Coronavirus Crisis: Main Thread

[stickdog99]

The unforgivable sin

Considering that vaccinees shed and transmit as much virus as unvaccinated people, how could one even postulate that unvaccinated people are susceptible to severe disease whereas vaccinees are still largely protected from severe disease?

Frankly speaking, this doesn’t make any sense at all. So there must be a ‘small’ detail the current ‘narrative’ overlooked.

[...]

Does anybody realize that protection from (severe) disease in healthy children and youngsters is due to innate Abs, even regardless of the possible short-term presence of poorly functional S-directed Abs (which may even contribute to diminishing rather than strengthening their immune defence)?

[...]

As the mechanism of immune defense in vaccinees is totally different from the one at play in unvaccinated individuals, the mantra of mass vaccination stakeholders that vaccination of youngsters and children will provide them with improved protection from contracting severe disease is a textbook example of scientific nonsense. Their irrational, erroneous extrapolations lead people to believe that they should get their children vaccinated whereas there is barely any more catastrophic immune intervention one could think of.

[...]

we can only conclude that the scenario is the following: Vaccination of children and youngsters is turning off their broadly protective innate immunity in exchange for S-specific vaccinal Abs that are becoming increasingly useless since their neutralizing capacity becomes more and more eroded as a result of enhanced escape of Sars-CoV-2 from neutralizing Abs [NAbs] (a trend that has been clearly confirmed by molecular epidemiologists). Resistance to the neutralizing effect of vaccinal Abs that are nevertheless still able to bind Sars-CoV-2 virions and thereby outcompete protective innate Abs is likely to enhance the susceptibility of vaccinees to ADE (Ab-dependent enhancement of disease).

Unless virology and immunology are being rewritten, I cannot imagine how mass vaccination of our youngsters and children will not lead to an even more disastrous outcome of all the scientifically irrational and unjustifiable vaccination efforts.

[...]

While unvaccinated children who contract Covid-19 disease in the vast majority of cases don’t suffer severe disease and contribute to the buildup of herd immunity in the population, mass vaccination campaigns in children will prevent them from contributing to herd immunity

[...]

It cannot be that highly knowledgeable vaccinologists don’t understand this clear-cut message. I can only shout at all of them, no matter their international reputation, the number of awards and recognitions they’ve gotten, the number of books they’ve written or high-ranked papers they’ve published in peer-reviewed journals: shame on you for not standing up!

[stickdog99]

https://www.geertvandenbossche.org/post ... s-pandemic

Experts, Public Health authorities and politicians are all the time asking the wrong questions.


Questions like: “Who shed more, the vaccinated or unvaccinated?” or “Who is better protected, the vaccinated or the unvaccinated?” are simply completely irrelevant when it comes to understanding the real challenge posed by this pandemic. Everyone should know by now that ALL of us could shed ‘more’ or ‘less’ virus than anyone else or could be ‘more’ or ‘less’ susceptible than anyone else, regardless of our vaccination status.


So, what are then the right questions to ask?


The right questions ‘they’ should be asking themselves is: “How can we impact viral infection/ transmission in ways that dramatically and durably reduce overall viral spread of more infectious Sars-CoV-2 variants in the population (i.e., in all of us)?” and “How can we impact host immunity in ways that dramatically and durably increase overall protection against disease in the population (i.e., in all of us)?”


The answer to both questions is actually rather straightforward and simply based on common sense:


Population-level viral spread in highly vaccinated populations could dramatically and durably be reduced by massive antiviral chemoprophylaxis of all healthy individuals, subsequently followed by enrichment of these populations with healthy, unvaccinated individuals (hence why we will need a baby boom and encourage the influx of young & healthy unvaccinated immigrants).


Population-level immune pressure in highly vaccinated populations could dramatically and durably be reduced by massive early treatment of all individuals contracting Covid-19 disease, which would (automatically) be followed by long-lived acquired immune protection.


Both of the above proposals will effectively contribute to building herd immunity, which is the one and only solution to tame a pandemic. Or are the stakeholders of the current mass vaccination program still convinced that – contrary to all scientific evidence – it is mass vaccination that will ultimately end up generating herd immunity and that the virus will spontaneously tone down its virulence, regardless of all immune and infectious pressure currently exerted by the increasingly vaccinated and virus-exposed population, respectively?


As the original pandemic is now more and more evolving towards a pandemic of more infectious Sars-CoV-2 variants, we have no choice but to immediately implement a pancontinental intervention with broadly effective antivirals and early multi-drug treatment. Given the enhanced evolutionary context of this pandemic, there is no longer any place for non-sterilizing vaccines, let alone for using such vaccines in mass vaccination campaigns.

[Harvey]

The unforgivable sin

From the comments:

“Pfizer reported that its vaccine showed a 95% efficacy,” explained the documentary, entitled COVID Shot or Not? “That sounds like it protects you 95% of the time. But that’s not actually what that number means.

“That 95% refers to the ‘relative risk reduction’ (RRR), but it doesn’t tell you how much your overall risk is reduced by vaccination. For that, we need ‘absolute risk reduction’ (ARR).

“In the Pfizer trial, 8 out of 18,198 people who were given the vaccine developed COVID-19. In the unvaccinated placebo group, 162 people out of 18,325 got it, which means that even without the vaccine, the risk of contracting COVID-19 was extremely low, at 0.88%, which the vaccine then reduced to 0.04%.

“So the net benefit, the absolute risk reduction, that you are being offered in the Pfizer vaccine in 0.84%

“That 95% number? That refers to the relative difference between the 0.88% and 0.04%. That’s what they call ‘95% relative risk reduction’.

[Belligerent Savant]

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From March 2021.

.

...

The Covid synthetic gene therapy injections employ synthetic, thermostable nucleotide sequences which are wrapped in a PEG (polyethylene glycol)-lipid nanoparticles to protect from destruction in the bloodstream and facilitate entry into the cells. The claim is that the cellular machinery will engage with these synthetic sequences and produce segments which code for the SarsCov2 S1 spike protein. It is believed that the immune system will mount a sufficient antibody response.

Dr David Martin, emphasized that this technology does not meet the definition of a traditional vaccine as per the manufacturers’ claims. The trials do not test for reduction in transmission. These therapies do not prevent infection, merely reduction in one or more symptoms.

Interestingly, Moderna describes its technology as the “software of life,” not a vaccine.


Media outlets, politicians, and public health officials have blared the 95% efficacy for both formulations. To the casual observer, this would denote 95% reduction in hospitalizations or deaths. When in fact the 95% is calculated, based upon the “Primary Efficacy Endpoints.”

In the trial literature these endpoints are described by both companies as non-severe cold/flu SYMPTOMS coupled with a positive PCR.

Pfizer has reported:

For the primary efficacy endpoint, the case definition for a confirmed COVID-19 case was the presence of at least one of the following symptoms and a positive SARS-CoV-2 NAAT within 4 days of the symptomatic period: Fever; New or increased cough; New or increased shortness of breath; Chills; New or increased muscle pain; New loss of taste or smell; Sore throat; Diarrhea; Vomiting.”

