Ever feel you are the de facto or default “little guy”? You’re the powerless one in the path of forces well beyond your control? That you can see what others who should be able to see similarly just don’t see what is obvious to you? Helplessness isn’t uncommon. In a world of constant verbal turmoil, where those who want to stir the fires of civil unrest can do so with a click on a computer, yes, in that world of social media and media stages for those who veer too far right or left in your reasoned opinion, you might feel you have little control and that those who should exert the control you seek just fail by simple mental inertia. You see that one of the problems is, in fact, inertia in a large society encompassed by a bureaucracy for every aspect of human endeavor. Imagine a conversation between a frustrated guy who found out that research that could be used to prevent a potential outbreak or to control its effects wasn’t being fast-tracked and his friend who understands the nature of bureaucracies, even health agency bureacracies.
Frustrated Guy. “What’s a layperson to do? I don’t have access to a lab, don’t have expertise or time to run year-long or multi-year multifaceted or double-blind experiments, and don’t have the power to force government health-care bureaucrats to pursue some research that they don’t favor.”
Friend. “Let me guess. You are probably thinking about how slowly biological research advances when you need a rapid response as the COVID-19 pandemic demonstrated. But no one has the funding to pursue research that would eliminate potential disasters.”
Frustrated Guy. “Yep. Sure, we got vaccines faster than usual in 2020. The panic-mode drove us under Operation Warp Speed to dive into previous research to find those RNA-based vaccines. But think of how long those RNA studies languished without coming to fruition until the pandemic struck. It took a pandemic to overcome that inertia. Where’s the NIH been? Where’s WHO been? What about preventing the next one?”
Friend. “Yeah, no doubt another one is just around the corner.”
Frustrated Guy. “I just read that camels are carrying MERS-CoV and that it is just a few mutations away from becoming a pandemic. * All it’s gonna take is for an African dromedary to go to the Middle East and make the return trip. It’ll pick up the more contagious and deadly version of MERS-CoV, carry it back to Africa, and spread it to Saharan people and from there to the world.”
Friend. “Whoa. Camels?”
Frustrated Guy. “Dromedaries, not Bactrian camels. Gotta get your hump-count right.”
Friend. “Okay, I’m hooked. What’s this about?”
Frustrated Guy. “Three things, really. Hard to keep epidemic diseases straight nowadays, but if you remember, in 2021 MERS-CoV was found in Saudi Arabia, a dangerous form that has the knack of killing 40% of those it infects. Well, it seems that the disease has a refuge in dromedaries that might have gotten it from—you guess—bats. Anyway, that’s the first thing to think about. The second one is something that investigators—even people in the Congress—are seeking answers to, you know, whether or not some gain-of-function research was the cause of COVID-19. Now, here’s the scary third thing. I just read that some researchers took variants of MERS-CoV found in African and Middle Eastern dromedaries and discovered that if they genetically engineered one of the African variant’s amino acids, it becomes more transmissible. That’s gain-of-function research. So, here we are in 2021 thinking, ‘Woo! We’re getting to the end of this thing.’ And while we’re breathing more easily without masks, there’s a group out there experimenting on something that might put masks back on our faces.”
Friend. “All those scary movies like Twelve Monkeys and Outbreak are becoming real-life.”
Frustrated Guy. “Yes. If people are correct in saying that a lab developed COVID-19, we’re already living those movies.”
Friend. “So, what’s this that got your wire spectacles so twisted?”
Frustrated Guy. “Well, I was thinking about how bureaucracies work, how they are big, and how once any human gets put in charge of something there’s a mess-up waiting to happen. And there’s no one for the little guy to blame. Bureaucracies, like governments, protect their own, protect their interests. That’s what got me to thinking I about diamidobenzimidazole.”
Friend. “Diamid what?”
Frustrated Guy. “I know. It’s a mouthful of letters. So many letters that you need a toothpick to get them out of your teeth. Anyway, it’s been shortened to diABZI-4.”
Friend. “What is it?”
