Response To Jessica Hockett

Jessica Hockett wrote an open letter to me on Substack which you can read here. As it is behind a paywall I thought I would reply on my own substack.

I do not agree with everything Jessica believes but I have always been happy to try and learn from her and develop my thinking.

Dear Jessica,

I do apologise for not replying on Twitter. It was not my intention to ignore you.

Thank you for reaching out and posing some interesting questions. I have always found you are an honest person who is evidence based and I am happy to debate with you and have learned from you in the past.

I have reproduced your questions here and put my replies beneath.

• Are you referring to the agent the ICTV-CSG named SARS-CoV-2 (formerly nCoV-2019) when you say, “A virus spread around the world”?

  Yes - that is the virus that I am referring to.

• You have stated that the virus is manmade. Do you believe it was created at the Wuhan Institute of Virology?

  I have no way of proving where it was created. There is compelling evidence that the mutations are similar to ones proposed in grants at that site but the details were in the public domain and anyone could have mimicked that work as a decoy.

• At this point, do you suspect the virus ‘leaked’ or ‘escaped’ accidentally, or do you think it was ‘released’ intentionally?

  Again, there is no way to prove this one way or another.

• When do you believe the virus first began to spread globally?

  The earliest evidence of spread is from Autumn 2019. Evidence put forward for spread before then look for all the world like false positive results with no control period with a lower rate. Where people have tested back far enough and then shown an increase that increase was from Autumn 2019.

  That begs the question as to why the deaths were not evident at that time. Other respiratory viruses also spread in a low grade way and it can be unpredictable which one will dominate when a seasonal surge occurs. This hypothesis is born out by the way that influenza and SARS-CoV-2 had a reciprocal relationship from 2022.

• By “the definition of a pandemic,” I assume you are referring to the one you used here, which involves something ‘novel’ that is ‘spreading.’ How do you believe this manmade virus spread worldwide—what was the mechanism—and over what timeframe, in your estimation?

  I believe that the virus spread by replicating in the respiratory epithelium of infected people who exhaled virus in aerosols into the air. The aerosols rise in the warmth of the breath and can remain airborne for very long periods of time. The primary time for spread would be at night when there is no uv light. Judging by when variants appeared globally the spread is incredibly fast - and nothing to do with people travelling. Within a few days virus can traverse most the world. Having said that, I do not discount person to person spread as also occuring. However, the primary driver of spread is aerosol transmission because spread was too rapid, continued throughout lockdown reaching remote places and was unhindered by masking.

• When you said “only 10% are susceptible at any one time,” were you referring to 10% of the global population? Susceptible to what, specifically?

  There is a good body of evidence that only 5-15% of people are susceptible to influenza in the northern hemisphere each winter. Spanish flu is thought to have infected 30% of the population over the course of 3 separate waves. Researchers estimated that a laboratory leak would affect 5-15% of people. In March 2020, Chris Whitty estimated that under 20% had been affected in Wuhan. Household transmission data in England showed that 10% of household contacts would be infected after an index case returned to the household - this was true for every variant including the first Omicron variant (after which data was not collected). However, there were parts of the world where the susceptible population was far lower including almost all of South East Asia and Oceania in 2020.

  I am excluding never symptomatic “infection” from this tally as that is a ludicrous construct. I am talking about susceptibility to cellular entry by the virus with replication enough to produce symptoms. A key factor in this is failure of the mucus layer that lines the respiratory mucosa. This is impenetrable but for some reason is breached in a fraction of people.

  The particularly odd thing about respiratory viruses is that they can infect people who were apparently immune previously. I think this failure of the mucus barrier is key to understanding that.

  Also, the susceptibility appears to come in waves. I say this for two reasons. Firstly, the hospitalised population had peak infections at exactly the same time as the infections peaked in the community. If person to person spread was the cause of the peak then we would expect the hospital peak to occur after admissions from the community -that never happened. Secondly, the peaks happen at predictable times of year.

• We agree that the capabilities of Gain of Function (GoF) research have been overstated—Sunetra Gupta is with both of us on that point! The experiments cannot create something that exceeds nature’s capabilities, whatever those may be. However, are you suggesting that GoF-produced agents can at least match nature? If so, what is the basis for that belief?

  SARS-CoV-2 was quite nasty on paper and had a number of ways it could inhibit an immune response. Influenza has some of these too but not all. The consequence of that was that immunity was paused for a few days. The immune cells took aim but could not fire. Eventually, depending on a variety of factors, the full response would kick in. This tended to happen at around day 10 and resulted in cells being killed all at once in the lungs. That caused low oxygen and hospital admission for quite a number of people. It also caused cytokine storms in some. However, for most of us it just meant that infection lasted longer than an average cold or flu.

  Ultimately any respiratory virus will be handled by the resiratory mucosa with the infected cells being sacrificed in the process - which is part of their job. Even Fauci admits that there is no evidence of virus entering the blood to cause disease elsewhere. Positive RNA tests from the blood were just finding genetic debris not whole virus.

• Finally, we agree that the harms caused by protocols receive too little attention.

  Yes they do!
  

  I’d be happy to continue this conversation.

Kind regards,

Clare