Moderna reported in likeness:

For the primary efficacy endpoint, the case definition for a confirmed COVID-19 case was defined as: At least TWO of the following systemic symptoms: Fever (≥38ºC), chills, myalgia, headache, sore throat, new olfactory and taste disorder(s), OR At least ONE of the following respiratory signs/ symptoms: cough, shortness of breath or difficulty breathing, OR clinical or radiographical evidence of pneumonia; and NP swab, nasal swab, or saliva sample (or respiratory sample, if hospitalized) positive for SARS-CoV-2 by RT-PCR.”

To reiterate, in both trials, once one/two symptoms appeared in a participant, it was designated a “case” or “event” when coupled with a positive PCR “test”. Once 170 “cases” occurred in Pfizer/BioNtech trial, and 196 “cases” occurred in Moderna trial, this data was used to calculate efficacy. Shockingly, only under 200 cases for a novel therapy which is being deployed/subjected on millions of people around the world.

Furthermore, people are not being informed that “95%” or so efficacy, is calculated based on a useless metric of relative efficacy and is therefore very misleading.

Eg.Pfizer/BioNtech:

8 “cases” in vaccine group
162 “cases” in placebo group

8/162 = 5%
100%-5%= 95%

Therefore, they are claiming that the synthetic gene therapy injections are 95% efficacious. What they are not factoring in is the size of the denominator. If it is large, then with 8 vs 162, the difference becomes less significant. It matters how many people were in each group, for example, whether this be 200, 2,000, or 20,000.

This is the absolute risk reduction for Pfizer/BioNtech, each group had over 18,000 people!

Injection Group: 8/18,198 = 0.04%
Placebo Group: 162/18,325= 0.88%

Therefore, the absolute risk reduction for Primary Efficacy Endpoint is 0.84%. (ie. 0.88-0.04)

This means, that someone who takes the Pfizer/BioNtech injection, has less than 1% chance of reducing at least one symptom of non-severe “Covid” for a period of 2 months. This means that someone who takes this injection has over 99% chance that it won’t work, regarding the efficacy. Over 100 people have to be injected for it to “work” in one person.


The actual efficacy of Pfizer/BioNtech Synthetic Gene Therapy


The actual efficacy of Moderna Synthetic Gene Therapy

There are many issues with the trial data, and design. It must be noted that PCR tests are not fit for purpose and without Sanger sequencing we have no idea how many of these people actually had “Covid” vs another respiratory virus or something else. This is a preeminent reason why Dr Yeadon and Dr Wodarg filed a Stay of Action on the vaccine trials.

As Dr Peter Doshi, Associate Editor of BMJ highlighted, access to the raw data is required to further elucidate the areas of concern:

With 20 times more suspected covid-19 than confirmed covid-19, and trials not designed to assess whether the vaccines can interrupt viral transmission, an analysis of severe disease irrespective of etiologic agent—namely, rates of hospitalizations, ICU cases, and deaths amongst trial participants—seems warranted, and is the only way to assess the vaccines’ real ability to take the edge off the pandemic.”

Approximately 5-6 symptoms listed as “side effects” are the same as Covid symptoms. Pfizer/BioNtech only started counting “cases” one week after the second dose, and Moderna, 2 weeks after the second dose. Therefore, if these side effects were labelled as “Covid” symptoms instead, even the paltry efficacy of about 1% would be relegated into the negative integers.

In others words, the injected group may have been sicker with “Covid” more than the placebo group.

...

To convey informed consent, the side effect profile must also be considered. Up to 80% of injected trial recipients experienced side effects, in a setting for a nebulous syndrome where 80% of people are asymptomatic.

The incidences of immediate side effects in both trials were significant and dwarfed the absolute risk reduction in both the primary efficacy endpoints, as well as for “severe” Covid.

For example, for Moderna 81.9% experienced any systemic reaction. Grade 3 reactions (considered severe) were experienced by 17.4%. This is 79X more likely than the incidence of severe Covid in the Moderna group. (17.4/.22=79X) Based on preliminary reports of adverse events [emphasis added]:

This is an injury rate of 1 in every 40 jabs. This means that the 150 shots necessary to avert one mild case of COVID will cause serious injury to at least three people.“

The safety data for both companies is approximately only two months before receiving emergency use authorization status. Therefore, there is no data for mid-long term side effects, as the trials are ongoing.

The estimated completion date for Pfizer/BioNtech trials is Jan 31, 2023. The estimate completion date for Moderna trials is October 27, 2022.

According to the data, and elaborated by Tal Zaks (CMO of Moderna) the trials are not designed to demonstrate a reduction in transmission, due to “operational realities”. It is therefore baffling how medical doctors and public health officials are proclaiming these SGTs will promote herd immunity.

The manufacturers have also made it clear that efficacy beyond 2 months or so is unknown. Therefore, the 1% absolute risk reduction in mild/moderate, cold/flu symptoms may not last more than a few months.

Tragically, there is no pervasive data-centred discourse, only excessive fear-mongering. Without addressing the data people cannot make an informed choice about experimental SGTs.

Many are not aware any SGT recipient who participates in this therapy is now a part of an unprecedented experiment. When Health Canada shockingly agreed to interim authorization of the Pfizer/BioNtech injection, it came alongside a caveat: The company must submit 6 months of trial data when it is available.

To underscore: Health Canada approved this experimental SGT on the populace without even 6 months of trial data.

It is difficult to embark on a comprehensive risk-benefit analysis, as there is no safety data beyond a couple of months. New vaccines typically take about 7 to 20 years of research and trials before going to market. Pfizer/Moderna ran all of their trials simultaneously, including their animal trials, instead of sequentially. As retired Health Canada research scientist Dr Qureshi elaborated, it is during proper animal trials that meaningful toxicology data is obtained.

The anaphylactic reactions observed in some people is also worrisome, worthy of analysis. Children’s Health Defense submitted a request to the FDA to address PEG allergies, as up to 70% of the populace has antibodies to these compounds. PEG has never been a component in a vaccine before.

It must also be noted that according to an internal Health Human Services and Harvard study, less than 1% of vaccine side effects are reported. At this juncture, based on: paltry efficacy, issues with data transparency and trial design, high level of immediate side effects, and low IFR for Covid, there is already enough reason for concern.

Yet, the more disconcerting side effects are the potential mid-long term effects.

Many doctors and researchers around the world have promulgated concerns about the well-documented phenomena referred to as Antibody Dependent Enhancement (ADE) seen in some viruses such as coronaviruses.

In previous SARS, MERS, Dengue fever and RSV virus vaccine trials the exposure of wild viruses to vaccine recipients resulted in severe disease, cytokine storms, and deaths in some animal and human trials. The phenomenon of ADE did not present initially in vaccine recipients, rather it presented after vaccine recipients were exposed to wild viruses.

