Confessions of an Amateur Virologist

It’s me, I’m the guy they talk about, I’m the one who did his own research. I am an amateur virologist. I have no credentials to display and no achievements to boast of, and no one will write me a recommendation. I cannot find work in virology and never will, I will always be an amateur. Direct at me whatever slings and arrows the amateur virologist is due, for I am one.

But I am an amateur virologist with an acute appreciation for the professional virologist. I do understand the difference. I know firsthand how hard professional virologists work and how much respect is properly due that work. My father was a surgeon, a professional surgeon, and I know how hard he worked to become one and to remain one. I saw it every day in my own house. I do know how hard the professionals work.

When I was in the first grade my father asked me if I had been taking any tests at school, and I said sure, we take a spelling test every Friday. He asked to see them and I said I still have the one from last week and brought it back. I was six years old and no one had ever told me to try and get the highest score on a test. No one had told me, it did not naturally occur to me, and I found tests boring. I had a very low score. This did not sit well with the professional in the house.

My father kept me at the kitchen table late into the night and made me practice spelling each word on the test, starting at the top and going down, until I could spell it perfectly. When I could spell one word on the test perfectly each time he would go to the next word on the test and we would start over. He made me repeat each word on the test over and over until I could spell it perfectly without hesitation over and over again. Then I would have to do the same for the next word on the test. When I could finally spell all the words on the test perfectly there was no reward or praise. Perfect is just barely good enough, it’s what you should always score on a test, and being perfect doesn’t mean you can celebrate, it just means you can stop now and go to sleep. Because perfect is just barely good enough.

I was young, but I understood what my father was teaching me. He was not teaching me how to spell. He was teaching me the family business. We lived in a nice waterfront home and took nice vacations and had nice things, because my father was a successful surgeon who could afford them. He was born poor and started working after school in a factory when he was twelve, he worked every summer in college and medical school and he worked his whole life. He made something of himself by graduating first in his high school class and getting a scholarship. A devout Catholic, he always dreamed of attending Notre Dame, but they wouldn’t come up with the money. There are dreams and there is reality.

My father made a very comfortable living as a surgeon because he did well in his residency, and he did well in his residency because he did well in medical school, and he did well in medical school because he did well in college. But before that my father was a child and he practiced the questions on tests over and over again until he could do them perfectly, because perfect is just barely good enough. My father did well in life because he practiced skills and knowledge over and over again until he could do them perfectly without hesitation over and over again. He made his money as a surgeon, but he was a surgeon because he practiced skills and knowledge over and over again until he could repeat them perfectly without hesitation. Because perfect is just barely good enough.

What my father was teaching me that night was the family business, the source of the family money, the waterfront house, the nice vacations, all of it. The source of all this money was repeating things over and over until you could do them perfectly. This is hard work and not everyone wants to do it. Everyone wants a waterfront home, but not everyone wants to repeat things over and over until you can do them perfectly. My father wanted to repeat things over and over until he could do them perfectly. He was teaching me how he made all that money that I got to spend, and he was teaching me the family business which he wanted me to continue in. He was teaching me how to learn and to work and how to hold yourself to the highest standards so I could be a surgeon as well. Because perfect is just barely good enough. It doesn’t mean you can be happy, it just means you can stop now and go to sleep.

I never became a surgeon, or even a very good student. This wasn’t going to be my path through life and eventually my father accepted that. But he gave me the choice, he let me know how to become a surgeon, if that is what I wanted. You do it by repeating knowledge over and over again until you know it perfectly. You do it by work. A surgeon is a surgeon because of work. Everyone is what they are because of work. I did my own kind of work in my own way, but my father gave me the opportunity to be a professional virologist if I so chose. 

I understand what my father was teaching me. Every time a neuron fires the threshold for firing is lowered and it becomes easier to fire on the next try. A neuron, the nerve cells in your brain that control your thoughts and actions, will only fire if the threshold for firing is reached. Every time you make that neuron fire the threshold is lowered. This is why things become easier with repetition. Each repetition lowers the threshold for firing. This is why speaking a foreign word or using a new skill is so embarrassingly difficult at first, but with enough practice it becomes easy. It becomes easy because repetition lowers the firing threshold on the relevant neurons to the point where getting them to fire and make the action occur becomes easy. But it is never easy at first. Repetition is always needed to lower the threshold, in the beginning it is always hard and remains hard until you put the work in. Everything is because of work.

Professional virologists have put the work in. They have repeated skills and knowledge to the point where the firing threshold is so low the skills and knowledge are easy for them. They have changed their brains through work. They are professionals because their neurons are different from the amateurs and their neurons are different because of work. The amount of prerequisite knowledge needed to be a professional virologist takes a lifetime to master. It requires a lifetime of repeating skills and knowledge until the firing threshold on countless facts has been lowered until you have mastery of the subject. The usual estimate is that students learn two million facts in medical school. That is two million sets of neurons that have to have their firing threshold lowered through work. This is something to be respected and I do respect it, more than most. I respect the professional virologist.

