My point is mostly that the vaccine affects immune response to future infections, whether that be by not producing anti- N abs or producing fewer of them.
As for Whitaker he clearly states “ All Delta infections in our dataset were symptomatic, while 20/279 Alpha infections were asymptomatic”
"Your point" is sophomoric. Circulating antibodies fade in everyone according to how many long lived plasma cells colonized the bone marrow. It has no bearing on immunity to a respiratory virus.
Score on the symptomatic point acknowledged, however.
"Just how does one know that there is bias in the donor set? Well, look back at the graph from October, 2021. The S positivity (and hence Covid-vaccination rate) was virtually 100%."
I don't understand a "100 percent S positivity rate" proves that all of the donors were vaccinated. Infected people always get both S and N, right? So you could have 100 percent S positivity in a group, some members of which had just S (vaccination) and some of whom had both S and N (infection).
That is true - if unvaccinated donors are nearly 100% previously infected then they can still be in the sample (any less, and they can't be more than 1% in the sample or we would be able to see them). This still proves my point because it would mean the sample is biased - only vaccinated or previously infected unvaccinated. All I need to show is that it doesn't represent the UK at large; from there I have shown that it is possible that it does not represent the vaccinated as a whole either.
What if the Ab prevalence was already 99% at that time? Those data are from late 2021 and sars cov 2 was circulating already for 2 years. Pretty much everybody had met the virus at that time, and the tiny minority who was hiding in their doom's day bunkers actually are irrelevant for the question if the vaccinated were able to build N-Abs.
The rise in S abs tracks with the vaccine roll-out, not case rates at the time.
I don't think most people had been infected yet. Before Omicron, the virus usually burned out after each wave after only infecting 10% or so of people, at least in the locked down West. For UK children and teens, S positivity was only 19.9% and N positivity only 17.7% in April to Jun 2021 https://adc.bmj.com/content/early/2022/07/20/archdischild-2022-324375 That's the same time period when blood donors are climbing from 70 to 90% S positive.
Oh, so if a person is unvaccinated and has not caught covid (no S and no N), then they wouldn't show up in that chart at all? I guess the wouldn't.
I still don't know how you know that the unvaccinated weren't donating. I keep an eye on donation constraints (I am not vaccinated and would like to donate but I'm not allowed since I was in England during mad cow times), and I never have seen the unvaccinated being forbidden to donate blood.
It's self-selection. Same as in my example in a comment below - no one says people who don't want to eat at McDonalds can't go; but 100% of people in a McDonalds want to eat there (well, not really, but it's a thought experiment). When you are looking at voluntary activity you have bias built in.
I am not covid-vaccinated, but do wish to donate blood (but I'm not allowed to since I was in England during mad cow times). Maybe my situation affects my perspective.
Rather, that when they get an infection after vaccination, they are less likely to donate. So the percentage of N positive blood donors stays artificially low. I didn't notice until after I posted that the confidence bars for the by-age plot are consistent with this. You can see them grow in the young during the Delta era and grow up to the present for the old - that is consistent with donors dropping out.
I think the self-selection you hint to at the end is more simple. It is the same property that explained so many differences between "vaccinated" and "non vaccinated" as well. Certain social, political and economic groups behaved dramatically different during the last two years. Because they wanted and importantly could. Certain groups worked from home more than others - again because they could and wanted. Others could not and/or had no interest.
Mathew Crawford based on a CDC study shows that vaccinated were less likely to die in a car accident or homicide. The Dutch in official COVODI death research reluctantly observed that vaccinated were less likely to die in non-COVID related causes. Etc. Health/social/economic factors and behaviour matter.
So certain groups were less infected, but these groups were also the ones that were more frequent vaccinated. More left leaning, more towards desk jobs, more towards upper economic social circles, healthier, etc. Hence one reason why vaccines showed efficacy in Q2-Q3 2021 and saw it dropping later.
But hence why blood donors also had low N-antibodies. They were less infected as they are not a random selection of people from society. They oversample from the hyper-vaccinated / stay-at-home groups.
Omicron changed everything as everybody gets infected. There is no escape. And somewhere in the first half of 2022 also the behaviour changed in these isolating groups. They stopped isolating and got infected as catch up as they had less natural immunity. (Hence also why we see negative efficacy in the double/triple jabs in some studies.)
Alex also misinterpreted the Moderna study, which is a big reason he believes the vaccinated don't produce N-antibodies. You've written about that too, and based on that I cannot blame him as he in essence followed the Moderna conclusions (graph B) and not the raw data (graph A) which showed Moderna was wrong in its conclusions based on their own data.
Alex has many strengths, but he seems to be sometimes a bit too much "output" and not enough "feedback".
I agree that those biases apply, but I think they are diminished in the UK compared to the US, because the UK had few vax hesitant. Might be comparable to the Dutch. Moreover, it's hard to square that with "negative real-time efficacy" in the UKHSA numbers since last October. Though, I think that was all from broken denominators for the unvaxxed. And you could still square it with a difference for the blood donor set - the bias to donate blood goes with virus-avoidance, even if vaccination overall doesn't.
I think my theory is supported by the confidence intervals widening as I mentioned in the reply to Kareninca above. But having two theories for the bias against N-positivity is better than one.
Why would those biases not apply to the UK or Europe? With the exception of Austria there is no such deep divide by political colour as we have, but that doesn't mean there is no cohort bias between vaccinated and non-vaccinated.
