Apr 30, 2022·edited Apr 30, 2022Liked by Brian Mowrey
I haven’t been following you so I have no idea what your track record is. Not that it matters because I am only commenting on this post.
I think you are right. At the same time, the risk that you may not be is sufficiently appreciable for the vaccine rollout policy to have been reckless, regardless of what eventually transpired.
Personally I strongly suspect that numerous respiratory viruses are currently circulating for reasons more related to lockdown policies and related reactions than to either Covid or the vaccines.
I hypothesise that people getting tested to exclude a Covid reinfection are mostly getting false positive PCRs due to the earlier infection. Is there any reason not to entertain this hypothesis?
I don’t believe the current “Covid” numbers at all.
Some points you may or may not be aware of. Vaccines meh at best. Clean drinking water and a proper sewage system fixes most of what vaccines purport to do without the side effects. Remember the guy with swollen balls? Known possible outcome of the mumps vaccine as it's protection wanes in young adult males. More properly known as the adult reaction to getting the mumps in young males. Mumps is nonlethal as is chicken pox. Smallpox outbreaks are tiny and overblown. Polio and Ebola are passed by feces. The HPV vaccine are causing cancer clusters in young girls.
HIV is a well documented scam. The mRNA virus appears in half the population randomly and is not harmful on its own. AIDS should more properly be called oxidation poisoning. As that was the cause of the initial few cases. The organ failure and death in non oxygen poisoned individuals is caused by the approved treatments. The tests to get you into treatment are entirely subjective.
Obviously, you'll tell me that COVID really isn't that dangerous to people in my age category; in other words, you'll tell me that nothing the media or government said about COVID was true. Uh, so why should I trust what those same sources are saying about the vaccines?
Literally, your argument is that I should trust the vaccines because I should distrust everything the same sources told me about COVID.
My question, therefore, is were you lying then or are you lying now? Or were you merely stupid then, but now you've figured it out?
Look, the fact that I'm unvaccinated & alive means that SOMETHING you COVIDIOTS told me was wrong, either because you were idiots or because you were lying.
Neither explanation comforts me.
At this point, based solely on the evidence, I have to infer that you either don't know what you're talking about or you do, but you're lying. Either way, I have to presume you're wrong.
At the very least, you need some serious mea culpas here.
Having been wrong about EVERYTHING for 2 years now, a little modesty is in order.
Because just as you're now basically conceding that COVID was NEVER that dangerous, I don't want to be back here in a few years when you have to concede the vaccines were never as safe & effective as you claimed.
You've got to be careful with the UKHSA / SIREN reinfections data -- they specifically excluded BA.1 as being a reinfection candidate (ie, if they had a sample with BA.1 more than 20 days after BA.1 initial infection it was regarded as the test finding remnants of the original infection, not a reinfection). They didn't find much in the way of BA.2 because there wasn't much of it in the country at the time.
This isn't 'proof' -- just shows that it is necessary to do the investigations properly.
I’m sick of skimming long articles full of scientific jargon so I’m just going to assume you’re controlled opposition on the payroll of Pfizer. I guess we’ll know for certain once the vaccinated are decimated by OAS this winter.
Have you seen this (just published last week): https://rdcu.be/cLc7b ("SARS-CoV-2 antigen exposure history shapes phenotypes and specificity of memory CD8+ T cells")?
From the abstract: "Our findings suggest that breakthrough infections diversify the T cell memory repertoire and current vaccination protocols continue to expand and differentiate spike-specific memory."
It seems to me that these findings further refute the hypothesis of OAS (at least pre-omicron). Just wanted to call it to your attention.
Long time reader, first time commenter here. I tend to agree with your take on OAS and your theory of innate immune suppression. It jibes with what G.V. Bossche says, plus it jibes with what I've been observing anecdotally. Two things:
1) Have you seen this most recent study out of Germany: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.04.01.486695v1. It's entitled "Omicron breakthrough infection drives cross-variant neutralization and memory B cell formation." They found that Omicron post-vaccination infection mediated a robust B-cell recall response, and primarily expanded preformed memory B-cells that recognized epitopes shared broadly by different variants, rather than inducing new B-cells against strictly Omicron-specific epitopes. Wouldn't this study be more evidence that OAS is not what is occurring?
2) Re: spike protein shedding of vaxxed onto unvaxxed. In the past you've discussed this phenomenon. I have observed (and experienced) it anecdotally. In light of our innate immune suppression theory, could it be that the unvaxxed who experience cold-like symptoms after being around the vaxxed are not having a reaction to shed spike protein, but rather are experiencing an innate immune response to omicron itself? If the vaxxed have suppressed innate immune systems, they could be infected (to varying degrees) with omicron but aren't experiencing the mucousal (innate) compartment response (i.e. no symptoms). Thus, the unvaxxed, especially one who had a previous infection and has innate immunity memory intact, would experience an innate immune response after having close/extended contact with an infected vaxxed individual (who is ignorant of it). I could elaborate more, but wanted to run it by you.
So leaving all the acronyms aside, what do you project might happen if people got a measles vaccine every three months for a couple of years? Would the immune system stop recognizing measles as a threat? Maybe see it as part of the larger organism? Then what might happen if there were a slight mutation to the virus...nothing too obvious to the immune system but enough to make a significant impact to the organism?
