michael F. Holick, PhD, MD, professor of medicine, physiology and biophysics and molecular medicine at Boston University School of Medicine.

A blood sample to measure vitamin D status (measured serum level of 25-hydroxyvitamin D) was taken from 235 patients were admitted to the hospital with COVID-19. These patients were followed for clinical outcomes including clinical severity of the infection, becoming unconscious, having difficulty in breathing resulting in hypoxia and death. The blood was also analyzed for an inflammatory marker (C-reactive protein) and for numbers of lymphocytes. The researchers then compared all of these parameters in patients who were vitamin D deficient to those who were vitamin D sufficient.

In patients older than 40 years they observed that those patients who were vitamin D sufficient were 51.5 percent less likely to die from the infection compared to patients who were vitamin D deficient or insufficient with a blood level of 25-hydroxyvitamin D less than 30 ng/mL.

Holick, who most recently published a study which found that a sufficient amount of vitamin D can reduce the risk of catching coronavirus by 54 percent, believes that being vitamin D sufficient helps to fight consequences from being infected not only with the coronavirus but also other viruses causing upper respiratory tract illnesses including influenza. “There is great concern that the combination of an influenza infection and a coronal viral infection could substantially increase hospitalizations and death due to complications from these viral infections.”

According to Holick this study provides a simple and cost-effective strategy to improve one’s ability to fight the coronavirus and reduce COVID-19’s adverse clinical outcomes, including requiring ventilator support, overactive immune response leading to cytokine storm and death. “Because vitamin D deficiency and insufficiency is so widespread in children and adults in the United States and worldwide, especially in the winter months, it is prudent for everyone to take a vitamin D supplement to reduce risk of being infected and having complications from COVID-19.”

I maintain, as I always have based on the fact that the NIH themselves told us so, that Hydroxychloroquine is an effective treatment for this virus given the necessary combination of early treatment, antibiotics and Zinc.  Also, there is the little issue of more than 100 studies to prove out the 2005 assertions by the NIH it its effectiveness.

However, absent this debate, there are things we can be doing to maintain our health, which we should be doing anyway.

Vitamins C and D, proper mineral intake (including Zinc), and getting plenty of exercise and sun, to name just a few.

As linked at WRSA, the Covid-liars.

More detail.

Officials in the Nashville health department and mayor John Cooper’s office are being accused of colluding to conceal the low amount of people whose positive coronavirus cases were traced to bars and restaurants, as Fox 17 revealed leaked emails.

One leaked email exchange, between mayor Cooper’s senior advisor Benjamin Eagles and health department official Leslie Waller, revealed that as of June 30th just 22 cases had been linked to bars and restaurants. After that data was disclosed, the exchange went as follows:

Waller: “This isn’t going to be publicly released, right? Just info for Mayor’s Office?”

Cooper: “Correct, not for public consumption.”

Fox 17 also uncovered an email from an unnamed Nashville health department official, in response to an inquiry about how to handle a question from Tennessean reporter Nate Rau. In late July, Rau asked the health department about intel that just 80 cases of the 20,000 in Davidson County were attributable to exposure at bars and restaurants.

Brian Todd, the health department official who sent the email asking how the department should respond, got the following answer from an unnamed official: “My two cents. We have certainly refused to give counts per bar because those numbers are low per site. We could still release the total though, and then a response to the over 80 could be because that number is increasing all the time and we don’t want to say a specific number.”

The mayor’s office declined to confirm or deny the emails to Fox 17; city council-member Steve Glover said he had an attorney reveal the authenticity of the emails and accused Metro Nashville of “fabricating information” in an orchestrated cover-up.

It should of course be considered good news that so few cases wound up being tied to bars and restaurants. The hospitality industry, which already operated on razor-thin margins in normal times, is in dire straits in big cities across the country and as a result many beloved institutions are shuttering. Here’s a list of places that have permanently closed in Nashville during the pandemic.

The implication of a deliberate plot to conceal information about low spreads from bars and restaurants is a desire to maintain strict restrictions. Thus, these emails represent an agreement between officials, who work to serve taxpayers, to prop up unpopular governing decisions.