With no intend of becoming political, that just reflects that Europe as a whole is more left wing add hence has a much higher trust in government. And hence vaccination-rates are higher. For me therefore the opposite seems more likely: that with so much willingness to vaccinate, it seems that there must be something even more 'odd' with the people who choose not to get a shot. In the US it may just be a reflection from living in a certain 'Red' area, but in Europe that is less likely. Not being vaccinated is more likely a deep choice of some sort.
But even if you are skeptical, off the bat, you see that just as in the US e.g. hispanic communities are less vaccinated, in Europe various non-western immigrants have far lower vaccinated rates. That is a huge cohort bias already.
That said, the broken denominators are a good point as well.
Happy to opine. It should be noted, that a related danger is still in play, which is IgG4 antibodies which induce tolerance. These don't help the virus enter cells but instead hide virus-infected cells from T Cells and other immune cells. This if anything is probably why there's (seemingly) more reinfections, Paxlovid rebound, longer infections, etc. https://unglossed.substack.com/p/boosting-tolerance-igg4
"It should be noted, that a related danger is still in play, which is IgG4 antibodies which induce tolerance. These don't help the virus enter cells but instead hide virus-infected cells from T Cells and other immune cells. This if anything is probably why there's (seemingly) more reinfections, Paxlovid rebound, longer infections, etc."
So the vax doesn't prevent you from making N-antibodies, but it induces the production of other ones that make your immune cells "blind" so you can have cells presenting/producing spikes floating around unchecked? That sounds pretty bad too!
The mRNA vaccines over-sensitize your B Cell pool (at least; potentially also Helper T Cells) with too much sustained antigen. So the B Cells switch to a IgG model that says "don't attack this." The spikes / virus floating around might still be neutralized but without cellular immune engagement you're fighting the infection with one hand behind your back.
So the N antibody question is important - it means that after infection and re-challenge with the virus, T Cells will see N and attack infected cells; that's good. But still probably not as good as it could be.
The question of whether Omicron spike induces new B Cell lines from naive B Cells, or merely remodels the original spike B Cell pool ("imprinting") is also important. So far it seems like it just remodels the pool, even in blood draws 46 days after infection https://unglossed.substack.com/p/the-actual-imprinting-study. So you have a "good" response to Omicron spike except it turns out it's all still T Cell-suppressing IgG4. But there could be a new wing of B Cells for the Omicron spike specifically that emerge later.
I think the unvaccinated will be fine. "Omicron" was so immune-evasive because it switched to the upper airway, where no one had strong mucosal immunity (tissue resident T Cells, which are rarely discussed but a huge part of what "immunity" actually is; these T Cell go live in your tissues and look for the virus to return; there's also IgA secreting B Cells that bolster mucosal immunity as well). So the unvaccinated have tissue resident T Cells covering the whole respiratory tract at this point. Whereas for the injected, once again, those T Cells could be sabotaged by IgG4 antibodies.
Correct as far as known. But cross-reactive, pre-existing T Cells responses can suppress symptomatic infection if they get a head start on replication - https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-04186-8
. These might not prevent having to eventually get a symptomatic infection but they still probably bolster protection. So there's an unknown grey zone, rather than it being a binary, and I would say that the "uninfected" overlap with the (previously-infected) immune to an extent.
A year ago I was predicting that it would do so 1 or 2 years down the road. I no longer think so.
First, my prediction was based on an assumption that Delta would continue to circulate and slowly mutate over time. Omicron is like a leap decades into the future compared to that scenario. So I think we would have seen it with Omicron if it was going to happen at all.
Second, I don't even agree with my original logic. In fact it probably would have been seen immediately if it was going to happen at all. But there was a lot of hype last year about the "Delta is poised to acquire" paper* and that was my mind-frame at the time.
Shimizu, et al, "The Japanese ADE" paper** failed to use naturally infected or naive controls (so did the "poised to acquire" paper) and so it's impossible to conclude that any of the results are specific to the injection-induced antibodies specifically.
There is, however, one potential group to worry about which is the very young victims of the "toddler" formulation. It could be that their complete naivety to coronaviruses will lead to results that more resemble the failed animal coronavirus vaccine trials and the 1960s RSV vaccine fiasco.
I know definitively that there are unvaccinated blood donors in the U.K., going every 3 months!
Giving blood is not weird - it’s good for you if you carry the genes predisposing to haemochromatosis and probably for a fair few other reasons too ( which I can’t remember now)!
I maintain that giving blood is objectively strange. Maybe if vampire aliens take over the Earth and officially declare that humans are now livestock that have to grow blood for their culinary pleasure, I will go along to get along at that point.
Except that study has huge flaws. The biggest one is that the raw data doesn't actually support their own conclusions. What the researchers did wrong is that upfront they intended to fit a curve onto the data. Their idea was that there is likely relation between how much virus you had in your body when infected vs whether you make N-antibodies and how much.
That is likely true, but they had so few samples that their fitted curves (Graph B) were pretty much meaningless. Looking at the raw data (Graph A) you see that 100% of the people who got infected after vaccinated and actually gotten enough virus replication to get likely symptoms, produced N-antibodies. 100%!
But because more people in the vaccinated group with very low virus amounts produced no N-antibodies, the overall curve looks as if it is producing N-antibodies less. This was basically an example of trying to fit a curve without sanity checking whether the curve-type is actually appropriate for the data.
There were more weaknesses. Brian point out the lack of time, but there is also that they don't record whether the person had symptoms meaning they included 'asymptomatic - I got it at the busstop by standing too close' types of cases.
The trial protocol should demand that recorded PCR+s were preceded by 48 hours of symptoms, per my understanding. That doesn't remove the obvious hazard that the false positive rate swamps the vaxxed due to rarer positive outcomes; and that would also match with the higher cycles (lower viral loads). You're right about the curve of course - rather than failure to sanity check I called it "stupid, intentionally deceptive."
