Level 4 Infectious Disease Specialist: Fear of an Incoming Pandemic

By Prof Mark Lee Mon
Oct 12, 2019

Background

•China/India hotspots for fatal pandemics and bioweapons
•Viruses most dangerous thing in the world today, even moreso than nuclear weapons
•World unprepared

Want to know more?

I work daily with some of the world's most infectious and fatal diseases. Reading internal reports and also stuff available on the internet (papers, new articles), I'm becoming extremely concerned we are massively unprepared for the next epidemic.

People imagine that any kind of epidemic that occurs today can be more or less mitigated through modern public health infrastructure, stocks of vaccines and antivirals, and basic quarantining measures.

The issue is that in modern, densely populated cities, a sufficiently advanced pathogen would be capable of infecting the vast majority of inhabitants in weeks, before any health measures could have an effect. The population density is enough that current quarantining techniques used in cases like smallpox would be completely ineffective. Antivirals have historically proven ineffective and hard to disseminate while our current vaccine stocks might not work at all.

Currently computer simulations indicate that a dangerous enough pathogen could effectively destroy a city like Los Angeles in a few months. "Destroyed" in the sense that emergency services are shut down, medical services are shut down, all economic output ceases and over 30-60% of the population is wiped out.

In short, a small nation-state or even well-funded terrorist organization could easily reduce the US to the state of a third world nation with. Yet no one except my colleagues seems to give a fuck.

So what exactly is scaring you?

I saw a few internal documents that scared me pretty badly. One was regarding what are called chimeraviruses and research work done in the Soviet Union and more recently in North Korea (hypothesized). The simple idea of a chimera virus is you combine two viral agents into one, which as you can imagine would make it easy to create a virus with more than 95% mortality rate. The scarier part is that a chimera virus can theoretically have multiple traits that make it far superior as a biological weapon, and the traits can present at different time periods. For example, Ebola is quite deadly, but it's actually pretty hard to spread due to needing direct blood contact. So what would happen if you combined ebola with say, a common flu? With sufficiently advanced engineering, you could have an ebola that initially only presents as a standard flu for the first 1-2 weeks. People would continue to take flights, go to work etc thinking it was just a relatively harmless flu. Then two weeks later you'd have massive "mysterious" outbreaks of Ebola all across the world. Millions of people would suddenly present with symptoms of ebola and be freaking the fuck out. Meanwhile, people who still had the "flu" would continue taking flights, going to work etc. By the time we discovered that the flu and ebola outbreaks were all a part of the same virus, you'd be looking at easily over 100 million dead, completely collapsed infrastructures etc. It would be unprecedented in modern times. but THAT's not even the scariest document I read, and I hesitate to talk about it just to avoid alarming people. it's not even really something you can prepare for beyond relocating to a shack in the woods and submerging yourself in a vat of bleach five times a day.

Tell us what’s too scary for even slobs to contemplate?

Hypothetically there was a country that wanted to create a doomsday weapon that would function even beyond the deterrent capabilities of nuclear weapons. Basically a "fuck you, world" kind of weapon. If certain dissidents are to be believed, this weapon has been produced, likely still exists, and may have even been used at some point. The key feature of the virus is the incubation period. The claim is they extended the incubation period of a certain highly lethal virus to not days, or weeks, but possibly a decade or more. During this extended incubation, the number of virus particles is low enough that it shows zero symptoms, and it would be undetectable unless you were actually looking for it. While transmission rates would be quite low, over the course of a couple years it should be able to easily spread throughout an entire population. A literal 100% rate of infection. Now this has been known about in the virology community for a while. One of those intriguing campfire stories we would tell each other after one too many drinks at the hotel lobby. Well one group had the idea of testing this. Is there a latent and highly lethal virus lying dormant in the population? They took blood samples from people across the US as well as some Western European countries and discovered something quite disturbing. A mysterious virus, referred to internally as "pathogen X" present in something like 95% of the samples. It's an unusually large virus with a very particular shape, like a large toroid with spiky protruberances along the central axis. The genome is HUGE, and that makes knowing its actual payload at this stage almost impossible. It shares significant similarities with smallpox, lassa, influenza, and HIV, but it neither looks nor behaves like any of these. So the conclusion at this point is an uncomfortable one. You are likely infected by a mysterious virus that might be nothing, or it may become active at some point and almost certainly kill you.