This is the reason we do not have a vaccine for the common cold, MERS and SARS which is 78% homologous with SarsCov2 (based on analysis of the digital genome). Immunology Professor Dolores Cahill warned that this disease enhancement may cause many vaccine recipients to die months or years down the road. Esteemed German infectious disease specialist, Dr Sucharit Bhakdi opined:

This vaccine will lead you to your doom.”

Researchers in The International Journal of Clinical Practice stated:

The absence of ADE evidence in COVID-19 vaccine data so far does not absolve investigators from disclosing the risk of enhanced disease to vaccine trial participants, and it remains a realistic, non-theoretical risk to the subjects. Unfortunately, no vaccines for any of the known human CoVs have been licensed, although several potential SARS-CoV and MERS-CoV vaccines have advanced into human clinical trials for years, suggesting the development of effective vaccines against human CoVs has always been challenging.”

Traditional vaccines involve injection of the pathogen/toxin in whole/part to elicit an immune reaction. For the first time in history, the recipients’ cells will manufacture the pathogen, the S1 spike protein of SarsCov2 virus.

In a presentation for Emergency Use Authorization to the FDA, Moderna reps explained that the mRNA stays in the cytoplasm of the cells, manufactures the S1 Spike Protein and then is destroyed. As Dr Sucharit Bhakdi and others have queried:

Where else do these packages go?”

Also, based on a couple of months of safety data, we do not know that these mRNAs last long enough to manufacture the protein but not long enough to exert deleterious effects. This nascent technology is risky.

Firstly, the RNA sequences are synthetic. Therefore, we do not know how long they will last in the cells. Dr Judy Mikovits has expressed concerns in that they may not be degraded immediately, and perhaps linger for days, months, years.

More at link: https://off-guardian.org/2021/02/22/syn ... -analysis/

[Elvis]

Wait, isn't this all about politics? I don't mean party-partisan politics, I mean the allocation of limited resources—which is also a definition of economics (politics & economics are the same coin). I mean Covid restrictions serving as Big Capital's pretext for the Great Reset described in WEF's own communications.

While I know practically nothing about coronavirus & vaccines, I hold as entirely possible that the Covid-19 virus was designed to do what it's doing and was deliberately released for the purposes of restructuring society & the economy in a way that cements capital's power & control. That's almost my default position, but I have no way of knowing if it's remotely true, nor do I feel any urge to deep-dive the question (I'm up to my ears in other studies). Just as likely, it was an accidental release (if not natural) and some people are taking advantage of the resulting social/economic conditions.

Vaccines would presumably be part of this dark concert, and there are numerous vaccines. Cuba developed three Covid vaccines; do Cuban vaccines have the same problems as, say, the G20 nations'? (I see claims that all vaccines are worthless or harmful, so there's that.)

I just got back from the grocery store. The required masks do seem stupid, but I keep telling myself, "ten percent risk reduction" if everyone's wearing them (I don't really buy the claim that N95 masks let all waterborne virus pass through). I did laugh at a friend—a lifelong germophobe who's hyper-paranoid about Covid—for wearing a narrow "bikini" face mask in the store, barely covering his nose & mouth, and stretched straight, leaving long, wide gaps around his nose. I was like, "What the hell is that, even?!" It looked useless to me, and, he kept pawing at it to adjust it.

Another friend in his late sixties, who's been very cautious about the virus, very recently caught Covid—after being vaccinated. He assumes his symptoms are milder than if he'd been unvaccinated, but he was still down quite sick for ten days.

Of course my preferred scenario is that it's just a novel virus and the institutional responses are like gaggles of the blind, feeling their way along—while a specialized class of professional pickpockets glides through the crowd.

[Belligerent Savant]

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I typed the following in an email response to an 'uber-liberal' friend of mine, a regular subscriber/follower of NPR news/NY Times; he'll occassionally share recent studies on masks to insist they are beneficial. Of course, he will have his children vaccinated as soon as available.
My approach with him on this topic is markedly softer than here in RI.

Recently, during an exchange, I typed:

Bottom line, though:

People who wear masks get covid. People who don't wear masks get covid.
People who are vaxxed get covid, people who are unvaxxed get covid.
People who are masked and vaxxed also get covid.
Do the shots generally help lessen symptoms? Perhaps they do for a limited timeframe.
And yet: people i know that got covid express different symptoms regardless of vaxx status. By this i mean: some unvaxxed people who got covid got very ill, some barely noticed.
Some vaxxed people who got covid got very ill, and some didn't.

Nothing today is happening as it was assured to us by govt and bureaucratic leaders. We didnt get back to normal after vaxx. The vaxx didn't stop covid. Etc, etc.
And still people are following the dominant narratives without question.

But, more and more people are questioning and beginning to doubt the stories as told.

This is good.

Earlier, i typed the following in response to his sharing of a recent CDC study on masks in schools:

they're just desperate at this point to justify it. Studies like this have inherent bias because they are aiming for a specific result.
Look at real world data. Every city/country with high vaxx and mask compliance continues to see spikes. Certain news media sources dumped on Southern states during the summer for their spikes.
Now, as expected, we're seeing spikes shift to the northwest and northeast, despite heavy mask use and vaxx percentages.

This short video clip by viral immunologist Dr. Byram Bridle is probably the best, simplest summary of the ineffectiveness masks. He even demonstrates a brief experiment by putting on multiple masks at once (5 total) and still getting his glasses to fog up.

https://youtu.be/UXLPRBqyBww

I know you'll likely ignore these sources because they're not official news sites (they're not political nor tied to any agenda), but they're spot on anyway:

https://wmbriggs.com/post/37320/

The above link includes this quote, which i shared some time ago. Before it became a political/conditioning device, masks were acknowledged by Fauci as ineffective.

Dr. Anthony Fauci wrote in February 2020 that store-bought face masks would not be very effective at protecting against the COVID-19 pandemic and advised a traveler not to wear one.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/fauci ... ar-AAKCZ0c

This link is on the recent cdc school mask study

Https://wmbriggs.com/post/37548/

Here's a portion of it:

This is the start of the problems you give yourself by counting the wrong thing. They measured counties, not kids. And, as we’ll see, they measured something not terribly interesting: “cases”.

If you, for instance, started on the east coast early in the morning and measured kids exposed to sunrise and compared these kids with kids in California, it looks bad for living on the east cost, if being exposed to sunrise worries you. But if you pondered it for a moment, you’d realized every damned kid is eventually going to get exposed. So why not measure something useful, like skin cancer?

Now, what’s this before and after the start of the school year business? They should have been looking inside schools during the school year. Not before. That’s the only valid comparison. Who in the world knows what these kids were doing in areas of more and less freedom before the school year.

They did not look at the kids wearing masks or not, just “cases” in counties with out without mandates. Cause is already suspect.

And what is a “case”, dear reader? Regular readers will—should—know the answer to this.