There is no pandemic and there never was.  There was a virus that ended up being contagious but killing far fewer people than the seasonal flu when co-morbidity is accounted for (an average of 2.3).

And here is more coverage at NRO.

Liars, one and all, everyone who has conspired to shut down businesses, kill jobs, destroy wealth, and harm families.  All of this to make political points.  This is how badly they want the office of the chief executive.

God will judge them, and men should.  They all deserve to be hung from oak trees until dead.

From reader Joefour, Zerohedge.

Authored by Alan Hamilton via Off-Guardian.org,

“On at least 3 or 4 occasions in the past week we’ve had to smash the windows of people in cars and pull them out of there so they could provide their details – because they weren’t telling us where they were going; they weren’t adhering to the chief health officer’s guidelines, they weren’t providing their name and their address.”

– Shane Patton, Victorian Chief Police Officer 04/08/2020

“Show me your papers!”

You can replace the word “pandemic” with “excuse for tyranny,” and you’ll understand the last eight months.

It’ll go on until LEOs get shot pulling stunts like this.  Oh, wait.  The Aussies turned them in.  Never mind.

I’m sure all of those highly educated and brilliant PhD microbiologists and virologists at Google will take down this video because they know that her facts are wrong.

Uh … er … I guess Google doesn’t have any highly educated and brilliant microbiologists or virologists.  But I guess they’ll take this down anyway.

This.

If the US had the death rate of NY/NJ we’d be at half a million. Instead the rest of the US looks like this https://t.co/qC7HFNvSNI pic.twitter.com/2DsImBBw5A

— Eric (@IAmTheActualET) September 7, 2020

Cuomo.  Murderer of the elderly, the very ones God says to honor (Leviticus 19:32).

Medium.com (via reader WiscoDave).

Earlier this summer, the Summit supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Lab in Tennessee set about crunching data on more than 40,000 genes from 17,000 genetic samples in an effort to better understand Covid-19. Summit is the second-fastest computer in the world, but the process — which involved analyzing 2.5 billion genetic combinations — still took more than a week.

Time on this computer is heavily leveraged and a lot of code writers and researchers use it.  I suspect that they didn’t use every processor, and it would be interesting to know how many CPU-hours were tallied.

When Summit was done, researchers analyzed the results. It was, in the words of Dr. Daniel Jacobson, lead researcher and chief scientist for computational systems biology at Oak Ridge, a “eureka moment.” The computer had revealed a new theory about how Covid-19 impacts the body: the bradykinin hypothesis. The hypothesis provides a model that explains many aspects of Covid-19, including some of its most bizarre symptoms. It also suggests 10-plus potential treatments, many of which are already FDA approved. Jacobson’s group published their results in a paper in the journal eLife in early July.

According to the team’s findings, a Covid-19 infection generally begins when the virus enters the body through ACE2 receptors in the nose, (The receptors, which the virus is known to target, are abundant there.) The virus then proceeds through the body, entering cells in other places where ACE2 is also present: the intestines, kidneys, and heart. This likely accounts for at least some of the disease’s cardiac and GI symptoms.

But once Covid-19 has established itself in the body, things start to get really interesting. According to Jacobson’s group, the data Summit analyzed shows that Covid-19 isn’t content to simply infect cells that already express lots of ACE2 receptors. Instead, it actively hijacks the body’s own systems, tricking it into upregulating ACE2 receptors in places where they’re usually expressed at low or medium levels, including the lungs.

In this sense, Covid-19 is like a burglar who slips in your unlocked second-floor window and starts to ransack your house. Once inside, though, they don’t just take your stuff — they also throw open all your doors and windows so their accomplices can rush in and help pillage more efficiently.

The renin–angiotensin system (RAS) controls many aspects of the circulatory system, including the body’s levels of a chemical called bradykinin, which normally helps to regulate blood pressure. According to the team’s analysis, when the virus tweaks the RAS, it causes the body’s mechanisms for regulating bradykinin to go haywire. Bradykinin receptors are resensitized, and the body also stops effectively breaking down bradykinin. (ACE normally degrades bradykinin, but when the virus downregulates it, it can’t do this as effectively.)

