21 Comments

Many thanks for such an informative post. I was wondering how the four hypotheses would affect different age groups.

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I think it was a mistake to discard your original hypothesis in the UK. In all age groups but Under 18 and 40-49, the overall case rates are declining. It's just that the Unvaccinated case rates are declining faster. I think this can entirely be explained by the actually non-immune portion of the "Unvaccinated" denominator being a very small portion of the overall number.

Using the UK Sero Prevalence data, I show that overall immunity in the population is over 90% in all groups and 96% or higher in the 80+ group and moreover the truly non-immune (no prior infection) make up between 5-20% of their "Unvaccinated" age group cohorts. Part one is here https://justguy.substack.com/p/what-does-unvaccinated-mean and consider it bait for vaccine proponents (while also being correct). Part two sets an lower bound on prior-infection case rates and part two attempts to tease out the cases rates among those with no vaccination but prior infection and those who are truly non-immune.

None of this means the vaccines cannot ALSO be losing efficiency, but it puts negative efficiency into a much more plausible arena - it is paradoxical for vaccines to have negative efficacy but hospitalizations and deaths still show efficacy if the vaccines were ACTUALLY causing more disease. This is an outcome I think isn't at all impossible in the future - I'm more or less expecting it - but it doesn't appear to be the case currently.

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Thanks for sharing these, and I'm pleasantly surprised to see my hypothesis incorporated into your thinking. My thought is that if the genetic vaccines truly are inducing negative efficacy via immune tolerance, the consequences for the vaccinated will become disastrously obvious at some point and the responsible vaccines will disappear from use in a giant scandal - and perhaps will be replaced by Novavax-type or even inactivated-virus vaccines. Tolerance will presumably fade eventually, so I don't think it will truly be a "forever spike" situation inducing tolerance in unvaccinated people.

If the superspreader hypothesis is real, the vaxxed/unvaxxed illness/death differential should disappear once a majority of unvaxxed have natural immunity. At that point (probably sometime in the next few months in the US) we will see whether the differential reverses which would indicate tolerance/immune suppression, original antigenic sin, antibody-dependent enhancement, or some other issue specific to the vaccines.

I won't be 100% convinced of negative-efficacy data until I see a chart that separates unvaccinated-naive from unvaccinated-prior-immunity people. It seems like people with prior immunity would self-select into the unvaccinated group, and given that we know natural immunity is superior that alone could lead to lower infection levels in that group.

I like your graphic - that is about what I would expect from immune tolerance. I'm also interested in understanding the degree to which induced tolerance might be protective against severe illness due to immune dysfunction/overreaction - in which case it might appear superficially as a feature rather than a bug.

I've never been convinced by the Marek's disaster scenario. For one, it is much more of an exception than a rule - much as was true of smallpox in terms of being eradicable through vaccination. For another, there are many important factors that are true of Marek's in chickens that are not true of SARS-CoV2 in humans. Below is a response I recently posted to another forum on this issue.

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Although I'm certainly not an expert on the level of Geert Vanden Bossche, I find the Marek's scenario unlikely for several reasons.

1. Natural immunity is superior to vaccine immunity, and we are rapidly reaching a point at which a majority of unvaccinated people have natural immunity. This is in contrast to the situation in chickens, in which the entire population turns over on average several times per year and so there is a constant influx of disease-naive birds and natural immunity plays a smaller role.

2. The concern is that a vaccine that reduces symptoms without blocking infection could select for more virulent strains that are capable of causing symptoms in vaccinated people - but that then are deadly to unvaccinated people. This is more likely if symptoms are required for spread - e.g. a virus that spreads through lesions or pustules. In the case of covid, which spreads through breathing and talking, suppression of symptoms may actually increase transmission as asymptomatic people are more likely to be out and about. So there should not be much selection for more virulent strains among vaccinated people.

3. The selective pressure for respiratory viruses to become endemic through increased transmissibility and decreased virulence over time is very strong, and while vaccination may interfere with this trajectory in harmful ways I would not expect it to destroy it entirely. Natural immunity against coronaviruses and influenza viruses is also "leaky" and of limited duration, and so leaky vaccination is not so much a special case as an inferior version of natural immunity. I would be much more concerned about a Marek's scenario if we had a leaky vaccine against Ebola, polio, or smallpox - diseases with a naturally high virulence and for which natural immunity is typically sterilizing (non-leaky) and lifelong.

4. We have been vaccinating with leaky flu vaccines for years without creating new lethal strains, and SARS-CoV2 is much more similar to influenza than to the carcinogenic herpes virus that causes Marek's in chickens.

5. Vaccine efficacy is rapidly waning to the point at which they are not merely "leaky" but might better be called "ineffective against everything except severe illness." In this circumstance there should be little if any selective pressure for increased virulence among vaccinated people. The primary selective pressure will be for evasion of vaccine-induced neutralizing antibodies, and these antibody-escape mutants should not in general cause more severe illness in unvaccinated people. (Although if leaky vaccines increase the total amount of virus in circulation, they will increase the overall mutation rate, which could lead to new strains emerging more frequently and potentially causing more frequent reinfection among both vaccinated and unvaccinated people. This is a problem but not on the level of Marek's.)

6. The Marek's scenario unfolded relatively slowly. It was not so much that the vaccines selected *for* hotter (more virulent) strains but rather that they failed to select *against* them. Because the vaccines suppressed symptoms, strains that would have been eliminated in unvaccinated populations because they killed birds too quickly were allowed to evolve and persist if they also increased transmissibility even slightly. Thus Marek's disease gradually became more deadly to unvaccinated birds over several decades of widespread leaky vaccination. So even if widespread leaky vaccination against influenza or SARS-Cov2 does have the effect of increasing virulence, I would expect this to occur over a years-to-decades timescale - whereas many of the other crisis scenarios we have been discussing could easily unfold over the next few months.

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