BY MITCHEL COHEN
From the start of the pandemic in 2020, thoughtful vaxxine challengers asked, “What would happen if the experimental mRNA vaxxines ended up increasing the chances of one’s body manufacturing misfolded spike proteins of the Covid virus? And what then?”
Unlike prior vaccines, the mRNA vaxxines are designed to cause cells throughout the body to “manufacture” Covid spike proteins where no spike protein had gone before. The novel idea would be to induce the body to then create antibodies to the spike proteins the body itself would be “induced to produce”.
But what if the spike proteins themselves, even those vaxxine-generated by the body disattached from the rest of the Covid virus, causes unexpected harm in particular circumstances? And, what if the resulting vaxxine-induced mass-production of spike proteins dramatically increases the possibility of biological errors and mutations?
One would expect regulatory health agencies to examine evidence of vaxxine-induced “malfunction”, which in this case would mean the incidence of Covid spike proteins misfolding into what are called “prions.” Is it possible that relatively small numbers of prions created in the mRNA vaxxine process could result in out-of-control cascading chain reactions in the brain, cascades that have been documented previously as causes of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans and Mad Cow disease?
The Food and Drug Administration, which is charged with evaluating such reports, does not appear to have required the Pfizer and Moderna manufacturers of the Covid vaxxine to submit research reporting incidence of misfolded proteins prompted by the mRNA vaxxines. (Note that this is a separate concern from adjuvants, metals, graphene oxides, and impurities in the composition of the vaxxine itself.) And yet, the FDA approved “emergency” allocation of the vaxxines despite the companies’ failure to test for prion formation — data which is essential in assessing risk prior to approval of such new vaxxine technology.
The No Spray Coalition against pesticides — which in 2007 had after many years won a federal lawsuit under the Clean Water Act against New York City’s spraying of massive amounts of organophosphate and pyrethroid pesticides to kill mosquitoes said to be carrying and transmitting West Nile virus — has had some encounters with the frightening prion brain diseases. Farmers in Europe had been directed to drench their cattle with Malathion and Phosmet, which caused a rash of Mad Cow disease, Downer Cow syndrome and Scrapies (diseases with parallels in humans known as Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (CJD)).
S-[(1,3-Dioxo-1,3-dihydro-2H-isoindol-2-yl)methyl] O,O-dimethyl phosphorothioate
In the U.S., also implicated in those diseases was the feeding of protein supplements from “rendered” diseased animals to livestock, from animals already drenched in organophosphate pesticides, causing proteins to fold into prions and resulting in the animal diseases mentioned here. Organophosphate pesticides are, we learned, cholinesterase inhibitors (more on this later) and endocrine disruptors. The misfolding of proteins into nucleic acid-free prions seems to also be related to Parkinson’s disease, dementia, and more.
When vaxxine critic Steve Kirsch similarly hypothesized that the mRNA vaxxines for Covid may be facilitating the creation of prions leading to some of the same prion diseases we saw with the mass-applications of organophosphate pesticides, Twitter banned him “for life” from communicating such thoughts to others.
In my 2003 booklet, “Got Pus? Bovine Growth Hormone and the New World Order,” I quoted Barry Commoner as saying:
“In the 1980s, Stanley Prusiner confirmed that the infectious agents that cause scrapie, mad cow disease, and similar very rare but invariably fatal human diseases are indeed nucleic-acid-free proteins (he named them prions), which replicate in an entirely unprecedented way. Invading the brain, the prion encounters a normal brain protein which it then refolds to match the prion’s distinctive three-dimensional shape. The newly refolded protein itself becomes infectious and, acting on another molecule of the normal protein, sets up a chain reaction that propagates the disease to its fatal end.” (“Unraveling the DNA Myth The Spurious Foundation of Genetic Engineering,” Harpers, Feb. 2002.)
Prions cause infected cattle to literally develop holes in their brains, suffer seizures, fall down and die. Studies now indicate that mad cow disease is linked to the devastating Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans, although this was at first strenuously denied by the pharmaceutical industry and the researchers they control who twisted every which way to protect the products of their corporate employers. We are seeing outbreaks of CJD in some people following mRNA vaxxinations today, and so need to again raise the same questions
Prions are able to withstand severe heat such as pasteurization and even irradiation because they contain no DNA or other nucleic acids. There is no known way to defuse them. They may incubate for 30 years, and are passed to humans who eat meat from sick cows, regardless of how well one cooks the meat.