I do not agree that a diminished acute antibody response implies shorter term protection. ALL antibodies are meant to fade out in the end; and then ramp up upon reencounter. Anything else is just internalized pro-vaccine Titer Anxiety propaganda.
Who cares about the Moderna paper. It doesn’t give timepoints between infection and the blood draw. Whitaker, et al., does.
Whitaker paper has COI. Also all his Delta patients were symptomatic so not exactly representative of the population at large. Moderna paper follow up was a median 53 days post dx. Good enough.
Anti-N abs wane faster than spike abs. The lower the max the faster you get to the point you must rely on memory B cells. The difference is a matter of days which means you risk more serious disease.
There is a lot immunologists don’t know. We haven’t seen many studies on the effect of the vaccine on anti-N memory B cell responses .
Also, we need studies on Omicron.
The key take away , just relying on Whitakers paper, is why are the vaxxed producing fewer anti-N abs, and is this also diminishing T-cell responses to the N protein?
We also know the vaccinated seem to have diminished TLR7 signaling, which is not a good thing for anti-viral defense
Why would you include patients that were NOT symptomatic? In classical medical definition this mean they are not sick/infected. They just test postive in a PCR test and hence were exposed. (Not to be mistaken with pre-symptomatic.)
But that is the same as that I can test positive for measles. I'm immune and hence would be asymptomatic, but I certainly can test positive. Immune responses are by definitions responses to exposure, and a PCR test merely tests exposure.
Without symptoms and just a PCR test you should not expect to make any N-antibodies. Hence you should not include these people.
Now there is the snag that people are notoriously poor at reporting symptoms, and hence asymptomatic people may in fact produce them. That si because they were not actually asymptomatic. As countless research showed with countless of illnesses, if you ask people whether they have symptoms from a list they suddenly do report having them. "Ah yes, I was indeed tired/had a headage/etc but thought it was unrelated." etc.
So the safest thing is to either only include symptoms or record the actual cycle threshold. It is extremely rare to have low cycle threshold and no symptoms.
Whitaker and Moderna both showed that if you had enough virons to have symptoms or low cycle threshold, you did produce N-antibodies with almost 100% certainty within a few short months.
"key take away" 1 No. Internalized Titer Anxiety. If you are making abs at all you have made germinal centers, you have made long lived Plasma Cells, you have made memory B Cells, you have made T Cells, all keyed to the N protein. You have an immune response to the N protein and it is going to protect or not according to your individual biology. Titer is nothing. Titer has never been anything. It is status-envy channeled into vaccine propaganda. 2 Blatant goalpost-shifting. The myth that Whitaker et al rebuts is "can't make N antibodies." Not "cant make as much as cool kids, losers nanana."
"has COI" ALL papers should always be regarded with a measure of suspicion. This is just taking your ball and going home.
"all his Delta patients were symptomatic" Totally invented out of thin air. "A random sample of vaccine-eligible individuals identified from community testing data who had tested PCR-positive" - no reference to symptoms. And who is the "he"? Did you even look at the paper itself (no, obviously)?
"Moderna paper follow up was a median 53 days post dx. Good enough." No it isn't. The half under the 54 day mark had 18% lower seropositivity. So what is the time from PCR+ to blood draw of the half that were less than 53 days? "Median 53" is not informative. You need a hard limit - zero early draws because they are before seroconversion can take place. "Oh look, all students were "median 2 hours from starting their 1 hour test" ok How many were still under the given hour? 1 of them? All of them?
The authors of the Moderna paper DON'T give us this information. It's intrinsically damning.
That's on top of this being winter, 20/21 infection outcomes. If "studies of infections during super-juiced S antibodies" is the era we'll base our understanding off of, we might as well all hop over to MedPage and troll the comments saying the vaxxed don't get infected or transmit, and they have lower viral loads!
"For newer readers, who may not remember why they subscribed and may not understand why they are reading anti- “The Official Anti-Covid-vaccine Narrative” dissent in an anti-Covid-vaccine journal, here is the timeline of events:"
LOL, it can get confusing these days when people on the same general side disagree. There is room in Team Reality for some debate over finer scientific points, so long as we remember who the true enemy is. Evil is evil, scientific error in good will is something else.
Berenson has his issues, with his obstinacy about IVM being the biggest one for me. Still, I will forever respect and appreciate him for being an early prominent voice against the worst of the pandemic madness. He was there at a time we all needed that badly.
Of course, he was hardly the only wise observer! Unfortunately, I wasn't following you in 2020. Wish I had been. Berenson was in the right place at the right time with the right criticism, causing our overlords considerable heartburn. I'm grateful to everyone who's stood up no matter the platform size.
Silver lining to Covidstan: I've discovered so many great thinkers, writers, and speakers I never would have before.
I've mentioned this several times as a point of contention, but Alex Berenson was one of the first people to argue that the lack of N antibodies was an indication of OAS. After that, many people seized upon Alex's work and used it as an example of OAS, thus leading to a consensus that OAS is in fact occurring.
Then when people such as yourself made comments refuting such claims, it became an issue of existence over substance. Everyone was suggesting that OAS is a thing, so clearly it's a thing (to put it one way). And thus the false notion that the N antibodies had any association to OAS was strangely born and continued to be perpetrated.
I'll say that was a reminder that many people may not read studies to take a deeper look. It was generally accepted that was what was happening and now we have OAS running around going through more iterations that the COVID variants themselves.
From what I can tell, and as you mentioned here, Alex never appeared to have corrected for that initial mistake, but now is building off of it which should raise some criticisms, so thanks for at least providing some pushback.
