Boostermania!

US approval of triple-dose "boosting" is now all-but official. But will triple-dosing plausibly change infection outcomes? (I argue yes, but for the worse.)

Adventures Inside the Harem

Our public health overlords have at last seductively winked, satisfying the feverish hopes of their besotted Believers: Dose is in the air, tonight.

The sultry gesture of impending additions to the Schedule of Penetration was issued this time (via intermediaries at a scrappy outfit which I understand is named The Failing New York Times) by “administration officials familiar with the discussions” - our Emperor, the media, having apparently become so bored of the illustrious CDC after her three-week preeminence within the palace public health bureaucracy harem that they have resorted to fishing in the back bench.¹

What “the discussions” with which these officials are familiar have deemed meet, is that triple-dose Covid vaccine “boosters” should be recommended for “most Americans,” beginning in harvest season - to be received, on an individual basis, roughly eight months after the first course. But… why? After all, there hasn’t actually been any evidence yet that so-called “breakthrough” infections are a problem, nor enough time to allow for any evidence that they will be.² Certainly not for “most” Americans, as the Times report declares the officials to have implied.³

⁴Two weeks ago, I argued based on the Israel dashboard trends that the signal for Covid vaccine “[symptomatic] infection/spread” efficacy shows that it is nearly nonexistent, even among those not yet six months post-2nd-dose mark, and yet the signal for severe outcomes efficacy remains strong, even among those well past that mark.⁵ As of mid-August, this remains the case.⁶ So much so, that I have ventured to form a tentative multi-part theory of Covid vaccine immune response that goes as follows:

1. Covid vaccination mis-trains the immune system to treat SARS-CoV-2 as a primarily blood-borne pathogen, similar to Dengue virus.

2. This accounts for poor performance in attenuating symptomatic infection and spread - viral shedding into the respiratory tract.

   Edit, 9/27: In light of the appearance of “negative infection efficacy,” I have modified my current theory of the Covid vaccine immune response to argue that residual, non-“sterilizing” mucosal antibodies are also exerting a significant detrimental impact on innate immunity, echoing the prediction made by vanden Bossche. See “Forever Spike.”

   However, negative infection efficacy does not void the rest of the predictions below.

3. This accounts for strong performance in inhibiting viral shedding into the bloodstream and further serious illness/outcomes.

4. Regular infection produces a correctly targeted immune response that provides excellent, but intentionally variable infection/spread efficacy and likely unsurpassable serious outcome efficacy.⁷

5. Post-vaccination “breakthrough” infection is plausibly likely to significantly correct the mis-targeted immune response induced by the Covid vaccines, but time will tell.

6. Because Covid vaccination does not inhibit spread, it is not applying selection pressure on SARS-CoV-2 to any meaningful degree. So-called “antigenic drift” will continue to proceed at the current slow pace; and “antigenic shift” mutants with vaccine-defying traits will not enjoy a significant fitness advantage (despite plausibly causing more severe illness), thus only emerging as dominant strains if by random chance.

7. Covid-vaccinated individuals who do not “meet” SARS-CoV-2 in advance of its crossing the “antigenic drift vaccine-recognition threshold” are in high danger of experiencing the immune-dysfunctional antibody dependent enhancement outcomes which have been characterized as severe Covid-19 (as well as are those who do meet it, if Point 5 is incorrect). This threshold may not be crossed until 2-3 years from now, if not later.

8. When this threshold is crossed, individuals in high danger will be safeguarded by our improved understanding of therapeutics (if that understanding is ever broadly acknowledged within the medical communities of Western nations), and severe outcomes will be moderately or highly mitigable.⁸

9. Since 1-8, even vulnerable individuals are not in immediate danger of severe outcomes from infection and have no reason, now or in the immediate future, to “top off” their mis-trained antibodies (antibody ramp-up will occur naturally during infection).

10. If triple-dosing temporarily boosts “symptomatic infection/spread” efficacy throughout the (likely) winter wave, Point 6 will become void, and the “antigenic drift vaccine-recognition threshold” in Point 7 will be crossed in advance of 2 years, if not .5 years. “Boostered” individuals will exert Gain-of-Function-pressure on the virus throughout the winter.