A “case” is a function of test quantity, test sensitivity and accuracy, and disease prevalence. A “case” does not measure previous infections. A “case” does not measure disease severity. Test quantity—here normalized by population—is a function of madness, panic, and “concern” level.

Did those counties without mandates, thinking they were necessary, have more testing, and thus possibly higher “case” numbers? Did the masked kids have higher previous infection rates. I have no idea. The CDC isn’t saying about either.

And what about prior infections? All the panic that goes into creating mandates may, and likely did, have seen differences in behavior that are causally related to the outcome. Which kids already had the bug, but which the testing doesn’t reveal?

This means, again, individual kids must be checked, both for prior infection and thus excluded, and for something real, like hospitalization for Covid, or serious illness defined in some defensible clinical way. Or death.

Ah, no deaths reported. Kids aren’t really dying of this disease—only about 500 in the entire USA in two years—so comparing that most useful number wouldn’t have been possible.

All this change in rates of change is also impossible to keep straight. What’s wanted is direct comparisons of rates between kids wearing and not wearing masks. Cumulatively, too. That is, “This many infected day 0, this many day 7, this many day 14”, and so on. Again, properly excluding those previously infected. We can’t get any solid idea of effect from these weird numbers.

CDC says “Statistical significance was defined as p<0.05 for all analyses.” P-values? Uh oh. Get ready to be flashed.

Then came the regressions—I know, I know. “To further assess the association between pediatric COVID-19 cases and school mask requirements, a multiple linear regression was constructed that adjusted for age, race and ethnicity, pediatric COVID-19 vaccination rate, COVID-19 community transmission, population density, social vulnerability index score, COVID-19 community vulnerability index score, percentage uninsured, and percentage living in poverty.”

If you can’t get a wee P out of all that, you’re just not trying.

Any study in which a researcher with pride waves his–or her! -- p-value at you should not be trusted.

Another link:

https://boriquagato.substack.com/p/more ... mask-study

For the record, his replies (Re: recent CDC study on masking in schools):

It’s a recent real world test. When you send me compelling evidence I take it in. You are the one who seems to be stuck on a point of view!

...

You can write all you want, I’m just saying it was a big study in the real world right now and masks seem to be making a major difference in terms of spread in schools. Period.

My reply to his last comment:

No, the data out there shows that there are ebbs and flows in cases and hospitalizations regardless of masks and vaxx status. The real world data shows this clearly. Nothing can change those facts.

He has a law degree, this friend of mine. Smart man.

One other note on the above: my general stance when discussing this with others, particularly those subscribing fully to establishment narratives, is that the situation remains fluid, not static; that I hope my more cynical takes turn out wrong; and that ultimately, time will tell.

Unfortunately, there's clearly a hard push right now to prevent people, generally, from a 'wait and see' approach: observing how circumstances -- and policies/opinions -- may change over time. There is a concerted push to get as many people as possible vaccinated via various coercion tactics/mandates, in the very near-term, prior to end of year. This last point should be a clear red flag for everyone, and it's perhaps the top reason I remain unvaccinated.


Leave y'all with this clip, which may be taken down soon:


8 prominent doctors & scientists engage in a remarkable exchange

[Belligerent Savant]

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Excerpt from the above video. It's a raw output from Youtube; don't have time to clean up but perhaps someone here can convert to easier-to-digest paragraph form without timestamps. Regardless:

Pierre Kory:
24:10
...you have to ask yourself why
24:13
if we have a solution we have effective
24:15
treatments why aren't they being
24:17
recognized and disseminated across the
24:19
world
24:20
and there's really two forces that i
24:21
think we're up against the first force
24:23
is that
24:25
in general our health agencies are
24:27
suffering what's called regulatory
24:29
capture they're largely driven by
24:31
financial interest external financial
24:34
interests
24:35
that are really influenced in making
24:37
sure that the solution to the pandemic
24:40
is one that is profitable
24:42
vaccines are profitable
24:45
the other challenge that we're having
24:47
which is somewhat overlapping is that
24:51
in academia what we call the ivory
24:53
towers the big academic institutions in
24:55
the last 10 years there's been this sort
24:57
of
24:58
increasing belief
25:00
into
25:02
the idea
25:03
that the only
25:05
proof of efficacy of a drug has to come
25:09
out of a large double-blind randomized
25:11
controlled trial when you do a
25:13
randomized control trial you have to
25:15
first make the diagnosis everyone has to
25:17
have a positive test they have to have
25:19
symptoms they have to be enrolled
25:21
consented randomized and then the drug
25:23
is delivered each one of those steps
25:25
takes time and so by the time they do
25:27
these randomized control trials
25:29
oftentimes it's very delayed and
25:31
oftentimes it's under dosed because
25:33
they're using doses that i was using six
25:35
months ago we move with this pandemic
25:38
because we can't prove it with the one
25:40
tool that we that we need to prove it we
25:42
are getting suppressed and that message
25:44
is getting suppressed.

Question:
25:44
who funds big randomized controlled trials?

Pierre Kory:
25:48
uh that would be pharma generally uh
25:50
there now there is philanthropy and
25:52
there is the nih but
25:54
but however the nih and pharma are quite
25:56
tightly linked.

Moderator:
25:59
let's just take a minute and address
26:00
some of the vaccine-related questions
26:02
that i think people have and i want to
26:04
start with you dr malone if that's okay
26:06
because you are the one of the
26:08
architects of mrna technology and if i
26:11
were to ask you, dr malone
26:13
are you against a vaccine for covid i
26:16
know your answer would be absolutely not
26:18
but you do have some issues with this
26:20
particular vaccine, why?

Dr.Malone:
26:24
um thanks for that opportunity to make
26:26
the point that i'm not an anti-vaxxer
26:28
i'm a guy who's spent the majority of my
26:30
adult life developing vaccines and
26:33
trying to get vaccines licensed
26:35
for example the ebola vaccine that we
26:37
call the merck vaccine
26:39
this this is a technology platform that i believe and
26:46
many believe has enormous
26:49
promise
26:51
and right now it's in its infancy
26:55
the safety of the underlying technology
26:59
is not yet fully demonstrated it hasn't
27:02
been fully characterized
27:04
and that will come that's good news
27:07
however in in the fog of war and the need to come
27:12
up with something as soon as possible
27:14
some decisions were made to move things
27:18
forward very rapidly they were based on
27:20
incomplete information no harm no foul
27:23
people did what they did
27:25
in good faith
27:27
and focused on a protein that they
27:29
thought was fully safe: spike.
27:32
but now over a year later
27:35
we know that in the virus this protein
27:38
is responsible for much of the disease
27:40
that the virus causes the pathology in
27:43
your vascular endothelial cells the
27:45
coagulation
27:47
and it's unfortunate that this
27:48
particular protein
27:50
in its in what appears to be a
27:52
biologically active form was used in
27:54
these vaccines.

Question:
27:56
what is the result of that, what does that mean is happening?

