Link to podcast episode on Spotify
[Danny Jones]
Discussion on Cannabis Amendment 3 in Florida
We were just having a great conversation about the amendment, I think it was three, the cannabis one. Yes. And I was telling you my understanding of it, the picture DeSantis painted about it was that there was one big company that was going to control all the weed and this was somehow going to be bad. Yes, this is true leave.
[Kevin McKernan]
Kevin McKernan’s connections to DeSantis and Joe Latipo
So the bill was written, perhaps it could have written the bill a little bit better, but what I don’t think and what I tried to do is weigh in, I have some connections to DeSantis and Joe Latipo from some of the work we’ve done in the COVID space.
Impact of hemp legalization on the cannabis market
And I don’t think they appreciate that the federal government just kneecaps all the cannabis companies a few years ago by basically legalizing hemp, which I’m all for, I think hemp should be legal. But what they’ve done is they’ve created a two-tier regulatory structure where the people who are growing hemp don’t have to safety test it, don’t have to have the same labeling, they don’t have to have licenses, they don’t have to have cameras, they don’t have to grow indoors.
[00:01:06]
I mean, they don’t have banking restrictions like the cannabis field has. So what’s happening in the cannabis field is everyone is kind of moving their business out of the regulated market and into the hemp market and selling it across state lines. Because if it’s hemp, it doesn’t have to, it can go across state lines.
Alternative cannabinoids and lack of regulation
So what you’ll find in Florida, you can go to any smoke shop down here and see people are selling THCP, HHC, these are all like alternative cannabinoids that we don’t know much about because they’re technically not cannabis.
[Danny Jones]
Or like the Delta-9s and all those.
[Kevin McKernan]
Delta-8 is one.
CBD and Delta-8 THC
So if you take CBD, you can take CBD, which comes out of hemp and is not psychoactive. Very helpful compound for a lot of different, for epilepsy, a lot of different diseases. But you can acid catalyze that into Delta-8, which is psychoactive. And then that is technically derived from hemp. And you can sell that in an unregulated fashion across state lines everywhere.
Exploiting the hemp bill to sell psychoactive THC
And so everyone is sneaking forms of psychoactive THC through the hemp bill into all of these states that only have medical, because there’s a rec market there that wants it.
[00:02:06]
And so the whole Amendment 3 thing is a real kabuki theater, because they were kind of shutting down moving the medical market here that is actually using tested and tracked material, moving that into the rec market so that you would have tested and tracked material in the rec market. And now that that’s blocked, the hemp market is going to just swell in here and take over and I wouldn’t be surprised if Trulia and these other companies just say, screw it, throw in the towel and start calling their stuff hemp and selling it.
Negative impact on consumers due to lack of regulation
And then they don’t have the same cost structure, testing oversight and understanding of what’s actually in the product. So net, I think it’s worse for consumers what they did, because they don’t have, you know, the one selling aspect of a regulated and tested market is that you know what’s in the product.
[Steve]
Right?
[Kevin McKernan]
Is that they test it. They know there’s no heavy metals, there’s no pesticides. Right. There’s no, you know what the cannabinoid concentration actually is, and that’s in fact THC and not some synthetic cannabinoid like spice that they popped in.
[00:03:03]
All of those type of kitchen chemists sell things through the hemp market. So even though things are labeled as hemp, you don’t really know if it’s even Delta-8. Sometimes it can be THC acetate, it can be THCP, it can be HHC. There’s a long list of compounds that we don’t really have thousands of years of biochemistry and toxicology on. So yeah, it’s a bit ironic.
Discovering contamination in vaccines
The reason I know Joe Latipoe is that we ended up discovering this contamination in the vaccines. And ironically, we would have never discovered that if we didn’t have recreational cannabis in Massachusetts, which is a very bizarre story.
Sequencing cannabis plants and hop latent viroid
But that whole discovery came about because we were sequencing cannabis plants to try to understand hoplatin viroid. Hoplatin viroid is a small RNA molecule that infects the cannabis industry and it just devastates grows, like 40% loss in crop yields. And so what we were doing is taking these plants that were infected and looking at their RNA signature throughout time to see what happens when this viroid infects the plant.
[00:04:06]
Why does it kill it? What is the 40% loss? What genes does it turn down? What genes does it activate? Where is it in the plant? Those experiments were running great for about nine weeks and then suddenly they stopped. Our sequencing data came back and it was no longer concentrated on genes. It was like sequencing the entire genome. That’s not what we wanted. We wanted to look at what genes were going up and down. So what you do when something like that happens in an experiment is you have to go get a control that’s like a pharmaceutical grade RNA and spike it in to see why is it broken. If that pharmaceutical grade RNA doesn’t come through, then you can help pinpoint, okay, this is the step in the lab that’s not functioning and that’s why we’re not capturing RNA.
Using vaccines as control in cannabis sequencing
And I happen to have vaccines on the shelf for another reason we can perhaps go into it another day. People sent them to me and I was reading the mail because I thought I would do something with them and they probably didn’t expect me to do this with it.
[00:05:00]
So I ended up using those. I spiked them into the well being like, all right, this is a perfect pharmaceutical, in theory, this is a perfect pharmaceutical grade RNA. I’m going to spike this into our cannabis sequencing to see where the pipeline is broken.
Discovering contamination in vaccines through cannabis research
And when it came out, we found that contamination that Jack spoke about here. But that experiment would have been harder to do in Florida because we have recreational rules in mass, which allow us to actually do that type of research. That’s harder to get done down here because you have to have a medical card and it’s much more tightly regulated. So it was it saddened me when I saw that the amendment three didn’t go through.
[Danny Jones]
DeSantis and Latipo’s approach during the pandemic
Yeah.
[Kevin McKernan]
And that and what I loved about DeSantis and and gelatopos during the pandemic, they brought in, you know, a set of contrarians to say, you know, what’s going on with the pandemic?
[Danny Jones]
Yes.
[Kevin McKernan]
You know, the fringe people, they allowed.
[Danny Jones]
This was one of the only places that had the the monoclonal antibodies that you could.
[Kevin McKernan]
Yes. Until Biden came and took them. Right.
[Danny Jones]
Right.
[Kevin McKernan]
So so anyway, they were very good. I have a lot of respect for them, for what they did to the pandemic, because they stopped and looked outside of the box and said, hey, what’s this?
[00:06:06]
Something’s wrong. Let’s get some other experts in here. They brought in Jay Bhattacharya. They brought in Martin Kulldorff. They brought in Sunupji Kutra and that steered them in the right path. And I wish I had the time to do it with them on the canvas front, because I think they got I understand their concerns, which is that, hey, you don’t want this to go willy nilly with all the kids, right? You don’t want the kids running around with vape pens in schools and making a big mess at the canvas front. The reality is they already have that problem. They probably.
[Danny Jones]
Yeah. They don’t know the source. Right.
[Kevin McKernan]
Yeah.
[Danny Jones]
It’s all it’s terrible. Every freaking kid running around here has a little vape pen that they run around that they have in their car, in their pocket, at the gym. They’re hitting it. It’s crazy.
[Kevin McKernan]
Concerns about unregulated vape pens and pesticides
It’s out of control. And it’s not what frightens me about that is no one screening those things for pesticides, for metals. And the whole the whole vape industry is a very new industry from from cannabis plants. Like when you pull and extract these things out of cannabis plants, the pesticides tend to enrich more than the cannabinoids. Right. So you’ll get pens that are just loaded with pests like that whole the whole Valley crisis that wasn’t vitamin D acetate.