11. If this is repeated next summer, the same will occur.

12. If 10-11 are false (implying that the apparent Covid vaccine infection/spread efficacy during the winter and spring were a construction of poorer data collection; or that “boosters” do not replicate the momentary infection efficacy of initial Covid vaccination for some other reason), then Point 6 is still valid even under a booster regime.

The plausible sum of these elements is the following: Biannual Covid vaccine boosters (and the ADE treadmill upon which recipients will find themselves) both are completely unnecessary for the already vaccinated, and will be incredibly easy to falsely portray as necessary.

Thus, even though the real antibody dependent enhancement danger is quite low for those who are currently in the Covid-vaccinated boat, the fear of the danger will likely be used to create the danger.⁹

¹⁰

The Genoan Walkout

Whether we assume our public health overlords are promoting universal Covid vaccination out of benevolent intentions or not, this places them in a tactical quandary:¹¹ The narrative that advances boosters (“whoops, one and done was a lie, and herd immunity is impossible!”) destroys the narrative that advances initial uptake amid the hesitant (“just one and done; help us get to herd immunity!”). And (again, whether they were trying to reach universal vaccination before the end of summer out of benevolent intentions or not), the successful achievement of universal vaccination before the end of summer would entirely have circumvented this tactical challenge.

A mere two weeks ago it seemed that, anticipating this quandary, our overlords were setting up a radical offensive blitz to head it off: Either vaccination passports, or universal state mandates. As of a week ago, the buzz of communications offering hints of such a bold maneuver has largely gone silent (outside of Canada).

Instead, our overlords seem like the French nobles at Crécy after their Genoan mercenaries mutinied. Despite the dismantling of their advantage; they intend to charge perfunctorily into defeat. The (likely false) inevitable necessity of boosters has been ceded throughout the West, even while the ceding makes voluntary Covid vaccination unattractive for all those citizens who did not yet buy into the fraudulent “one and done” and “herd immunity” narratives.

Yet our mounted French nobles - even blind King John, bless his profoundly stupid heart - may yet carry the field.¹² Large employer mandates - especially among healthcare systems - have stepped up throughout the month, despite the incoherence of insisting that workplaces can be made “safer” for employees or customers by a medical intervention which does nothing to prevent transmission of this (or any) virus; and despite potential legal woes based on employee rights statutes; and despite potential future legal penalties for Nuremberg Code violations, if society decides that those standards mean anything again.

Meanwhile, morale among the French infantry remains high - reports of already Covid-vaccinated individuals using alternate forms of ID to seek out triple-doses well in advance of approval have emerged throughout the month¹³ - and large swaths among “the enemy” - i.e. the unvaccinated - seem to actually (still) be on their side.

¹⁴

Islands of Insanity

The UK, which nearly embarked into the Pandemic™ with a sensible and even-headed attitude only to veer into sixteen months of totalitarian insanity, has recently corrected from their initial incorrect correction with a formal declaration of reopening, paired with a massive cultural movement against vaccination passports - especially ones which might target children and young adults.¹⁵ Whether this “bold” embrace of sanity, which only took root after the mortal fear of SARS-CoV-2 among British adults was fully covered by the mental fig leaf of the vaccines in the first place, will persist after it is widely acknowledged that the vaccines do not work, remains to be seen; but for now, Vaxxed Brits seem eager to burn the theatre of emergency to the ground, fence off the embers, and mount the skulls of a few public health officials on the fence-posts as a warning to future actors. In this they could not be more distinct from the subjects of their two largest island colonies cum commonwealths, Australia and New Zealand. The people over there, where the mental fig-leaf of the floundering vaccines has yet to be delivered, have gone more stark, raving crazy than ever.

Whoa! This could be The Big One!