You didn't comment on the Indian data, and thus didn't address a big part of Berenson's point, his belief that the more "traditional" vaccines elicited a different immune response than the mRNA vaccines. Even if the blood donor data is junk, in your opinion, isn't it of some interest that there would be this striking difference between the Indian data and British data?
True, I didn't. But they aren't truly comparable. Berenson isn't showing you, "Here is a random survey from India, here is a random survey from the UK." He is comparing a survey in one country with clearly self-biased donors from another.
Central Asia is also a bit of a Bermuda Triangle as far as pre-2021 infection rates, with stratospheric seropositivity rates in urban areas despite few reported cases https://www.icddrb.org/news-and-events/news?id=878 :
"The overall adjusted seroprevalence among 3,220 participants was 68% with higher seropositivity in Dhaka (71%) than in Chattogram (55%)." - October 2020 and February 2021 in Bangladesh, before the vaccines, and well before Berenson's survey.
So inferring anything at all about the effect of vaccine platforms used in India based off of a summer, 2021 (between 14 June and 6 July 2021) survey of multiple districts with a shotgun urban/rural spread isn't reliable. Yes, the spring wave had just passed, but the pre-spring wave positivity rate might have been just as high.
'anti- “The Official Anti-Covid-vaccine Narrative” dissent in an anti-Covid-vaccine journal'
I think of you as our devil's advocate. Keeping us honest. From a dictionary: 'One who debates from a view which he or she may not actually hold, usually to determine its validity or simply for the sake of argument.' It's a valuable role.
It's kind of discouraging that so many on Team Skeptic expect everybody to hew to an identical narrative. That's one of the things we criticize about Team Mainstream Narrative, after all.
I've raised some concerns before when viewing some of these conferences, although I'll admit I have only watched a few, but I always thought it was a bit strange that no one really provided criticisms or pushback to people. The only main criticism has been against Dr. Ardis and in some cases it was seen as being mild in many instances. Team Skeptic should itself provide some skepticism to each others work in order to allow for the best ideas to push through.
Not being a paid subscriber, I can't comment on Berenson's article, so I will inflict my sarcasm on you. He quotes some paper or other: 'Researchers [said?] that mice which produced both anti-N and anti-S antibodies had “better viral control [than those that had anti-S antibodies alone], including against the Omicron variant.”'
Well, duh!
At the risk of sounding stupid, am I the only one who thinks this is so patently obvious that it doesn't need saying? It's the reason why I initially became an mRNA vax skeptic, because natural immunity gives you *both* (and other good stuff besides), and PTB were claiming the spike-based vaccines had better protection.
Shame on you. Don't you want to pay to have someone tell you over and over how much their life revolves around their access to a totally different platform?
Agree that the mouse (and hamster) study results were pretty obvious - marginal efficacy from N alone, marginal improvement in S+N vs. S alone thanks to T Cell engagement against N.
It's also a weird take, to say that Omicron induced N antibody is the thing that reduced mortality as opposed to Omicron itself. Then why did the unvaccinated benefit? But that would require acknowledging severe efficacy in the pre-Omicron era, which he will never do.
I do find it quite ironic that his criticisms of Ivermectin were generally met with, "This was a bad take! I'm only staying subscribed to comment!" Ok? So you're paying to be on a social media platform? Quite ironic really.
My last sentence just generally refers to the fact that his thinking is poisoned by not acknowledging severe efficacy. So he doesn't see unvaccinated severe outcome rates as needing to be in his model at any point. This doesn't actually match the language I used, so I'm being a bit imprecise here in comment chat mode.
YES - such Alex Berenson nonsense! I never understood how he made such a big deal about blood donors (and people gobbled it up). Your last sentence... that’s literally all that’s needed to solve the great mystery. 🤦♀️
Meaning the "This Blood Donor Nonsense Is Totally Dumb" part?
I don't know whether to be surprised by his latching onto the data, or the reception. A lot comes down to his (and many researchers, and who knows what portion of libertarian-leaning substack readers) probably never having worked a real job. For example if you work at McDonalds as a teen, you understand bias: You don't think, Holy cow, I thought the people in my city liked lots of different food, apparently they only like McDonalds! Also my city gets younger between early breakfast and late night dinner every day! This is crazy!
'Alex Berenson (who, thank God, seems to have finally discovered that not just his iPhone can be used to generate screen-captures for blogs, any actual computer can do it too)'
Har! I've complained about that forever. Plus he needs to put some sort of a border around his images because it's hard to tell them from the text or from each other.
My point is mostly that the vaccine affects immune response to future infections, whether that be by not producing anti- N abs or producing fewer of them.
As for Whitaker he clearly states “ All Delta infections in our dataset were symptomatic, while 20/279 Alpha infections were asymptomatic”
Maybe you should read it again.
Your a jerk so our discussion is over
"Your point" is sophomoric. Circulating antibodies fade in everyone according to how many long lived plasma cells colonized the bone marrow. It has no bearing on immunity to a respiratory virus.
Score on the symptomatic point acknowledged, however.
So you are saying that the sort of people who would donate blood are less likely as a whole to catch covid?
"Just how does one know that there is bias in the donor set? Well, look back at the graph from October, 2021. The S positivity (and hence Covid-vaccination rate) was virtually 100%."
I don't understand a "100 percent S positivity rate" proves that all of the donors were vaccinated. Infected people always get both S and N, right? So you could have 100 percent S positivity in a group, some members of which had just S (vaccination) and some of whom had both S and N (infection).