[00:07:02]
The vaping crisis and vitamin E acetate
The what crisis? There was a Valley crisis right before COVID that many people forgot about because COVID came in and destroyed everyone’s lives. But the Valley crisis was a vaping crisis that killed a bunch of people. They had ground glass opacities in the lungs, all these things that sound like COVID. But it was about six months before COVID hit. And it was it was pinned down to some nicotine and THC pens. And eventually the CDC said, well, about 70 percent of these things have vitamin E acetate. It must be vitamin E acetate. Vitamin E acetate has been in vape pens for 10 years. It’s not vitamin E acetate. It’s it’s some it’s probably pesticides they’re not looking for. And a couple of testing labs we know in the space were finding high levels of pesticides in those pens. And those pesticides, the nature of them means that they can be in parts per million, maybe parts per billion in cannabis. You put them through an extraction system and they’re in parts per thousand like they and the cannabinoids might enrich threefold in the pens, like they might go from the plant from 20 percent to 80 percent, maybe 60 percent in the pens.
[00:08:03]
But you can see that the pesticides go up a hundredfold in concentration.
Dangers of unregulated vape pens and pesticide concentration
And so they it’s you don’t want to have an unregulated vape pen thing out there when when the cannabis field right now has two different regulatory structures, one where you can grow outdoor hemp and no one can really QC it or does QC it and you can load it with pesticides. Doesn’t have to go through safety testing and ends up sold into gas stations outside of whether amendment three votes yes or no. So Florida is loaded with this. You can go to all types of places here that sell pens that have no safety testing on them.
[Danny Jones]
And that’s all with hemp products. Yeah, those are all coming through the farm bill. But the stuff that you buy from like the dispensaries, that’s not hemp.
[Kevin McKernan]
Price difference between hemp and THC products
That’s actual that’s actual THC. And usually that stuff is more expensive, too, because way more expensive regulatory structure is probably overboard on that front. Because they have to grow it all indoors with lights. I mean, if you look at Cal, Cal, Colorado’s grid, I don’t know if it’s still true today, but earlier on when they legalized something like two to four percent of electrical grid in Colorado was going to the cannabis lights.
[00:09:05]
Environmental impact of indoor cannabis growing
So, like, you know, going this indoors is stupid, particularly down here.
[Danny Jones]
Right.
[Kevin McKernan]
So that that that creates overhead. So if that bill passed, you still wouldn’t be able to grow your own.
Argument for homegrown cannabis
That’s that’s that’s a legitimate complaint. Like there shouldn’t be you should have homegrown. You should be able to do that. Just like you can brew beer at home. And the reality is most people who do grow at home, they don’t turn. It’s a fricking plant. It’s yeah.
[Danny Jones]
It doesn’t turn out like you’re, it’s not like you’re Walter White.
[Kevin McKernan]
No, no. Yeah. You can grow one or two plants and have plenty for yourself for a year. Like you don’t, you don’t need to have an orchard of this stuff.
[Danny Jones]
Addressing concerns about cannabis use in public spaces
One of the, one of the goofiest complaints that I heard was that people are saying, oh, the, now they’re going to be at all the parks. So I don’t want to go to the playground with my kid and have some stoner sitting there in the park smoking his. I’m like, I talked to my friend, like my stoner friends. And they’re like, if weed becomes legal recreationally, it’s not going to change anything in my life. They’re just like, like you think I’m just going to all of a sudden decide to go to the kid’s playground to smoke.
[00:10:00]
I smoke it on my couch. Like I don’t want to go anywhere else.
[Kevin McKernan]
Yeah. It’s that, that, that was a bad way I think for them to pitch it. It wasn’t really necessarily honest that right. That, oh, all the kids are going to start using it.
Impact of legalization on cannabis use across age groups
Now when we look in states that legalize, actually it’s, it’s the boomers that start using this stuff. They start using gummies and CBD and stuff for, you know, pain of back pain and everything else. There are actually several studies that they’re showing that that adolescent use goes down. It’s no longer, it’s no longer this like, you know, and so it’s a, I don’t think that’s a very strong case.
Cannabinoid hyperemesis and other health concerns
A cannabinoid hyperemesis is important. He brought that up. I’m glad Joe brought that up. Cause that’s, that’s the one area that gets overlooked in cannabis is that no one talks about that one disease and that one disease is actually well studied and well linked to THC. They tend to bring in schizophrenia, which is poorly linked. And I think they even said like, you know, Fry’s brain cells and no one in the, in the cannabinoid space that like, that’s just well understood that no, it’s neurogenic. It’s actually the opposite of that. It’s actually gross. You know, you can, you can, if you have a stroke or if you are into MMA, you’ll, you’ll notice a lot of the MMA players use CBD and it’s because you need a, a lipid soluble antioxidant in the brain when you get brain injury.
[00:11:10]
So there’s neural inflammation. The best thing for that is CBD. Really? It gets right through the blood brain barrier and a very potent antioxidant and, and just dampens down the inflammation.
[Danny Jones]
CBD and ketones for neural inflammation
And ketones is really good for that too.
[Kevin McKernan]
Yeah. I’ve ketogenic diets. I see. I think it’s, there’s probably some, some like overlap in the pathways there. And likewise, you know, the things that Jack was bringing up as well is, is a very interesting area of research as to where the actual cannabinoid chemistry overlaps with mitochondria like those there’s like in the brain, 15% of the cannabinoid receptors are actually on mitochondria and, and, and, and in neuronal cells.
Cannabinoid receptors and brain energetics
So it’s very much dialed into the, the energetics inside the brain and, and the metabolisms in the brain is, is the whole endocannabinoid system.
Suppression of cannabinoid research by the pharmaceutical industry
So it’s, it’s, it’s an important area of the medical field that’s frankly just been suppressed for, for longer than, you know, everyone got a good glimpse of what happens in medical suppression during COVID.
[00:12:10]
Imagine that for 40 years, that’s what’s been going on with, with cannabinoids is the pharmaceutical industry has been doing everything they can to, to suppress this because it’s not a compound that they can exclusively own. Right. And so if, if it, if they even do bother to try and patent it to some degree and get it out, like GW Pharma did, they’re then faced with the fact that there are hundreds of dispensaries around thousands of dispensaries around the country that are going to sell it five times cheaper than their FDA approved product.
Epidiolex and the challenges faced by pharmaceutical companies
Right. So they did this for epilepsy, which is Epidiolex. This is a CBD extract, got it all the way through the FDA. It works great for DeVry syndrome and seizures. It’s, it’s, you know, many of the people in the field would be like, yeah, it’s too pure because it came up with this drug. Epidiolex is from GW Pharma. So they’ve since been bought by a Japanese company. I’m forgetting its name, but it took a long time to get that through.
[00:13:00]
And of course, the expense of running all the clinical trials and building that, that business out means when their final product comes out, it’s usually five times the price of a CBD oil. You can get a dispensary. So, so they end up being faced with getting a drug through an expensive process only to turn around and find out there’s a, there’s already a generic out there that’s going to mimic it. And the only thing they can do is beg the FDA to go in and threaten these dispensaries by saying you can’t have any medical language or, or treatment guidelines on your products. Right. That’s why you won’t see things written on, on cannabis products saying this is good for headaches or, or what have you. You’re not supposed to list any kind of medical quality, if you will, on the label of these products. Right.
[Danny Jones]
Danny Jones asks for Kevin McKernan’s background
Okay. So for people that are here listening that don’t know who you are. Oh yeah. We just jumped right in.
[Unidentified]
Yeah.
[Danny Jones]
We jumped right into the cannabis stuff. That was fun. Can you give a brief background and your history in like medicine and science? Sure.
