Yes but only ones without parents, so it's ok. (This was done again by Koprowski for polio.)
I anticipate being back to full time after the summer, yes - if so, I will turn them back on! Next month, on the other hand, will possibly have another two weeks of blackout. But everything is tentative!
Fascinating history - thank you for making it accessible to this engineer. I'm generally not the sort to be impressed by punchlines - mostly because I don't trust them unless I can see where they came from.
Thanks for the info. Everyone should have a historical primer before they start their careers in their selected fields. It would definitely help them advance the field. If you ignore the past knowledge, you will go down the rabbit hole like today.
Wow, frankly I am too dumb to understand and evaluate all of this. But I have a sincere question: if not OAS, how do we explain that the vaccinated are more like to get infected and even seriously ill than the unvaccinated, seven months after the vaccination? This seems to have been confirmed by several reports.
EDIT: do you believe it is just incorrect data interpretation?
To sum: If negative efficacy is true, that leaves whether *reinfections* are driving it still not demonstrated. So a reinfection-based theory (OAS) shouldn't be weighted over higher infections in general (first time + reinfection), and there's plenty of things that could drive that (ADE, innate immune deficiency, or non-development of cellular immunity (T Cells, especially tissue resident T Cells) after infection which is not OAS since OAS only comments on antibodies.) Also tolerance if you want to throw that in. Lots of available explanations.
As for higher likelihood of serious illness, in the pre-Omicron era at least that is in most cases statistical illusion. Either "not on deathbed" bias for boosters which makes the "2nd dosed + 6 months group" look bad (https://unglossed.substack.com/p/the-panera-kingdom-problem) or too much age-grouping.
This is exactly the type of detail that is needed to correct the errors and groupthinks of the past, rather than basing future developments on their faulty science.
Thank you! I hope to offer the reader a liberation from the predestined narrative that is always offered RE flu, so they can walk their own path, even if the end point winds up being the same or not.
Wow, this is legitimately the stuff that would be relegated to science textbooks and used as for graduate level courses!
I will have to read this again a few times, but the most important factor in this article is the degree of laboratory procedures highlighted here. If we talk about people not wanting to know how the sausage is made, most people don't want to know how the study is conducted.
And so most people just want the punchline- tell us what this all means. In doing so, we miss over all of the effort that went into reaching the conclusion. Science is messy, science is dirty, and to be quite honest science is VERY boring. I have legit fallen asleep in lab a few times when it becomes too routine (or maybe that's just me...).
No one likes to hear the boring details because it's not mixing a few beakers to make something super colorful, or any of those other experiments conducted by pop scientists (if you have to preface your job with "pop", you're not a deep scientist).
So this is the truth of the matter. This is all of the nitty and gritty stuff that lead to the practices we have today. We can see all of the faults, but we always examine these practices through the lens of what is available at the time, and how they proceed. I'll say in the lab I used to work in I had people only a few years older than me tell me the crude lab practices they had which involved blotting blood onto special paper and just holding it up to the light and go "well, that's what that is!"
It's unfortunate that this is generally missed when we discuss science to the general public. It's not about what study was conducted, but all of the processes needed. I think that's why your posts may go over people's heads, and yet it's pivotal to understanding how you go through a study. There's a reason why neutralization assays don't tell us the whole story. There's a reason why PCR tests are done the way they are (and why they probably shouldn't be used for tests...).
Well, at this point I'm not sure where I was going, but thank you for such a deep dive that apparently only appears to go even deeper!
I've been thinking of writing about OAS because of my post from two weeks prior, and so maybe I can gain some inspiration from this post!
And what do you mean by "schizophrenic research habits"?! No such thing!
Well, the title of my newsletter wasn't an accident, haha.
Still, I hope that by retaining at all times in this essay a concrete description of performed methods, the result rather than being tedious or boring serves as a rosetta stone between the lay person and the Sexy, Snot-Flinging, Mouse-Killing Carnaval that is early flu research
I think eve if people do not understand many of the protocols, they at least respect the process and how you reach the position you are in. It reminds me of things such as chemists who used their mouth to pipette toxic reagents, or one professor who kept talking about how they would just clean organic compounds from their hands by dipping them into buckets of acetone. There's a lot of accidents, and honestly deaths, that have occurred under the pursuit of science so that we have the type of practices we have today. And even still, we are nowhere near the apex of scientific discovery, and so in a few years many people may look back and see what is going on and question our practices today.
Your appreciation is appreciated. In particular I gave preference to the "raw" mouse results for Shope's swine-to-ferret paper, discarding his lower resolution bar graphs. It's just so much more impressive to actually see the mouse mortality resume/cut off almost on a dime (with evidence of a lull before the final 1918-flu-related wave circa 1924.
The insulin paper is daunting. "Moo-ey GBBS," as the noble folk of Ehthpanya would say.
"...and then inoculated members of a children's institution..." 😮 They tested children?!
You turned off automatic subscription payments for the summer, correct? Will you be turning it back on by Fall?
Yes but only ones without parents, so it's ok. (This was done again by Koprowski for polio.)
I anticipate being back to full time after the summer, yes - if so, I will turn them back on! Next month, on the other hand, will possibly have another two weeks of blackout. But everything is tentative!
Thanks for the response.
Yes, I assumed as much. 😠 😥
Fascinating history - thank you for making it accessible to this engineer. I'm generally not the sort to be impressed by punchlines - mostly because I don't trust them unless I can see where they came from.
