Forever Spike v1.1
Another update. Plus: Sweden severe efficacy errors, and recommended reading.
An update notification, and a bit of topical tether-ball as the weekend dawns. I will be as terse as possible since I am working on the cancer theory post, which should go live soon (it will not be long, anyway; the theory is very simple).
“Forever Spike” update (again)!
I have edited my Forever Spike Disaster! theory to feature a more nuanced model for the mechanisms by which residual antibodies against spike could “disable” innate immunity. The original version was too simplistic and too “simple”-istic (it used the word “simple” too many times). These changes do not fundamentally alter the import of the theory, so no re-reading of the original post is hereby recommended. However, the curious can find the new, improved verbiage immediately after footnote anchor 14.
My declaration, last week, of ambivalence over the real-world signal for “negative infection efficacy” remains intact. An illuminating study appearing today provides a more up-to-date view of infection outcomes than previous studies have done, and yet does not support the theory that the Covid-vaccinated are worse-than-equal to the unvaccinated in susceptibility to infection.2 Looking at rates of “secondary infection” when delta was prevalent, the Covid-vaccinated infected were just as likely to transmit the virus to others in their household as the unvaccinated infected (from my very cursory skimming of the results; this is not a detailed review which accounts for selection bias etc.). But Covid-vaccinated household members did not get infected at as high a rate.
The seemingly most important chart in the study lacks the relevant percentage calculations which, in the pdf version, are provided in the corresponding results text on the same page:
The SAR [secondary attack rate] in household contacts exposed to fully vaccinated index cases [between May 24 and September 15] was 25% ([…]17 of 69), which is similar to the SAR in household contacts exposed to unvaccinated index cases ([…]23 of 100; table 2).
A caveat: I find it hard to reconcile the authors’ description of Table 2 as only consisting of delta cases with the numbers they provide for the ATACCC2 data set in Figure 1, especially the reference to “19 index cases.” This calls the time-frame into question (the ATACCC1 set used for other analysis extends back to last September).
Note that the similar overall “transmission rates” between the “fully” Covid-vaccinated and the unvaccinated obscure some interesting dynamics in the by-household-contact-Covid-vaccination-status transmission rates.
Note, also, that the partially Covid-vaccinated are the most “resilient” to secondary infection. The mysteriously popular theory that the “worry window” is filled to the brim with mis-categorized “breakthrough” infections once again fails to find support in the real-world. As does any signal for “Marek’s Effect Disaster!” - the unvaccinated index cases transmitted to more unvaccinated household contacts than did the Covid-vaccinated (8 out of 20 compared to 7 out of 20, if you include partially and fully Covid-vaccinated transmission rates together). Of course, all of this could be the product of the small scale of the study, various biases in who was recruited into the contact tracing program, and the high variability of how many days post 2nd-dose the “fully Covid-vaccinated” were in each household and how many of the unvaccinated were previously infected. Nonetheless, it’s getting past time for the Worry Window and Marek’s Effect Cassandras to be open about the lack of real-world support for their theories.
The study, amusingly (and among other flawed conclusions3), blames the decrease in Covid-vaccine infection efficacy on delta, rather than the obvious effect of time since 2nd-dose on efficacy.
Our findings [on different clearance schedules for alpha and delta “breakthrough” infections] help to explain how and why the delta variant is being transmitted so effectively in populations with high vaccine coverage.
Yet even if it has nothing to do with observable changes to “infection efficacy” over time, I am becoming open to the idea that the mainstream narrative that delta is more contagious turned out, for one reason or another, to be correct - and that the increase in case-rates over the summer in heavily vaccinated Israel and the southern US should not be taken as indirect evidence of “negative infection efficacy.” The most compelling argument in favor of this conclusion is the current wave in Russia, where Covid-vaccination rates are very low.
“More contagious,” however, need not be a product of the virus itself. Covid-vaccination is not the only “confounding factor” which can change how susceptible humanity at large is to whichever version of SARS-CoV-2 happens to be the flavor of the day. I believe the innate resistance of east and central Asia and California to the virus, which appears to have waned in 2021, could be a signal that there is a second type of “dark matter immunity” based on a higher competition for the “infection bandwidth” that is available to the virus.
This competition could come in the form of locally prevalent coronaviruses, or an “early leaked” version of SARS-CoV-2 which created overlapping T-Cell immune recognition, as hinted in the footnotes to last week’s post. Once these “competing” viral or immune response motifs began to fade in the protected regions, vulnerability to test-measurable infection with SARS-CoV-2 increased. It’s a working theory, anyway.