Unlike fully-vaxxed Iceland, another island nation in the midst of renewed drama, Australia and New Zealand are both nearly six months behind most of the industrial West in Covid vaccination rates. And, both countries idiotically chose to ride out the entirety of the Pandemic™ in conditions of effective isolation from the rest of the world, subjecting themselves to seventeen months-worth of immune debt - repeating the very same mistake made in 1918.

Authorities in both countries have, therefor, made it their task to avoid having both their real and their narrative-fabricated failures made visible by allowing the impending super-wave to play out before the tortoise of vaccination makes it to their imaginary finish line. And the citizens of both countries, likely intuiting the inevitable sting of the removal of the band-aid they have worn for so long, are complying with the fraudulent and self-serving “public safety” measures prescribed by their dictators even as those measures, in Australia, reveal themselves to be “too much, too late.”

The primary signal for the Australian citizenry’s descent into mass insanity is the silence of city streets in Sydney and Melbourne, which have been subjected to an unending lockdown since late June. Sydney, a metropolis of 5.3 million Public Health Serfs, saw an anti-lockdown protest on July 24 - but it was a meager display, numbering a mere 3,500 dissidents, who found no support from the armed guards of their oppressive government, and accrued 10,000 tip-offs from their fellow citizens who still support the failing local regime.¹⁶ A planned follow-up protest the next Sunday never materialized; and organizing for resumption of protests, in the end of August, has gone underground - free speech on the matter of defying Euphemized Martial Law being essentially nonexistent. Enforcement of the perpetually renewing lockdown has since been quite effective, outside of the “migrant heavy” inland quarters of Sydney which are being blamed for the burgeoning outbreak that government officials know heralds political armageddon - and the beach, which has remained a more or less officially-sanctioned Exception Zone for coastal suburbanites.¹⁷

Meanwhile, the astoundingly sinister-seeming “Vaccine Hesitancy Tracker,” collated by the University of Melbourne, observes a dramatic reduction in (already low) rates of professed hesitancy in both NSW (Sydney) and Victoria (Melbourne) after the imposing of the lockdowns (and concurrent with the outbreak) which have since leveled at, roughly, “Won’t be missed if shipped off to a concentration camp percent”:¹⁸

To Australians and New Zealanders, therefore, the foreknowledge that the “protection” offered by these experimental interventions into the human self-destruct button will require biannual re-injections to sustain seems not to operate as a disincentive at all. A living hell of permanent immune dysfunction mediated by a semi-nonfunctional pseudo-vaccine with unknowable long-term effects is preferable to a brief brush with possible death - or, they perhaps imagine, something akin to certain annihilation or disablement.

Bring on the shots! Bring on the boosters! This, after all, is The Apocalypse! Hell On Earth awaits the unvaccinated! Pledge your soul to the one true God, Vaccine, before it is too late! What’s that in your arms - a baby? Officer, fill that thing to the gills! The same populace that somehow manages to sleep under ceilings crawling with spiders the size of footballs and shares land with human-sized gerbils that can kick a man through a wall is so afraid of a respiratory virus that they would likely beg their own police to force-inject them with a vaccine that doesn’t even work, if it would somehow make this rollout go any faster.

¹⁹

Another view into this dissonant mass insanity is provided by a partially intelligent document of “science journalism” published last week, entitled “Is the herd immunity dream dead?”²⁰ Written by Liam Mannix (bring your own Mad Max pun), it offers the most sober and coherent overview of what experts mean when they use the term “herd immunity” in the context of SARS-CoV-2 that I have yet read.

Mannix supports his dismantling of the herd immunity myth with quotes from a panoply of credentialed researchers who understand that it was never a valid framework to begin with. It makes for a refreshing and illuminating read. He nonetheless peppers this competent assessment of reality - explicitly premised on the observed plunge in Covid vaccine infection efficacy to near-zero levels - with repeated vague, qualified references to the infection efficacy being “not 100 per cent,” which are at last grounded to a set of out-of-date figures for infection efficacy spectacularity so naïve in the present moment that they cannot be read without a double take:

As good as our vaccines are (really good!) they do not provide 100 per cent protection against passing the virus on. […]

Unfortunately COVID-19 is more contagious, and our vaccines – as amazing as they are – do not offer 100 per cent protection against spreading the virus. […]

And vaccines do not offer 100 per cent protection against catching it. In Israel, Pfizer posted an 81 per cent effectiveness rate; in the UK, Pfizer clocks in at 88 per cent and AstraZeneca at 67; In Canada, the figures are 72 and 56 per cent.