Unlike the eating of rendered meat from cows that died of Mad Cow disease or of drinking milk from cows injected with Monsanto’s recombinant Bovine Growth Hormone, the relationship of CJD to consuming milk products from sick cows has not yet been established but should be seriously considered.
The U.S. government maintains that no BSE-infected cattle have been discovered in the U.S. But, as Jeffrey St. Clair and Alexander Cockburn point out, the disease may have appeared in the U.S. before the 1995 outbreak in England. (St. Clair & Cockburn, “Dead Meat: Why Mad Cows Are the Least of It,” City Pages Online, April 2, 1995.)
Richard Marsh, a veterinary scientist at the University of Wisconsin, was raising the alarm about BSE in American cattle a decade earlier. In 1985. Marsh discovered an outbreak of spongiform encephalopathy at a mink farm in Wisconsin. The mink had been fed a protein supplement made from rendered cows that had reportedly died from ‘downer cow syndrome.’ Marsh believed the cows had actually succumbed to a previously undetected form of BSE.
Around 100,000 cows a year die from downer cow syndrome in the U.S. Most of these dead cows were at the time rendered into protein supplements to feed other cattle, who under normal circumstances ate grass and not meat. As Cockburn and St. Clair saw it, “if this is true, the U.S. cattle population may already be infected with BSE and American meat consumers may have already contracted CJD.”
HEAVY METALS AND PRION DISEASES
Prions bond with copper; those molecules are carried to the brain, destroying free radicals along he way. So far so good. But in bodies deficient in copper, prions will bind instead with manganese, which is what causes the proteins to fold improperly and create deadly chaos.
What causes deficiencies in copper? Among other things, overdosing with zinc — a mineral so important in fighting Covid — can actually make our bodies deficient in copper and thus more susceptible to Covid and other viruses. So it is essential to take zinc as part of one’s anti-Covid regimen but not to overdose on it over extended periods. Keep zinc and small amounts of copper in balance.
Now, here’s a very interesting ribbon tying together the activities of the No Spray Coalition against pesticides with understanding how to deal with Covid. Certain environmental toxins, particularly organophosphate insecticides such as the widely used Malathion and Phosmet, which were derived from nerve gas developed by the Nazis in World War 2, introduce high levels of manganese (along with other toxins) into the environment. Organophosphate pesticides (OPs) are, in the opinion of those challenging official claims, critical co-factors in causing Mad Cow disease and CJD. OPs are also Cholinesterase inhibitors, and play havoc with nerve and brain functioning.
Is there a relevant synergy among the zinc, copper and manganese in the blood, and in specific organs? One area of research would be to follow up on the role of manganese in the advent of Covid-19, and deficiencies of copper and zinc, in Parkinson’s / Alzheimer’s / dementia diseases.
Also in need of further examination would be the massive applications of Monsanto’s widely used herbicide Roundup, and its main active ingredient, Glyposate, on the management of metals in the body in establishing conditions in which the SARS COV2 virus thrives. The trace minerals, so-called +2 cations such as iron, zinc, copper, cobalt, selenium, manganese and molybdenum — writes Stephanie Seneff, Ph.D and senior research scientist at MIT in a chapter of my book “The Fight Against Monsanto’s Roundup: The Politics of Pesticides” (newly reissued, 2022) — “are exploited by the body to catalyze various enzymatic reactions essential for metabolism and protection from oxidative stress. These metals are, however, dangerous if they are present as free ions in the blood, because of their high reactivity. In consideration of this, the body has developed sophisticated mechanisms to hide many of these metals in transport proteins in the blood and also produces specific proteins to carry them across the cell wall for passage across the gut barrier and then later for uptake by a cell.” How this relates to Covid-19 seems a crucial area for research and assessment.
Seneff continues a prescient essay, written a few months before the pandemic but with obvious implications to the biochemistry involved: “Ironically, with chronic glyphosate poisoning can come a situation of iron-based anemia simultaneous with iron-overload toxicity, in part because glyphosate tightly binds iron, preventing its uptake into the transport protein transferrin. Glyphosate then lets go of the metal it is carrying when it reaches a terminal watershed area of the blood, such as the kidneys or the brain stem, where the pH drops, causing glyphosate to lose binding capacity. The freed-up iron then becomes toxic to the tissues.” If you’re suddenly noting: “Holy Cow! Some of that is exactly what we’re seeing with Covid,” you’d be in good company — but don’t expect the FDA to have asked those questions of the corporate manufacturers prior to granting emergency authorization for its vaxxine distribution!