A gratifying comment, thank you.
But - Punchline?
Meant to be a reference to Modern Discontent comment near the bottom. Oops!
Oh yeah - a common employment of the word but one that didn’t spring to mind
Thanks for the info. Everyone should have a historical primer before they start their careers in their selected fields. It would definitely help them advance the field. If you ignore the past knowledge, you will go down the rabbit hole like today.
Wow, frankly I am too dumb to understand and evaluate all of this. But I have a sincere question: if not OAS, how do we explain that the vaccinated are more like to get infected and even seriously ill than the unvaccinated, seven months after the vaccination? This seems to have been confirmed by several reports.
EDIT: do you believe it is just incorrect data interpretation?
This was addressed in "The Hot Spot," my vote is just innate immune impairment https://unglossed.substack.com/i/51614930/innate-immune-deficiency-and-critical-mass
To sum: If negative efficacy is true, that leaves whether *reinfections* are driving it still not demonstrated. So a reinfection-based theory (OAS) shouldn't be weighted over higher infections in general (first time + reinfection), and there's plenty of things that could drive that (ADE, innate immune deficiency, or non-development of cellular immunity (T Cells, especially tissue resident T Cells) after infection which is not OAS since OAS only comments on antibodies.) Also tolerance if you want to throw that in. Lots of available explanations.
As for higher likelihood of serious illness, in the pre-Omicron era at least that is in most cases statistical illusion. Either "not on deathbed" bias for boosters which makes the "2nd dosed + 6 months group" look bad (https://unglossed.substack.com/p/the-panera-kingdom-problem) or too much age-grouping.
Thanks! I guess OAS is commonly and incorrectly used by non-experts (like me) as a catch-all for any immunity impairment resulting from vaccination.
Right, there's a ton of "OAS is whatever you want it to be" out there - even in the published lit!
I’m so glad many others also engage in headstands outside their swimming pools.
This is exactly the type of detail that is needed to correct the errors and groupthinks of the past, rather than basing future developments on their faulty science.
"Age of Enlighten-meh" 😅😅
Thank you! I hope to offer the reader a liberation from the predestined narrative that is always offered RE flu, so they can walk their own path, even if the end point winds up being the same or not.
Honestly, it sounds like something Eric Cartman would say during a class presentation, even though I know what he was getting at!
Wow, this is legitimately the stuff that would be relegated to science textbooks and used as for graduate level courses!
I will have to read this again a few times, but the most important factor in this article is the degree of laboratory procedures highlighted here. If we talk about people not wanting to know how the sausage is made, most people don't want to know how the study is conducted.
And so most people just want the punchline- tell us what this all means. In doing so, we miss over all of the effort that went into reaching the conclusion. Science is messy, science is dirty, and to be quite honest science is VERY boring. I have legit fallen asleep in lab a few times when it becomes too routine (or maybe that's just me...).
No one likes to hear the boring details because it's not mixing a few beakers to make something super colorful, or any of those other experiments conducted by pop scientists (if you have to preface your job with "pop", you're not a deep scientist).
So this is the truth of the matter. This is all of the nitty and gritty stuff that lead to the practices we have today. We can see all of the faults, but we always examine these practices through the lens of what is available at the time, and how they proceed. I'll say in the lab I used to work in I had people only a few years older than me tell me the crude lab practices they had which involved blotting blood onto special paper and just holding it up to the light and go "well, that's what that is!"
It's unfortunate that this is generally missed when we discuss science to the general public. It's not about what study was conducted, but all of the processes needed. I think that's why your posts may go over people's heads, and yet it's pivotal to understanding how you go through a study. There's a reason why neutralization assays don't tell us the whole story. There's a reason why PCR tests are done the way they are (and why they probably shouldn't be used for tests...).
Well, at this point I'm not sure where I was going, but thank you for such a deep dive that apparently only appears to go even deeper!
I've been thinking of writing about OAS because of my post from two weeks prior, and so maybe I can gain some inspiration from this post!
And what do you mean by "schizophrenic research habits"?! No such thing!
*Looks at 8 windows with 15 tabs each...
Well, the title of my newsletter wasn't an accident, haha.
Still, I hope that by retaining at all times in this essay a concrete description of performed methods, the result rather than being tedious or boring serves as a rosetta stone between the lay person and the Sexy, Snot-Flinging, Mouse-Killing Carnaval that is early flu research
I think eve if people do not understand many of the protocols, they at least respect the process and how you reach the position you are in. It reminds me of things such as chemists who used their mouth to pipette toxic reagents, or one professor who kept talking about how they would just clean organic compounds from their hands by dipping them into buckets of acetone. There's a lot of accidents, and honestly deaths, that have occurred under the pursuit of science so that we have the type of practices we have today. And even still, we are nowhere near the apex of scientific discovery, and so in a few years many people may look back and see what is going on and question our practices today.
Your appreciation is appreciated. In particular I gave preference to the "raw" mouse results for Shope's swine-to-ferret paper, discarding his lower resolution bar graphs. It's just so much more impressive to actually see the mouse mortality resume/cut off almost on a dime (with evidence of a lull before the final 1918-flu-related wave circa 1924.
The insulin paper is daunting. "Moo-ey GBBS," as the noble folk of Ehthpanya would say.