Dr. Cole:
27:58
this is a thromboembolic disease what
28:00
does that mean? Covid is a clotting
28:02
disease, Covid is a clotting disease,
28:03
Covid is a clotting disease.
28:06
Now when we give a spike protein to dr
28:09
malone's point that is an active
28:12
biologic
28:15
molecule
28:16
we chose the wrong molecule that causes
28:19
disease. So what do i see under the
28:21
microscope you see these coveted skin
28:23
cases you know these weird covered
28:24
rashes what is that? That's clotting in
28:27
the skin.
28:28
When i get the autopsy tissues now from
28:30
my colleagues around the country these
28:32
patients that, you know, we have
28:34
unfortunately doctors that say there's
28:36
no damage from the vaccines and no
28:38
deaths from the vaccines.
28:40
We should use the french legal system
28:43
when we have a new product that's never
28:44
been used on humanity in the market, it's
28:47
guilty until proven innocent.
28:49
Every time there is damage or disease
28:52
from that product we need to assume it
28:54
is until we prove it isn't. So under the
28:57
microscope
28:58
we see clotting in the lungs, we see
29:00
clotting in the vessels, we see clotting
29:02
in the brain.
29:03
Not from the virus,
29:06
but from the spike from the vaccine
29:07
itself. Now consider the numerator and
29:09
the denominator:
29:11
Are most people going to be fine? Yes, and
29:13
i want to emphasize that,
29:15
in our data around the world from the
29:17
united states, from the uk, from the euro
29:19
vigilance
29:21
in
29:22
europe, we have seen more death and
29:24
damage from this one medical product
29:27
then
29:28
all other vaccines combined in the last
29:32
several decades. In just a short eight
29:35
month window of time
29:37
it has done more damage than any other
29:40
medical product therapy shot
29:44
modality of anything we've ever allowed
29:47
to stay on the market to this point.
29:49
do i mean to sound alarmist? No, i'm
29:52
being factual and when i look at it
29:55
under the microscope, and i see the parts
29:57
of people
29:58
or people that are no longer with us,
30:01
the damage in the disease is caused by
30:03
that spike protein, it is present. Common
30:05
sense would tell me you can't tell me
30:08
you know a vaccine's efficacy is
30:10
debatable but you're figuring it out but
30:12
you know it's safe if you couldn't
30:14
possibly know it's safe because you
30:16
would need five - ten years to really know
30:19
it's safe just common sense.
30:21
Let's just think
30:24
for a minute, let's just apply common sense.

[Belligerent Savant]

@m1sscynical
.
I just finished my meeting with OSHA. There were a number of other government agencies on the line. Here is the full speech I gave.

It was a meeting for “Covid-19 Vaccination and Testing Emergency Temporary Standard Rulemaking”. It allowed me to upload documents that will be shared on their website. I uploaded adverse events data from VigiAccess + VAERS death totals as of 10/01/21.

https://twitter.com/m1sscynical/status/ ... 52129?s=20

-----------------------------------------------------------

http://vigiaccess.org/

[stickdog99]

https://www.geertvandenbossche.org/post ... -never-see

Keep looking at snapshots and you’ll never see where this pandemic is headed
... until it reaches its final destination

The debate and tension over the efficacy of the Covid-19 vaccines is flaring up. Comparative assessments of vaccine-mediated protection from infection, disease, hospitalization, and death in vaccinated and unvaccinated people are all over the place, with results ranging from convincing evidence of benefit to compelling proof of failure depending on the source of information. Those who’ve become addicted to these comparative statistics seem to forget that gauging the success of human intervention in a pandemic is about measuring success in a dynamic phenomenon, and that snapshots taken under certain conditions/settings do not provide information about the overall evolutionary trend and likely health outcome of a pandemic. The latter can only be monitored by measuring temporal changes of parameters that are relevant to public and individual health.

By March 2021, molecular epidemiologists had already expressed their concern about the emergence of a super-variant that ‘might have any combinations of increased transmissibility, altered virulence and/or increased capacity to escape population immunity’ and would, therefore, enjoy a huge fitness advantage (1). Back then, their concern was based on phylogenetics-based natural selection analysis indicating that immunity-mediated selective pressure is driving convergent evolution of a diversified spectrum of mutations to ensure viral persistence in the face of mounting infectious and vaccine-induced host immune pressure.

Their findings lead one to conclude that mass vaccination in the presence of more infectious variants inevitably involves selection-driven convergence of compensatory adaptive mutations at positively selected genome sites, and hence promotes enhanced expansion in prevalence of more transmissible immune escape variants. This would imply that vaccine efficacy is expected to diminish over time while the infection rate would progressively increase. It is reasonable to assume that the evolutionary convergence of more infectious immune escape variants and the culmination thereof into a ‘super-variant’ will also cause distinct trajectories of the pandemic to increasingly converge in countries/regions that are subject to mass vaccination.

An increase in infectious pressure leads to a higher risk of rapid viral re-exposure in the population. As far as previously asymptomatically infected unvaccinated individuals are concerned, rapid re-exposure to SARS-CoV-2 may lead to viral replication on a background of suboptimal spike (S)-directed immune pressure (due to suboptimal, short-lived anti-S antibodies [Abs] of low affinity) and even to enhanced susceptibility to disease (due to suppression of functional innate Ab capacity by the afore-mentioned suboptimal anti-S Abs). When such suboptimal anti-S immunity occurs in a substantial part of the population it is likely to further increase natural immune selection pressure on viral infectiousness and, therefore, promote further expansion of more infectious variants, thereby giving rise to additional waves of infectious cases and morbidity. As the evolutionary dynamics of the virus in highly vaccinated countries/regions are now placing huge immune selection pressure on the viral fitness landscape, it is fair to postulate that the highly diversified spectrum of evolutionary trajectories of this pandemic seen in different highly vaccinated countries will now rapidly narrow down to a more uniform path characterized by the following, prognostically unfavorable features:

* Waning of vaccine efficacy as mirrored by a relative increase of morbidity and mortality rates in vaccinees over time

* A relative increase of morbidity and mortality rates over time in vaccinees as compared to the unvaccinated

* A relative increase in suboptimal immunity over time in both the vaccinees and unvaccinated individuals (due to diminished vaccine efficacy and suboptimal naturally elicited Abs, respectively), which may translate into a relative increase in cases of ADE (Ab-dependent enhancement of Covid-19 disease pathology)

* A relative increase in the base-line infectivity rate over time

* Continuing waves of increased infection, morbidity, and mortality rates

* A relative increase in frequency of more infectious viral variants with immune-resistant phenotypes over time

Conclusion: All experts and public health authorities seem to agree that the evolutionary dynamics of a pandemic are very complex and shaped by an interplay between infectious pressure exerted by the virus on the host immune system and immune pressure exerted by the host on viral infectiousness, and that a pandemic can only come to an end when sufficient herd immunity is developed to control the virus. It is, therefore, surprising that none of these authorities seem to worry about the impact that massive immune intervention could have on the evolutionary dynamics of a pandemic that is now characterized by widespread dominance of highly infectious variants. The impact of any human intervention on these dynamics can only be assessed and measured by monitoring changes in population-level infection, morbidity, and mortality rates, and comparing these rates between vaccinees and unvaccinated individuals as a function of time. Likewise, phylogenetics-based natural selection studies should be conducted on viral sequences to monitor the evolutionary dynamics of SARS-CoV-2 adaptation to public health interventions.