McKernan’s background in biology and the human genome project
All this stuff.
[Kevin McKernan]
Okay. So where do we start?
[00:14:00]
My background is a BS in biology from Emory University and I learned how to do radioactive sequencing when I was there, which I thought was a trick I’d never use again in my life. And it turned out shortly after I did a, maybe a nine or 10 month stint at a company doing pharmaceutical marketing, I decided I want to get back to the bench and luckily got into the human genome project up and in Cambridge at MIT. So my resume ended up on Trevor Hawkins desk from two different people at once for some bizarre reason. He hired me and the guys who hired me a year later who were running that group were also MIT grads. And there’s this thing in MIT that if you’re still at MIT a year after you graduate, you’re kind of still in your mom’s basement. And so they decided they had to leave and they left the reins to me. And I started running the research and development program there as that scaled up and raced against Craig mentor. And so we built a really fast DNA sequencing pipeline at the white head. And through the course of that, we discovered various new ways of, of isolating DNA, patented those.
[00:15:05]
And as the human genome project came to close, a bunch of pharmaceutical companies started asking, like how do we license this stuff? We need to import and import this stuff into our facilities. So we spun out a company in called.
[Danny Jones]
The purpose of the human genome project
And what was the purpose of the human genome or what was it for people who don’t know?
[Kevin McKernan]
All right. So yeah, I’ll back up on that. So we wanted to, the whole port, it was really, this is an important history actually that you cover.
[Danny Jones]
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[00:16:01]
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[Kevin McKernan]
Personalized medicine and the human genome project
It was really ironically through Francis Collins who we’ll probably get to later and the pitch there was we want to go to personalized medicine.
[00:17:08]
We want to sequence everyone’s genome, figure out their differences and drug them accordingly. Instead of this, let’s build one drug tested on 10,000 people and send it across the entire globe and hope it works.
[Unidentified]
Right.
[Kevin McKernan]
The idea was now we’re going to get more precision about this. We’re going to actually, when you have cancer, sequence your genome and then sequence the genome of your tumor, which will be different in most cases and see if we can find druggable differences that will kill the tumor, not kill the patient.
Targeted drug development based on genetics
And some of those started to occur in that timeframe. There was one drug called Orissa that was specific to it failed as a drug until they discovered, I think it was Dan Haber of an MGH that did this and Matthew Myerson, Dana Farber, they discovered that if you took that drug and actually looked at people’s EGFR receptors, there was like a 15 base pair insert, a deletion inside that gene that if you had it, the drug worked. And if you didn’t, it did not work. So the drug failed on population wide. But if you isolated the people and sequence them first, you had remarkable success rates with the drug.
[00:18:04]
So it rescued a drug just by knowing the genetics of the population that put it on.
[Danny Jones]
That’s amazing.
[Kevin McKernan]
So that was really the whole goal. The human genome project was to do that a thousand times over and do that in every disease is can we target these drugs so that we’re, we’re not sloppily blanketing the population with drugs that we test on small populations and they blow up as when we hit, you know, different, different HEPA groups or different populations out there.
[Danny Jones]
Variation in the human genome
And is it true that the, the, the variation in the human genome, there’s like, there’s not a lot of variation.
[Kevin McKernan]
If you want to compare it to cannabis plants were completely inbred and should be walking backwards.
[Unidentified]
Yeah.
[Kevin McKernan]
So, you know, maybe there’s a million variants maybe between any given individual. So it’s like a variant for every thousand or something.
[Unidentified]
Yeah.
[Kevin McKernan]
Yeah. So that’s a fair number. You know, now that we have better sequencers, some would argue maybe it’s more like one in every 500 if you include some of these insertions and deletions and longer structural variations that we couldn’t see very well back then with the technology we had that, that initially did the human genome project.
[00:19:00]
But 20 years on, so we are now, we now have completely different technology to survey genomes that are remarkable compared to what we had before. And we can see much more variation now than we could then, but still really, yeah, we’re, we’re, we’re not at the level of cannabis plants. All right.
[Danny Jones]
Right.
[Kevin McKernan]
Right. Cannabis plants are, are their own beast.
[Danny Jones]
Now is that just quick side note on the genome stuff, is that normal for most mammals?
[Kevin McKernan]
Mammalian genome variation and human population bottleneck
The polymorphism rate is, that’s a good question.
[Danny Jones]
Cause I was good. Cause I was listening to something where you were talking about like essentially if you took our, our genome, it, if you extrapolate into the past, basically means we came from like 10,000 humans.
[Kevin McKernan]
Yeah. Most, mostly in, in Sub-Saharan Africa.
[Danny Jones]
And there was like a bottleneck in the population and the human population.
[Kevin McKernan]
Yes. As Neanderthal came out and the Denisovans played a role in some of this. So they’re, they’re still piecing some of that structure together with paleogenomics. So there’s a whole field where you can go back and sequence, you know, things that are old.
[00:20:00]
Paleogenomics and sequencing ancient DNA
Like I was involved in one sequencing Utsi, the mummy, which they found frozen in ice. That was probably 5,000 years old up in the Alps. Just, just to understand, you know, what, what, what were the genetics like back then? I think they, interestingly enough found Lyme disease in that guy. It’s that, that really, that’s, that’s something that shocked everyone. Cause I wouldn’t believe that was a new world.
[Danny Jones]
And this guy was from 3000 BC.
[Kevin McKernan]
Something like that. Yeah. It’s, it’s about 5,000 years ago.
[Danny Jones]
Yeah.
[Kevin McKernan]
That sounds about right. There’s another Pablo, that’s Pablo’s last name. He, he, there’s a really good on paleogenomics system. I’m forgetting, but he actually, I think he, he may even got a Nobel prize. So I should know this, but it’ll come up, but he has done a lot of work in developing the methods that make it possible to sequence DNA. That’s that old. Cause when DNA gets that old, it tends to, it tends to break down in a particular manner in a predictable manner. And you have to be aware of that in order to sequence it. And he’s been very good at getting like woolly mammoth to sequence and a variety of things. So you can begin to put that back together.
[00:21:01]
Svante Pablo. There he is. Yes. I forgot his first name. So yeah, he’s, he’s a real pioneer in being able to do this this type of work, but that helps bring the picture back. But you’re right. We are a diaspora that came through a bottleneck and which is one reason why many people on the genome project were I think there’s a, there’s a strong message in here that, that this, this idea of race differences is actually irrelevant when you look at the genome.
[Danny Jones]
Right. Do we have any idea when that bottleneck occurred?
[Kevin McKernan]
Um, I think there is probably a hundred thousand years ago was when the, when the diaspora was most extreme. You, although, you know, you can find obviously hominids back a million years. Um, there he goes as far back as Australopithecus. We haven’t gotten sequenced from material that’s that old. I think some of the records in sequencing are probably 50 or a hundred thousand years. I haven’t, I haven’t kept directly up, up to speed with it. Svante probably has the record on the oldest thing ever sequenced. Um, but, uh, that’s, um, yeah, I haven’t, I haven’t kept up with the human population genomics story there cause in some ways it’s very boring.
[00:22:06]
It’s, it’s, it’s, as you said, there’s not a lot to it. We all came from a fairly recent ancestor.
[Unidentified]
Right.
[Kevin McKernan]
And, uh, it’s, you know, you, you can find some interesting things about, uh, the genetics that change with lactose tolerance based on when we think we went through, uh, you know, when we began to get involved in agriculture and, and a more, you know, um, uh, farm based lifestyle.
