Disease X, COVID-19, and Bio-Hacking the Next Pandemic

Mail-Order Kits allow anyone to alter DNA. "We used to think our fate was in our stars. Now we know, in large measure, our fate is in our genes.” ~ Nobel Prize winner James Watson

An abd-A mutant hatchling created by CRISPR-Cas9. Credit: Erin Jarvis and Nipam Patel, UC Berkely

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The next pandemic was on everybody’s minds as the elites gathered in Davos for the World Economic Forum’s yearly shmooze-fest. They’re calling it Disease X. Hm, where have I heard that before? Oh yes, that’s what Elon Musk renamed Twitter. X. It’s a little disconcerting that the next pandemic-causing disease has the same name.

But it’s fitting. It reminds us that the farther we travel down the road of “progress” the less we know about where we’re going.

According to the World Health Organization, X "represents the knowledge that a serious international epidemic could be caused by a pathogen currently unknown to cause human disease.”

They say Covid-19 killed almost 7 million people worldwide. This hypothetical virus would be 20 times deadlier.

"If we did so poorly with something like COVID-19, you can imagine how poorly we would do with something like a 1918-level event," said Dr. Amish Adalja, an expert on emerging diseases at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, referring to the influenza pandemic of 1918 that killed an estimated 50 million people around the world.

Of course, if you don’t believe viruses exist you will have a hard time swallowing that last bit of information. I have readers with many different opinions, which is as it should be. Please don’t be discouraged from reading on. This article isn’t about proving or disproving viruses, it’s about what will happen next, no matter what we call it. We simply don’t know—I mean, it’s “X”. And whatever disagreements we may have, we can all agree that something periodically sweeps across the earth, killing a whole lot of people, and something will surely do it again. The only question is whether it will be caused by humans or by nature.

Whatever theories you espouse to about Covid, whether it happened exactly as the government said it did, or whether you think it was the flu reimagined, or a bioweapon that escaped from a lab, or that it was no more than a money-making scheme for Big Pharma, we continue to be given conflicting information about it, resulting in continued confusion and division.

So, let’s put all of that aside for a moment and focus on what we do know. Something called Covid happened that changed our lives forever. It’s doubtful that any of us fully comprehend how much Covid messed with us psychologically. A lot of people have turned into absolute hypochondriacs. Anyone coughing sets off alarm bells. More and more people are wearing masks again. Anything to feel safe in a dangerous world.

In the long gone pre Covid days, I remember saying to friends on occasion when I was sick, or hearing them say to me, “Wow, I’ve never been this sick in my life, I feel like I’m going to die.” But it was just an expression. We were young and strong, and we all got better and quickly forgot about it.

No more! People now read death into the slightest tickle in their throats. We are told the only way to combat illness is to treat it like a war. Oh, and we sure do have war on our minds now, every kind of war. How can we possibly combat all of the disease, death and destruction bombarding us at once? World Wars might be out of our control, but we can take drugs and vaccines and pills and remedies and maybe regain sort of control over our bodies that seem to be more and more out of control every day.

The WHO warns us that the frequency and intensity of health emergencies is growing, due to evolving pathogen threats. “Climate change could double the chances of future COVID-scale pandemics occurring. Together with climate shocks, this worrying combination of disaster and disease heralds a perfect storm of devastation and disruption — and it means that COVID-19 could just be a taste of things to come.”

Hold on! Let me just pop a pill, put on some headphones and listen to my favorite pundit on YouTube pull me back from the brink of hysteria.

There's no doubt the Covid vaccines have seen better days. Not many people are still interested in taking them. But that doesn’t mean the end of these types of vaccines. It is only the beginning. Drug giants like Pfizer and Moderna are always on the lookout for the next big disease—trying to predict which one is likely to make them the most money. In my essay Building the mRNA Empire, I talk about how mRNA factories are being built all over the world in preparation for the next disaster. As just one example, BioNTech's BioNTainer are portable, shippable, modular and turnkey mRNA manufacturing facilities. Each container can produce 50 million doses of mRNA shots per year—or any other vaccine for any other disease, take your pick.

“For the next pandemic, we’ll have gigantic mRNA factories in India,” says Bill Gates.

“The goal is to make all these applications we were hoping for, pushing for, become part of everyday life,” said Dr. Adalja. “When they write the history of vaccines, this will probably be a turning point.”