That is true - if unvaccinated donors are nearly 100% previously infected then they can still be in the sample (any less, and they can't be more than 1% in the sample or we would be able to see them). This still proves my point because it would mean the sample is biased - only vaccinated or previously infected unvaccinated. All I need to show is that it doesn't represent the UK at large; from there I have shown that it is possible that it does not represent the vaccinated as a whole either.
What if the Ab prevalence was already 99% at that time? Those data are from late 2021 and sars cov 2 was circulating already for 2 years. Pretty much everybody had met the virus at that time, and the tiny minority who was hiding in their doom's day bunkers actually are irrelevant for the question if the vaccinated were able to build N-Abs.
The rise in S abs tracks with the vaccine roll-out, not case rates at the time.
I don't think most people had been infected yet. Before Omicron, the virus usually burned out after each wave after only infecting 10% or so of people, at least in the locked down West. For UK children and teens, S positivity was only 19.9% and N positivity only 17.7% in April to Jun 2021 https://adc.bmj.com/content/early/2022/07/20/archdischild-2022-324375 That's the same time period when blood donors are climbing from 70 to 90% S positive.
Oh, so if a person is unvaccinated and has not caught covid (no S and no N), then they wouldn't show up in that chart at all? I guess the wouldn't.
I still don't know how you know that the unvaccinated weren't donating. I keep an eye on donation constraints (I am not vaccinated and would like to donate but I'm not allowed since I was in England during mad cow times), and I never have seen the unvaccinated being forbidden to donate blood.
It's self-selection. Same as in my example in a comment below - no one says people who don't want to eat at McDonalds can't go; but 100% of people in a McDonalds want to eat there (well, not really, but it's a thought experiment). When you are looking at voluntary activity you have bias built in.
I am not covid-vaccinated, but do wish to donate blood (but I'm not allowed to since I was in England during mad cow times). Maybe my situation affects my perspective.
What?
All of us English people who were in England are not allowed to give blood.
You learn something every day.
Rather, that when they get an infection after vaccination, they are less likely to donate. So the percentage of N positive blood donors stays artificially low. I didn't notice until after I posted that the confidence bars for the by-age plot are consistent with this. You can see them grow in the young during the Delta era and grow up to the present for the old - that is consistent with donors dropping out.
I think the self-selection you hint to at the end is more simple. It is the same property that explained so many differences between "vaccinated" and "non vaccinated" as well. Certain social, political and economic groups behaved dramatically different during the last two years. Because they wanted and importantly could. Certain groups worked from home more than others - again because they could and wanted. Others could not and/or had no interest.
Mathew Crawford based on a CDC study shows that vaccinated were less likely to die in a car accident or homicide. The Dutch in official COVODI death research reluctantly observed that vaccinated were less likely to die in non-COVID related causes. Etc. Health/social/economic factors and behaviour matter.
So certain groups were less infected, but these groups were also the ones that were more frequent vaccinated. More left leaning, more towards desk jobs, more towards upper economic social circles, healthier, etc. Hence one reason why vaccines showed efficacy in Q2-Q3 2021 and saw it dropping later.
But hence why blood donors also had low N-antibodies. They were less infected as they are not a random selection of people from society. They oversample from the hyper-vaccinated / stay-at-home groups.
Omicron changed everything as everybody gets infected. There is no escape. And somewhere in the first half of 2022 also the behaviour changed in these isolating groups. They stopped isolating and got infected as catch up as they had less natural immunity. (Hence also why we see negative efficacy in the double/triple jabs in some studies.)
Alex also misinterpreted the Moderna study, which is a big reason he believes the vaccinated don't produce N-antibodies. You've written about that too, and based on that I cannot blame him as he in essence followed the Moderna conclusions (graph B) and not the raw data (graph A) which showed Moderna was wrong in its conclusions based on their own data.
Alex has many strengths, but he seems to be sometimes a bit too much "output" and not enough "feedback".
I agree that those biases apply, but I think they are diminished in the UK compared to the US, because the UK had few vax hesitant. Might be comparable to the Dutch. Moreover, it's hard to square that with "negative real-time efficacy" in the UKHSA numbers since last October. Though, I think that was all from broken denominators for the unvaxxed. And you could still square it with a difference for the blood donor set - the bias to donate blood goes with virus-avoidance, even if vaccination overall doesn't.
I think my theory is supported by the confidence intervals widening as I mentioned in the reply to Kareninca above. But having two theories for the bias against N-positivity is better than one.
Why would those biases not apply to the UK or Europe? With the exception of Austria there is no such deep divide by political colour as we have, but that doesn't mean there is no cohort bias between vaccinated and non-vaccinated.
With no intend of becoming political, that just reflects that Europe as a whole is more left wing add hence has a much higher trust in government. And hence vaccination-rates are higher. For me therefore the opposite seems more likely: that with so much willingness to vaccinate, it seems that there must be something even more 'odd' with the people who choose not to get a shot. In the US it may just be a reflection from living in a certain 'Red' area, but in Europe that is less likely. Not being vaccinated is more likely a deep choice of some sort.
But even if you are skeptical, off the bat, you see that just as in the US e.g. hispanic communities are less vaccinated, in Europe various non-western immigrants have far lower vaccinated rates. That is a huge cohort bias already.
That said, the broken denominators are a good point as well.
Thank you for your reply‼️ Hopefully, that is one of many risks we can remove from the list‼️
Happy to opine. It should be noted, that a related danger is still in play, which is IgG4 antibodies which induce tolerance. These don't help the virus enter cells but instead hide virus-infected cells from T Cells and other immune cells. This if anything is probably why there's (seemingly) more reinfections, Paxlovid rebound, longer infections, etc. https://unglossed.substack.com/p/boosting-tolerance-igg4
Hi Brian,
"It should be noted, that a related danger is still in play, which is IgG4 antibodies which induce tolerance. These don't help the virus enter cells but instead hide virus-infected cells from T Cells and other immune cells. This if anything is probably why there's (seemingly) more reinfections, Paxlovid rebound, longer infections, etc."