[Danny Jones]
Human adaptability and genomic complexity
Uh, so there, there are some, you know, genetics that follow that, but well there’s also, there’s also people like this that, that study the climate change through the, on like the end of the ice age around like around like 11,800 years ago when there was younger dryness impact hypothesis where they impact these, these comments came and hit like the North American ice sheet.
Climate change and the younger dryas impact hypothesis
Right. Right. Wiped out all the mega fauna here. Um, but I, I mean that wouldn’t, that wouldn’t be enough destruction and that wouldn’t be enough to bottleneck the population down to 10, 10,000.
[Kevin McKernan]
The thing that’s really unique about humans is that we’re very adaptable and we can move. Um, and as a result, I think you’ll, you’ll find that our genomes aren’t nearly as complex as plants.
[00:23:03]
Plants are sessile, so they’re stuck when the environment changes, they can’t run away from it. They have to have, they have to carry a lot more genomic tricks in their bag, uh, to compensate for it. Right. So, um, in fact, there’s, there’s a very good and interesting piece of work. I’d forward you to, from David Sinclair who works on a lot of this longevity stuff.
[Unidentified]
Plant secondary metabolites and hormesis
Yeah.
[Kevin McKernan]
Uh, he, he, he was been digging around in the senior hormesis field, which is, I think is fascinating. It’s kind of an intersection of, of, of cannabis and, uh, in human genetics. And that, um, plants, um, as we became, uh, agriculturally, you know, centered as a society, um, and this is, has probably happened long before that occurred, but plants have this capacity of making secondary metabolites that signal to the organisms that, that eat them and spread their seed around. Um, they give them information about the environment. So a lot of the secondary metabolites that you’ll find in plants when they’re stressed will signal to the, the organism that consumes them to prepare with caloric restriction. So you’ll see many of the compounds that hit the rapamycin pathway and the mTOR pathway, um, are polyphenols and flavonoids and things plants create when they’re stressed out.
[00:24:07]
Whoa. So this is one of these, uh, this is something we pay attention to in the, in the cannabis field, because if you want to get very diverse, um, chemotypes of plants, you can’t grow them in perfectly happy environments. Like you, you actually want to stress them to some extent so that you get anthocyanins to come up. When you stress them, you tend to get different terpene profiles. You tend to get, um, the cannabinoids are coming off that same pathway.
Stressing cannabis plants for diverse chemotypes
And how would you stress them? Well, in some ways you never get, let them see pollen. That makes them stressful. Okay. So they end up growing really large flowers waiting for pollen. So the highest, the way to get the highest THC loads are to never let them see, see pollen. Um, at least for the females. Uh, and you can also do it with light cycles. You can do it with temperature and pH and other types of, um, treatments in the soil that will alter its, um, uh, its actual secondary metabolite profile. So you get a different chemotype of the plant that might be important in the way people are making oils for cancer.
[00:25:01]
Like cancer is oftentimes a scenario where you need to grab onto the mTOR pathway or the rapamycin pathway and just change the metabolism of the organism. And you need to feed them with these plant, these extracts that are from plants that are stressed. Whoa. Yeah. It’s a wild world, uh, is wild.
[Danny Jones]
The Secret Life of Plants
You know, that’s weird. I was just reading this book the other day about, um, a poly, a guy who’s, um, a polygrapher and the CIA. And he decided, he wrote a book called the secret life of plants.
[Kevin McKernan]
Oh, interesting.
[Danny Jones]
He, uh, he, he decided one day when he was bored in the office, he was looking at the plant. He’s like, I’m going to try to polygraph this plant. And then he like hooked it up to the polygraph on the leaves and then he was going to light it on fire. And then he, as soon as he lit the match, the thing went off the charts. Oh, really? Yeah. Wild.
[Kevin McKernan]
Um, anyways, Count on the CA to torture things, right?
[Danny Jones]
Yeah. Right.
The human genome project and the race with Craig Venter
Uh, anyways, we were talking about the human genome project. Um, and you are, you were excited with that.
[Kevin McKernan]
So, uh, we got in this big race with Craig Venter to, you know, sequencing human genome as quickly as possible.
[00:26:04]
Right.
[Unidentified]
Right. Right.
[Kevin McKernan]
I was in the government side. And then when that came to a close, um, uh, I ended up dropping out of a PhD program and starting a company. Uh, we started this company called Agincourt, which took a lot of the technologies we built in the genome project and commercialize them and started selling them to every biotech company that wanted to catch up, if you will, to, to what they were doing down at MIT to sequence this quickly. Um, that company, um, a few years later, Francis Collins funded it for an obscene amount of money, um, to be one of the five genome centers in the country. I think we were probably the only private one that was in there. It was, it was, um, Eric Lander at the Whitehead had one of the grants. Um, Baylor had one of the grants with, um, uh, Richard Gibbs, who’s a hilarious guy. You should have him on one day. Um, and then, um, there was, uh, St. Louis, WashU St. Louis had a genome center, ours and then Venter they also funded. Um, so we ended up, um, becoming a sequencing shop, specializing in that.
Developing new sequencing technology
And, in the course of doing that, we decided to, to like, just change sequencing, like reinvent the whole thing and build a new sequencer.
[00:27:05]
Um, also received a grant for that. So the Agicort company got acquired in 2005 by Beckman Coulter for the, the genetics pipeline and all the magnetic bead tools we, we built to purify DNA. There are these little magnetic particles you can use to capture DNA and rip model solution. It’s really handy for studying viruses and everything else. And that was kind of the, the, the cornerstone of the IP that we had at, at Agicort. Um, but when that happened, we had also had played around with taking those beads and putting them down in glass slides under microscopes and sequencing DNA individually off of every single bead. Uh, so that we, instead of doing 96 things at a time, we’re doing a hundred million things at a time. It was a massively, just totally different way of doing it. We couldn’t get the read lengths that we’re used to getting, which were like used to be able to read like 600 bases or so with these older tools. But this thing, you can get like maybe 30 to 50 bases, but you can get a hundred million of them at once in the same timeframe. So it was a total game changer in the, in the sequencing field.
[00:28:00]
The development of SOLID sequencers
Ultimately we were getting genomes. They used to cost about $300 million to do, um, the first human genome. And this thing was pumping them out at like $3,000. Whoa. Um, and, uh, so at once, once we had proof of principle that working, uh, we had to spin out a company and this 19 person company got in a bidding war with, uh, Lumina and ABI, where we’re the two largest genetic companies in the world started having a bidding war over this company. Um, and they eventually, uh, acquired that company. And, um, I went with that acquisition and, uh, we started building those, these things were called solid sequencers. We started putting them to the market and the first people that were picking up, picking those up, we’re pointing them at cancer. What were they called? What kind of sequencers? Uh, solid. Solid sequencers. Standard for sequencing by oligo ligation detection. It was a, we did it, we did sequencing a different way. I mean, most people use polymerases that, that grow DNA strands with enzymes on, uh, in, in one direction. Um, there’s another, if you, if you remember your biology, there’s the, you have two DNA strands and when they split polymerases, copy one strand, the other strand is replicated with something known as lagging strand synthesis.
[00:29:06]
It’s a, it’s a different way of, of, of replicating DNA that yourselves use. So when one gets done with polymerases, the other side gets done with ligases, all the IP in the world was covered on the polymerase front. That’s what everyone had been using since Fred Sanger. And so we realized that that’s just a minefield of, of, of patent estate. Right. And like, we’re going to go on the other strand and do it backwards. And so we started doing these ligation things and it worked, worked really well. It’s still to date, I think has the record as, as probably the most accurate sequencer ever built, but it’s just limited in the length of reads they can do. It can probably only do like 50 to a hundred base pair reads. And now these other sequencers that are out there can do thousands to a million base pair reads. And, um, they, they take, they take a hit on some of the, um, accuracy of the sequence, but they can get lengths that we could never get on a system that we had back then. But, uh, nevertheless, it was, it was a powerful tool.
