What To Do With Jordon Walker?
What To Do With Jordon Walker?
Can He Be Taken Seriously? Or Is He Just A Midwit Dimwit?
It is the acme of understatement to say that Project Veritas created yet another storm of controversy with their video of (ex?) Pfizer Director, Worldwide R&D Strategic Operations and mRNA Scientific Planning Jordon Walker casually discussing Pfizer’s either contemplated or ongoing efforts to actively mutate and alter the SARS-CoV-2 virus, seemingly oblivious to the ethical minefields surrounding what he attempts to describe.
As I said the other day, Jordon Walker ultimately said the quiet part out loud: Big Pharma researchers think nothing at all about “playing God” with viruses.
Jordon Walker merely said that quiet part out loud. He merely confirmed that this is what Big Pharma does—and you can be sure they are doing it with more than just SARS-CoV-2. This is what university researchers do. This is what Big Government does.
That is by far the most terrifying aspect of Jordon Walker’s reveals: the “normality” of it all.
As I have outlined in numerous other articles, the casual manipulations of viruses is the disturbing and ethically questionable research status quo for modern virology.
However, other writers—whose work I respect and have recommended more than once—have expressed skepticism about Jordon’s statements, their veracity, and the level of credibility we should assign to them. They raise a number of points that warrant consideration and reflection, which I shall attempt to begin herein.
Brian Mowrey of Unglossed took issue with Walker’s notion of preemptive vaccines.
CATFISH: Pfizer ultimately is thinking about mutating Covid?
WALKER: Well, that is not what we say to the public. No. Don't tell anyone this by the way. You have to promise you won't tell anyone. You got to promise you won't tell anyone, okay. You know how the virus keeps mutating?
CATFISH: Yeah.
WALKER: Well one of the things we're exploring is like why don't we just mutate it ourselves so we could preemptively develop new vaccines, right?
This cannot be true because:
Walker’s formulation of the “scheme” lacks regulatory and marketing executability. There is no system for putting “future” variant mRNA injections on the market. Can you go to Walgreens and ask for the Pfizer Fall 2023 vaccine? No? Oh, that’s weird. Because Jordon Trishton Walker said you could on a date! Robert Malone said he’s a senior emissary! Nobody leaves this Walgreens until the cops get here!
What must be said on this point is that pre-emption is an explicit goal of current mRNA “vaccine” research (emphasis mine).
BioNTech and Pfizer say they could begin shipping vaccines that target Omicron within 100 days if protection from their existing vaccines declines substantially against the new variant. Moderna has already started testing booster shots designed to anticipate mutations. It also says it would rapidly advance an Omicron-specific booster shot, which could be available early next year.
This is what Stéphane Bancel, Chief Executive Officer of Moderna, had to say in a press release outlining their COVID-19 booster strategy (again, emphasis mine):
As we seek to defeat COVID-19, we must be vigilant and proactive as new variants of SARS-CoV-2 emerge. Leveraging the flexibility of our mRNA platform, we are moving quickly to test updates to the vaccines that address emerging variants of the virus in the clinic. Moderna is committed to making as many updates to our vaccine as necessary until the pandemic is under control. We hope to demonstrate that booster doses, if necessary, can be done at lower dose levels, which will allow us to provide many more doses to the global community in late 2021 and 2022 if necessary.
Separately, Eugyppius offered up this observation on Walker’s comments.
What this actually reveals, is that the Pfizer/BioNTech bivalent vaccine has been a total flop. Uptake is lower than ever, and within months of its rollout, BA.5 infections receded in the face of what will probably soon be the new dominant lineage, XBB.1.5. Because it takes so long to research and produce updated vaccines, you’re always vaccinating against yesterday’s variant. Vaccinator hysteria, however, has created an enormous global market for on-target Covid boosters, so you’d better believe that there are people out there right now trying to get ahead of the evolutionary curve. One way to do this, would be to infect bivalent-vaccinated animal models with current virus lineages, and observe which escape mutations emerge. Walker appears to say that Pfizer is considering a research programme along these lines, and that other scientists are already doing this work.
“Preemptively develop new vaccines”, “anticipate mutations”, “vigilant and proactive”, and “get ahead of the evolutionary curve” are little more than different articulations of the same overall objective. Whether the objective is realistic and achievable is a relevant question—and I share Brian’s skepticism on that point—yet we should not presume that mere impossibility fully discredits the notion of there being any attempt to achieve it.
As regards regulatory protocols arguably standing in the way, we must also pause to consider the import of Walker’s commentary about Big Pharma’s regulatory capture, as well as the reality that Pfizer’s bivalent Omicron booster was submitted for Emergency Use Authorization without any testing on human subjects.
I submit that regulatory protocols are not the disqualifying barrier we might hope them to be. Theoretically, Pfizer could have had the bivalent vaccine on the shelf waiting to be used, and only needed the emergence of a qualifying strain for Pfizer to proceed with releasing it for use.