Mannix seems to be operating in a state of denial regarding infection efficacy (and thus his personal chances of post-vaccination infection) even while he comes to grips with the implications for Australia at large (either that, or he is worried that his own vaccine will smite him in wrath if he fails to vocally praise it).

His readers reinforce this double-think, offering a portrayal of their mindsets which suggests that every argument against the vaccine - including that it will not relieve Australians of useless mask mandates, social distancing, and sporadic lockdowns absent a redefinition of those paradigms - can somehow sit side by side with an axiomatic insistence that universal vaccination is still a must. A sampling of the cognitive dissonance on display in the essay’s comments:

The sooner everyone gets vaccinated, the more likely it is that even more dangerous mutations will take place. We could and should hit that target around the end of this year.

Evidence would tend to confirm herd immunity is a myth […] So wear your bloody mask - you may asymptomatic but infectious!!

Yes - all this does is reinforce greatly the need for compulsory vaccination, protection under Workers Compensation if an ordered employee gets a bad reaction, protectiong for Drs who inisist their patients must get vaccinated not necessarily with the vaccine of their choice which my Doctor is saying to me, Vaccination Passports essential, compolsory Tracking Apps, Social Distancing if necessary etc and ...

Its the reason suppression via personal responsibility, prompt testing, isolation awaiting test results and continuous safe distancing with masks is the first step to 'normalcy'. No exceptions, even if vaccinated.

The message is twofold, everyone will be exposed to COVID ultimately and there is no "free rider" benefit for the unvaccinated = get the vaccine.

Since neither you nor anyone else benefits from your getting vaccinated, get vaccinated!²¹

These samples, again, were selected to highlight the apparent dissonance in the active worldview prevailing among the totalitarian-minded, lockdown-compliant Australian populace. Plenty of other comments miss Mannix’s point entirely, still clinging onto the fiction of a Covid vaccination threshold that somehow drives the virus into oblivion (sustained, some advocate, by perpetual national isolation), and clearly taking Mannix’s wishful “not 100%” mantra to imply “nearly 100%”:

Ie 60% vaccinated + 20% recovered cases = 80% with immunity (noting that vaccine and recovered are not 100% immune)

Thoughts anyone?

Paul, read the article - it answers your question!

Hi Diana, re-read but didn't see, maybe need to be more across this topic that I am to interpret.

Good article though

And others merely take the stand to lament the continued right of fellow citizens to question their public health authorities in public fora:

Unfortunately, 'free speech' experts don't require only a small fraction of time to write in comparison to science reporters, such as [Mannix].

Thanks to [unsuppressed high-profile dissenters], ordinary people are now bizarrely fighting for the right to become sick and spread disease [i.e. be a living organism, not a robot]. It's all about power and influence and we need to outsmart these pied pipers of disease.

On the other hand, there are a handful of comments which dare to voice the proposition that Australia, in response to these new realities, allow for medical choice. And one or two that go even further, advocating for an unqualified and final end of the state of emergency. And these comments receive, in turn, a handful of likes.

So, who knows? Maybe it will actually take more than a couple shifts for Australian police to finish rounding up the holdouts.

The example of Australia and New Zealand, of course, might not carry over to America to any significant degree. Here the vaccine-hesitant have already lived through three waves, and can observe for themselves that “life with SARS-CoV-2” is merely a synonym for “life” - despite the perpetual media reenactment of the filling of the suddenly critical-for-everyday-life Empty ICU Bed Somewhere Else™.

