17 Comments

Excellent read Chris… well done!

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BTW I know you or your friends will write back w/ all the real world data that supposedly proves your case, but I think you're missing my point. If your story is that an elephant walked through a crowded room, then I would expect that EVERYONE would have noticed - you wouldn't have trouble rounding up witnesses to an elephant walking through the room. And that's my point: the evidence for the safety and efficacy of a vaccine that BILLIONS of people took should be impossible to miss; the fact that this evidence isn't obvious is the problem. I should be struggling to find ANY unvaxx'd population that's doing better than the vaxxed, not the other way around. So I'm not arguing the particulars of your evidence; rather, I'm arguing a larger point: the evidence isn't what we'd expect, and that's a problem.

Look, if you told me an elephant walked through a crowded room, the fact that you could find a FEW witnesses who saw the elephant wouldn't reassure me at all. If 3 or 4 out of 100 potential witnesses saw that elephant, I'd doubt those witnesses - I wouldn't assume that they were more perceptive.

To illustrate my point by analogy, if I developed a safe & effective vaccine for cancer, you wouldn't be struggling to explain why cancer deaths hadn't dropped, nor would you struggle to explain why deaths hadn't fallen. Granted, COVID's never been as dangerous as cancer, so I admit some of it is that we were lied to about COVID in the first place, but the idea that we've been lied to isn't particularly reassuring now is it? I mean if they lied to us about COVID why should I trust them about the vaccines?

The problem here is that you're telling me an elephant walked through a crowded room and only 3 or 4 people noticed because you know elephants - it's hard to notice when they walk through crowded rooms. Your story doesn't make sense. What should be clear and obvious is obscure...WHY?

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It's interesting how you devote so much of your time to insulting your opposition; they don't do anything like that at all (in fact, they speak respectfully of you & link to your cite). In your experience, does the guy who's hurling all the insults have the better of the argument?

More importantly, I'm interested in the structure of the argument. If vaccines are safe and effective, then why do you have to go to such lengths to prove it? Shouldn't you simply be able to say, "Here's the COVID death rate and overall death rate in vaccinated populations and here's the COVID death rate and overall death rate in unvaccinated populations; now, it's not true that the former always beats the latter, but the trend's clear - it's not a correlation of 1, but it's awfully close"?

Instead, it's all sorts of excuses about why the expected correlation can't be found. (You didn't know that Israel is just a much healthier place to live? You do now!)

Again, is that the hallmark of the truth? Is your struggle to find POPULATION level data that proves your claims just something we should ignore? Should we fail to notice that you have to speculate over and over again as to why the POPULATION data doesn't fit your theory? You can tell me all the problems w/ the various studies; you can point to studies that "prove" your point, but you can't point to any real-world population level data (because that's messy or filled w/ confounding variables or whatever).

Sure, your story is possible, but is it truly plausible?

The unvaccinated aren't dead. Or dying. The vaccinated aren't living. Or healthy. At least, there's no discernible trend on each side's health. It's impossible to id a high vax or low vax population merely from their COVID deaths or overall death. If anything, low vax = better health as the African countries have great COVID #'s and low vax rates. (Again, not claiming this proves vax is bad; just saying that there's a disturbing lack of evidence for your side where there should be evidence for your side.)

Do see the problem? It takes - according to you - an extraordinary amount of expertise to see the benefits of vaccination, which doesn't make any sense. Your side should be obvious; my side should be struggling to find real-world proof.

Long and short, why are you struggling to explain the UK? Shouldn't that be obvious? (Like the general trend (which favors the vax) isn't seen here because everybody knows tea kills and they love tea or some other UK specific explanation).

I mean from my perspective your entire analysis fails the obvious counter: the UK keeps better stats and has publicized them more. Since there's every reason to believe Israel either doesn't know (worse stats) or lies (same stats but less transparency), why isn't THAT the explanation? The fact that you don't even mention the stats issue but talk about Israel's climate instead tells me that you were driving to support a specific conclusion.

To me, this is sort of a who are you going to believe - your lying eyes or me, the expert - situation. The real world should confirm your theories; it doesn't, so you keep trying to "explain" why the real world isn't as reliable as your theories. I have a problem w/ elevating theories and lab results above the real world.

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"your immune response has ceased to be trainable"

Even if true, the author appears to have misplaced the caveat "for this specific virus". Sneaky sneaky!

"a new pathogen with more than 30 mutations on the S protein evoked NO new immune response"

I read somewhere (I think it was up to Delta variant) that the T-cell epitopes had not changed at all. Cannot find that page / study now, but searching for omicron t-cell epitopes turns up

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/labs/pmc/articles/PMC8764507/

T cell epitopes in SARS-CoV-2 proteins are substantially conserved in the Omicron variant

where they observe, " In the Omicron variant, 80.4% (74/92) and 94.7% (178/188) of epitopes from the spike and nonspike proteins, respectively, were fully conserved, and 90.0% (252/280) of CD4+ T cell epitopes were completely conserved. These results indicate that the majority of T cell epitopes are considerably conserved in the Omicron variant."

Mentioning "30 mutations on the S protein" is all well and good but if said mutations do not change the epitopes the infected / phagocytic cells present to T cells via MHC then it's pretty much irrelevant.

My understanding is, B cells most reliably respond to **new** threats via T-cell co-stimulus. If T-cell stimulus remains largely unchanged (because the epitopes are pretty much the same), then to my way of thinking, "NO new immune response" is exactly what you'd expect.

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Ironically, it feels like many people who have clung to OAS have themselves become a one trick pony. I think we need to come to terms that Substack operates no differently than any other forms of media such as YouTube or Twitter, and because of that people have typecasted themselves to continue to cover topics that they believe provide them with a lot of attention. It's likely why OAS has sprouted up all over the place as a justification for what's happening with these vaccines, mostly because it may provide them some position in the dissenting COVID narrative. I think because of this they may not be able to let it go instead of examining studies and taking a more cautionary approach.

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Mar 7, 2022Liked by Brian Mowrey

I love how you get annoyed on things I would not even notice. I keep coming reading you because I really don't know what your position will be on anything until I read your position.

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