There is still one wrinkle in the signal - the suggestion, hinted at in my Forever Spike Disaster! theory, that the Covid-vaccinated are dysregulating the immune response of the unvaccinated. In this scenario, “negative infection efficacy” can be disguised by higher rates of infection among the unvaccinated caused by sensitization to “expressed” spike. This will be returned to, as there is relevant new evidence.
Bayes’ Revenge in Sweden!
A recently published study out of Sweden appears to show quite dismal drops in Covid vaccine “severe outcome efficacy” over time.5 This pricked my ears, as I have been quite bullish on sustained severe outcome efficacy since August.6 So, instead of reading the study, I immediately went to check if Sweden is actually having any cases since the summer, when Covid vaccine infection efficacy would have begun to wane among Swedish recipients.
No. To select a day which gives the extent of the scale of “Covid-19 deaths”:
The reason the study finds similar rates of severe outcomes and deaths is most likely because rates for both groups, the Covid-vaccinated and the unvaccinated, will consist nearly entirely of false positives. This is due to math, which is evil.7
When infections are this rare, most deaths and many hospitalizations will be false positives - deaths for “something else” that just happened to be proceeded by a positive test. When Covid-vaccine infection efficacy is still strong, as in the first months after the 2nd dose, false positives will only appear amongst the unvaccinated. When infection efficacy drops, the Covid-vaccinated will join the false positive party.
The happy lack of cases in Sweden since the summer is surely a sore disappointment from the perspective of any researchers who had happened to set up possibly the best population-wide study to date to capture changes to Covid vaccine efficacy in the first months after the second dose. As these authors seem to have done.
Had a wave of cases passed through in Sweden in the late summer and autumn, we would likely have excellent evidence not that severe outcome efficacy is plummeting in the months after the 2nd dose, but that it is resilient, and boosters are unnecessary.8
Oh, well.
Recommended Reading!
“Immunology 101.1,” by Colleen Huber. Huber gives a condensed grand tour of the cellular immune system, which puts (medical intervention-focused) adaptive immunity in its place:
This means that probably less than 0.004 % (or 4 in 100,000) of all cells in the blood are targeted by vaccines. In the generous scenario that all T-cells are stimulated and boosted by vaccines, that would raise the count to 0.1% (or one in one thousand) of all cells in the blood that would be stimulated by vaccines.
And, Huber accurately points out that even that .1% is not autonomous - it is mediated and orchestrated by the specialty cells of the innate immune system, who are the real brains behind the whole operation.
“Grieving the End of Progress,” by Mark Luterra. Luterra, whose comment under the user name dendroica indirectly inspired my Forever Spike Disaster! theory, has inaugurated a new substack devoted to negotiating the coming psychic and social transition out of industrialism. His older blog nonetheless contains many worthwhile gems of political insight. In “Grieving the End of Progress,” he offers a model of contemporary Western politics according to the grieving process, with reactionary politics and cancel culture as anger and various other trends as denial, etc. What is it that is being grieved? The transition from human progress to stasis and decline.
I am not sure it is compatible with my own, more simplistic framework in which the perceived end of (briefly revived) technological progress has merely prompted secular America to channel its need for progress back into a much older meme - the “arc of history,” which portrays the human soul as being ushered to a promised land of liberation from sin, via excellent laws and instagram story-replays. This arc has been latched onto at various times by slave-owner, Indian-killer and civil rights advocate alike (the religious revolt against the statues deifying the first secular humanists who created the religion of progress, of course, was only a matter of time); in either case it offers a real-world analog to the Christian belief in original sin and the afterlife.11 I would note that in the cultures of ancient Rome and Egypt - whose foibles resemble modern America’s in various ways - “progress” was not even a concept. Yet these societies weren’t any angrier than ourselves, even if just as unhappy and politically corrupt.12 Luterra’s model is darn good reading, nonetheless.
“The Women of Generation X,” by Toby Rogers. I encountered Rogers by way of Huber’s recent hat tip. This post was my first read - it offers a tidy model of late 20th-Century medicalization as being driven by corporations and the declining value of middle class labor:
Workers were not allowed to get sick anymore because that was depriving an employer of profits. Forbes literally ran a story saying that workers who got the flu stole $9 billion each year from their employers because of the lost productivity that these companies were entitled to.
Again, I am not sure if this theory-of-everything is quite compatible with my own (in this case, I think the factors that led to modern medical dependence are both far more complicated and mundane - the vanity of vaccine researchers, secularization once again, the mythologizing of Science in primary public education, intermittent self-aware public health totalitarianism, the physical addiction that is intrinsic to the prolongation of natural death, etc. etc. etc.), but it is a provocative argument for the influence of modern transformations of what “work” means.