I'd like to read a bit more about this agent. Can you give more details?

It's a confidential, internal paper (not for public dissemination). If you move within virology circles you will likely know someone that knows about it. You can MAYBE find a paper or article in the wild if you Google the virus by its scientific name but I already feel like I'm getting close to crossing the line so I'm trying to tread lightly here. The genus/family is unknown. The genome is like a sock drawer. It's somewhat like a coronavirus but mostly defies classification. This lends to the speculation of it being an engineered pathogen as it appears so different from every other known virus. It's like if you suddenly saw a dog in the wild with wings and feathers. There's no way mere evolution could produce such an unusual organism seemingly overnight. It would have had to have been purposefully created.

How dat candida auris doin at this time?

A couple years ago at a conference I mistakenly entered a small conference room with a presentation about the emergence of candida and its potential as a possible bioweapon. Fungi have unique properties in that they are incredibly resilient and good at spreading, so if you were to introduce a dangerous fungus into a major city it would be almost impossible to fully eradicate so you would end up having to abandon the city or else spend something like $500 billion on cleanup. I couldn't figure out whether the presenters were cranks or geniuses but seeing the recent articles about candida it does make me wonder...

Visitor Comments

Svetlana Abdurakhmanova:

I work in a larger hospital, also in infectious disease.

Shit is hands down the scariest scenario you can imagine, and it really isn't a question of if, but when.
Making a mutated, and more virulent or deadly, strain of existing viruses could almost be done at home. If you've got a small nation-state they could engineer their own damned virus in 6 months, fully customized.

Yin:

bizarre and reproducible shit is popping up on our multiplex PCR machine.

Similar to coronavirus in the fact some of the PCR results got flagged for coronavirus but not SARS. This was last week but when we worked it out it was generally around 35kb which is MASSIVE for an RNA virus.

This is just a rotation for me so I'm likely not the best person to ask beyond letting you know its in Eastern Canada.

Massive RNA virus, no obvious symptoms, NP swabs detected it on a PCR machine. 

Whatever it is the genome is massive and vaguely trips our automated coronavirus threshold

Doc Simon Fink:

Aren’t depopulation faggots like Gates already spreading pathogens via insect vectors?

Sean Lavois:

AIDS was a virus that is protected by the protein coat on the RNA preventing the antibodies, the T-4 cells, of the immune system from detecting and eliminating it. The alleged cure for AIDS lies in the excrement of the white fungus that’s grown from the Chinese cucumber Trichosanthes kirilowii. This excrement, which develops after about two or three weeks, is separated with hydrazine sulphate in an acidification process which dissolves the protein coat on the RNA and exposes the nucleus of the virus that’s detected by the antibodies in the immune system. Regardless of how weak the immune system is, the virus will be destroyed. No more than 20cc dose per 36 hour period should be administered. No antibiotics should be used during this period. The 20ccs are metabolized in 36 hours, having dissolved the protein coat on the virus.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/261948355_Inventing_the_AIDS_Virus

Alan Li:

China is a major source of concern. Not only is the place a massive breeding ground for novel agents due to shitty agricultural practices, the proximity of humans to animals ensures that novel strains of influenza and other viruses will hop to humans and spread like wildfire.

It literally only takes one mutation of one virus to unleash a pandemic. Every infectious pig or bird is a little viral containment vessel that could birth the next plague.

Though I'd be surprised if China is actively doing large-scale tests on their population, it wouldn't surprise me. That said, China's biological weapons program is much much larger than the public or even experts in the field are aware of. They are almost certainly genetically engineering certain viruses (smallpox) to be vaccine immune, but they are probably also engineering them to be more lethal agents in general. We really don't know the full scale of China's biological weapons program but I would bet you wouldn't be able to sleep well if you knew its full scope.

Romea Acosta:

so that would be a torovirus of the coronaviridae?
but jumping from 25-28bp to 35+bp is quite a lot