Dear Candace,
You have sent me three links.
The first, https://www.bitchute.com/video/nFMwCaApptoe/, is a link to an English conspiracy theorist.
The second, https://www.bitchute.com/video/xwSVyw5jbdzH/, is a link to an American antivaxxer.
And the third, https://rumble.com/vbortj-covid-vaccine-changes-dna-and-has-aborted-fetal-tissue.html, came with a condemnation that I’m not thoroughly watching your videos, I’m just dismissing them. You say I’m not researching, I’m just talking down the info you have posted.
But here’s the thing. I’ve already done my research. Surely, you don’t think you’re the first person to be confused about mRNA?
So let’s take a look at that most recent video. There’s an infinite number of bad sources of information on the Internet, so I don’t have time to do a writeup and do research to debunk every single one. But the aborted fetal tissue case is an interesting moral argument in itself, so I’ll do this one. For you, Candace. For you.
First, it tickles me that the target audience is explicitly bible groups. I guess it makes sense, it’s just not something you see often on medical advice.
1:04 into the video: She hasn’t done enough research to know that the “O” in “ChAdOx1-S” is an “O” not a “0”. And also that the “x” is not a “times.” This is not “ChAd zero-times-one”, this is a shortening of “Chimpanzee Adenovirus (led by) Oxford, #1” I got that from dictionary.com: https://www.dictionary.com/e/tech-science/chadox1-ncov-19/ (“Chimpanzee Adenovirus” I got without dictionary.com, but I couldn’t figure out Oxford on my own)
And you’re saying “But wait! You’re just nitpicking that the person doesn’t know the name, you’re not picking apart her actual argument!” And, sure maybe, but we’ll get to that part later. For now, I’m laying some basic groundwork, a little 101 course in evaluating sources. Do you have kids? Let’s say you do, and you meet their high school math teacher. She’s a nice gal, you think, but then she makes a joke about how “one cross one doesn’t always mean two!” And she isn’t even joking. She doesn’t know the name for the “+” or the “=”, and being from a very religious upbringing, has always called the first one a cross.
Maybe she’s the next Erdos. Certainly, Erdos had a way with saying weird terms for things. But you’re probably going to pause for a bit and wonder, just for a second, is this really the person who should be teaching my kid math?
So it’s the same thing here. Am I really going to learn extremely advanced (PhD-level) medical knowledge from somebody who doesn’t even know the name of what they’re talking about? On a website which seems like a conservative angry at being kicked off of YouTube made their own knockoff YouTube? When the information they’re claiming flies in the face of every single other reliable source I have?
That’s why I don’t watch your videos. But, I said I’d do this one, so let’s hit Play.
1:26: “I do these videos because I want you to learn to do your own research.” Hopefully, she teaches us to do better research than she’s doing? But okay, let’s open that website. I guess she left a few steps out, because she doesn’t show us what the preprint she’s looking at is, or how to find it (I’m curious how long it took her to look up “chad zero times one”)
I’ll answer that question for you. Go to researchsquare.com right now. Click on the “Browse Preprints” button on the side. In the search boxes, put “chadox1-s” into the “abstract” field (the abstract is “back cover” of the paper: It’s a high-level summary of what the paper says), and hit “update filter.” When I did it, in mid-March 2021, there were three papers: One from March 11th, 2021, one from January 13th, 2021, and one from October 20th, 2020. If we click on all three links, it is clear that the one she is referencing is the one from October 20th, this one: https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-94837/v1 (The compellingly named “SARS-CoV-2 candidate vaccine ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 infection of human cell lines reveals a normal low range of viral backbone gene expression alongside very high levels of SARS-CoV-2 S glycoprotein expression”)
Okay. Now that’s out of the way, let’s hammer that Play button.
And then, she has some really good advice: Look up all the terms. What does recombinant mean? Don’t just skip the mumbo-jumbo and think it’s just science stuff. Obviously, have some humility, but don’t take it for granted.
At 2:30, she again says “it’s right in front of your face,” without saying what exactly. What’s right in front of my face? The definition of recombinant DNA? Let’s be clear, recombinant DNA, though not an everyday term, is not out of reach nor overtly evil. It is a tool. This may sound surprising to you, but I have made recombinant DNA. That’s right. I have used plasmids to create DNA that was “not natural” (in my case, it was making some E. Coli glow in the dark for a high school chemistry class.) So it’s not clear to me what is right in front of my face.
Oh, by 2:45 it’s clear that she’s just saying that the recombinant DNA is in the vaccine, and that’s bad for some reason. Maybe because it’s not natural? Let’s keep playing.
3:17 is the part I really wanted to get to. MRC-5! What an interesting moral question. Look it up and what do you find?