“Barrett and Kavanaugh Supply Majority to Deny Religious-Liberty Claim on Vaccine Mandate,” (paywalled) by Andrew McCarthy. McCarthy meticulously explains the faulty, meta-procedural rationale cited by the two newest justices to deny relief to healthcare workers in Maine who will soon be fired for noncompliance with mandated participation in an already-failing medical experiment, with no option for religious exemption.
Despite being both a more sober and credulous take on the decision than I would offer (these two are obviously plants who were selected by the future global regime!), it is an exquisite deconstruction of the farce of their stated rationale:
The emergency docket entails cases that arise in exigent circumstances and must be addressed expeditiously, often by injunction applications, on schedules far tighter than what might generously be described as the Court’s customary pace of a hobbled snail. Barrett frets that when the Court takes the “extraordinary” step of entertaining such a case, the justices are put to the unwelcome burden of providing a “merits preview” — a forecast of how the case is likely to be decided if fully reviewed. This is said to be less than optimal because the Court must proceed “on a short fuse without benefit of full briefing and oral argument,” when, if they’d had more time to think it through, the justices might not grant review of the case at all.
Cue the violins. […]
Furthermore, who cares if the Court has to give a merits preview? It is a fact of life that emergency circumstances occasionally arise, forcing us mere mortals to do the best we can, ruefully realizing we could do better if only there were time for calm deliberation. Why should the Supreme Court, the last bastion for safeguarding our fundamental rights, be spared that burden? […]
And mind you, granting a preliminary injunction would not deprive the justices of their coveted full briefing; it would just mean that the unvaccinated medical professionals got to keep their jobs until the Court finally decided to either deny full review (in which case the injunction would lapse) or grant review and then rule on the merits.
Presumably Justices Barrett and Kavanaugh appreciate that when they exercise their “discretionary judgment” to duck a case, it doesn’t mean the case goes unresolved. There is still a winner and a loser. Here, overbearing government prevailed, and the loser was the Constitution.
And on that incredibly upbeat note: Happy Halloween weekends - and thanks for subscribing to Unglossed!
Such as:
Increasing population immunity via booster programmes and vaccination of teenagers will help to increase the currently limited effect of vaccination on transmission, but our analysis suggests that direct protection of individuals at risk of severe outcomes, via vaccination and non-pharmacological interventions, will remain central to containing the burden of disease caused by the delta variant.
“Covid-vaccination doesn’t work, but we should keep doing it and mix it in with all the other things that also don’t work, to boot.”
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See “Boostermania.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_rate_fallacy
“Severe outcomes” to infection with SARS-CoV-2 are likely to be false positives when local case rates are low - they are hospitalizations, intubations, deaths, etc. with a positive test for SARS-CoV-2, not from infection. More rigorous classification of “cases” of infection and “Severe Covid-19” can potentially lead to more accurate results, but in all likelihood measuring severe outcome efficacy in a given region is probably impossible outside of a wave. It will look strong when infection efficacy prevents false positives, it will look non-existent once infection efficacy wanes.
The study from Sweden counted severe outcomes and deaths as any hospitalizations and deaths occurring after a positive test.
“Methods: A retrospective cohort study was conducted using Swedish nationwide registries. The cohort comprised 842,974 pairs (N=1,684,958), including individuals vaccinated with 2 doses of ChAdOx1 nCoV-19, mRNA-1273, or BNT162b2, and matched unvaccinated individuals. Cases of symptomatic infection and severe Covid-19 (hospitalization or 30-day mortality after confirmed infection) were collected from 12 January to 4 October 2021.”
This would have ceased to be a correlate for actual severe outcomes to infection with SARS-CoV-2 by the end of May.
The outcome rates in the UK Health Security Agency still support this conclusion, but as mentioned last week those rates are no longer very reliable. See “(Not) Coming Up.”
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This model of understanding contemporary politics, I should mention, is not original - it is heavily shaped by Joshua Mitchell’s work, including American Awakening.
The Egyptians had their own afterlife, but it was quasi-material. The Romans had a performative trust in the ability of later generations of offspring to recall the works of the current. Modern secular Americans imagine future citizens of Safespacia gazing back at their current anti-racial instagram posts in admiration, or fashioning incredibly boring films about the time their workplace overcame structural racism, to the same ends. Both the Roman and American models of material afterlife were imperfect; but then, so was Egypt’s (see: Mertz, Barbara. Red Land, Black Land. “The Hekanakhte Letters.”)
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"Crackpot" only applies if you're wrong. If you're right, the proper term is "genius." Excellent analysis -- thanks.
The most interesting thing from these revelations is the reminder that research is continuing, and the many mysteries that currently produce the religious fervor will soon be replaced by guidance based on evidence instead of superstition and politics.
So do you recommend the jab for any particularly age groups, then?