Oh, the COVID conspiracies. Can all be true? Can any?

Okay, the COVID-19 conspiracy industry, if it had a stock symbol, would now officially be the hottest stock on the market.


They can’t all be true. There’s considerable evidence that none of them is.


5G stratagem


There are radiation-phobes who are using COVID-19 to advance their anti-5G agendas. (5G is a high-speed cellular data network.)


It is painful to have to repeat this, but clearly 5G doesn’t cause viral disease. If nothing else doesn’t debunk this bizarre position, keep in mind that 5G still doesn’t exist in most of the world. And doesn’t exist at all in many of the places with the worst COVID-19 outbreaks. So, (sigh), if 5G caused COVID-19, how can COVID-19 exist when the vast majority of the world has no 5G?


Another 5G conspiracy theory is that COVID-19 doesn’t exist. That it is really just a hoax to cover up something called “5G Syndrome,” which is presumably a kind of radiation sickness. Again, that doesn’t explain people getting sick in areas that are absent 5G. And it doesn’t explain how the worldwide medical community, using different tests, somehow erroneously found viruses that weren’t there.


Depopulation scheme



There are folks who believe this pandemic is a secret plot to depopulate the world or a certain portion of the world. But wasn’t that AIDS/HIV? Or Ebola. Or SARS. Is it that the folks trying to kill off much of the world just aren’t that competent?


Realistically, pandemics have been with us for a long time. Think of the 1918 Spanish Flu. And much earlier, the Black Death. And before that the Justinian Plague. Both of the latter were likely bubonic plague. Smallpox and cholera have also caused historic pandemics. You don’t need an evil conspiracy to have pandemics.


Vaccination plot


There’s a weird one that COVID-19 is just a means to an end, a long game, a conspiracy to force everyone to accept vaccines. Well, dude, you can always not take the shot. But when a working vaccine is developed, you should.


Police state incubator


I heard a suggestion that this pandemic is a scheme aimed at putting a permanent police state into effect. Doesn’t China already have one of those? Why would they launch this?


Reelection intrigue


Some conservative pundits argue this is a Democrat conspiracy to reduce President Trump's likelihood of being re-elected. That wouldn’t explain why the disease is not only in the U.S. but everywhere else as well, or why Democratic mayors and governors appear to be working far harder than the President on responding to it.

Another theory


But maybe a new theory would be that COVID-19 is a secret government scheme to bring down organized governments, liberal, socialist, capitalist, communist, whatever. That’s it, a Greenie plot to solve climate change and save the planet by destroying the global economy.


It’s as random as the others. On its face, it might make sense, except for lack of evidence.


Debunk your own conspiracy


There’s a fun resource on conspiracy theories that can help you recognize one when you come across it. It is “The Conspiracy Theory Handbook,” by cognitive psychology professor Stephan Lewandowsky of University of Bristol and John Cook of the Center for Climate Change Communication at George Mason University.


The booklet can be downloaded free from here.  


My favorite clue recognizing a conspiracy is its invulnerability to evidence. This is the “but that’s what they want you to think” argument. If every piece of contrary evidence is met with that response—that’s a clue.


© Jan TenBruggencate 2020

COVID-19 conspiracy theories: Hoofbeats and zebras?

Lots of conspiracy theories about the new coronavirus make little sense, and if you actually apply a little scientific rigor to the issue, they fall apart.

They even contradict each other. If it came from a Chinese lab, why? They got hit first. If, as some
Russians say, it came from America, why are we Americans also sick? Whoa, what about the fact that
Russia seemed to be largely free of the disease, isnʻt that suspicious? Well itʻs not, any more--they've got a growing number of cases as well.

The philosopical theory known as Occamʻs Razor suggests that the simplest solution is generally the
right one. There's the old line that if you're in the American west and hear hoofbeats, your first thought should not be zebras.

A group of researchers looked into whatʻs likely and whatʻs not about the origins of COVID-19, also
known as SARS-CoV-2.