MANGANESE MADNESS IS KILLING MY COUNTRY
Let’s return briefly to Manganese madness, whose symptoms mirror those of Mad Cow and CJD. Manganese madness is an irreversible fatal neuro-psychiatric degenerative syndrome that plagued manganese miners in the first half of the 19th century. But thus far official researchers have ignored the probability that these are parallel diseases with the same causation, aggravated by the intense use of organophosphate pesticides reacting with prions in the meat of sick cows.
Just prior to the mad cow disease epidemic in Britain, the governments of that country and of Switzerland mandated Malathion and Phosmet skin treatments for all cattle. Phosmet was initially marketed as an agricultural pesticide by ICI, and later by their renamed subdivision, Zeneca, and is used on more than 1.1 million acres of fruit orchards in the U.S. as well as in dog collars; it has been found in the dust in homes of pesticide applicators living close to orchard farms.
As mad cow disease terrorized Britain and Switzerland (1982), organic farmer Mark Purdey performed soil analyses on the areas near clusters of CJD and found high levels of manganese from crop spraying. Neurobiologist David Brown at Cambridge University, concluded that Purdey’s findings in the toxic environment were supported by research that he had done in the laboratory and confirmed the synergistic links.
And yet the FDA, corporate scientists and pharmaceutical companies have thus far failed to examine the obvious relationships between genetically engineered hormones, prions, pesticides, novel anti-mRNA vaxxines, and Mad Cow and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. How is an animal’s uptake of metals such as manganese and environmental conditions consistently exposing them to organophosphates and/or glyphosate (Monsanto’s pervasive “Roundup”) making them more or less susceptible to SARS‐CoV‐2, the causative pathogen of COVID‐19? No laboratory studies on these synergies have been reported. Neither Monsanto nor Novartis — which manufactured Malathion, along with DDT, Clioquinol, and Ritalin, and which remains one of the world’s largest genetic engineering pharmaceutical companies — is particularly keen on revealing research that might establish such connections. (The Bayer-Monsanto consolidation—one of the rotting legs of what physicist and world ecology advocate Vandana Shiva calls “The Poison Cartel”—came on the heels of the merger of the agricultural divisions of Dow and Dupont (now called Corteva Agriscience), and Syngenta’s merger with ChemChina. (Syngenta itself was the outcome of the consolidation of part of Novartis with AstraZeneca.)
All of this has severe environmental, economic, and health consequences. Groundwater becomes even more polluted as mutated, drug-resistant viruses, fungus, and bacteria enter the water supply and soil, blossoming in response to the increased use of antibiotics, metals, and genetically engineered chemicals in waste run-off.
What is the relation of pollutants to the malformation of Covid spike proteins and prions eventuated by the mRNA vaccines? Where are the holistic and synergistic analyses we so desperately need before such products are authorized? And, what ever happened to the “Precautionary Principle” before approving, even in a limited emergency capacity, new and experimental vaxxines based on technological platforms never fully tested nor previously utilized?
Mitchel Cohen, Coordinator
No Spray Coalition against pesticides
Another NoSprayer added this: I have been very concerned about shedding from the vaccines. Shedding is generally thought to only occur if a vaccine contains live virus, but shedding doesn’t have to be limited to a virus. We excrete all sorts of stuff through our skin. I’ve met former pesticide applicators who were still offgassing chemicals through their skin that they hadn’t been around in months.
It is also generally believed that prion diseases are not easily transmitted, but that has been put in question. It is certainly not true among animals that are confined as ‘live stock’ by humans, and millions of cows have been slaughtered because of outbreaks and fear of spread. These are just a few articles that describe prion shedding by various routes that can affect vulnerable individuals, mostly discussed among other animal species, but not excluding the potential effect on humans:
https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn19971-prion-disease-can-spread-through-air/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3268960/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4784231/
STEPHANIE SENEFF ADDS:
A Possible Link to Prion Diseases and Neurodegeneration
Prion diseases are a collection of neurodegenerative diseases that are induced through the misfolding of important bodily proteins, which form toxic oligomers that eventually precipitate out as fibrils causing widespread damage to neurons. Stanley Prusiner first coined the name `prion’ to describe these misfolded proteins (Prusiner, 1982).