Frustrated Guy. “It’s a compound. It’s a carbon-hydrogen-nitrogen-oxygen compound. I don’t know all the subscript numbers. It’s a potential so-called STING agonist; it has something to do with stimulating interferon genes—that’s what STING stands for. I guess it can be used to prevent a virus from infecting because it ups the prophylaxis effect; and I hear its effective, or might be effective against COVID-19 and maybe that dromedary-spread disease. It’s anti-viral.”
Friend. “Sounds good. What’s your problem?”
Frustrated Guy. “It’s not available now, and it reminds me of experiences I’ve had with the biases and inertia of bureaucrats. I’m going to go around a mountain of digression here to get to that. Years ago, I went to a Department of Energy conference in Morgantown, West Virginia. There were presentations on a number of energy problems—we were still energy dependent on OPEC and other oil producers. Anyway, entrepreneurial small companies presented their solutions to problems like what to do with nuclear power plant waste. One set of guys proposed enclosing radioactive wastes in glass or in glass-like substances. They had it all worked out, even had samples and diagrams of the process. But as in all government gatherings, some favored theory, group, or process got the stage. The glass guys got little attention though I thought they had something worth examining and debating at length. Now here’s another digression—a digression within a digression, but I digress. I was on the phone with someone from the National Science Foundation, also years ago, asking about oceanographic institutes where I might go to do research during a sabbatical leave. The guy on the phone started to list institutes in a hierarchy of prestige. Now, I know that doesn’t sound interesting or related to the energy conference, but to me it reveals that those who work in government agencies have their biases and preferences. In other words, if someone has a potential solution to a problem that the government could support, the first obstacle is the person in charge of the funding. That person doesn’t necessarily make decisions on the basis of pure science or logic, but rather on the basis of reputation. People with ‘track records’ of research get to stay on the tracks until they disappear at the ‘vanishing point’ by retiring or dying.
“So, when someone with a novel idea comes along, like putting the nuclear wastes in glass, the presenter gets the proverbial short shrift—though I don’t know that shrift, or confession, is the right term. If the powers-that-be aren’t in favor of the idea, the idea dies of neglect. So, when a group of people now say that diABI-4 has promise as a viral prophylaxis, if that group of people doesn’t have the right reputation or isn’t associated with the ‘right’ lab, then the government funders put the proposal on the bottom of the pile.”
Friend. “Bureaucrats. Can’t live with ‘em; can’t keep them from proliferating. Certainly, can’t get them to act swiftly and efficiently. All that paperwork. But what can you expect from agencies grown larger than small countries? Look at all the government waste. Heck, I just heard that more than 300 million bucks of stimulus money can’t be accounted for and might have been stolen by foreign interests.”
Frustrated Guy. “And now we have to consider that Middle East respiratory syndrome, or MERS-CoV, is hiding in dromedaries AND in some lab. Back in 2012 in Saudi Arabia, it was deadly. If it mutates and makes its way back to the African continent by way of some traded dromedary, it might start another pandemic. Right now the trade in dromedaries is a one-way street, going from Africa to the Middle East. But what if it reverses? Why should we have to wait to develop this kind of STING therapy?” **
Friend. “I guess that’s why we are called the ‘little guys.’ For all our supposed sophistication, we aren’t much better prepared for an epidemic than those fourteenth-century victims of the Black Death. For all our affluence, we find ourselves at the mercy of some accidental or purposeful release of disease. Accidents are inevitable, but so are actions by people and whole governments with malicious intent.”
Frustrated Guy. “And now that we know after the mainstream media shut down reporting on the surmised leak out of a Wuhan lab, where research was conducted with funding indirectly funneled by the NIH, gain-of-function research is the suspected likely cause of the pandemic, what are we supposed to do with gain-of-function research on MERS-CoV found in dromedaries? Do we ask the governments of many countries to shut down that research? Or do we ask governments to expedite research into STING therapies? And in either request, do we expect a response? You know that we’re likely to be dismissed because we are the ‘little guys’ who need to mind our own business while the ‘professionals’ handle what we don’t understand. Geez. We laypeople can’t say the word diamidobenzimidazole any better than a first grader learning to read phonetically. I think you can understand my frustration.”