1. They found that we know of seven previous cases of this class of disease getting into humans;
2. They found that itʻs highly unlikely that this was a human-engineered virus.

Their study was published in the journal Nature Medicine. The authors are American, Australian and British researchers Kristian G. Andersen, Andrew Rambaut, W.vIan Lipkin, Edward C. Holmes and Robert F. Garry.

"Our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated," they wrote.

One clue, they said, is that when you look at the genetics, this virus behaves more like a random
mutation than a purposeful construct. In other wordS, if someone had engineered it, theyʻd have done a better job, or at least would have done it differently.

Which is not to say that labs donʻt work on viruses. They do. But not like this. "The genetic data irrefutably show that SARS-CoV-2 is not derived from any previously used virus backbone," the authors wrote.

The most likely pathway is one of two, Anderson and his co-authors said. Either the virus evolved into its current form in an animal and then was passed to humans, or an earlier form of the virus passed from animals to humans and then evolved into its current form in humans.

You may have heard that many of the early victims of the virus had visited live-animal markets in
Wuhan, China. And that the animal host might have been bats, or pangolins or birds.

So far, none of those animals has been found with a form of the virus that looks close enough to be the source of the COVID-19 pandemic, they said, but they admitted that the animal population has been "massively undersampled." Pangolins seem to have the virus version closest to the pandemic version.

Alternatively, it is possible an early version of the virus jumped repeatedly to humans in a version that did not spread from human to human. Until one evolved the ability to be transmitted between people.

It is not yet possible to determine which of these things actually led to the outbreak, but there is lots of study going on, and at some point, it will be possible.

"We do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible," but more research will doubtless show which of the natural mechanisms was the more likely culprit.

One of the best arguments against a laboratory conspiracy to infect the world: Animal-to-human transfer of disease has been a common source of human misery since long before sophisticated laboratories were set up. There is even a term for it, zoonosis. That link is the Centers for Disease Control site on zoonotic diseases.

We have had lots of zoonotic diseases in Hawai`i, like leptospirosis and dengue, but most of these diseases require an animal-to-human infection path for each sick human. The difference with COVID-19 is that once it crossed the species barrier, it could be transmitted directly human to human.

This has happened repeatedly. Think of bird flu and swine flu. The source of the devastating 1918 "Spanish" flu, is not well known, although it almost certainly didn't come from Spain. It went on to infect a third of the world population and to kill an estimated 50 million people. Some suggest it might have crossed from birds.

Thus, this is neither new nor rare. "More than 60% of the roughly 400 emerging infectious diseases that have been identified since 1940 are zoonotic," wrote the authors of this 2012 paper in the journal The Lancet, which has the ominous title, "Prediction and prevention of the next pandemic zoonosis."

© Jan TenBruggencate 2020

Last Hawaiian yellow-tipped tree snail dies.

 Achatinella apexfulva. Credit: DLNR

The tree snails of O`ahu were both common and famous.

So common that kids would walk into the hills above Honolulu and collect them to make leis. So famous that songs and legends referred to them.

Today, habitat change, predatory snails, rats, chameleons and other threats have made all of the many species rare. And now, another one, Achatinella apexfulva, has become extinct.

The last of his species, this guy was in captivity, and he made it into this year. He died New Year's Day 2019, at age 14.

This Achatinella was part of a gorgeous clan. The tree snail shells are just amazing, with whorls of gold and green, chocolate and café-au-lait, black and ivory. George himself was among the less stunning specimens, his palate limited to pales and browns.

Like his kin, he was famous. Hundreds of school kids have come to see him. He was named Lonesome George, after a lone tortoise from the Galapagos Island of Pinta. Tortoise George was also the last of his species, and he died in 2012. Read more about that George here. 

George was part of a small group of the last Achatinella apexfulva that were taken into captivity by the Snail Extinction Prevention Program. Researchers were able to get some to reproduce, but not enough to sustain the species. Their scientific name referred to the yellow tip on their shells.