Sequencing tumors for personalized medicine
It got distributed to lots of, um, cancer centers that were sequencing tumors to try and differentiate tumors from the patient’s genome. And this whole personalized medicine thing was really looking like it was, it was, it was about to shine.
[00:30:04]
[Unidentified]
Yeah.
[Kevin McKernan]
So, um, I was there for about five years. Uh, when was that?
[Danny Jones]
I think, how many different types of cancers?
[Kevin McKernan]
Oh, that they initially were going after, um, that there was a group, Mike Stanton’s group, I think in Sanger Center used this to look at lung cancer, um, glioblastoma got sequenced with it down in UCLA. Um, uh, and there was a group down at Baylor looking at, uh, breast cancer. I mean, it got used across the spectrum of, uh, of different cancers, colon cancer. Um, uh, I was on a paper with a group at Johns Hopkins. They’re, they’re on top of the game with all this stuff down there at Bert Vogelstein’s lab.
[Danny Jones]
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[Kevin McKernan]
Sequencing bloodstreams to track cancer progression
Cancer when you have it oftentimes is sloughing dead cells out into your, into your bloodstream. And if you sequence your bloodstream, you can kind of track which cells are dying from the cancer and look at their mutations and try to get a profile of whether the tumor is getting better or getting worse by just noninvasively sequencing bloodstreams.
[00:33:09]
So Rebecca Larry put out this paper where they did that. And we’re scanning people over time through the course of treatment by sequencing their bloodstream over time and developing markers that were very personalized to their tumor that would tell them that your, your particular tumor is going up or down based, based on what we’re doing. And this, the same tool got rolled into amino for, sorry for that little, no, you’re good.
[Danny Jones]
Non-invasive prenatal testing (NIPT)
No, you’re good.
[Kevin McKernan]
Amniocentesis. So the other thing circulating in mother’s bloodstreams, around 6% of the DNA in a maternal bloodstream is actually the babies. So if you don’t want to do amnio something that I’m sure you’re familiar with, given your recent, recent father, amniocentesis is like a one in 400 like fatality rate.
[Danny Jones]
Like I’m not familiar with what you’re saying.
[Kevin McKernan]
So if you want to look for chromosomal abnormalities in a child, they, they, the amniocentesis, they probably don’t even do it anymore. I mean, amniocentesis they used to literally have to put a needle into the mother’s womb to look and get cells and look for chromosomes and see if there’s any trisomies, right?
[00:34:03]
Like trisomy 21 is predictive of, of down syndrome. Well, mothers who are over 40, they often ask for an amnio because there’s a higher risk of this way, higher risk. And some people have it perhaps a little bit more in their family and they want to do amnios. One in 400 is crazy, but it’s all we had back then. But since then they’ve been able to leverage this fact that the sequencers are so cheap that you can sequence the entire mother’s genome right out of her bloodstream. And 3% of that DNA is going to be the child. And you can figure out whether this trisomy 21 or, or any other chromosomal abnormalities just from doing what’s called non invasive prenatal testing and IPT.
[Unidentified]
Yeah.
[Kevin McKernan]
A bunch of companies sprouted out and are very successful doing that now. And it’s all based on being able to sequence these fragments of DNA that are circulating.
[Danny Jones]
This is also how they figure out the sex of the baby early.
[Kevin McKernan]
Oh yeah. You can use, you can easily, I mean, there’s probably, I’m sure you can probably do that with ultrasound as well at a certain stage. But if you had to get, if you had to get in there before ultrasound could see it, you would see it in the DNA.
[00:35:00]
And I mean, the fascinating thing about that whole field is that not only does DNA circulate from the child, but so do eurythrocytes and other other particular cells that stay in the mother, like mothers have some number of cells in their brain from the child’s that they’ve born before that stick around that you can detect decades later. Really? So it’s a, yeah, it’s a fascinating field of like, you know, what does that mean? And what does that, what does that bring to the mother? And you know, the, the, the bonding that could be going on there and, and what’s the, what’s the communication and meaning or what’s the purpose of that? I suppose biologically.
[Danny Jones]
McKernan’s involvement in COVID-19 vaccine research
Right. How did you get involved in talking about and kind of like you essentially kind of like blew the whistle on something that was going on with the COVID vaccines. So yeah, I watched that video where you were talking, speaking to a panel and you discovered something with the DNA plasmid actually being aware and you somehow got your hands on two expired vials of the Pfizer.
[Kevin McKernan]
FDA’s restrictions on 23andMe
Indeed.
[00:36:00]
Yeah. So, so this is to fill in a bit of a small gap there in my history is after what was exciting about sequencing all of these tumors is that I was hopeful that we see personalized medicine, but of course the FDA has a, has a pretty, you saw what they did to 23andMe, right? 23andMe at one point had a great genetic tools that people could learn about their genomes online and, and the FDA came in and said, no more of that. You can really, I wasn’t aware of this. Yeah. A long time ago they, they, they were accusing them of practicing medicine. And so now they could, they could only report 23andMe can only report on like a couple medical conditions when before their chips used to be able to tell you all types of information from Alzheimer’s to breast cancer risk to, and they, they, the FDA significantly narrowed how much medical content that they could have in the, in the interpretation of that data. So I got a little frustrated with that.
Sequencing cannabis genomes and challenging patent thickets
And I was, I was coming on the rat race of startup building these sequencers and decided I was going to get out and just start doing something completely different sequencing cannabis genomes.
[Unidentified]
Okay.
[Kevin McKernan]
And I got put onto that path because these cancer centers were doing a great job of differentiating tumors from their patient, but they were still picking from gross drugs like cisplatin and all these toxic drugs.
[00:37:08]
Like they’re trying to thread the needle of killing the tumor in the patient better with genetics, but they’d still pull out poison to, to, to target. And that’s when I’ve learned for many, for many cancer patients and some friends of mine that were going through these struggles as well, that these cannabinoids are published to be anti neoplastic. What the hell? Why has that mean they shrink tumors? Now, so you might be familiar with them helping with people’s nausea and their appetite and sleep, which are all really important aspects of dealing with cancer. But very few people know the fact that there’s, there’s just reams of literature in them being anti neoplastic and shrinking various tumors.
[Danny Jones]
Wow. No matter how you ingest it.
[Kevin McKernan]
No matter how it’s very important and how you ingest it. Like most of these people are taking oils because they last longer in the body when you take them orally. Okay. But there are times droplets on your tongue. Yeah.
[Danny Jones]
Yeah.
[Kevin McKernan]
There are cases where you do have to vaporize it or smoke it because you can’t keep food down. So putting an oil, an oral, an oral drug in comes right back up. So there, there’s a place for both.
[00:38:01]
But, um, uh, that kind of put me into this a bit more of a, uh, I’d say anti authoritarian scientist is that I was a little decentralized. Yes. This is when I started learning about Bitcoin. This is when I started learning about how the medical system is too centralized. They’re not allowing us to use these new technologies to, to, to segregate the population and into ways that are more intelligently treated. Um, everything kind of gets centralized to the FDA. And, uh, even the concept of sequencing these tumors and drugging them independently was very controversial with the FDA. They wanted to go through five, 10 K. So how would you go about doing this today if you wanted to do it? Oh, you, there’s a company, there are companies now that have kind of gone through the process with the FDA now that it’s been decades. But that’s the problem is it took decades. Um, so like, you know, foundation medicine I think has, they probably have a five, 10 K by now. Um, or using at least, uh, more FDA, uh, approved, um, tests if you will, but they can sequence your tumors and give you a profile. I’ve used this with my father. Actually we profiled him at, uh, foundation medicine and at, at, um, Johns Hopkins, um, to, to track his, the, you know, the progress of his tumor.
