In an April 11, 2022 video interview, entitled “Watch the Water,” former chiropractor Dr. Bryan Ardis made the astounding claim that COVID-19 is not a virus, but a snake venom.
It is a sign of the times that a theory so scientifically flawed and factually baseless should receive so much attention.
After two years of government officials, scientists and the media lying about COVID-19 and the pandemic, it should surprise no one that the American people seek alternative sources of information.
Unfortunately, there are those, who, whatever their motives, are eager to fill that void with misinformation.
They are people who add 2 + 2 and get 5, who connect unconnectable dots of information and draw faulty conclusions. They are people who traffic in half-truths.
At the very beginning, Ardis misrepresents what is published in the scientific literature.
There was never any serious consideration that snakes were the origin or an intermediate host for the COVID-19 coronavirus.
Genetic and protein sequence comparisons always indicated bat coronaviruses as the most likely backbone for a laboratory-created COVID-19.
Ardis does not seem to understand the action of cobra venom, which is fundamental to his argument.
First of all, cobra venom is a cocktail of several different active proteins with multiple effects, the alpha-neurotoxin being the primary component.
Ardis refers to the action of cobra venom on the brain, specifically the neurotoxin. He claims that people die of respiratory failure, not from a viral lung infection and the inflammation it causes, but from the cobra neurotoxin’s depression of the respiratory center in the brain.
Unfortunately for Dr. Ardis’ argument, cobra neurotoxin doesn’t act on the brain because it doesn’t pass through the blood-brain barrier and doesn’t enter the brain.
The neurotoxin in cobra venom blocks respiration peripherally, where the phrenic nerve meets the diaphragm muscle at the neuromuscular junction.
Dr. Ardis attempts to buttress his snake venom theory by referring to a University of Arizona scientific article, not by citing the actual scientific article, but a news article about it entitled:
“Like Venom Coursing Through the Body: Researchers Identify Mechanism Driving COVID-19 Mortality.”
The actual scientific article is:
“Group IIA secreted phospholipase A2 is associated with the pathobiology leading to COVID-19 mortality.”
Again, Ardis misdirects. The scientific article only refers to snake venom indirectly, that phospholipase A2, which is naturally-occurring in the human body and elevated in some COVID-19 patients, also happens to be an enzyme found in rattlesnake venom. In the University of Arizona article, no suggestion is made that the elevated phospholipase A2 found in COVID-19 patients is from rattlesnake venom.
Ardis also doesn’t provide an adequate explanation for human-to-human transmission of COVID-19, other than to suggest without providing any evidence that the snake venom might be passed between humans through the water supply, which is epidemiologically impossible based on the actual data.
Furthermore, the theory that a biological toxin could be distributed by terrorists to a population via the water supply was actually mathematically simulated at Fort Detrick in the 1980s, in that case using the far more lethal botulinum toxin as a model. The theory was found to be implausible due to dilution factor alone.
Bryan Ardis’ claim that COVID-19 is a snake venom is not even scientific speculation, because that requires some basis in reality.
It is snake oil.
Watch an interview with retired Col Sellin on this subject of COVID and its origins on the Joe Hoft Show on the Real Talk Radio Network.
Lawrence Sellin, Ph.D. is retired U.S. Army Reserve colonel and a veteran of Afghanistan and Iraq. He had a civilian career in international business and medical research. Dr. Sellin is the author of Restoring the Republic: Arguments for a Second American Revolution. His email address is [email protected].