Yes, the Covid vaccines were a turning point. They showed that the majority of the world could be convinced to take an experimental drug, all at once, for the “common good”. If an even worse disaster strikes, the masses will be lining up and begging for their shot. They will be locking down and accusing their neighbor of causing death if they don’t comply. The grand Covid vaccine experiment might be waning. But we are being prepped for the next experiment.

Remember when we were told, Covid-19 mRNA vaccines do not enter your cells and they do not alter your DNA. Maybe that’s true and maybe it isn’t. Like with everything else, we receive conflicting information. So, let’s stick with facts. Let’s stick with what the experts tell us themselves. It will help us to see how these mRNA vaccines and the testing the masses were encouraged to do on themselves led to the acceptance of ever more invasive experiments.

The World Health Organization says:

The field of DNA vaccination is developing rapidly. Vaccines currently being developed use not only DNA, but also include adjuncts that assist DNA to enter cells, target it towards specific cells, or that may act as adjuvants in stimulating or directing the immune response. Ultimately, the distinction between a sophisticated DNA vaccine and a simple viral vector may not be clear. Many aspects of the immune response generated by DNA vaccines are not understood. However, this has not impeded significant progress towards the use of this type of vaccine in humans, and clinical trials have begun.

How many times are we told by scientists “we don’t understand what we’re doing”, but they keep doing it anyway. It’s all terribly exciting, they say, because it’s progress and you can’t stop progress. Be a good lab rat and jump into the petri dish—for the sake of progress.

With the next pandemic, we can be sure that more testing will be required. Data must be collected. And it will be done using CRISPR-Based technology.

Here is a simple chart that shows how CRISPR works:

Scientists are crazy for CRISPR. It means they can play God by messing around with our DNA. They can snip and stitch at a cellular level, altering everything from microbes to plants, to animals and yes, to you and me. Just think, says the skinny, bespeckled scientist, maybe we can turn everyone into Superman. Well, not everyone, not all those ordinary people we are experimenting on. But we’ll dazzle you by curing a few diseases, like the first CRISPR treatment being approved for Sickle Cell Anemia. Okay, it has a price tag of $2.2 million per patient, but it’s a gamechanger! And yes, the process involves chemotherapy, another poison. Let’s see how it all plays out…

Showing they care about people with Sickle Cell Anemia, means they can keep on experimenting on everyone in order to cure us all. Because we are all sick with something, aren’t we?

The first step in this grand experiment is testing. Covid PCR tests prepared the masses to accept this invasion as normal and necessary.

Let’s take a look at SHERLOCK Biosciences.

In 2020 the company made history with the first FDA-authorized use of CRISPR technology. Their boast is that they are “engineering biology to test anywhere, everywhere.

SHERLOCK, which stands for “Specific High-sensitivity Enzymatic Reporter unLOCKing,” is a CRISPR-based diagnostic tool that can detect genetic “fingerprints” across multiple organisms or sample types down to the single-digit attomolar scale, which could indicate the presence of a single molecule of DNA or RNA in a sample.

It’s faster the PCR tests, can be completed in an hour, meaning thousands of tests can be added per day to a lab’s volume. Companies like SHERLOCK care about poor people, too. With its 221B FOUNDATION, Sherlock Biosciences is “committed to making a positive impact on global health”. Its mission is to “bring novel CRISPR based diagnostics to underserved populations around the world to maximize global impact and improve public health”.

In November 2022, SHERLOCK Biosciences announced that “technology developed with support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation will Enable Testing in Remote Low- and Middle-income Environments, Expanding Healthcare Access and Improving Global Health”.

Sherlock Biosciences is developing products that will empower people to access answers and have more control over their health decisions…. SHERLOCK and INSPECTR can be used in virtually any setting without complex instrumentation, making it well suited for use in the home and in low resource settings, opening up a wide range of potential applications in areas including infectious disease, early detection of cancer, treatment monitoring, and precision medicine.

The day could well come when you will be tested for everything and anything and it will all go into a database controlled by the government. Such genetic databases are a goldmine. I’ve written more about this in essays like The Nefarious Goal Behind Covid Testing.