To be clear, there is no evidence that is actually what happened, and I am not suggesting that this is indeed did happen. However, Pfizer’s ability to persuade the FDA to approve the booster without full testing itself is evidence that Pfizer views regulatory protocols as a solvable problem, not an unsolvable barrier.
As for why this is a problem, we need to consider another point Brian asserts.
Gain of function, i.e. modifying virus tropism in a lab through serial passage, is real. But it has been taking place in science for over a century, with little apparent consequence.
There are some historical data points that serve to rebut (or at least contextualize) this assertion:
The 1977-1979 “Russian Flu” pandemic
has been identified as a lab-released strain of H1N1 Influenza A virus, which killed 700,000 people. While there is not any assertion the virus was the subject of specific Gain-of-Function experimentation so far as I am aware, it does prove absolutely that viruses can escape the lab environment and spread like any other pathogen.
Martin Furmanski, of the Center for Arms Control and Nonproliferation, later argued in an op-ed letter in mBIO that the 1977 pandemic was prime evidence of why GoF research should not be accepted ever.
Furmanski further argued that accidental releases of dangerous pathogens are more likely and more common than most would like to believe.My review of 11 relevant events (2) found that escapes of high-consequence pathogens causing community infections typically occur from state-of-the-art laboratories, including six outbreaks of severe acute respiratory syndrome and one of foot-and-mouth disease since 2003.
Furmanski also points out that four of those events occurred here in the US.
The post-9/11 anthrax attacks, in which letters laced with anthrax were sent to multiple individuals around the US, killed five people. What is notable about these attacks for this discussion is that the strain of anthrax used was a laboratory strain known as the “Ames strain”.
We were surprised it was the Ames strain. And it was chilling at the same time, because the Ames strain is a laboratory strain that had been developed by the U.S. Army as a vaccine-challenge strain. We knew that it was highly virulent. In fact, that’s why the Army used it, because it represented a more potent challenge to vaccines that were being developed by the U.S. Army. It wasn’t just some random type of anthrax that you find in nature; it was a laboratory strain, and that was very significant to us, because that was the first hint that this might really be a bioterrorism event.
While not causing a death toll in the hundreds of thousands such as the Russian flu pandemic, this warrants mention because it is an act of bioterrorism—a pathogen developed in a lab for the purposes of “threat reduction” became a deliberate example of “threat creation.”
Thus, even without the arguable inclusion of SARS-CoV-2 in this list, we have conclusive evidence that laboratory strains of pathogens do escape, do get in the wild, do cause death, and do cause pandemic disease. This much is documented history, not any form of “conspiracy theory.”
Regarding Pfizer’s non-denial denial, Modern Discontent raises an intriguing question:
This is why this recent post from Pfizer elaborating on their work with PAXLOVID may not be the bombshell reporting that it may seem (emphasis mine):
In addition, to meet U.S. and global regulatory requirements for our oral treatment, PAXLOVID™, Pfizer undertakes in vitro work (e.g., in a laboratory culture dish) to identify potential resistance mutations to nirmatrelvir, one of PAXLOVID’s two components. With a naturally evolving virus, it is important to routinely assess the activity of an antiviral. Most of this work is conducted using computer simulations or mutations of the main protease–a non-infectious part of the virus. In a limited number of cases when a full virus does not contain any known gain of function mutations, such virus may be engineered to enable the assessment of antiviral activity in cells. In addition, in vitro resistance selection experiments are undertaken in cells incubated with SARS-CoV-2 and nirmatrelvir in our secure Biosafety level 3 (BSL3) laboratory to assess whether the main protease can mutate to yield resistant strains of the virus. It is important to note that these studies are required by U.S. and global regulators for all antiviral products and are carried out by many companies and academic institutions in the U.S. and around the world.
If we are looking for consistency, wouldn’t any study using PAXLOVID to find resistant strains of the virus be considered GOF based on this metric? The same goes for Remdesivir, Molnupiravir, Ivermectin, HCQ, or really any antiviral that has ever been on the market.
The short answer, I believe, is “no”. Simply testing existing variants to determine which, if any, have a capacity to develop resistance to an antiviral would not be “gain of function”, as such tests merely reproduce within a laboratory setting phenomena which occur in the wild already.
Stephanie Brail, over at Wholistic, offers this assessment of the same text:
Wow. This is bad. They are basically saying they conduct gain of function research when computer models won’t suffice, and they are also performing “in vitro” (petri dish) experiments on resistance selection, which could create a virus that is more resistant to treatment.
I agree with her view of this. The problem is not that Pfizer is culturing SARS-CoV-2 in cell cultures with nirmatrelvir (PAXLOVID) to see if resistant strains will emerge, but that they are, by their own admission, engineering viral strains with known gain of function mutations for use in the cell cultures, as opposed to using currently circulating variants (XBB.1.5, anyone?). It is one thing to test for resistance using known viral strains, and it is quite another to create a previously non-existent strain on which to test.