Friend. “I do, and I don’t have a solution. Maybe I’ll just stock up on toilet paper, masks, nitrile gloves, and canned goods in case someone lets MERS-CoV with its variant amino acid escape a lab and enter the general population. Then I’ll turn on the TV and watch people with an agenda whose supposed job is unbiased investigation refuse to hold accountable those responsible because of some political viewpoint. And I’ll watch health officials stand before cameras to say, ‘Hey, don’t look at me. These things happen. We want everyone to wear as many masks as there are blades in a Gillette razor.’”
Notes:
*Yirka, Bob. 8 June 2021. MERS-CoV just a few mutations away from becoming a pandemic threat. MedXpress. Online at https://medicalxpress.com/news/2021-06-mers-cov-mutations-pandemic-threat.html Accessed June 8, 2021. See Ziqi, Zhou et al. Phenotypic and genetic characterization of MERS coronaviruses from Africa to understand their zoonotic potential. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2021) DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2103984118
**Fessenden, Jim. 11 June 2021. Research identifies potential antiviral compound for COVID-19, flu, other viral infection. MedXpress online at https://medicalxpress.com/news/2021-06-potential-antiviral-compound-covid-flu.html Accessed June 12, 2021. See also Fiachra Humphries et al. A diamidobenzimidazole STING agonist protects against SARS-CoV-2 infection. Science Immunology (2021) DOI: 10.1126/sciimmunol.abi9002 Accessed June 14, 2021.
Also consider this. A group of doctors and medical researchers pleaded with Congress to get the government moving on Ivermectin as a therapy for COVID-19. They were met with political responses and scoffed at. But then the National Library of Medicine released this statement in February, 2021: "Ivermectin, a US Food and Drug Administration-approved anti-parasitic agent, was found to inhibit severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) replication in vitro...There were no severe adverse drug events recorded in the study. A 5-day course of ivermectin was found to be safe and effective in treating adult patients with mild COVID-19." The doctors seem to have been vindicated. Politics and bureaucrats blocked and mocked, and while they did so, people died. Real people with real loved ones who might have been saved by a rapid and unbiased response to the advice and research of the doctors. See Ahmed, Sabeena, et al. A five-day course of ivermectin for the treatment of COVID-19 may reduce the duration of illness. PubMed.gov. DOI: 10.1016/j.ijid.2020.11.191, Online at https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33278625/
Frustrated Guy. “What’s a layperson to do? I don’t have access to a lab, don’t have expertise or time to run year-long or multi-year multifaceted or double-blind experiments, and don’t have the power to force government health-care bureaucrats to pursue some research that they don’t favor.”
Friend. “Let me guess. You are probably thinking about how slowly biological research advances when you need a rapid response as the COVID-19 pandemic demonstrated. But no one has the funding to pursue research that would eliminate potential disasters.”
Frustrated Guy. “Yep. Sure, we got vaccines faster than usual in 2020. The panic-mode drove us under Operation Warp Speed to dive into previous research to find those RNA-based vaccines. But think of how long those RNA studies languished without coming to fruition until the pandemic struck. It took a pandemic to overcome that inertia. Where’s the NIH been? Where’s WHO been? What about preventing the next one?”
Friend. “Yeah, no doubt another one is just around the corner.”
Frustrated Guy. “I just read that camels are carrying MERS-CoV and that it is just a few mutations away from becoming a pandemic. * All it’s gonna take is for an African dromedary to go to the Middle East and make the return trip. It’ll pick up the more contagious and deadly version of MERS-CoV, carry it back to Africa, and spread it to Saharan people and from there to the world.”
Friend. “Whoa. Camels?”
Frustrated Guy. “Dromedaries, not Bactrian camels. Gotta get your hump-count right.”
Friend. “Okay, I’m hooked. What’s this about?”