If mass vaccination eventually enables SARS-CoV-2 to evolve dominant immune-escape variants that are capable of escaping from both the adaptive and innate immune systems, the outcome of this pandemic will resemble that of introducing a pathogenic virus into a naive host species. This is actually likely to enhance viral virulence instead of controlling viral disease.

[stickdog99]

Thanks for the video!

I highly recommend it. How it has been allowed over 400,000 youtube views without getting banned is beyond me.

Can't have anybody questioning the narrative, no matter how calmly, scientifically, or helpfully.

[Joe Hillshoist]

I typed replication and proliferation. You didn't address the proliferation bit, but in the prior page I already quoted on methods for proliferation, especially its proliferation beyond the injection site:

I'm pretty sure that Japanese study or whatever it is doesn't do what is claimed by some people.

And here's a simple explanation for how copies are made of the spike proteins. The spike proteins themselves don't replicate on their own, but copies are indeed made of the spike protein:

Yes that is how this treatment works. Your body makes copies of the spike protein expressed on the surface of muscle cells

All treatments for COVID including suppressed early intervention create evolutionary pressure on SARS2.

Please cite your sources for the bolded bit of this claim, and the specific early treatments you're referencing that reportedly qualify.

Its how evolution works. All interventional medicine creates evolutionary pressure on the disease it treats. Or on the cause of that disease. If you don't understand that do you understand what evolution is? It a basic, fundamental concept.

What are one of the key triggers for evolutionary pressure? For these experimental vaccines, it was unprecedented wide-scale inoculation across all populations regardless of risk profile/age/overall health factors, in the middle of a pandemic, rather than focused on those at greater risk while allowing the healthy to develop herd immunity.

Alternative treatments haven't had anywhere near the prevalence rate as these covid vaccines, and as such wouldn't impose the same pressure.

Evolutionary pressure isn't a thing. Its a word used to describe a process. Herd immunity would provide the same pressure or the same type of pressure. Your body produces antibodies to RBD protein. They are triggered equally by the virus as by natural immunity, Wide scale innoculation hasn't happened. There are less than a billion vaccinated people on the planet. The vast majority "of all populations" haven't been vaccinated. Not that those people matter.

Vanden Bossche:

https://www.geertvandenbossche.org/post ... iticism-ii

the mechanism of selection of immune escape variants is very different from what is proposed by Noorchashm. He proposes that spontaneously occurring mutants/ variants will escape immune pressure and get established in people who happen to mount the type of suboptimal immune response that would match the spontaneously occurring mutations. As a result, he states, variants would selectively ‘prey’ on subjects exhibiting suboptimal immune pressure, for example as a result of vaccination. This is wrong as the mechanism of immune selection works the other way around. Again, it’s not like spontaneously occurring mutations become dominant because some of them happen to bypass vaccinal immune responses in a certain cohort of vaccinees. According to the scenario he’s proposing, emerging variants that are, for example, completely resistant to the vaccine would have the same chance to become dominant as those which are more infectious but far from fully resistant to the vaccine. That is definitely not how evolutionary pressure and selective immune escape work as pressure (including immune pressure) and escape therefrom are interdependently co-evolving. This particularly applies to C19 which has been experiencing a steadily growing pressure on its S(1) protein (responsible for its infectiousness), first through global infection prevention measures and second, through mass vaccination campaigns using vaccines that are targeted at S1, and particularly at the RBD, to prevent binding to ACE2 and hence, to prevent infection. That’s also why selected mutations in more infectious variants have been found to increasingly converge to S1, even including RBD.


In conclusion, I do all but concur with Noorchashm’s conclusion that C19-infected subjects are the source of more infectious variants. I am under the impression that he confuses ‘mutations’ with ‘selection of immune escape variants’ or ‘emergence/ selection of viral variants’.

Reality is at odds with Vanden right now. If what he is saying is true then a more strain would have arisen from vaccinated populations to replace the current dominant strain, delta, whioch arose in India before anyone had vaccinations.

Delta, the dominant variant right now arose in India, before they had started vaccinations there and spread thru mostly unvaccinated populations. As of yet nothing has come along that has removed that dominance by Delta.

I don't understand. I just posted example regions in India with low vaxx rates that had great success with Ivermectin as primary treatment. Your comment above seems to ignore this. Am I missing something?

Yes you are missing the point. The point is that the people you quote claim more virulent variations will arise in the vaccinated population. The most dominant (ie most infectious) strain at the moment is called Delta. It specifically didn't arise in a vaccinated population. It arose in India, possibly vefore things were so bad the started issuing Ivermectin in home treatment kits.

Where did I claim that vaccines create more dangerous/more virulent variants? It remains possible I typed something along these lines in the past, but needless to say the science is not static. We are all witnessing and participating in a grand experiment right now on behalf of govt 'leaders', bureaucrats and those occluded from view. It will be years before there's clarity on current policies.

You keep quoting people who say that. Like that Vanden fella directly above this little part of my post. You don't add anything to the quotes or qualify their comments with your own opinion therefore you are making the same claim or parroting their claim. Therefore its the same thing a you claiming it.

Not sure what you're getting at here -- It's self-evident why it's fucking noteworthy. And nowhere did I suggest anything along the lines of this silly strawman example of yours.

Somewhat ironic though, as that's an example of how a covid death has been classified if death due to car accident occurred within a certain timeframe of a PCR positive result.

What is the connection between those incidents the doctor you quoted has referred to and the vaccine. Other than a simple correlation in time? What process of causation is there from the vaccine to those incidents that have been referred to?

[Joe Hillshoist]

So there are about 3 billion people vaccinated on the planet. Way more than I thopught and as yet there hasn't been a super variant due to the vaccinated population.

[Joe Hillshoist]

The Long Shadow of an Infection:
COVID-19 and Performance at Work*

Kai Fischer„J. James Reade…W. Benedikt Schmal§
August 2021
Abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic has caused economic shock waves across the globe. Much
research addresses direct health implications of an infection, but to date little is known
about how this shapes lasting economic effects. This paper estimates the workplace
productivity effects of COVID-19 by studying performance of soccer players after an
infection. We construct a dataset that encompasses all traceable infections in the elite
leagues of Germany and Italy. Relying on a staggered difference-in-differences design,
we identify negative short- and longer-run performance effects. Relative to their pre-
infection outcomes, infected players’ performance temporarily drops by more than 6%.
Over half a year later, it is still around 5% lower. The negative effects appear to have
notable spillovers on team performance. We argue that our results could have impor-
tant implications for labor markets and public health in general. Countries and firms
with more infections might face economic disadvantages that exceed the temporary
pandemic shock due to potentially long-lasting reductions in productivity.

https://www.dice.hhu.de/fileadmin/redak ... Schmal.pdf

[Belligerent Savant]

.