My question to Pfizer would be whether or not current regulatory protocol calls for the use of such “chimeric” viral constructs in testing, or if known strains in the wild will suffice.
We should not forget the dustup a few months back when researchers at Boston University spliced some Omicron RNA onto the ancestral Wuhan strain to create a “chimeric” strain that killed 8 out of 10 “humanized” mice.
Nor should we blithely assume that such research is intrinsically necessary or even informative. As the recent example of the University of Glasgow virology team that mixed influenza A and RSV viral strains together to study whether or not the viruses can “coinfect” the same host—a question with an already known answer
.Which brings me back to my core problem with Jordon Walker’s statements: it’s not the details of what he said but the offhand “business as usual” way in which he said it. We are presented with a person casually talking about mutating a virus as a protocol for researching vaccines—and, as I detailed the other day, we already know that is the status quo within viral research.
Yes, the use of chimeric viral constructs and other exemplars of what could be considered gain of function research under an expansive definition of the term is nearly ubiquitous within Big Pharma. No, this research is not necessarily secret (except in the manner of most trade secrets), nor is it covert.
Yet this research is also not necessarily established as being ethical and proper. Jeff Goldblum’s classic quote from “Jurassic Park” is a pithy framing of this issue:
Yeah, but your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.
Our concern should lie not in what Jordon Walker said but in how he said it, and why.
Exactly how does one justify research if we have no clear limits and no clear boundaries between the permissible and the impermissible?
Is it normal and ethical to discuss in a crowded bar or restaurant details of your employer’s work that is covered by a Non-Disclosure Agreement?
Is it normal and ethical to discuss with anyone, but particularly a relative stranger, topics that you do not want being discussed elsewhere?
Ultimately, the relevant questions the Project Veritas video calls to our attention arise not because what Pfizer is or may be contemplating doing is extraordinary or unusual, but because it is, in every sense, the “old normal.”
Michaelis, M., Doerr, H.W. & Cinatl, J. Novel swine-origin influenza A virus in humans: another pandemic knocking at the door. Med Microbiol Immunol 198, 175–183 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00430-009-0118-5
Furmanski, Martin. “The 1977 H1N1 Influenza Virus Reemergence Demonstrated Gain-of-Function Hazards.” mBio vol. 6,5 e01434-15. 29 Sep. 2015, doi:10.1128/mBio.01434-15
Franz, Anna et al. “Correlation of viral load of respiratory pathogens and co-infections with disease severity in children hospitalized for lower respiratory tract infection.” Journal of clinical virology : the official publication of the Pan American Society for Clinical Virology vol. 48,4 (2010): 239-45. doi:10.1016/j.jcv.2010.05.007
He likely believes his own BS and was hired as a useful idiot. Which he is, and then some! Lets b careful not to be fixed into the GoF narrative of fear for the “next bug”. No such animal did ever nor will exist. We been fooled, folks. Twice.
Next bug will be on a plate, not sneezing out past a faucidiaper.
There's been a lot of commentary on JW's glib affect, but medical people talk casually about things that outsiders would deem horrific. It's their day to day reality, and they speak of it as such.
And after a few drinks, if you're pursuing sex, you'll communicate differently than if you were being interviewed by a reporter.
So, the response to that aspect is overblown.
[One way to do this, would be to infect bivalent-vaccinated animal models with current virus lineages, and observe which escape mutations emerge.]
Whether it's mathematical models or in vivo experiments in a controlled laboratory environment, I can't see how either, or a combination of the two, could possibly hope to replicate what might happen in the REAL world, with its uncontrolled setting and endless variables, and unpredictability of both people, circumstances, and events.
From that perspective, "science" appears to be a pretend game, a fantasy: even if you can narrow variables to one, what bearing does that have on REAL life?
What real predictive value does it offer?
"We made this happen in a lab, we ran this simulation on a computer, we created a model, so now we know that despite her staggering anti-charisma, Hillary Clinton will beat Donald Trump, and a kajilion people will die from COVID, despite its infinitesimal death rate."
Back up a claim with the magical spells such as "laboratory experiment" or "funfair model," and somehow we disengage our intellect.
Humans are endlessly fascinated by those who predict the future. "Here are my Top 10 predictions for 2023," and most people lean in for a listen.
But whether it's soothsayers or psychics, astrologers or prophets, Fed watchers or stockpickers, economists or scientists, they all seem on equal footing:
Different methods, same track record.
Abysmal.
What we do have irrefutable evidence of is that expert predictions are often less inaccurate than those from laypeople. That's been tested a number of times and is well-established.
People crave certainty in times of trouble, but confidence- and even expertise- is not correlated with accuracy.
Even if the prediction is "backed by science."