Health is a life or death concern and so perfect is barely good enough. Professionals have to spend a lifetime reducing the firing threshold on countless facts and skills. No one in a short time or as a part-time pursuit can lower the firing threshold on enough facts and skills to be good enough for something where not being perfect means someone else not being alive. Perfect is just barely good enough, and perfect requires a lifetime of work mastering countless facts and skills. No amateur can do this.

I’m a smart guy, I have confidence in myself. I can learn things quickly and I have confidence in my conclusions. When Covid hit and so much of the official story seemed odd and lacked coherence and explanatory power I immediately suspected the official version and began studying the topic on my own. I became an amateur virologist. I knew it would be difficult, but I have great confidence in myself. I trusted my own sense of what is right or wrong and began forming conclusions.

Many of those conclusions turned out to be wrong. They were wrong because I am an amateur virologist, not a professional virologist. Once I learned that Covid enters the cell through ACE2 on the cell surface I became fascinated by this, it seemed like the fundamental key to understanding Covid. I learned how the body needs a certain amount of ACE2 on the lung cell surface and Covid uses this to enter the cell. The Covid vaccine produces spike proteins that interact with ACE2 the same way the whole virus does. I thought to myself, if the body has a need for a certain amount of ACE2 and the vaccine is making spike proteins that use up the ACE2, won’t the lung cell make even more ACE2 on its surface to compensate? Won’t this increased amount of ACE2 make the lung cell even more vulnerable to viral entry?

I thought to myself, is the lung cell upregulating ACE2 expression in response to vaccination and thus making things worse, not better? For months I looked for research on this and found none. I thought I had figured out a puzzle no one else had, I had discovered something new. Because no one was talking about it in the scientific literature and the logic seemed obvious to me, so I thought I was the inventor of a new and useful idea.

Everyone wants to be the inventor of a new and useful idea. Having a new idea is easy, having a new and useful idea is very, very hard. Everyone wants to be known for discovering a new and useful idea because everyone wants to be known for doing something that is very hard, something that most people can’t do. Human nature desires recognition and praise, this is not a weakness, it is a normal part of being human. No one has to be ashamed of wanting to be proud. The desire for recognition is normal and universal. Wanting to be known for doing hard things is normal, no criticism is due. And I thought I had discovered something new and useful. I was very happy about this.

The body needs a certain amount of ACE2 and I could see a way the vaccine would be using up that ACE2, making the lung cell make more of it, and since ACE2 is the door the Covid virus walks in through, this would make things even worse. I thought I had done something hard: discovered a new and useful idea. I looked and looked and found no information against this. For months I was very happy. But I was wrong. I am only an amateur virologist. The reason no one was talking about the effect of the vaccine spike protein on ACE2 upregulation is because the professional virologists already asked similar questions with SARS in 2005. These questions that came to my mind had already come to the minds of the professional virologists and they investigated these issues and by 2006 they knew the lung cell down regulates ACE2 in the presence of a virus that uses ACE2 as the door into the cell.

I was wrong and the reason I could find no discussion of my interesting idea in the scientific literature is they were discussing new questions, not an old question that was already answered in 2006. A professional virologist has to master mountains of information, they have to lower the firing threshold on the neurons guarding countless facts until they can access them perfectly. The amount of prerequisite knowledge needed to come up with a new and useful idea in virology is beyond what the amateur virologist is capable of. I was wrong and it took me months to learn I was wrong. This is why I am an amateur virologist and not a professional.

I understand the difference between an amateur and a professional. I know how hard the professionals work and I believe they are due great respect for this, and also waterfront homes. Anyone can do the work, but only someone does. Everything that is so, is so because of work. Professional virologists are professionals because they did the work I never chose to do. I had the opportunity, my father showed me how. But I chose not to. And so it takes me months to learn no one is talking about my questions because this is 2020 and those are 2006 questions to the professionals. And I am an amateur.

I do understand how hard the professionals work. Every professional in every field. No one wants someone to watch what they do for a living for a few minutes and start giving advice. Everyone wants the time and effort they spent lowering the firing threshold on the skills and knowledge they need to do their job respected by others: because work is nearly the one thing in the world most deserving of respect. Effort is a result of choices and choices are the only things about us deserving of respect, and the choice of learning things until you can do them perfectly is the choice deserving of the second most respect in the entire world. Because everything that is so, is so because of work.