Joe - rather than a continued to and fro on this, I will simply state that nothing is currently static. We are in the fog of war; clarity likely won't be available for at least another couple years (though I hope much sooner).

I do have a question, though: how is a 'Delta' case confirmed and/or identified? Is there a particular test for this strain available and in use by hospitals or the CDC? Earnest question, haven't looked into it yet.

In other words, To what extent are current cases and deaths all primarily due to 'Delta' rather than other strains -- or vaccine-related adverse reactions, or other factors?

Right now, my primary concern is not cases or deaths from covid or delta, but the potential for severe under-reporting of adverse reactions to these shots. To what extent is there clarity that current hospitalizations are not due at least in part to statistically significant adverse reactions to these shots, rather than the virus?

Here's one of many, many samples of suppression of data:



It appears that all cause mortality is already higher in 2021 than in 2020 (and there's still 2.5 months left to the year). Vaccines weren't available in 2020, but they were in 2021. Shouldn't we see at least some drop in mortality as a result, if indeed these shots are 'effective and safe'?*

*need to check back on this metric and the regions it covers.

Due to data suppression and/or manipulation, we likely won't know for some time. But databases like http://vigiaccess.org/ and https://openvaers.com/ offer clues. Right now, plausible deniability remains a viable tactic. Again, time will tell.

Leave y'all with this piece that touches on recent points raised. The source piece has plenty of embedded links in it:

https://roundingtheearth.substack.com/p ... munity-3ca

Variant Roulette (Evolution and Immunity Escape) Part 2

Multiple recent papers have emerged that relate to the debate over whether vaccinated or unvaccinated people drive the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 variants since I wrote my first article on the topic. Let's take a look at what they tell us, and how vaccine partisans are misinterpreting them as publicly as possible.

A Computer Model

On July 30, Rella et al reported in their paper Rates of SARS-CoV-2 transmission and vaccination impact the fate of vaccine-resistant strains on the results of computer simulations testing for variant emergence during the ups-and-downs of seasonal infection waves. From the abstract:

As expected, we found that a fast rate of vaccination decreases the probability of emergence of a resistant strain. Counterintuitively, when a relaxation of non-pharmaceutical interventions happened at a time when most individuals of the population have already been vaccinated the probability of emergence of a resistant strain was greatly increased. Consequently, we show that a period of transmission reduction close to the end of the vaccination campaign can substantially reduce the probability of resistant strain establishment.

As much as I dislike lockdowns and social distance and feel certain that the vast expansion of global food insecurity that resulted from those policies are likely to kill far more people (likely several times as many) than 20 months of COVID has, I can see the logic in avoiding indoor crowds this Winter. Just remember that you need to get outdoors when possible and almost no spread occurs outdoors. Wear your mittens.

More to the point, the Rella research team focused their modeling specifically on what they called "vaccine-resistant strains". Is this the right logic?

Those who claim the sloganesque "Unvaccinated are Variant Factories" would claim that vaccine-resistent strains are a subset of Variants of Interest. While they're not wrong, technically, let us remind ourselves that the Variants of Interest never seemed to emerge until vaccine trials were held, then emerged in the vicinities of where those trials were held. Also, the Variants of Interest strongly display the quality of escape from antibody classes:


While my own framing of the multiply-conditional problem of finding the probability that variants emerged from the vaccinated differs from that of the Rella team (that would take work that isn't at the top of my current priority list), I appreciate their approach and would now look for a way to incorporate it into my own model. And I'll be glad to piggy-back off of some of their work if I find the time to follow through with computations. And while I haven't performed those calculations, my belief is strongly that either there is >99.9% chance the variants are driven primarily by the vaccinated or a >99.9% chance that the variants are driven primarily by the unvaccinated. And given conditions such as when and where the variants emerged...I'll throw my wager on those receiving COVID-19 vaccines being the source...of...variants that fall into the category of vaccine-resistant strains.

The other side of the argument seems to have a steep uphill climb, and I've so far not talked to anyone in genetics who feels otherwise. The closest thing to that was an email exchange with Biostatistics Professor Jeffrey Morris, who began with the position, "All of these variants were around before vaccination started so, if vaccination produces any variants, they haven’t appeared yet." After I explained his mistake, he shifted to,

But vaccine trials involve thousands of individuals in a population of many millions.

There is no conceivable way for a few thousand vaccinated to drive the evolution of new variants.

But this takes no conditional into account. While geography is certainly not the most restrictive conditional (after all, we're talking about...vaccine-resistant variants as per antibody escape, not T cell or PK cell escape), this response disrespects the coincidence factor. Take the individual probability coincidence factor to the fourth power and we get something like a black swan. I politely offered to walk through the math, but he settled with, "I don’t need someone to walk me through the math; I am a Biostatistics professor." A few fruitless emails later, he produced no math at all.

I'm guessing he doesn't do work in genetics, but he might be the one person I've encountered with any computational genetics background sticking to the narrative. It is what it is, I guess.

Entertainingly, even CNN promoted the Rella paper, which may serve as a hedge to their participation in the "unvaccinated are variant factories" campaign.

The "Two Highly-Effective mRNA Vaccines" Paper

The bias in the title alone of Puranik et al's paper forces my eyes to roll, and not a little.


Reading the Competing Interests Statement gave me a rash.

AP, PJL, ES, MJN, JC, AJV, and VS are employees of nference and have financial interests in the company. nference is collaborating with Moderna, Pfizer, Janssen, and other bio-pharmaceutical companies on data science initiatives unrelated to this study. These collaborations had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. JCO receives personal fees from Elsevier and Bates College, and receives small grants from nference, Inc, outside the submitted work. ADB is supported by grants from NIAID (grants AI110173 and AI120698), Amfar (#109593), and Mayo Clinic (HH Shieck Khalifa Bib Zayed Al-Nahyan Named Professorship of Infectious Diseases). ADB is a paid consultant for Abbvie, Gilead, Freedom Tunnel, Pinetree therapeutics Primmune, Immunome and Flambeau Diagnostics, is a paid member of the DSMB for Corvus Pharmaceuticals, Equilium, and Excision Biotherapeutics, has received fees for speaking for Reach MD and Medscape, owns equity for scientific advisory work in Zentalis and nference, and is founder and President of Splissen Therapeutics. MDS received grant funding from Pfizer via Duke University for a vaccine side effect registry. JH, JCO, AV, MDS and ADB are employees of the Mayo Clinic. The Mayo Clinic may stand to gain financially from the successful outcome of the research. This research has been reviewed by the Mayo Clinic Conflict of Interest Review Board and is being conducted in compliance with Mayo Clinic Conflict of Interest policies.