George, a hermaphrodite like all of his species, could play both the male and female roles in reproduction, but apparently required a mate in order to reproduce. The state Department of Land and Natural Resources announced his demise.

More on the Snail program, along with some stunning imagery of the beautiful shells, is here. 

The tree snails and others in the Hawaiian native forest will be featured in an hour-long film, "Forests for Life," which looks at all the benefits of native forests and the threats they face. The film will be shown on KFVE-TV (K5), at 7:00 p.m. on Friday, Jan. 18th with a repeat on Monday, Jan. 21, 2019 at 8:00 p.m.

© Jan TenBruggencate 2018

Cool Hawaiian science: blend up some healthy leaves, spray on sickly plants, and create healthy plants

We are not alone, and we can’t be.

Whether human or plant or other species, we all live by John Donne’s rule: “No man is an Island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the Continent, a part of the main.”

(Image:  The native mint P. kaalaensis in flower, with fungal

infection (white spots on leaves). Credit: Geoff Zahn.)

University of Hawai`i researchers, in an elegant new piece of work, show that even plants in the garden depend on a community of other organisms to protect them. Some of these natural allies live in the soil and root, in the stems and leaves, and even on the stems and leaves.

In this case, working with a native mint called Phyllostegia kaalaensis, professor Anthony Amend and researcher Geoff Zahn found that they could transplant disease resistance into a plant that otherwise was a severe risk of fungal attack.

The mint, which was once thriving in the wild, has been extinct in the wild since 2015. The ones still living in nurseries were extremely weak--perhaps because they were sprayed regularly with fungicides to prevent fungus attack. The fungicide kept them alive but also kept them weak, said Zahn.

As long as the plants remained so vulnerable, there was little hope of restoring them to the wild, where they would immediately be killed off.

Healthy native mint in the wild. Credit: Vincent Costello.

All it took was to blend up (actually blend, in a blender) the leaves of a related wild plant, which presumably contained whatever protective organisms lived with the wild plant. The donor plant was a related endangered Hawaiian mint from Molokai, Phyllostegia hirsuta. 

They sprayed the blended stuff onto nursery plants. And the plants that had been given this “transplant” of beneficial organisms were suddenly able to fight off fungal attack. The beneficial organisms are called endophytes, which are forms of life like fungi and bacteria that live inside the plant. 

Here’s now the University of Hawai`i press release put it:

“They took leaves from a closely related wild that plant was healthy and contained a typical mix of endophytes, blended them into a smoothie and sprayed the mixture onto the leaves of (the native mint)  to see if beneficial microbes could be transplanted from one species to another. They then subjected these plants, along with a control group, to the deadly powdery mildew. The plants that received the microbial spray were able to resist disease, those that didn’t receive the spray soon died.”

The research is simply remarkable. Nursery plants, generally planted in sterile media, are “alone.” They don’t have their natural biological communities around them. And as a result they are severely vulnerable. 

In this case, Amend and Zahn weren’t sure which of the constituents of the blended spray did the anti-fungal work, so they tested for it.

“Using DNA barcode sequencing to identifying which species were inside leaves before, during, and after the disease, Amend and Zahn determined the beneficial fungus that was most likely responsible for protection from disease: the yeast Pseudozyma aphidis. Those treated plants did so well, that they have since been planted out in the wild, and now represent the only wild population of P. kaalaensis on the planet.”

Zahn said this yeast can live both on the leaf surface and inside the plant's tissues. When they prepared the leaves for blending, they cleaned the exterior, so the protective fungus came from inside the tissues of the hirsuta. 

The National Science Foundation and the Army funded the research. Anend and Zahn were associated with the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa botany department and the O'ahu Army Natural Resources Program. Zahn has since moved on to Utah Valley University.

Amend continues the work in Hawai`i, and also works with University of Hawai`i researcher Nicole Hynson, who is studying, among other things, beneficial organisms in the roots of plants.

This remarkable research builds on a growing understanding of the relationship between diverse life forms. 

Some years ago, researchers were able to save an exceedingly rare native orchid on Molokai.