So the vax doesn't prevent you from making N-antibodies, but it induces the production of other ones that make your immune cells "blind" so you can have cells presenting/producing spikes floating around unchecked? That sounds pretty bad too!
The mRNA vaccines over-sensitize your B Cell pool (at least; potentially also Helper T Cells) with too much sustained antigen. So the B Cells switch to a IgG model that says "don't attack this." The spikes / virus floating around might still be neutralized but without cellular immune engagement you're fighting the infection with one hand behind your back.
So the N antibody question is important - it means that after infection and re-challenge with the virus, T Cells will see N and attack infected cells; that's good. But still probably not as good as it could be.
The question of whether Omicron spike induces new B Cell lines from naive B Cells, or merely remodels the original spike B Cell pool ("imprinting") is also important. So far it seems like it just remodels the pool, even in blood draws 46 days after infection https://unglossed.substack.com/p/the-actual-imprinting-study. So you have a "good" response to Omicron spike except it turns out it's all still T Cell-suppressing IgG4. But there could be a new wing of B Cells for the Omicron spike specifically that emerge later.
Thanks
I did read that many of the vaccinated are getting asymptomatic reinfection. Is this also a risk for unvaccinated? Would Ivermectin help?
I think the unvaccinated will be fine. "Omicron" was so immune-evasive because it switched to the upper airway, where no one had strong mucosal immunity (tissue resident T Cells, which are rarely discussed but a huge part of what "immunity" actually is; these T Cell go live in your tissues and look for the virus to return; there's also IgA secreting B Cells that bolster mucosal immunity as well). So the unvaccinated have tissue resident T Cells covering the whole respiratory tract at this point. Whereas for the injected, once again, those T Cells could be sabotaged by IgG4 antibodies.
"So the unvaccinated have tissue resident T Cells covering the whole respiratory tract at this point."
The unvaccinated who have caught covid have those tissue resident T cells. Not the unvaccinated who have never caught covid. Is that right?
Correct as far as known. But cross-reactive, pre-existing T Cells responses can suppress symptomatic infection if they get a head start on replication - https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-04186-8
. These might not prevent having to eventually get a symptomatic infection but they still probably bolster protection. So there's an unknown grey zone, rather than it being a binary, and I would say that the "uninfected" overlap with the (previously-infected) immune to an extent.
Are you of the opinion that ADE will not occur in the vaccinated❓❓❓https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=B-ve5hZmSnc&t=4s
A year ago I was predicting that it would do so 1 or 2 years down the road. I no longer think so.
First, my prediction was based on an assumption that Delta would continue to circulate and slowly mutate over time. Omicron is like a leap decades into the future compared to that scenario. So I think we would have seen it with Omicron if it was going to happen at all.
Second, I don't even agree with my original logic. In fact it probably would have been seen immediately if it was going to happen at all. But there was a lot of hype last year about the "Delta is poised to acquire" paper* and that was my mind-frame at the time.
Shimizu, et al, "The Japanese ADE" paper** failed to use naturally infected or naive controls (so did the "poised to acquire" paper) and so it's impossible to conclude that any of the results are specific to the injection-induced antibodies specifically.
There is, however, one potential group to worry about which is the very young victims of the "toddler" formulation. It could be that their complete naivety to coronaviruses will lead to results that more resemble the failed animal coronavirus vaccine trials and the 1960s RSV vaccine fiasco.
*https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.08.22.457114v1
**https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-19993-w
I know definitively that there are unvaccinated blood donors in the U.K., going every 3 months!
Giving blood is not weird - it’s good for you if you carry the genes predisposing to haemochromatosis and probably for a fair few other reasons too ( which I can’t remember now)!
I maintain that giving blood is objectively strange. Maybe if vampire aliens take over the Earth and officially declare that humans are now livestock that have to grow blood for their culinary pleasure, I will go along to get along at that point.
However, on-topic dissent is always welcome here.
The vaccinated generate fewer n-abs which probably mean they are less protective and for a shorter period.
Also this study from the Moderna trial (pre-Omicron/Delta) show the vaxxed were less likely to produce N-abs
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.04.18.22271936v1
Except that study has huge flaws. The biggest one is that the raw data doesn't actually support their own conclusions. What the researchers did wrong is that upfront they intended to fit a curve onto the data. Their idea was that there is likely relation between how much virus you had in your body when infected vs whether you make N-antibodies and how much.
That is likely true, but they had so few samples that their fitted curves (Graph B) were pretty much meaningless. Looking at the raw data (Graph A) you see that 100% of the people who got infected after vaccinated and actually gotten enough virus replication to get likely symptoms, produced N-antibodies. 100%!
But because more people in the vaccinated group with very low virus amounts produced no N-antibodies, the overall curve looks as if it is producing N-antibodies less. This was basically an example of trying to fit a curve without sanity checking whether the curve-type is actually appropriate for the data.
There were more weaknesses. Brian point out the lack of time, but there is also that they don't record whether the person had symptoms meaning they included 'asymptomatic - I got it at the busstop by standing too close' types of cases.