The best-known prion disease is MADCOW disease (bovine spongiform encephalopathy), which became an epidemic in European cattle beginning in the 1980s. The CDC web site on prion diseases states that “prion diseases are usually rapidly progressive and always fatal.” (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2018). It is now believed that many neurodegenerative diseases, including Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s disease, and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) may be prion diseases, and researchers have identified specific proteinaceous infectious particles linked to these diseases (Weickenmeier et al., 2019).
Furthermore, researchers have identified a signature motif linked to susceptibility to misfolding into toxic oligomers, called the glycine zipper motif. It is characterized by a pattern of two glycine residues spaced by three intervening amino acids, represented as GxxxG. The bovine prion linked to MADCOW has a spectacular sequence of ten GxxxGs in a row (see uniprot.org/uniprot/P10279).
More generally, the GxxxG motif is a common feature of transmembrane proteins, and the glycines play an essential role in cross-linking α-helices in the protein (Mueller et al., 2014). Prion proteins become toxic when the α-helices misfold as β-sheets, and the protein is then impaired in its ability to enter the membrane (Prusiner, 1982). Glycines within the glycine zipper transmembrane motifs in the amyloid-β precursor protein (APP) play a central role in the misfolding of amyloid-β linked to Alzheimer’s disease (Decock et al., 2016). APP contains a total of four GxxxG motifs.
When considering that the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein is a transmembrane protein, and that it contains five GxxxG motifs in its sequence (see uniprot.org/uniprot/P0DTC2), it becomes extremely plausible that it could behave as a prion. One of the GxxxG sequences is present within its membrane fusion domain. Recall that the mRNA vaccines are designed with an altered sequence that replaces two adjacent amino acids in the fusion domain with a pair of prolines. This is done intentionally in order to force the protein to remain in its open state and make it harder for it to fuse with the membrane. This seems to us like a dangerous step towards misfolding potentially leading to prion disease.
A paper published by J. Bart Classen (2021) proposed that the spike protein in the mRNA vaccines could cause prion-like diseases, in part through its ability to bind to many known proteins and induce their misfolding into potential prions. Idrees and Kumar (2021) have proposed that the spike protein’s S1 component is prone to act as a functional amyloid and form toxic aggregates. These authors wrote that S1 has the ability “to form amyloid and toxic aggregates that can act as seeds to aggregate many of the misfolded brain proteins and can ultimately lead to neurodegeneration.”
According to Tetz and Tetz (2020), the form of the spike protein in SARS-CoV-2 has prion regions that are not present in the spike proteins for other coronaviruses. While this was reported in a nonpeer-reviewed article, the authors had published a previous paper in 2018 identifying prion-like regions in multiple eukaryotic viruses, so they have considerable expertise in this area (Tetz and Tetz, 2018).
A final point here relates to information about the Pfizer vaccine in particular. The European Medicines Agency (EMA) Public Assessment Report is a document submitted to gain approval to market the vaccine in Europe. It describes in detail a review of the manufacturing process as well as a wide range of associated testing data. One concerning revelation is the presence of “fragmented species” of RNA in the injection solution. These are RNA fragments resulting from early termination of the process of transcription from the DNA template. These fragments, if translated by the cell following injection, would generate incomplete spike proteins, again resulting in altered and unpredictable three-dimensional structure and a physiological impact that is at best neutral and at worst detrimental to cellular functioning. There were considerably more of these fragmented forms of RNA found in the commercially manufactured products than in the products used in clinical trials.
The latter were produced via a much more tightly controlled manufacturing process.
Pfizer claims the RNA fragments “likely… will not result in expressed proteins” due to their assumed rapid degradation within the cell. No data was presented to rule out protein expression,
though, leaving the reviewers to comment, “These [fragmented RNA] forms are poorly characterised, and the limited data provided for protein expression do not fully address the uncertainties relating to the risk of translating proteins/peptides other than the intended spike protein” (EMA 2020). To our knowledge no data has been forthcoming since that time.
While we are not asserting that non-spike proteins generated from fragmented RNA would be misfolded or otherwise pathological, we believe they would at least contribute to the cellular stress that promotes prion-associated conformational changes in the spike protein that is present.
1. Lessons from Parkinson’s Disease
Parkinson’s disease is a neurodegenerative disease associated with Lewy body deposits in the brain, and the main protein found in these Lewy bodies is α-synuclein. That protein, α-Synuclein, is certainly prion-like insofar as under certain conditions it aggregates into toxic soluble oligomers and fibrils (Lema Tomé et al., 2013).
Research has shown that misfolded α-synuclein can form first in the gut and then travel from there to the brain along the vagus nerve, probably in the form of exosomes released from dying cells where the misfolded protein originated (Kakarla et al., 2020; Steiner et al., 2011).