Edward H You, Supervisory Special Agent, Weapons of Mass Destruction Directorate, Biological Countermeasures Unit, Federal Bureau of Investigation is a former biochemist turned FBI investigator. This is what he has to say about the dangers:

They are building out a huge domestic database. And if they are now able to supplement that with data from all around the world, it's all about who gets the largest, most diverse data set. And so, the ticking time bomb is that once they're able to achieve true artificial intelligence, then they're off to the races in what they can do with that data.

Think about the dawn of-- the Internet of Things and the 5G networks and the-- and smart homes and smart cities. There are going to be sensors everywhere. It's gonna be tracking your movement, your behavior, your habits. And ultimately, it's gonna have a biological application, meaning that based on the data that gets collected, they'll be able to analyze that and look at improving your health. That data becomes incredibly relevant and very, very valuable.

A government or a terrorist organization or a loner could take that data and target an individual or a group of people to infect with a disease. Experiments on figuring out ways to make this happen are regularly conducted in labs. We all remember the gain of function controversy surrounding Covid. We were assured by Dr. Fauci that the NIH never funded gain of function research at the Wuhan Lab. In 2020, President Donald Trump was laughed at for suggesting that the virus causing COVID-19 was either intentionally engineered or resulted from a lab accident at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China. Just another one of his conspiracy theories.

By 2021, even mainstream news outlets like Newsweek admitted that Dr. Fauci was 'Untruthful' to Congress About Wuhan Lab Research. Controversy continues over what really happened to this day. Somebody knows what’s true and what isn’t, but it’s unlikely they’ll let the masses they experiment on find out.

Whatever your opinion may be on Fauci’s truthfulness or lack thereof, it is no secret that the United States conducts experiments in China and other countries that are bad for its ethical, clean energy image. It makes sense that the “most powerful country in the world” wouldn’t want its rivals to get further than it does. That would be insane. Like every other war, battles rage between rivals that want to outsmart one another.

Just last month it was reported that a Chinese lab crafted a mutant COVID-19 strain with a 100% kill rate in ‘humanized’ mice resulting in a ‘surprisingly’ rapid death.

In a Wuhan-esque study, Chinese scientists are experimenting with a mutant COVID-19 strain that is 100% lethal to “humanized” mice.

The deadly virus — known as GX_P2V — attacked the brains of mice that were engineered to reflect genetic makeup similar to people, according to a study shared last week out of Beijing.

All the mice that were infected with the virus died within just eight days, which researchers noted was a “surprisingly” rapid death rate.

GX_P2V had infected the lungs, bones, eyes, tracheas and brains of the dead mice, the last of which was severe enough to ultimately cause the death of the animals.

Most eerie of all, their eyes turned completely white the day before they died.

Francois Balloux, an epidemiology expert at University College London’s Genetics Institute, slammed the research as “terrible” and “scientifically totally pointless.”

“The preprint does not specify the biosafety level and biosafety precautions used for the research,” he continued.

“The absence of this information raises the concerning possibility that part or all of this research, like the research in Wuhan in 2016-2019 that likely caused the Covid-19 pandemic, recklessly was performed without the minimal biosafety containment and practices essential for research with potential pandemic pathogens.”

Dr. Gennadi Glinsky, a retired professor of medicine at Stanford, wrote: “This madness must be stopped before too late.”

How many times have we heard that before. Of course, it won’t be stopped. Just like the race to make Artificial General Intelligence won’t be stopped. Just like the use of Autonomous Weapons Systems won’t be stopped.

You can’t stop progress!

CRISPR-Cas9 gene drive technology can change the odds of inheriting a particular DNA sequence, and that can be a good thing. It can also be used to alter a virus, or a mosquito or a rat or whatever else some evil maniac wants to use to hurt people.

The Dark Side to CRISPR technology, as Shelley Simona wrote about in Harvard Law’s Bill of Health, 2019 could far outweigh the good.

• The Potential to Target Groups

Over the past several decades, advances in genetic testing have led to the discovery that it is possible to trace Jewish ancestry and specific carriers of mutations that are more common among Jews (it should be emphasized that there is no such thing as a “Jewish gene”). Jews are perhaps not alone in this regard; many other populations may share genetic characteristics. Thus, gene editing technologies might intentionally be used as a “negative enhancement” tool against specific groups.