Granted sample size wasn't optimal and viral load had something to do with it (vax IgG is most protective in lungs and serum)
As for symptoms the only participants subject to PCR testing in trial were symptomatic. Thus all positives had symptoms
The trial protocol should demand that recorded PCR+s were preceded by 48 hours of symptoms, per my understanding. That doesn't remove the obvious hazard that the false positive rate swamps the vaxxed due to rarer positive outcomes; and that would also match with the higher cycles (lower viral loads). You're right about the curve of course - rather than failure to sanity check I called it "stupid, intentionally deceptive."
I do not agree that a diminished acute antibody response implies shorter term protection. ALL antibodies are meant to fade out in the end; and then ramp up upon reencounter. Anything else is just internalized pro-vaccine Titer Anxiety propaganda.
Who cares about the Moderna paper. It doesn’t give timepoints between infection and the blood draw. Whitaker, et al., does.
Whitaker paper has COI. Also all his Delta patients were symptomatic so not exactly representative of the population at large. Moderna paper follow up was a median 53 days post dx. Good enough.
Anti-N abs wane faster than spike abs. The lower the max the faster you get to the point you must rely on memory B cells. The difference is a matter of days which means you risk more serious disease.
There is a lot immunologists don’t know. We haven’t seen many studies on the effect of the vaccine on anti-N memory B cell responses .
Also, we need studies on Omicron.
The key take away , just relying on Whitakers paper, is why are the vaxxed producing fewer anti-N abs, and is this also diminishing T-cell responses to the N protein?
We also know the vaccinated seem to have diminished TLR7 signaling, which is not a good thing for anti-viral defense
Why would you include patients that were NOT symptomatic? In classical medical definition this mean they are not sick/infected. They just test postive in a PCR test and hence were exposed. (Not to be mistaken with pre-symptomatic.)
But that is the same as that I can test positive for measles. I'm immune and hence would be asymptomatic, but I certainly can test positive. Immune responses are by definitions responses to exposure, and a PCR test merely tests exposure.
Without symptoms and just a PCR test you should not expect to make any N-antibodies. Hence you should not include these people.
Now there is the snag that people are notoriously poor at reporting symptoms, and hence asymptomatic people may in fact produce them. That si because they were not actually asymptomatic. As countless research showed with countless of illnesses, if you ask people whether they have symptoms from a list they suddenly do report having them. "Ah yes, I was indeed tired/had a headage/etc but thought it was unrelated." etc.
So the safest thing is to either only include symptoms or record the actual cycle threshold. It is extremely rare to have low cycle threshold and no symptoms.
Whitaker and Moderna both showed that if you had enough virons to have symptoms or low cycle threshold, you did produce N-antibodies with almost 100% certainty within a few short months.
Yet some studies have shown asymptomatic have similar viral loads and do seroconvert.
"key take away" 1 No. Internalized Titer Anxiety. If you are making abs at all you have made germinal centers, you have made long lived Plasma Cells, you have made memory B Cells, you have made T Cells, all keyed to the N protein. You have an immune response to the N protein and it is going to protect or not according to your individual biology. Titer is nothing. Titer has never been anything. It is status-envy channeled into vaccine propaganda. 2 Blatant goalpost-shifting. The myth that Whitaker et al rebuts is "can't make N antibodies." Not "cant make as much as cool kids, losers nanana."
"has COI" ALL papers should always be regarded with a measure of suspicion. This is just taking your ball and going home.
"all his Delta patients were symptomatic" Totally invented out of thin air. "A random sample of vaccine-eligible individuals identified from community testing data who had tested PCR-positive" - no reference to symptoms. And who is the "he"? Did you even look at the paper itself (no, obviously)?
"Moderna paper follow up was a median 53 days post dx. Good enough." No it isn't. The half under the 54 day mark had 18% lower seropositivity. So what is the time from PCR+ to blood draw of the half that were less than 53 days? "Median 53" is not informative. You need a hard limit - zero early draws because they are before seroconversion can take place. "Oh look, all students were "median 2 hours from starting their 1 hour test" ok How many were still under the given hour? 1 of them? All of them?
The authors of the Moderna paper DON'T give us this information. It's intrinsically damning.
That's on top of this being winter, 20/21 infection outcomes. If "studies of infections during super-juiced S antibodies" is the era we'll base our understanding off of, we might as well all hop over to MedPage and troll the comments saying the vaxxed don't get infected or transmit, and they have lower viral loads!
"For newer readers, who may not remember why they subscribed and may not understand why they are reading anti- “The Official Anti-Covid-vaccine Narrative” dissent in an anti-Covid-vaccine journal, here is the timeline of events:"
LOL, it can get confusing these days when people on the same general side disagree. There is room in Team Reality for some debate over finer scientific points, so long as we remember who the true enemy is. Evil is evil, scientific error in good will is something else.
Berenson has his issues, with his obstinacy about IVM being the biggest one for me. Still, I will forever respect and appreciate him for being an early prominent voice against the worst of the pandemic madness. He was there at a time we all needed that badly.
Well, I was ranting about the absurdity of "stop the spread" in March, 2020 as well - I just didn't have a platform at the time.
Of course, he was hardly the only wise observer! Unfortunately, I wasn't following you in 2020. Wish I had been. Berenson was in the right place at the right time with the right criticism, causing our overlords considerable heartburn. I'm grateful to everyone who's stood up no matter the platform size.
Silver lining to Covidstan: I've discovered so many great thinkers, writers, and speakers I never would have before.
I've mentioned this several times as a point of contention, but Alex Berenson was one of the first people to argue that the lack of N antibodies was an indication of OAS. After that, many people seized upon Alex's work and used it as an example of OAS, thus leading to a consensus that OAS is in fact occurring.