[00:39:06]
Um, but I went down a rabbit hole there again, but just to, how did this get to the vaccine is that, um, that that put me into the cannabis space. And I’ve been since sequencing cannabis genomes to try to, and putting their genomes public so that we can get all these genomes out of the patent thickets that exists on the human genome project. The human genome project ended up with like over 4,000 patents on it for various genes. So like 20% of the genes in the human genome ended up being patented. Uh, and that made it so that people like foundation medicine had a really hard time sequencing kids genomes, uh, to deploy these, uh, these tools because there was a patent thicket, um, trying to go through and sequence these things.
[Danny Jones]
So, and what was the case with when you, so am I correct in saying you, you tried to publish these cannabis genomes on the internet and then something happened with that? Someone tried to block you from doing that?
[Kevin McKernan]
Making cannabis genomes public
Well, what’s what we did knowing, uh, the experience we had on the human genome project.
[00:40:02]
And I’d spent a part of my career running a clinical diagnostic lab sequencing epilepsy kids and mitochondrial disease patients and autism kids as well. And, uh, we ran into the same problems. There’s patents everywhere and it’s a big mess and you couldn’t really grow your company too large without, um, you know, myriad of these other companies coming in and hitting you with their patents.
[Unidentified]
Yeah.
[Kevin McKernan]
Um, and so, uh, when we approached the cannabis genome, we said, screw this, we’re going to put the whole genome public before anyone has a chance to patent it. Uh, and at that time I didn’t understand Bitcoin.
[Danny Jones]
And that means, so if you, if you’re the one that publishes, it makes it public before anyone else, you essentially like own the common patent to it and no one else can actually go and patent it.
[Kevin McKernan]
Yes. It puts it, it puts in the public domain. Got it. So, um, now oftentimes the USPTO doesn’t find cannabis content because a lot of cannabis content is forced to have like, are you 21 or older to come into our website? So they don’t even crawl those sites for prior art. Um, so there isn’t a very good, um, preliminary search engine for this.
[00:41:00]
So what we did when we spoke to attorneys, they said, the best thing you can do now, we know there’s a better way to do this. But at the time it was submitted to the USPTO as a patent application and then abandoned it. That way it’s in their database. They can’t miss it. If they miss it, then you’re, if you ever have to go back and do a ex parte reexam and show them, Hey, look, it was in your database and you missed it. It’s really simple, you know, open and shut case today. You don’t need to do that today. You can basically publish the sequence online, put a fingerprint in the Bitcoin blockchain, and you’ve got proof of when it existed. Um, the Bitcoin blockchain is a perfect timestamping system. Uh, cause you can, it’s difficult to take your stuff to a notary. If you will, the notary system in the United States is all federally run. So you walk into a bank saying, Hey, can you notarize my, my cannabis science? There’ll be a, get out of here. You know, this is a, this is federally legal.
Using the Bitcoin blockchain for timestamping
So how do you do that?
[Danny Jones]
How do you put it on the Bitcoin blockchain?
[Kevin McKernan]
Uh, it’s a very simple thing. It sounds sophisticated. The whole sequence does not fit in a blockchain. Don’t do that. No one wants that blockchain bloat. Um, all you have to do is take a hash of the file.
[00:42:00]
So Shiloh 256 is a hashing algorithm that basically takes a fingerprint of a large document and spits out a particular length fingerprint of information. And it is, uh, it there, it’s collision proof in that. If you were to change one letter in that document, your hash will completely change. Uh, you, you will not get overlapping hashes. They’re long, they’re long enough that they’re unique numbers in space, if you will. They’re unique in the universe. So you can take that number and put that into the operator in a big point. And a bit Bitcoin has this little function where an operator can fit a hash. It’s like a, it’s almost like a note section of the transaction. And you can stuff that with a hash of the sequence information that you have for a given plant. Um, so we were using that function. We’ve been doing that for since 2011 where we’ve been sequencing people’s plants, um, and then hashing and stashing them on blockchain so that people have a record of when these things were made. Uh, and that’s helped out in that field because in the cannabis field, um, it’s easy to clone stuff and people take people’s genetics and there’s a big argument over who owns them.
[00:43:01]
And a lot of people don’t want to interface with the patent office. So, um, we’ve been involved in cases where, where clones were stolen from some one grow to another and they came to us, we sequenced them and showed them that, that this is identical to something this guy grew over here and we know it and you stole it and the courts have ruled in favor of that. Wow. Yes.
Verifying genetic ownership in cannabis cases
Yeah. So it does work. They do, they do acknowledge that fingerprints work.
McKernan’s concerns about PCR testing in COVID-19
Um, and so I got involved in the COVID sort of dissonance side of things because when I saw how they were using PCR and COVID, I realized it was a fraud. Like we run PCR on cannabis plants all day long. This is our bread and butter. We make tests that look for pathogens on cannabis like that, that PCR is essentially like the nose swab test that people are doing. Yeah. And PCR is actually a really good test. They destroy the reputation of PCR and COVID.
[Danny Jones]
You know, it’s, it’s, it was invented by Kerry Mullis. Yes.
[Kevin McKernan]
Yeah.
[Danny Jones]
Great book. You should read his book. I’ve been wanting to, I’ve watched some interviews with him. He seems like a really cool dude. He was a surfer.
[Kevin McKernan]
He was a surfer, sadly died right before the pandemic. But, um, and he hated Fauci. Yes. I think anyone who’s, who’s, who gets their nose into the space will come to the same conclusion as him.
[00:44:05]
So it’s, unfortunately, if you’re in the public, he’s, he’s elevated as some, some, uh, almost Jesus level of saint. But, um, if you see what he actually does behind the scenes, uh, he is the exact opposite of that. Um, so the, the pandemic comes along, they’re, they’re abusing these PCR tools. And, um, I make note of this, I write a paper about it. And, uh, of course it gets attacked. It gets, it goes to the typical, um, you know, censorship and ridicule that you, that you expect. Um, and, uh, and shortly after that, that, I think that caught the attention of Peter McCullough. He asked me to help write him a paper about the differences between the vaccines and the virus, which I went through all the molecular biology and how those two things differ. Um, and after that happened, people start randomly sending me vials of vaccines to our address or company.
[Danny Jones]
Receiving vaccine vials and the decision to analyze them
What prompted you to first write the paper?
[Kevin McKernan]
Um, well, I could tell that since the PCR was a fraud, that when I saw what they were going to do with the vaccine, I’m like, this is, this has not been tested.
[00:45:00]
I know how that sausage is made. Yeah. I, the, my history of, um, building DNA sequencers, man, I had a deep respect for when you start changing nucleotide chemistry on RNA molecules, you do, you have no idea what you’re doing. Um, and that’s what they did in the vaccine is they changed every single uracil out with pseudouridine, uh, that completely changes the function of that RNA. And these guys just said, Oh, we’re just going to change all of them and, and then inject it and see what happens. And, and, you know, you change that one methyl group in the course of, um, trying to build DNA sequencers and your own sequencer will fall apart. I mean, it’s the, the enzymes are that sensitive to a single methyl group being placed on some of these pieces of DNA. You put 800 of them on the RNA that you’re doing. You have, you are in completely unknown territory, uh, with how that RNA is going to fold, how it’s going to be processed in the cell, the RNA interference pathways is going to kick off. So when I saw what they’re doing, I’m like, this is complete reckless insanity that they’re doing. And no one’s, no one’s raising their hand about it. Uh, which is frustrating because you’re in a field and you’d look around and none of your peers are talking about this.