It’s originally developed from research deriving from lung tissue of a 14-week-old aborted fetus (for some reason, the video puts emphasis on the fact that it’s a “Caucasian male” fetus, but whatever). She says (3:48) “this vaccine has a truckload of sh*t in it” (despite not saying what the sh*t is), “but what it definitely has is the lung tissue of a 14-week-old aborted fetus.” (again with the Caucasian male stuff. Nobody cares)
Somebody (unidentified) in the background then says “that’s been replicated over and over for a very long time.”
4:30 is really an interesting twist I wasn’t expecting, where the MHRA is seeking an AI tool to process the expected high volume of COVID 19 vaccine adverse drug reactions. “They know that this vaccine is going to kill people or hurt people so badly,” she says.
That’s the end of the video. “Pray this out,” she signs off.
There’s three topics I want to cover a little bit more in general terms here. Firstly, and most briefly, is that she sort of takes on faith that “recombinant DNA” is bad. Perhaps she has a lot of evidence for this. Probably not. Based on her intonations when she’s reading the Wikipedia article on recombinant DNA, she seems most upset about the “laboratory methods.” Like I said above, these “laboratory methods” are not these secret laboratory methods that only the Democratic elite lizard people have access to. This is high-school level stuff.
Secondly, let’s talk about that “AI tool” thing. I wasn’t expecting this so I’m not super prepared. But, yes. The vaccine could hurt or even kill people. Remember on February 27th, 2021 when the FDA issued an emergency use authorization for the third COVID-19 vaccine? There have been over half a million deaths from COVID since it started, and a thousand more are dying every day. And that’s just in the US. If ten thousand people died from the vaccine, but it cut the pandemic even two weeks shorter? If a million people get a small rash at the injection site, and it cuts the pandemic even a day shorter?
Back in September 2020, Stanford said that less than 10% of Americans had had COVID (source). Let’s round that up - 20%, 30% (the number is looking like closer to 20%). We’re looking at a situation where three times more people could get infected. Five hundred thousand deaths?
Try one and a half million.
So yeah, of course they’re searching for AI tools to scan adverse reaction reports. It is an emergency authorization. And that allows them to do things like this, where they can analyze population trends and make decisions based on facts and numbers, not fear.
Before you say something about media bias, and how the “biased media” isn’t reporting this - the above was front-page news on CNN, I got it as the first item from their “5 Things” newsletter.
And then the third, most interesting one. The aborted-fetus-tissue case. If you’re anti-abortion (the term “pro-life” does not apply to anti-vaxxers), I can see why this would be upsetting. But, let’s be clear: The cells injected into your body, were not carved out of a fetus. These cells are the distance descendants of those cells - the fetus died in 1966. So in order to manufacture a vaccine, they do not need to do an abortion to get more cells.
(as a side note, it appears that it’s HEK 293, not MRC-5, which is used in the manufacture of the vaccine https://fullfact.org/online/foetal-cells-covid-vaccine/, and even that those cells might be filtered out of the final product. But that doesn’t change the moral argument)
This is the Nazi-medical-data (or, equivalently, the Unit 731-medical-data) moral question. In World War Two, the Nazis did horrific and brutal experiements on their captives. Experiments that us civilized people living in 2020 would never do.
But, conceivably, these studies generated valuable data (I’m not enough of a biologist to claim that the datasets are well-made at all). Data that we couldn’t, or wouldn’t, collect otherwise. Would you condemn a million people to death - in the US, for COVID alone, not to mention other diseases in other countries - solely because the saving grace came from somewhere objectionable? We could stop abortions today, and still make the vaccine. Would that make it acceptable, or is the cell line tainted forever?
To flip it around, the fetus is dead. Many decades ago. But it’s saving lives today. We can sing the songs of the heroes of our time - those who work tirelessly to develop vaccines - but these songs would be incomplete without singing the songs of our unborn heroes. Would you take away that glory? You can’t save the life of the fetus. But you can make its death be in vain.
These are tough questions. And these are interesting questions. But I am not philosopher, I cannot determine whether something is moral or unmoral.
You’ll say I have too much time. But this is fun. I like digging down, getting to the nugget of truth, and teaching my fellow humans about the little nugget I found. I know you are busy - you just see these videos on social media, watch them briefly, and share them with your friends. And that is how misinformation spreads, because these things are more complicated than you or I could fully understand in an entire lifetime of study. And we have such busy lives. You doing… whatever you do. And me procrastinating on some computer code I want to write. Today we need a PhD in genetics. Tomorrow we need a PhD in technology. And the day after?
(title image courtesy of Wikipedia)
UPDATE: As you presumably predicted, Candace has not read this blog, and NextDoor is famous for taking a hardline stance on people who post screenshots of posts there, so I will simply quote her:
seriously you put it into a blog ... im not reading that bs ...
I guess now we’re even.