The paper found a [much] lower efficacy reduction than is being seen in Israel for Pfizer's vaccine, or in the UK where both mRNA vaccines are in use. But I'm not going to go much further than that because I doubt many serious people will take this particularly seriously, except as biased and conflicted secondary evidence of efficacy against variants that is contradicted by that from other nations.

The Mutation Frequency Paper

Three days ago Yeh and Contreras posted this preprint on medRxiv entitled Full vaccination suppresses SARS-CoV-2 delta variant mutation frequency. The abstract goes a step further, claiming this is the "first evidence that full vaccination against COVID-19 suppresses emergent mutations of SARS-CoV-2 delta variants". The problem is that this is a plainly incorrect interpretation of the results. While this paper isn't Lyu and Wehby absurd, it almost appears (to me) designed to mislead.



Before we move any further, we need to discuss one term defined in the paper, and another one which is not. For many readers unfamiliar with statistical genetics, the distinction will help to disambiguate between a correct understanding of the results of this graph, and an intuitive but false one.

Mutation frequency. Simply put, mutation frequency is the measured frequency of mutations (as they exist) in a population. A low mutation frequency represents a population with sequences that are highly similar, while a high mutation frequency represents a population with sequences that are less similar to each other.

Mutation rate. The mutation rate is the measured frequency of mutations over time. The higher the mutation rate, the more likely that the "offspring" of a virus differ (at any particular location or base pair) from the immediate progenitor (or per time/ancestral distance from any progenitor assuming nothing like a speciation event).

So, the mutation rate tells us (technically, this can be defined in context, but usually for a virus…) how many single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs, like "snips") we expect to see from one viral generation to the next. But the mutation frequency measures the abundance of SNPs relative to the virions in a generational pool. What we see in the graph above is that greater vaccination results in greater selection pressure to eliminate those virions least like the others.

So, which virions do you imagine are being selected for in a highly vaccinated pool?

I'll give you one guess, and it's not the virions most easily neutralized by vaccination.

The statistical language of genetics is certainly a maze to the uninitiated, but the logic is ultimately on the common sense level.

So, let's be clear:

- This graph tells us that the SARS-CoV-2 samples from highly vaccinated nations are more similar to one another than are those from less vaccinated nations. The obvious conclusion is that the self-similar viral pools are more likely to be vaccine resistant.

- This graph does not tell us that the rate of mutation (SNPs per generation) changes in any way. In fact, that rate likely does not to any appreciable degree, though I suspect that many readers confirming their media-seeded "unvaccinated are variant factories" biases interpret it that way.

Note that when selection [for environment] occurs, the genetic variance of the genome "resets" relative to a new baseline because the other branches are "forgotten" in the sense that they are not present in the remaining population. Thus, we get low mutation frequency.

So, the graph on its own is fine. In fact, it's great information! The problem is how the authors [claim to] interpret this information. They leap---quite incorrectly---to the notion that the suppression of mutation frequency equates to suppression of emergent mutations.

Looking back at the introduction, I see a hint that these authors are not particularly deep in the statistical genetics field.

Mutations generate different SARS-CoV-2 variants to escape vaccine-mediated immunity and thereby, develop drug or vaccine resistance

This doesn't really make sense, or is terrible language to describe what is going on. Mutations don't "generate variants with a purpose". Mutations just happen. They are then selected according to contextual fitness in their environments. Left to random chance (sans vaccine), the locus of genetic diversity can get large, and so in the rare instances a single virion piles up enough SNPs to affect a functional domain (one functional specifically in escaping immunity), it nearly always get outcompeted locally before it can establish itself in another host. Even worse---en route to piling up multiple SNPs, such virions become increasingly unstable (less fit) as per Muller's ratchet.

The authors do not appear to have deep backgrounds in statistical genetics. Had I the free time, I'd read the several other papers the pair co-authored during the pandemic to see if they're all half-baked.

Still, as I said, I am glad to know the information in the paper. While their confusion over the meaning of the information seems consistent, their computations and graphs give us important confirmation about what is really going on. This includes their Tajima's D computations. For those not familiar, Tajima's D is a statistical test conjured by Japanese researcher Fumihiro Tajima to test the "neutral mutation hypothesis". Like my wife sometimes does, Tajima studied mutations in fruit flies (Drosophila).



This is the second graph in the paper, and it shows values of Tajima's D that go negative in India and the UK in particular---just prior to Delta variant breakouts! While I hate to quote Wikipedia, there is a simple table that explains what I noted above about the genomic "resets":



The correct interpretation is that vaccination campaigns channeled mutations through the bottleneck toward their moment of immune escape.

What Are the Implications of This Author Misinterpretation?

The problems get substantially compounded by the viral variant of abused reputation. Specifically, Scripps Research Institute founder Eric Topol, a man whose great achievement in genetics was an undergraduate paper opining about prospects for genetic therapy, got ahold of the paper and tweeted out what looks to be an even worse interpretation than that of the authors: that the result, if true, even as misinterpreted, necessarily generalizes:

@EricTopol

Debunking the myth that vaccination promotes mutations. Being fully vaccinated actually suppresses them

Now Go Do that Doo Doo that You Do So Well

It has grown extremely hard for me to respect Eric Topol on an even basic level. At some point, somebody must have convinced him that if he writes books about futuristic medicine (speculative topics for which nobody has to answer an actual argument beyond, "This will happen in the future,") he'll become fabulously rich and famous, and influence people. Perhaps that experience led him to fool himself into believing that he understands things he does not---like basic math.

And despite being the author of the book Deep Medicine: How Artificial Intelligence Can Make Healthcare Human Again, Topol appeared entirely clueless when interviewed about the world's most obviously fraudulent machine-learning-generated (NEVER HAPPENED) medical research (the Surgisphere paper on hydroxychloroquine's effects on COVID-19 patients).

Now, here he is, declaring a myth debunked while overgeneralizing an incorrect interpretation of data that says exactly the opposite of what he seems to think it does. And his many thousands of followers have no sense of how little he understands statistics, much less statistical genetics.

Predictably, Edward Nirenberg seems to have jumped on the incorrect interpretation as well. Since he is young, with ample opportunity to shed the notion that he understands more than he does (trained to that point no doubt by the educational institutions that fail us all), he has plenty of time to establish a locus of reality. However, his influential pandemic-era writing reads like a peacock-display of understanding much more than he does while cross-troping Reality Show political phrases like "deplatform [disease]" and "[vaccine] nationalism". Sigh.



I wonder what evolutionary theory he would cite if he cited any.

Sadly, this is how the public winds up being misinformed at about every turn during the pandemic. Can you imagine how Topol's going to look if the public comes to the conclusion that hydroxychloroquine works and vaccines kill more than help?

https://roundingtheearth.substack.com/p ... t-analysis

[Laodicean]