Then when people such as yourself made comments refuting such claims, it became an issue of existence over substance. Everyone was suggesting that OAS is a thing, so clearly it's a thing (to put it one way). And thus the false notion that the N antibodies had any association to OAS was strangely born and continued to be perpetrated.
I'll say that was a reminder that many people may not read studies to take a deeper look. It was generally accepted that was what was happening and now we have OAS running around going through more iterations that the COVID variants themselves.
From what I can tell, and as you mentioned here, Alex never appeared to have corrected for that initial mistake, but now is building off of it which should raise some criticisms, so thanks for at least providing some pushback.
Excellent analysis. Thanks.
You didn't comment on the Indian data, and thus didn't address a big part of Berenson's point, his belief that the more "traditional" vaccines elicited a different immune response than the mRNA vaccines. Even if the blood donor data is junk, in your opinion, isn't it of some interest that there would be this striking difference between the Indian data and British data?
True, I didn't. But they aren't truly comparable. Berenson isn't showing you, "Here is a random survey from India, here is a random survey from the UK." He is comparing a survey in one country with clearly self-biased donors from another.
Central Asia is also a bit of a Bermuda Triangle as far as pre-2021 infection rates, with stratospheric seropositivity rates in urban areas despite few reported cases https://www.icddrb.org/news-and-events/news?id=878 :
"The overall adjusted seroprevalence among 3,220 participants was 68% with higher seropositivity in Dhaka (71%) than in Chattogram (55%)." - October 2020 and February 2021 in Bangladesh, before the vaccines, and well before Berenson's survey.
So inferring anything at all about the effect of vaccine platforms used in India based off of a summer, 2021 (between 14 June and 6 July 2021) survey of multiple districts with a shotgun urban/rural spread isn't reliable. Yes, the spring wave had just passed, but the pre-spring wave positivity rate might have been just as high.
"He is comparing a survey in one country with clearly self-biased donors from another."
I don't see that as the case...
So blood donors in the UK are involuntary?
'anti- “The Official Anti-Covid-vaccine Narrative” dissent in an anti-Covid-vaccine journal'
I think of you as our devil's advocate. Keeping us honest. From a dictionary: 'One who debates from a view which he or she may not actually hold, usually to determine its validity or simply for the sake of argument.' It's a valuable role.
It's kind of discouraging that so many on Team Skeptic expect everybody to hew to an identical narrative. That's one of the things we criticize about Team Mainstream Narrative, after all.
I've raised some concerns before when viewing some of these conferences, although I'll admit I have only watched a few, but I always thought it was a bit strange that no one really provided criticisms or pushback to people. The only main criticism has been against Dr. Ardis and in some cases it was seen as being mild in many instances. Team Skeptic should itself provide some skepticism to each others work in order to allow for the best ideas to push through.
Right, but, I do hold the views I argue. So I am a devil's advocate who believes that the devil actually has a lot of good ideas, in that case...
'One who debates from a view which he or she *may* not actually hold...'
Not being a paid subscriber, I can't comment on Berenson's article, so I will inflict my sarcasm on you. He quotes some paper or other: 'Researchers [said?] that mice which produced both anti-N and anti-S antibodies had “better viral control [than those that had anti-S antibodies alone], including against the Omicron variant.”'
Well, duh!
At the risk of sounding stupid, am I the only one who thinks this is so patently obvious that it doesn't need saying? It's the reason why I initially became an mRNA vax skeptic, because natural immunity gives you *both* (and other good stuff besides), and PTB were claiming the spike-based vaccines had better protection.
Shame on you. Don't you want to pay to have someone tell you over and over how much their life revolves around their access to a totally different platform?
Agree that the mouse (and hamster) study results were pretty obvious - marginal efficacy from N alone, marginal improvement in S+N vs. S alone thanks to T Cell engagement against N.
It's also a weird take, to say that Omicron induced N antibody is the thing that reduced mortality as opposed to Omicron itself. Then why did the unvaccinated benefit? But that would require acknowledging severe efficacy in the pre-Omicron era, which he will never do.
I do find it quite ironic that his criticisms of Ivermectin were generally met with, "This was a bad take! I'm only staying subscribed to comment!" Ok? So you're paying to be on a social media platform? Quite ironic really.
I'm having trouble understanding that last sentence. Can you clarify?
Also, there could be some entirely different explanation that nobody has hit on yet.
My last sentence just generally refers to the fact that his thinking is poisoned by not acknowledging severe efficacy. So he doesn't see unvaccinated severe outcome rates as needing to be in his model at any point. This doesn't actually match the language I used, so I'm being a bit imprecise here in comment chat mode.
YES - such Alex Berenson nonsense! I never understood how he made such a big deal about blood donors (and people gobbled it up). Your last sentence... that’s literally all that’s needed to solve the great mystery. 🤦♀️
Meaning the "This Blood Donor Nonsense Is Totally Dumb" part?
I don't know whether to be surprised by his latching onto the data, or the reception. A lot comes down to his (and many researchers, and who knows what portion of libertarian-leaning substack readers) probably never having worked a real job. For example if you work at McDonalds as a teen, you understand bias: You don't think, Holy cow, I thought the people in my city liked lots of different food, apparently they only like McDonalds! Also my city gets younger between early breakfast and late night dinner every day! This is crazy!
Exactly! Great analogy BTW.
'Alex Berenson (who, thank God, seems to have finally discovered that not just his iPhone can be used to generate screen-captures for blogs, any actual computer can do it too)'
Har! I've complained about that forever. Plus he needs to put some sort of a border around his images because it's hard to tell them from the text or from each other.
It's as if he was on a "adult-sized screen"-strike to protest his twitter exile, lol (though he never used one before his ban either).