Frustrated Guy. “Three things, really. Hard to keep epidemic diseases straight nowadays, but if you remember, in 2021 MERS-CoV was found in Saudi Arabia, a dangerous form that has the knack of killing 40% of those it infects. Well, it seems that the disease has a refuge in dromedaries that might have gotten it from—you guess—bats. Anyway, that’s the first thing to think about. The second one is something that investigators—even people in the Congress—are seeking answers to, you know, whether or not some gain-of-function research was the cause of COVID-19. Now, here’s the scary third thing. I just read that some researchers took variants of MERS-CoV found in African and Middle Eastern dromedaries and discovered that if they genetically engineered one of the African variant’s amino acids, it becomes more transmissible. That’s gain-of-function research. So, here we are in 2021 thinking, ‘Woo! We’re getting to the end of this thing.’ And while we’re breathing more easily without masks, there’s a group out there experimenting on something that might put masks back on our faces.”
Friend. “All those scary movies like Twelve Monkeys and Outbreak are becoming real-life.”
Frustrated Guy. “Yes. If people are correct in saying that a lab developed COVID-19, we’re already living those movies.”
Friend. “So, what’s this that got your wire spectacles so twisted?”
Frustrated Guy. “Well, I was thinking about how bureaucracies work, how they are big, and how once any human gets put in charge of something there’s a mess-up waiting to happen. And there’s no one for the little guy to blame. Bureaucracies, like governments, protect their own, protect their interests. That’s what got me to thinking I about diamidobenzimidazole.”
Friend. “Diamid what?”
Frustrated Guy. “I know. It’s a mouthful of letters. So many letters that you need a toothpick to get them out of your teeth. Anyway, it’s been shortened to diABZI-4.”
Friend. “What is it?”
Frustrated Guy. “It’s a compound. It’s a carbon-hydrogen-nitrogen-oxygen compound. I don’t know all the subscript numbers. It’s a potential so-called STING agonist; it has something to do with stimulating interferon genes—that’s what STING stands for. I guess it can be used to prevent a virus from infecting because it ups the prophylaxis effect; and I hear its effective, or might be effective against COVID-19 and maybe that dromedary-spread disease. It’s anti-viral.”
Friend. “Sounds good. What’s your problem?”
Frustrated Guy. “It’s not available now, and it reminds me of experiences I’ve had with the biases and inertia of bureaucrats. I’m going to go around a mountain of digression here to get to that. Years ago, I went to a Department of Energy conference in Morgantown, West Virginia. There were presentations on a number of energy problems—we were still energy dependent on OPEC and other oil producers. Anyway, entrepreneurial small companies presented their solutions to problems like what to do with nuclear power plant waste. One set of guys proposed enclosing radioactive wastes in glass or in glass-like substances. They had it all worked out, even had samples and diagrams of the process. But as in all government gatherings, some favored theory, group, or process got the stage. The glass guys got little attention though I thought they had something worth examining and debating at length. Now here’s another digression—a digression within a digression, but I digress. I was on the phone with someone from the National Science Foundation, also years ago, asking about oceanographic institutes where I might go to do research during a sabbatical leave. The guy on the phone started to list institutes in a hierarchy of prestige. Now, I know that doesn’t sound interesting or related to the energy conference, but to me it reveals that those who work in government agencies have their biases and preferences. In other words, if someone has a potential solution to a problem that the government could support, the first obstacle is the person in charge of the funding. That person doesn’t necessarily make decisions on the basis of pure science or logic, but rather on the basis of reputation. People with ‘track records’ of research get to stay on the tracks until they disappear at the ‘vanishing point’ by retiring or dying.
“So, when someone with a novel idea comes along, like putting the nuclear wastes in glass, the presenter gets the proverbial short shrift—though I don’t know that shrift, or confession, is the right term. If the powers-that-be aren’t in favor of the idea, the idea dies of neglect. So, when a group of people now say that diABI-4 has promise as a viral prophylaxis, if that group of people doesn’t have the right reputation or isn’t associated with the ‘right’ lab, then the government funders put the proposal on the bottom of the pile.”