[00:46:03]
And you’re like, is everyone in on this? Like what’s going on? And being in Massachusetts, pretty much everyone is in, you know, Pfizer’s there. Moderna’s there. I mean, it’s, uh, the PCR companies are all there. So it’s, it’s a, it’s a breadbasket of people benefiting from the pandemic.
[Danny Jones]
So basically, uh, of comparing how sloppy the PCR test would be to measure this, you assumed that they were going to be way off with the vaccine. Is that a good way to sum it up?
[Kevin McKernan]
Yeah. I can see that there, there was a game going on here to pump up the pandemic’s risk so that there would be a need, a public desire for a vaccine. Uh, if you actually paid attention to how the PCR was behaving and how they were over calling this disease, you would have barely noticed this, uh, pandemic. Like it, it, the COVID pandemic that came through was predominantly, uh, human induced death. It was not that people weren’t dying from the virus. They’re dying from what people’s reaction to the virus. Like they’re putting them on remdesivir, putting them on ventilators, taking away antibiotics, not letting them use ivermectin.
[00:47:02]
Um, there was all types of, uh, iatrogenic death, if you will, um, from how they handled the pandemic. But very few people actually died of the actual virus.
[Danny Jones]
The people that died actually had lots of comorbidities, right? And the virus is basically like the final straw that broke the camel’s back.
[Kevin McKernan]
And it just happens to be there. And the, and hospitals were also all incentivized to tag everyone they could with COVID and give it to them on the way out the door so they could get better billing. Right. So if, if when they were, they were PCR and corpses, I mean, they’re, they, because if you could find COVID, you, you had no liability for the patient and you got a completely different reimbursement structure.
[Danny Jones]
What? Yes. They were actually doing the tests on corpses.
[Kevin McKernan]
Yes. They’re corpses. And they’re also have, there’s John Bowdoin you should talk to. He has gone, he foiled all the death records in Massachusetts and all the people who are, who are labeling these deaths of people that were clearly killed from the vaccine. They, they label as COVID. Wow. Uh, so the, the whole, um, COVID thing has a layer of scam too. Now that doesn’t mean that the virus is, doesn’t exist in that it doesn’t get you sick.
[00:48:01]
I got it. I got horribly sick. Um, I had a really long recovery from it, but it didn’t create that excess mortality wave that was created by people’s reaction to it. Um, so I knew that when the vaccine came out, I’m like, okay, this vaccine, they’ve got the whole population prime to be scared out of their mind that they’re all going to take this reckless drug that they’ve, uh, they’ve, they’ve, they’ve barely studied. And, um, that’s going to create another wave. And I think there’s probably more people dead from that than the rest of the virus. Uh, if you, at least if you go through John’s work, there’s easily 550,000 people that are dead in the United States from the, from the vaccine. Um, I don’t think the virus comes anywhere close to that. They’ll tell you a couple million people, but 90% of them are comorbid and then you start itemizing all the other, all the other types of iatrogenic death in there. It’s probably a 10th of that. It’s probably five fold less than the vaccine death. So, um, so anyway, that these people, after I wrote this paper with Peter McCullough, people started sending vaccine vials to my, um, company address, which I, it’s like, who sent you, who got ahold of these and sent them to you? I don’t know.
[00:49:00]
[Danny Jones]
They came anonymous. Who do you like, who could it have been? Probably my Twitter followers. How would they get their hands on vaccine? They just work at a pharmacy or something?
[Kevin McKernan]
I’m sure if they got their hands on them, they don’t want to tell me how. Right.
[Danny Jones]
I’m just trying to figure out like how they would have done that.
[Kevin McKernan]
Oh yeah. Pharmacists have them. They’re around, they throw them out. Um, so there’s, they’re the ones that we got weren’t, weren’t, were never opened. So, so they came, they came, um, they have these tamper resistant seals on them. Um, and so you can tell whether they’ve been opened or not. And, uh, we got some that were expired and some that weren’t expired. Um, but I, when I kept getting them, I just kept throwing them in the freezer being, I don’t know, I don’t know what to do with these things. But, um, the, uh, and then this, this cannabis experiment experiment I mentioned earlier, it was like, okay, we have a problem. I need a pharmaceutical grade vaccine. Maybe I need pharmaceutical grade MRNA. And I’m like, these things are sitting in the freezer. Just, just spike one of those in. It’s got a poly a tail that should tell us what’s going on with the RNA seq that we’re doing. And it, and it did, but out came the vector that they used to manufacture these things.
[00:50:00]
And that shouldn’t be in there.
[Danny Jones]
The manufacturing process of mRNA vaccines
The vector that they use to manufacture. What do you mean by that?
[Kevin McKernan]
So they, when they make these, um, these MRNAs, they have to have a DNA template to make it from. So all RNA is actually synthesized usually from some other piece of DNA. So they get it, they build a piece of DNA. Um, that is, think of it as like a mold. Uh, if you’re into injection molding, you need something to kind of print the, the, the RNA, uh, the DNA, they have to make it, they have to make it in the form of DNA first. So they take that spike pro that spike protein sequence and they first code it into DNA. And then they use an enzyme known as T seven polymerase to copy the DNA and turn it into RNA. And when they’re doing that process, in the case of these MRNA vaccines, they rip out one of the bases and put in this, this pseudo-uridine, uh, so that there’s only a pseudo-uridine and there’s no uracil. That’s how they get these MRNAs made. Now that means they have to have a piece of DNA that codes for the spike sequence they want to make the turn into RNA, but they need something to propagate that DNA. My DNA is not going to like, you know, organize itself.
[00:51:01]
So what they do is they put a couple other genes on that DNA that make it. So a coli will replicate it. So a what? That a coli bacteria. So you can, so basically you can brew it. And, uh, and this is, I mean, we did this in the human genome project, 20 million different clones. It’s, it’s a very common biotech thing is what, what you do is you put an antibiotic resistance gene attached to the spike sequence and that antibiotic resistance gene and a couple other pieces of sequence guarantee that it will grow inside of a coli. So when you put that DNA into a coli, you can then brew up huge vats of a coli and now it’s copying your plasmid as long as there is a piece, uh, there’s antibiotics in there that match the gene. So in this case they were using, uh, what do they have? I think they use kinemiasin in this case. Kinemiasin is an antibiotic. So they have, they have a spike sequence attached to a kinemiasin resistance gene attached to a what’s known as a bacterial origin of replication that coli will grab onto and replicate this DNA. Once that’s in a bacterial cell, you just have to grow that stuff at 37 degrees overnight and you get millions of double amplification of the cells.
[00:52:02]
They double every 20 or 30 minutes. And so every time the cell doubles, you get about 200 copies of that piece of DNA with it. So fermenting this overnight and suddenly you get yourself millions and millions of copies of this DNA that you now need to get out of a coli. So you lice it open with some soap and purify that DNA hopefully away from all the other junk. And now you’ve got your plasmid purified, ready to turn into RNA. That’s kind of the manufacturing process that they use for making these Pfizer vaccines.
What is a plasmid?
Now, what is a plasmid? A plasmid is that circular piece of DNA that that kind of carries the spike DNA that you want to have replicated in the coli. So it contains the plasmid is circular. So it contains an antibiotic resistance gene and an origin of replication that ensures the coli cell will replicate it. So if you glue your spike sequence onto that piece of DNA into a circle, put that in a coli and give it, give it an antibiotic. The only coli that will survive are the coli cells that have the plasmid that code for the resistance.