The cellular conditions that promote misfolding include both an acidic pH and high expression of inflammatory cytokines. It is clear that the vagus nerve is critical for transmission of misfolded proteins to the brain, because severance of the vagus nerve protects from Parkinson’s. Vagus nerve atrophy in association with Parkinson’s disease provides further evidence of the involvement of the vagus nerve in transport of misfolded α-synuclein oligomers from the gut to the brain (Walter et al., 2018).
Another pathway is through the olfactory nerve, and a loss of a sense of smell is an early sign of Parkinson’s disease. Ominously, diminution or loss of the sense of smell is also a common symptom of SARS-CoV-2 infection.
There are many parallels between α-synuclein and the spike protein, suggesting the possibility of prion-like disease following vaccination. We have already shown that the mRNA in the vaccine ends up in high concentrations in the liver and spleen, two organs that are well connected to the vagus nerve. The cationic lipids in the vaccine create an acidic pH conducive to misfolding, and they also induce a strong inflammatory response, another predisposing condition.
Germinal centers are structures within the spleen and other secondary lymphoid organs where follicular dendritic cells present antigens to B cells, which in turn perfect their antibody response. Researchers have shown that mRNA vaccines, in contrast with recombinant protein vaccines, elicit a robust development of neutralizing antibodies at these germinal centers in the spleen (Lederer et al., 2020). However, this also means that mRNA vaccines induce an ideal situation for prion formation from the spike protein, and its transport via exosomes along the vagus nerve to the brain.
Studies have shown that prion spread from one animal to another first appears in the lymphoid tissues, particularly the spleen. Differentiated follicular dendritic cells are central to the process, as they accumulate misfolded prion proteins (Al-Dybiat et al., 2019).
An inflammatory response upregulates synthesis of α-synuclein in these dendritic cells, increasing the risk of prion formation. Prions that accumulate in the cytoplasm are packaged up into lipid bodies that are released as exosomes (Liu et al., 2017). These exosomes eventually travel to the brain, causing disease.
2. Vaccine Shedding
There has been considerable chatter on the Internet about the possibility of vaccinated people causing disease in unvaccinated people in close proximity. While this may seem hard to believe, there is a plausible process by which it could occur through the release of exosomes from dendritic cells in the spleen containing misfolded spike proteins, in complex with other prion reconformed proteins. These exosomes can travel to distant places. It is not impossible to imagine that they are being released from the lungs and inhaled by a nearby person. Extracellular vesicles, including exosomes, have been detected in sputum, mucus, epithelial lining fluid, and bronchoalveolar lavage fluid in association with respiratory diseases (Lucchetti et al., 2021).
A Phase 1/2/3 study undertaken by BioNTech on the Pfizer mRNA vaccine implied in their study protocol that they anticipated the possibility of secondary exposure to the vaccine (BioNTech,
2020). The protocol included the requirement that “exposure during pregnancy” should be reported by the study participants.
They then gave examples of “environmental exposure during pregnancy” which included exposure “to the study intervention by inhalation or skin contact.” They even suggested two levels of indirect exposure: “A male family member or healthcare provider who has been exposed to the study intervention by inhalation or skin contact then exposes his female partner prior to or around the time of conception.”
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from Worse Than the Disease? Reviewing Some Possible Unintended Consequences of the mRNA Vaccines Against COVID-19
by Stephanie Seneff and Greg Nigh
International Journal of Vaccine Theory, Practice, and Research 2(1), May 10, 2021
Stephanie Seneff is a Computer Scientist in the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, MIT, Cambridge MA, 02139, USA, E-mail:
seneff@csail.mit.edu
Greg Nigh is a Naturopathic Oncologist, Immersion Health, Portland, OR 97214, USA
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MORE RESEARCH ON THE SPIKE PROTEINS (which are NOT innocuous)
“Certain antibodies in the blood of infected patients appear to change the shape of the spike protein so as to make it more likely to bind to cells, while other papers showed that the spike protein by itself (without being part of the corona virus) can damage endothelial cells and disrupt the blood-brain barrier.”
from: “Be aware of SARS-CoV-2 spike protein: There is more than meets the eye”, published in PubMed from J Biol Regul Homeost Agents. 2021 May-Jun;35(3):833-838. doi: 10.23812/THEO_EDIT_3_21.
See also: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34100279/ for links to many articles on this and related subjects.