The orchid did poorly in captivity, and did poorly when planted out in the wild. But when it was planted in soil that had been inoculated with soil from places where it had once grown, it did fine.

Growing with the soil organisms on which it depended, it survived. Alone, it did not.

We’re not even going to go here into the relationships between humans and their gut organisms. But whether you go by “no man an island” or “it takes a village,” the message is clear.

 © Jan TenBruggencate 2017

Frankenreefer: GMO marijuana exists, and more is coming.

Free and natural cannabis. Credit: USDA

As our state and nation lumber toward absolute legalization of marijuana use, the fake news crowd is having great fun generating toxic smoke.

We're here to clear the air.

There is a lot of absolute conjecture and supposition in this field, most of it baseless—or to use the latest terminology, Fake News.

We will review here some of the really smelly stuff on the internet, and then what’s really going on.

Did Monsanto create a GMO strain of marijuana, in an evil plot to take over the industry? Well, no, that would be a steaming pile, generated by the FakeNews website, World News Daily Report. 

Yes, this site is all cowcrap, and admits it. Satyrical, fictional, it says on the opening page, and any resemblance to truth is "purely a miracle." There are dozens of sites like it that promulgate the internet hoax, which Wikipedia defines as “deliberately fabricated falsehood made to masquerade as the truth.”

But Monsanto-branded GMO bud is a fun story, so not to let it die, some folks are arguing that if Big Ag isn’t genetically modifying pot, it soon will be. Here’s something from the site Herb, which reads as what it is, speculation.  

The bible of the reefer industry, High Times, continues to insist that it’s all a hoax, and that all today’s marijuana, while carefully interbred for potency and flavor, is the result of natural husbandry techniques, not laboratory genetic modification. 

You’ll see reports that the federales busted massive GMO pot operations, without any indication, no offer of proof, that the pot was in fact GMO. 

The marijuana seed company Dutch Passion goes out of its way to say it does not do genetic engineering, and that its crops are not GMO. 

But that said, its blogger, “Dutch Joe,” says GMO dope is inevitable. Dutch Joe says he believes it won’t be Monsanto, but Big Pharma that does it:

“I expect the pharmaceutical companies will invest heavily to genetically engineer a cannabis strain that yields ultra high levels of the whole spectrum of cannabinoid chemicals. The aim will be to extract and isolate them into individual cannabinoids on an industrial scale using thousands of tons of bud. Once individual cannabinoids are isolated I expect they will find their way into pills for very specific medical purposes.”

So, enough of the herb-addled inferences and implications.

The truth is that some GMO cannabis exists, and it is actively being researched, and Frankenreefer isn’t far off.

Italian researcher Fidelia Cascini actually tested strains of superstrong pot and said they were consistent with normal genetics, not laboratory-engineered genetics: 

“Our analyses support the hypothesis that marijuana samples submitted to forensic laboratories and characterized by an abnormal level of Δ9-THC are the product of breeding selection rather than of transgenic modifications.”

But that said, other Italian researchers have already created new genetically modified strains of cannabis by bombarding them with radiation to create the genetic mutations, and this was 15 years ago. 

Here, in the journal Botany and Biotechnology, is a report that talks about the ways to accomplish genetic modification of marijuana: “biotechnology companies have emerged that anticipate commercializing cannabinoid-based drugs in yeast and tobacco and to produce hemp cultivars.”

That's a strange one. What if, due to all the legal issues with the crop, you didn’t want to work with cannabis? 

What if you could create the active ingredients in another form of life—maybe yeast. Yep, that’s being done. And tobacco, as mentioned above.

In summary, there is a lot of interest in biotechnology of cannabis—the creation of GMO pot and the creation of variants of pot's many active ingredients. There are already strains in laboratories of GMO marijuana. And you can expect more.

 “Cannabis is a precious plant with multiple applications, hence the possibility of engineering it genetically to produce useful compounds/raw products is highly valuable,” said an article in the journal Frontiers in Plant Science.

© Jan TenBruggencate 2017