• The Potential to Target Individuals

The new developments in gene editing technologies might pave the way to an entirely new kind of “personal warfare.” It is not far-fetched to imagine a scenario where a prospective attacker would collect and grow live cells from a targeted person and, eventually, build a personally-targeted tool against him or her. Perhaps an easier way to collect genetic information would be through “gene-hacking.” It is likely that, in the future, there will be massive genetic databases. Like other databases, genetic databases will not be immune from cyber-attacks. Instead of trying to collect information from a tissue or a strand of hair that a particular person has left behind, gene-hackers will be able to collect genetic information by hacking into a database and then using it for illegitimate purposes.

• Demographic Design

It is possible to think of a scenario in which governments will use gene editing technologies in order to control the population within their borders. This risk invokes Foucault’s concept of “biopolitics,” according to which states exercise power to allow life or death and to define and manage life itself.

What in the world have we gotten ourselves into?

In February, the U.S. declared gene editing to be a potential weapon of mass destruction.

At the same time, home kits to modify the genes of bacteria using CRISPR are on sale online for as little as $140. The only restrictions I could find on these testing kits was in California where a human biohacking bill makes it illegal to sell the kits—unless they carry a warning that says not to use them on yourself. What? So, you can’t use them on yourself, but you can use them on someone else? What about your cat? Or one of those cute little mice?

Companies like Creative Biolabs are happy to sell you services including:

1) gRNA Design and Vector Construction Service where either you can provide the target sequences, choose a vector and we construct the plasmid. Or for convenience, you can just provide genome sequence and we design the target sequences using our proprietary gRNA design tool.

2) CRISPR/Cas9 Cell Line Engineering that provides a variety of reliable CRISPR/Cas9 cell lines engineering services to produce a genetically modified cell using any mammalian cell line and targeting any gene.

3) CRISPR/Cas9 Genome Knockout Kits providing 2 gRNA vectors and donor DNA to help you modify the specific gene by yourself.

4) Transgenic Mice Services.

Yes, you can even order transgenic mice like the ones those Chinese scientists experimented on to create the mutant COVID-19 strain that was 100% lethal.

What are transgenic mice, you might ask. In 2007, Mario R. Capecchi, Ph.D., of the University of Uta won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for devising “a way to change or remove any single gene in the mouse genome, creating strains of mice that pass the altered gene from parent to offspring. In the years since, these ‘transgenic’ and ‘knockout’ mice have become commonplace in the laboratory”.

How about ‘transgenic’ or ‘knockout’ people? How long will it be before we accept them as commonplace in the laboratory?

Biohackers are the cool rebels of the scientific world. Among them, Josiah Zayner is considered to be a legend.

Josiah Zayner has a PhD in molecular biophysics and spent two years as a research fellow at NASA. To me, he’s like the Andy Warhol of the biohacker world. You could say he’s made it into a kind of performance art.

Zayner has his own company, The Odin, and sells his biohacking kits to the general public. He believes everyone should have access to the technology that governments hide behind closed doors in their labs.

A 2016 article in The Verge describes how Zayner sterilized his body to “transplant” his entire microbiome in front of a reporter. He documents all his experiments, like his attempts to genetically engineer the color of his skin. In an attempt to enhance his muscles, he injected himself with DNA encoding for CRISPR and live-streamed it on YouTube.

According to the Odin website:

“…we believe the future is going to be dominated by genetic engineering and consumer genetic design will be a big part of that. We are making that happen by creating kits and tools that allow anyone to make unique and usable organisms at home or in a lab or anywhere.”

Here are examples of products that you can order:

Cell Culture Lab Kit: $3,973.00

Grow Your Own Penicillin Testing Kit: $79.99

Glowmander - Fluorescent GFP Axolotl: $299.00

Genetic Engineering Home Lab Kit: $2,500.00 $1,664.00

What do you think? If governments can do these things, if scientists can experiment on us with all these tests and vaccines and now the promise of altering our DNA, shouldn’t we be allowed to do it to ourselves? Or should we trustingly put our ourselves into the hands of the scientists employed by our government? Or should it all be stopped completely?

In his book The Code Breaker, author Walter Isaacson likens CRISPR’s technological capabilities to "Prometheus snatching fire from the gods — or maybe Adam and Eve biting into the apple."

And we all know how that turned out.

"The very secrets of life — our DNA — is something that we can not only read these days, but we can write. We can rewrite it if we want to," Isaacson says. "Like any technology, [it] is only as good or bad as we are."

I guess the real question is, which part of us will prevail in the end, the good or the bad?