The end result, the researchers say, is to release a bradykinin storm — a massive, runaway buildup of bradykinin in the body. According to the bradykinin hypothesis, it’s this storm that is ultimately responsible for many of Covid-19’s deadly effects. Jacobson’s team says in their paper that “the pathology of Covid-19 is likely the result of Bradykinin Storms rather than cytokine storms,” which had been previously identified in Covid-19 patients, but that “the two may be intricately linked.” Other papers had previously identified bradykinin storms as a possible cause of Covid-19’s pathologies.

As bradykinin builds up in the body, it dramatically increases vascular permeability. In short, it makes your blood vessels leaky. This aligns with recent clinical data, which increasingly views Covid-19 primarily as a vascular disease, rather than a respiratory one. But Covid-19 still has a massive effect on the lungs. As blood vessels start to leak due to a bradykinin storm, the researchers say, the lungs can fill with fluid. Immune cells also leak out into the lungs, Jacobson’s team found, causing inflammation.

An awful lot of smart people (e.g., Paul Cottrell, J.C., EMCrit, etc.) have said just about from the beginning that this was a blood disease first, not a lung disease [first].  You can Google “Happy Hypoxia” and see that Dr. Cameron Kyle-Sidell said from the first weeks of this disease in NYC that it wasn’t an ARDS disease as advertised by the CDC.  At last look, the idiot “experts” in my home state were still pushing this notion.

And Covid-19 has another especially insidious trick. Through another pathway, the team’s data shows, it increases production of hyaluronic acid (HLA) in the lungs. HLA is often used in soaps and lotions for its ability to absorb more than 1,000 times its weight in fluid. When it combines with fluid leaking into the lungs, the results are disastrous: It forms a hydrogel, which can fill the lungs in some patients. According to Jacobson, once this happens, “it’s like trying to breathe through Jell-O.”

This may explain why ventilators have proven less effective in treating advanced Covid-19 than doctors originally expected, based on experiences with other viruses. “It reaches a point where regardless of how much oxygen you pump in, it doesn’t matter, because the alveoli in the lungs are filled with this hydrogel,” Jacobson says. “The lungs become like a water balloon.” Patients can suffocate even while receiving full breathing support.

The bradykinin hypothesis also extends to many of Covid-19’s effects on the heart. About one in five hospitalized Covid-19 patients have damage to their hearts, even if they never had cardiac issues before. Some of this is likely due to the virus infecting the heart directly through its ACE2 receptors. But the RAS also controls aspects of cardiac contractions and blood pressure. According to the researchers, bradykinin storms could create arrhythmias and low blood pressure, which are often seen in Covid-19 patients.

The upshot is that there is hope for those who are badly affected.

As Jacobson and team point out, several drugs target aspects of the RAS and are already FDA approved to treat other conditions. They could arguably be applied to treating Covid-19 as well. Several, like danazol, stanozolol, and ecallantide, reduce bradykinin production and could potentially stop a deadly bradykinin storm. Others, like icatibant, reduce bradykinin signaling and could blunt its effects once it’s already in the body.

Interestingly, Jacobson’s team also suggests vitamin D as a potentially useful Covid-19 drug. The vitamin is involved in the RAS system and could prove helpful by reducing levels of another compound, known as REN. Again, this could stop potentially deadly bradykinin storms from forming. The researchers note that vitamin D has already been shown to help those with Covid-19. The vitamin is readily available over the counter, and around 20% of the population is deficient. If indeed the vitamin proves effective at reducing the severity of bradykinin storms, it could be an easy, relatively safe way to reduce the severity of the virus.

Other compounds could treat symptoms associated with bradykinin storms. Hymecromone, for example, could reduce hyaluronic acid levels, potentially stopping deadly hydrogels from forming in the lungs. And timbetasin could mimic the mechanism that the researchers believe protects women from more severe Covid-19 infections. All of these potential treatments are speculative, of course, and would need to be studied in a rigorous, controlled environment before their effectiveness could be determined and they could be used more broadly.

I’d say this was a good use of FedGov resources at ORNL, and the CDC and NIH is still as incompetent and lethargic as ever.  Or perhaps they never intended to create anything but fear and panic.