Everyone wants recognition, everyone wants to be thought well of. I am part of everyone, I hoped my idea about the threat of ACE2 upregulation in response to ACE2 consumption by the vaccine-produced spike protein was both new and useful. It made me feel happy to think I had done something both new and useful, two of the hardest words in the world to put together. But I was wrong. It hurts to be wrong, no one wants to be wrong. Schoolchildren are taught that real scientists are just as happy with a null result as a positive result, but obviously that isn’t true. Scientists are human too and they want a positive result, they want proof that they discovered something new and useful, because that is hard to do and everyone wants to be known as someone who can do hard things. The desire to be seen well by others is felt by all and is one of our strongest desires.

When I realized my idea was wrong, it did hurt. You want people to see you in a positive light, you want to be successful and have a position in life, a waterfront home. But you can’t lie. It hurts to be wrong, but you have to be adult about it and admit it, and move on. You can’t hide being wrong because you want to be seen well by others, or you want a waterfront home. You simply have to tell the truth, even when that means telling that you were wrong, or that you fell short in some way.

I am just an amateur virologist, I have no job offers in virology coming my way now or in the future. But I understand how to learn. It is just work, you repeat the skill or knowledge over and over again until you have mastered it. I haven’t learned enough about virology to be a professional virologist. But I have put a lot of work into this. The Covid era feels like forever, but it's been four years of our society being obsessed with this. I am an amateur, but I know how to learn. I know how to examine an idea for its explanatory power, meaning its ability to explain the past, its internal coherence, and most importantly its predictive power, its ability to explain the future. I know how to tell if something is true. And I can do this for any field, given the time to learn the prerequisite knowledge to the question. I am smart, and I can work hard when I want to. 

I have put a lot of amateur virologist hours into Covid over these years, and I know that ACE2 is the fundamental determinant of comparative risk. ACE2 is the door the Covid virus uses to enter the lung cell. It has to find a door into the lung cell before the immune system kills it. If a virus takes too long to enter the cell it will be found by the immune system first. If a virus easily finds entrance into host cells it will rapidly proliferate. For Covid the key to all of this is ACE2. The more ACE2 your lung cells have, the more doors for Covid to enter before the immune system finds it. The virus is racing against time, it has to find a door into the cell before the immune system finds it first.

Relative ACE2 levels are the fundamental source of relative Covid risk. Those with the most ACE2, the most doors into the cell for the virus, are at the most risk. And those with the fewest doors are at the least risk. No one has fewer doors than children. I am an amateur virologist, but I know this to be true.

Children are born with very low ACE2 levels in the lung. The nose and throat cells of all people have high enough ACE2 levels to become infected and test positive for Covid, but the lung is all that matters for risk of serious injury, or death. Children are born with very low ACE2 levels and then the levels increase with age. This is the real reason the elderly are at such risk of death from Covid, they have the highest ACE2 levels. For the elderly the virus can easily enter through this door before the immune system has time to find it.

But for children, it is the opposite. Children’s ACE2 levels are so low that they are at no significant risk for injury from Covid. They can generate positive test results because ACE2 levels vary between cell types. Not all cell types have ACE2 on the cell surface, one of the ones that do is gametes and this may matter. Nose and throat cells express ACE2 on the surface and their levels are different than the lung, everyone has a nose and throat that can get Covid, not everyone has a lung that can get Covid. Most children do not, and maybe even all children. The ACE2 levels of children are simply too low to be at a significant risk of injury.

I am just an amateur virologist. Nothing I know is unknown by the professional virologists, nothing I can do in this field is better than what a professional can do. But I do know how to learn, and I know how to judge truth. I can examine ideas for explanatory power, coherence, and above all predictive power. I can come to understand the fundamental relationships that govern the behavior and form a model from which I can answer novel questions and integrate novel data, this type of modeling is the ultimate goal of all learning. I am only an amateur virologist, but I do know that because of ACE2 levels children fundamentally have almost no risk of injury to Covid in comparison to adults.

All we are in the end is our choices. We can choose to do the work, or we can choose to not do it. But we can all choose to tell the truth or not. I am not a professional virologist, but I know how to judge comparative risk for Covid. I know some of the professional virologists are lying. We all want recognition, we all want to be seen well by others, and we all want a waterfront house. In the end, we have to choose if we are willing to lie to get these things. The right answer is no, do not lie. The right answer is to tell the truth. You should always tell the truth. Perfect is just barely good enough.

I am an amateur virologist, I do my own research. The professional virologists are better than me. This is because of my choices. I did not choose to do the work, and they did. I respect that. All we are is our choices and the choice to do work is the second most important thing to show respect for in this world, and I respect the work it takes to be a professional virologist. But the most important choice we make is the choice to be good people, and to tell the truth. This is the one choice that deserves the most respect. I am just an amateur virologist, but I am an honest amateur virologist. That is just barely good enough.