Friend. “Bureaucrats. Can’t live with ‘em; can’t keep them from proliferating. Certainly, can’t get them to act swiftly and efficiently. All that paperwork. But what can you expect from agencies grown larger than small countries? Look at all the government waste. Heck, I just heard that more than 300 million bucks of stimulus money can’t be accounted for and might have been stolen by foreign interests.”
Frustrated Guy. “And now we have to consider that Middle East respiratory syndrome, or MERS-CoV, is hiding in dromedaries AND in some lab. Back in 2012 in Saudi Arabia, it was deadly. If it mutates and makes its way back to the African continent by way of some traded dromedary, it might start another pandemic. Right now the trade in dromedaries is a one-way street, going from Africa to the Middle East. But what if it reverses? Why should we have to wait to develop this kind of STING therapy?” **
Friend. “I guess that’s why we are called the ‘little guys.’ For all our supposed sophistication, we aren’t much better prepared for an epidemic than those fourteenth-century victims of the Black Death. For all our affluence, we find ourselves at the mercy of some accidental or purposeful release of disease. Accidents are inevitable, but so are actions by people and whole governments with malicious intent.”
Frustrated Guy. “And now that we know after the mainstream media shut down reporting on the surmised leak out of a Wuhan lab, where research was conducted with funding indirectly funneled by the NIH, gain-of-function research is the suspected likely cause of the pandemic, what are we supposed to do with gain-of-function research on MERS-CoV found in dromedaries? Do we ask the governments of many countries to shut down that research? Or do we ask governments to expedite research into STING therapies? And in either request, do we expect a response? You know that we’re likely to be dismissed because we are the ‘little guys’ who need to mind our own business while the ‘professionals’ handle what we don’t understand. Geez. We laypeople can’t say the word diamidobenzimidazole any better than a first grader learning to read phonetically. I think you can understand my frustration.”
Friend. “I do, and I don’t have a solution. Maybe I’ll just stock up on toilet paper, masks, nitrile gloves, and canned goods in case someone lets MERS-CoV with its variant amino acid escape a lab and enter the general population. Then I’ll turn on the TV and watch people with an agenda whose supposed job is unbiased investigation refuse to hold accountable those responsible because of some political viewpoint. And I’ll watch health officials stand before cameras to say, ‘Hey, don’t look at me. These things happen. We want everyone to wear as many masks as there are blades in a Gillette razor.’”
Notes:
*Yirka, Bob. 8 June 2021. MERS-CoV just a few mutations away from becoming a pandemic threat. MedXpress. Online at https://medicalxpress.com/news/2021-06-mers-cov-mutations-pandemic-threat.html Accessed June 8, 2021. See Ziqi, Zhou et al. Phenotypic and genetic characterization of MERS coronaviruses from Africa to understand their zoonotic potential. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2021) DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2103984118
**Fessenden, Jim. 11 June 2021. Research identifies potential antiviral compound for COVID-19, flu, other viral infection. MedXpress online at https://medicalxpress.com/news/2021-06-potential-antiviral-compound-covid-flu.html Accessed June 12, 2021. See also Fiachra Humphries et al. A diamidobenzimidazole STING agonist protects against SARS-CoV-2 infection. Science Immunology (2021) DOI: 10.1126/sciimmunol.abi9002 Accessed June 14, 2021.
Also consider this. A group of doctors and medical researchers pleaded with Congress to get the government moving on Ivermectin as a therapy for COVID-19. They were met with political responses and scoffed at. But then the National Library of Medicine released this statement in February, 2021: "Ivermectin, a US Food and Drug Administration-approved anti-parasitic agent, was found to inhibit severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) replication in vitro...There were no severe adverse drug events recorded in the study. A 5-day course of ivermectin was found to be safe and effective in treating adult patients with mild COVID-19." The doctors seem to have been vindicated. Politics and bureaucrats blocked and mocked, and while they did so, people died. Real people with real loved ones who might have been saved by a rapid and unbiased response to the advice and research of the doctors. See Ahmed, Sabeena, et al. A five-day course of ivermectin for the treatment of COVID-19 may reduce the duration of illness. PubMed.gov. DOI: 10.1016/j.ijid.2020.11.191, Online at https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33278625/
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