[00:53:01]
Okay. Oh, there you go. Nice. Uh, plasma maps. So you can see a bacterial DNA in air that the bacterial DNA in a coli is like 6 million letters long. These plasmids are like 5,000 to 10,000 letters long, but they’re circular. Um, that helps them replicate and through a process known as rolling circle amplification, but also keeps them from degrading as quickly because there’s no ends of DNA. When they’re, when they’re tied in a Mobius strip like that, the enzymes don’t know how to really destroy them. So plasmids tend to tend to stick around for a very long period of time. Uh, but on the backbone of that plasmid, you will have an antibiotic resistance gene. I think I had another one over there. It was like a plasmid map. If you just scroll one image over like the, yeah, there you go. Bang. If you click on that, you’ll see that had these little pieces on them. So the inserted gene would be the spike that they put in there.
[Danny Jones]
The spike protein and its role in the vaccine
The inserted gene is the spike. And what is the spike?
[Kevin McKernan]
The spike is the sequence that they want to, that they want to make RNA for the vaccine that gets into a million. So we’ll, we’ll create a spike protein that your immune system theoretically will learn how to fight off COVID. Okay. There’s a huge leap between, between A and Z there.
[00:54:01]
Okay. That we’ll, we’ll go into.
[Danny Jones]
Okay. That was the, I’m trying my best to keep up with you here.
[Kevin McKernan]
Yeah. So that inserted gene ends up being, they put in the spike sequence there. There’s an origin of replication down there that teaches the E. coli cell to, Hey, copy this circle over and over again. If you ever see me, uh, it basically recruits a plumerase to do that.
[Unidentified]
Okay.
[Kevin McKernan]
That antibiotic resistance gene, let’s say that’s kanamycin in the case of, of Pfizer’s vaccine. That means if the coli is growing in kanamycin, the only cells that can survive are the ones that have soaked up the plasmid. Um, so it’s a selectable marker, which means the only E. coli that brew or ones that contain your DNA. Otherwise, when the cells divide, your plasma just gets lost. So that selectable marker is really critical to make sure the plasmid sticks around when you’ve grown E. coli. But when you, so once you have your gene in a system like this, you pop, all you need to do to get the new E. coli is you heat E. coli to like 37 degrees and it gets porous and it soaks up the plasmids. And then it has the superpower of being resistant to kanamycin. And so now only the cells that soaked up the DNA can survive in the growth.
[00:55:00]
They start replicating and now they’re replicating your hijacked spike sequence with this. Okay. So the, the challenge here is is that you now don’t just have your spike sequence as part of the contaminant in your vaccine. You have all that other crap, the antibiotic resistance gene and all the, the origins of replication that you introduced as replicative machinery to manufacture your.
[Danny Jones]
But they know this, right? They know that this stuff’s going to be in there.
[Kevin McKernan]
They know it.
[Danny Jones]
And do they have a process to get rid of it?
[Kevin McKernan]
They try, they fail. But that’s the point where they kind of, is this an all vaccines? No, these only mRNA ones are very unique, right? We’ve never done vaccines like this before.
[Danny Jones]
Okay. How, how many mRNA vaccines do we have? We have Moderna and we’ve got Pfizer. I mean, other than the COVID.
[Kevin McKernan]
They’re just rolling out RSV and I think flu ones now.
[Steve]
Okay.
[Kevin McKernan]
There’s, there’s really scary ones going on in Japan right now. They’re trialing out a, a self amplifying mRNA vaccine, which is horrifying. That is something that’s likely going to spread out of control. So there’s not many. It’s very.
[Danny Jones]
So COVID was the first one we had.
[Kevin McKernan]
Okay. First one we had.
[00:56:00]
Okay. Yes. So it was a complete unknown.
[Danny Jones]
And they, so, okay. But they, so obviously they knew that this stuff was going to be in there because that was, that was purposeful. You needed that to actually create it for it to replicate. Yes. And they, essentially, they didn’t have a good enough protocol to get rid of it.
[Kevin McKernan]
Moderna’s protocol and concerns about oncogenicity
Moderna had a better protocol. In fact, what’s really key about this whole story is if you read Moderna’s patents, they, they speak to this problem that one, it’s very difficult to figure out how much of this is left behind with PCR alone. So they, Stefan Bansal is a patent that says, don’t use qPCR to measure what’s left behind. But they also have some other patents in there on techniques to get rid of it. And the reason it is so important to get rid of is they write in that patent showing that it’s oncogenic. If you leave this DNA around, it will insert into your genome and can create cancer. So you have to get rid of it. And that’s written straight into their own patent estate.
[Danny Jones]
SV40 and its connection to turbo cancers
So is this the same story that Jack Cruz was telling us about SV40?
[00:57:00]
[Kevin McKernan]
It is the same story because the origin of replication that they have in Pfizer is an SV40 origin of replication. And they also have, you’ll see that little promoter thing up there in pink. They have another promoter over by your antibiotic resistance gene and your selectable marker that they have. They have multiple promoters on the Pfizer one. There’s one over by that green arrow that is an SV40 promoter. And those elements are from what contaminated the polio vaccines. Now the polio vaccines were contaminated with a full virus. It was like 5,500 letter viruses. But if you study that virus, the most carcinogenic aspects of it are the things that are in Pfizer. They are basically the SV40 enhancer and promoter in the origin of replication. So the parts of the most carcinogenic are in there and they hid them from the regulators. When they were asked to, when they submitted this to the FDA, the FDA demands that you give them a map like this, that tells them what everything does. Like show us where every selectable marker is, where every promoter is, where every open reading frame is.
[00:58:02]
You have to disclose it all. And the one area that Pfizer refused to disclose was the SV40 components.
[Danny Jones]
Okay. So essentially when Jack was in here, he was telling the story about how this guy named Alt Noshner was the one who created the polio vaccine. He famously went in front of a board of people or an auditorium full of people and injected his grandchildren with it. And then one of them died. And one of them like lost a limb or something crazy. And they found out that this SV40 came from, they were growing the vaccine on monkey kidneys or something like that. Simian virus number 40. And there was like a lot of simian viruses, right?
[Kevin McKernan]
At least 40 of them.
[Danny Jones]
At least 40 of them. And then number 40, for some reason that one created these quote unquote turbo cancers in humans.
[Kevin McKernan]
Yes. Now that was the story about the Linac. They were using the Linac to actually do mutagenesis on the, on the viruses to, to mutate them to see if they could get ones that were more potent as a bioweapon. Jesus Christ. And so and they were planning to kill Castro or something with it, right?
[00:59:01]
It was a, a crazy story. I didn’t know about that when I stumbled into this. I sadly learned about that after the fact. The question whether I’d actually would have ran away and hidden the mountains if I had known that prior to disclosing this, but the it is important to know. We don’t have the whole virus here. We have components in the, in the virus here that I think are actually still very problematic and dangerous, but we don’t have as firm of a grip on, is this causing the, the turbo cancers that people are claiming to come out of this vaccine? I think that’s a more complicated story that there’s there’s a Swiss army knife of problems in the vaccines that can drive cancer. And the SV40 may just be one component of it.
[Danny Jones]
Winter is coming and that means so is cold and flu season.
Winter is coming and that means so is cold and flu season. Viruses thrive in cold, dry air, and our immune system’s response becomes weaker in colder temperatures. I used to get sick often during these months, but I’ve avoided the flu for years now. And when I do get sick, I recover much faster. You’ve heard me talk about Verso before. That’s because I’ve been taking it for years and their product has greatly enhanced my immune system, especially clean being.