Nonetheless, it is a sign that the acknowledgement of the impending booster regime, and the shift from apparent state vaccination passports and mandates to peer- and organization-imposed pressure campaigns does not mean that the battle over universal vaccination is over.²² You can tell your roommate that the fan over the range in the kitchen doesn’t actually do anything, as it is not connected to an exhaust duct. He will still turn it on every time he burns his rice. Humans, on average, value their false cures just as much as true ones.

Thus, there are yet more victims who may be successfully swindled; and children, especially, should not be considered safe from the irrational fears of their booster-trapped parents, once the Emergency Authorization extends to the under-12 cohort.²³

1. Authors paywalled. “Title Paywalled.” (2021, August 16.) The Failing New York Times.

2. Aside from the possible high “long Covid” rate signal, which will still be unclear for a few more weeks (if the Israel Ministry of Health releases another update on their healthcare workers in a few weeks, that will provide a stronger signal).

Otherwise, the assertion that “breakthrough” infections are not a problem is based on my own analysis two Fridays ago (footnote 4), not on any outside source.

3. A conclusion which (surprisingly) has become all-but mainstream in the weeks following my claim!

4. (index link anchor)

5. See Midsummer Maladies.

6. Although the rollout of boosters among the elderly in Israel this month makes the over-60 rates a less useful indicator of 2-dose Covid vaccination efficacy.

7. See “Die Herd.”

8. An assessment of the TOGETHER Trial “ivermectin is a bust” bombshell is in draft.

9. My haters, if I could afford the advertising budget necessary to garner some, would say that I have arranged this entire construction in entirely the manner that allows me to be maximally conspiratorially-minded while appearing open to the current Covid vaccine efficacy signals. Perhaps they would have my number; the reader may judge for themselves.

10. (index link anchor)

11. Should I have used “strategic”? I honestly have no idea. I do not accept that there is a coherent difference in meaning between the two. Meanwhile, “tactical” is the more elegant-sounding adjective; “strategy” the more elegant-sounding noun.

12. I do not have a specific actor in mind for King John’s role - Biden?* Boris? Bibi? de Blasio? Readers may propose their own.

*Now available once again in “Malibu Masked” style.

13. See Klapper, Rebecca. “Over 900 People Have Gotten Third COVID-19 Vaccine Dose Before FDA Recommendation.” (2021, August 9.) Newsweek.

When the Delta variant started spreading, Gina Welch decided not to take any chances: She got a third, booster dose of a COVID-19 vaccine by going to a clinic and telling them it was her first shot. […]

Welch, a graduate student from Maine who is studying chemical engineering, said she has kept tabs on scientific studies about COVID-19 and follows several virologists and epidemiologists on social media who have advocated for boosters.

"I'm going to follow these experts, and I'm going to go protect myself," said Welch, a 26-year-old with asthma and a liver condition. "I'm not going to wait another six months to a year for them to recommend a third dose."

One might feel sorry for Welch, who must have little appreciation of the extent to which medicine and epidemiology do not really belong in the category of pure sciences in which she studies.

14. (index link anchor)

15. A recent appraisal of the protests in the UK, and the complicated local coverage surrounding them, is provided by Anna Brees in the interview conducted by Del Bigtree on August 11 at The Highwire.

16. See McLeod, Catie. “Police warn anti-lockdown protesters cooking up plans on encrypted apps.” (2021, August 17.) news.com.au.

17. See Kaye, Byron. Gralow, Jill. “'We are not the virus': Two-tier Delta lockdowns divide Sydney.” (2021, August 9.) Reuters.

18. See https://melbourneinstitute.unimelb.edu.au/publications/research-insights/ttpn/vaccination-report

19. (index link anchor)

20. Mannix, Liam. “Is the herd immunity dream dead?” (2021, August 10.) The Sidney Morning Herald.

21. An exaggeration, of course. The commenter is ascribing reduction of (already rare!) severe outcomes to the pro side of the Covid vaccine ledger, and not allowing for any possible items on the con side.

22. For healthcare workers and college students facing elapsing deadlines and scant local public support, of course, it is at its most critical phase yet.

23. What emergency, again?

/ Substack tracking profile scrambler link (?): Wiper blades (Walmart) /