About Those Venom Proteins...
At least 10 people asked me, too, about the venom proteins. I offer a plausible explanation, what do you think?
James Lyons-Weiler
CEO/President. Scientist. Author. Human Rights Advocate.
Apr 14, 2022

[snip]

Dr. Nass says the snake venom stuff is “hooey”. My analysis says yes, let’s move on to more productive pathways. I share two possible explanations for their presences in COVID-19 patients, one of which I favor over the other.

Snakes were first floated as a potential intermediate host organism by a very early speculative report covered by SciAm in Jan 2020 that found codon usage bias most similar to snakes of all things. Codon usage bias is determined by the percentage of times specific codons (triplet nucleotides) are used to bring specific amino acids in place in protein sequences. It’s suggestive, but very, very weak and has not been taken seriously by anyone as sufficient evidence indicating snakes were the intermediate hosts.

Reading the 2021 venom paper cited by Bryan Ardis, here is my breakdown:

In Italy, with 20 COVID-19 samples and 10 control (non-COVID-19 patients), 5 plasma samples from COVID-19 patients and 3 fecal samples had evidence of proteins of unknown origin detected using a protein assay that led to the finding of animal venom proteins in their blood or feces.

They sequenced the proteins and found multiple types of venoms, including snake venom proteins.

That’s it. It’s a small study.