I've been waiting to learn more about the highly touted Merck Covid drug, Molnupiravir. It's not that it sounds too good to be true--in fact, it doesn't sound as effective as HCQ or Ivermectin. It's that you know that it will be pushed hard by the medical-scientific establishment and their media proxies. My initial assumption was that it would turn out to be another Ivermectin clone, like Pfizermectin. However, that appears to not be the case.
Karl Denninger, in Merck's New Drug - A Wonder Or Incipient Slaughter? offers his explanation of what this new drug is all about, and it is cause for concern. Perhaps even alarm. Unfortunately, the post is written in KD's trademark barely readable style, laced with the usual gratuitous and pointless vulgarities. I've taken it upon myself to provide a digest of what he's saying.
This is definitely not some new version of Ivermectin. KD compares it to Thalidomide--the morning sickness drug that was used for years, and resulted in fetal deaths and grotesque infant deformities.
KD warns that in all likelihood an "emergency use authorization" (EUA) will be given to the Merck drug. I'm not about to bet against that, crazy as the idea is. Here's the lowdown on why KD thinks this drug could be very dangerous.
This drug is an analog (in other words, "looks the same to a living cell") of cytosine. In other words, to a living cell, it appears to really be cytosine. What is cytosine? It's one of four chemical "bases" that make up DNA. What Merck has done is modify this analog of cytosine in such a way that a cell will attempt to use it in the synthesis of RNA. The clever modification will cause an error in the cell replication process. That will lead to a process fail so that the virus (in this case Covid-19) cannot reproduce in the cell.
That might be a viable approach for people suffering from an imminently fatal disease, but there are real risks involved--just like with the Covid gene therapy medications that are leading to so many deaths and injuries. In what follows, I've edited and rewritten KD's post:
The problem with developing drugs like this is that if they get into other cells, not virally-infected ones, they can also cause those errors in the DNA replication and thus terminate the cell's propagation and cellular line. Depending on how quickly those cells replicate in the human body that might be a small and self-limiting problem (e.g. they replicate fast and only a few of them get "polluted") or it might be a ticking time bomb that ultimately harms you in hard-to-predict and impossible-to-treat ways (e.g. slowly-replicating types of cells where a lot of them get polluted.)
It's even worse if you're a person of reproductive age, since cellular replication happens very rapidly in a developing fetus ... This is exactly how thalidomide babies happened. Moreover, the potential danger isn't necessarily limited to women, since half the genetic material comes from the man. While women start life with all the eggs they will ever have, men are continually producing new sperm cells which conceivably could carry that damage into the zygote.
Folks, it's one thing to use drugs like this in a situation where you will inevitably die if you do nothing. Cancer is one of those situations and HIV is another. However, in the case of Covid-19, ... even if you're aged and severely morbid the data shows that death will only result in 5-9% of the cases.
The very bad news is that in the case of this drug, specifically, there are already indications that it may have mutagenic properties. There's allegedly a whistleblower who claims that data exists; this drug, like so many others, was originally looked at years ago for other conditions -- in this case influenza.
...
There are severe risks involved in EUAs and we're playing with ticking nuclear weapons without any indication as to whether they will go off or not. The so-called "vaccines" that cause your body to produce spike proteins are in this class because rather than deliver an inactivated virus into the body they cause your body to make part of it. This is profoundly dangerous. It might prove, over time, to be perfectly ok -- but we do not know and won't for another couple of years, at which point if you took those jabs you're screwed and there's nothing you can do about it.
This drug has the potential to be even more dangerous than mRNA technology because rather than "hijack" some of your cells to produce a protein that the immune system then recognizes it, Merck's drug works by damaging the process by which DNA (and RNA) reproduce themselves in living cells. The premise that this will be self-limiting in the patient--that it will suppress the infection but won't injure you over the intermediate and longer term--is nothing more than an hypothesis.
If it's wrong and you took this drug, you may not know for several years. By then it will be too late.
Kinda makes you wonder.
Mutagenicity was my first question upon hearing how this thing works. A compound that causes replication errors like this in RNA in general. I was not aware that the replication interference was achieved by messing with cytosine, one of the four base pairs used by not just RNA, but DNA as well.
I've been more cautious about characterizing the mRNA viruses as unworthy of use--I think they have potential, but they were rushed out without full long term safety studies. But this new drug being an analog of cytosine--well, this is insane to use. It takes no imagination at all to guess how this compound could mess with you.
I also wondered--if we use a drug that mangles the virus's RNA, we better be damned sure it messes with RNA in a 100% terminal way. Because if one in a million times it just mutates the virus, you're introducing a powerful evolutionary selective pressure.
There has been so little information like what you have provided here Mark--thank you for digging this up for us.
"Honey, please come to bed!"
"I can't, somebody said something wrong on the internet...."
I don't get paid to fix the internet, but I can't resist commenting when someone wanders into my wheelhouse.
Molnupiravir is a nucleoside analog. It's a polymerase inhibitor. There is nothing new about this class of enzyme inhibitor drug. Aids patients have been taking them for years, and so have herpes patients.
Some nucleoside analogs are toxic, and some aren't. They can inhibit viral polymerases and human polymerases. The distinction is a matter of specificity, binding constants, and rate constants. In addition to being incorporated into DNA during transcription, they can be excised by polymerase proof reading mechanisms.
Some analogs target viral polymerases with high specificity, and some don't. They can have high or low specificity for human polymerases. The ratio of viral/human specificity, in addition to variable proof reading against viral and human DNA sequences, will determine their toxicity.
I could go on, but, as I said, I don't get paid to do this. In short, Molnupiravir might be useful or it might not, and it might be highly toxic or it might not.
See this publication and similar ones for the real science:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11328813/