Apr 5, 2022·edited Apr 5, 2022Liked by Brian Mowrey
While I agree with most of your concerns about the validity of the N seropositivity data (it would be better to get a more explicitly uniform sample), I would also point out that the higher seropositivity by age tracks very well with the lower vaccine uptake by age. For example, the 17-30 age group is probably around 65% vaxed, and the uptake has risen fairly recently - so the lower uptake combined with the odds that they were infected prior to vax would seem to comport with the data on N positivity. At this point, as it appears that 10% of the UK population seem to have C19 at any given time, isn't it surprising that N positivity still remains down under 40%?
As for why UK seems worse than New England - I think the high vax rates in New England are biased along socioeconomic lines - in the highest density areas, higher likelihood of vax corresponds with higher likelihood of remote work. In my workplace it's got to be close to 99% (myself being the only refusenik I'm aware of) and the office is probably 20% occupancy on a busy day. These people don't live in the denser areas - and most of the poor folk who do already got infected last year, and are on balance less likely to take the vax (hey - they aren't overeducated idiots after all!)
The UK is overall 3.5x more densely populated than New England, and NE may have a bias in vax uptake to more wealthy suburban, zoom class populations. Some other differences include UK having a more homogenous population, substantially higher latitude, and a different mix of vax types, with higher prevalence of Astrazenica. I would also point out that while less dramatic, the Mass. new case rate has not hit 0 since July 2021, the lowest new case rate since then has been 30/100K after Omicron swept through. So basically the problem does exist there too.
Your point about the network effect is very important. I think this is also an important factor in your disagreement with the "worry window" concept. You point out that the worry window / immune suppression is a small effect. This is true. But it does exist - and I submit that this small effect, when combined with the network effect, leads rollouts to create outbreaks. This produces the very obvious signal in the data that people latch onto, and sometimes then want to over-estimate the actual effect of the immune suppression.
it was a good intro to the impact of pseudouridine which I found very enlightening. I still need to read the source papers to understand it more fully. One thing I remain puzzled about though - the effect described here seems like an intra-cellular effect as a result of the transfection - so once those cells get killed off in the immune response, why would this effect persist for longer? Maybe the answer is, it doesn't persist. But then why do we seem to continue to see signs of long term immune suppression? Psuedouridine does not seem to explain the whole story here.
Apr 5, 2022·edited Apr 5, 2022Liked by Brian Mowrey
Hi Brian. I just woke up (will go back to sleep asap) and saw your article! Love the controversy and your, as always, politely stated and carefully argued opinion.
This is what the debate should always be, as opposed to abuse or attempts to "cancel" their opponents.
That said, you make two statements:
1) OAS is not real
2) The UK's endless Covid is "immune suppression" driven, saying that there is a network of immune suppressed persons, that is big enough to drive a wave of endless cases.
I want to leave 1) aside for now because I need to go back to sleep.
However, regarding 2), you are likely to be completely right and spot-on in identifying ANOTHER problem in the UK: a critical mass of generally immune suppressed people having colds from hell, endless covids, and soon everything else, and endlessly infecting each other.
It is not just the UK's (or "the isles") problem. In Germany, the endless covid is even worse than in the UK, or perhaps the Germans do more tests, but clearly Germany has a endless covid problem also. Israel's graph of cases this year is similar to UK's. The only no-longer-important difference between UK and Israel is last November.
The US seems to be the exception. It may be so because the US is especially bad at keeping national statistics, but it could also be for other important reasons. We'll explore it later.
The bottom line is your immune suppression story is not something I am objecting to, and in fact I support it 100%. There is immune suppression indeed and we are seeing it. After three vax doses and three covids, the immune systems of such unlucky people will likely be severely suppressed, which is kind of what I kept on saying and screaming about too comparing Covid with AIDS.
Not sure how many spike protein transfections (vax or Covid illness) is enough to cause immune suppression, it could depend on luck of specific persons, but clearly, the more the worse, and the effect is cumulative, leaving people worse off after every episode.
We have a health emergency that is likely real and likely will end up badly, and we need to warn as many people as we can about it.
Thank you, I really appreciate it when substackers give a different views from one another. It keeps my mind open, and we all get better information. 👍🏽💕
There's a lot to say about the constant re-iteration of OAS. Just like I have said previous (and you have mentioned) it's like those ardent supporters of OAS are stuck within their own proverbial OAS. It just feels like something I've been increasingly concerned about where it feels like people are collecting information but generalizing further than they are allowed based on the evidence presented. It also doesn't quite make sense why OAS keeps being used to argue the immunological effects of targeting a completely different antigen.
One thing for people to keep in mind is that the concept of the N line being flat is "relative" and is likely affected by the scaling to accommodate the S curve- if you compare it from the start of measures you can see that it doubles.
The higher increase within the younger demographics is also to be reflective of older people being vaccinated first and the younger group not having it available for several months. All this suggests to me that, because the N protein is sequestered within the virus, it may be that the host is not experience the full exposure of the virus' antigens such that the anti-S spike may be removing the virus before the N protein can make itself known.
And quite frankly, I'm getting rather tired of the seeing this large dependency on case numbers. I thought many people have, rightfully, criticized the veracity and accuracy of these tests. Why do these people then rely so much on this as evidence for their narrative or ideas? Either PCR tests are faulty and we don't rely on them or they are accurate and we can trust their results. They can't have it both ways.
I haven’t been following you so I have no idea what your track record is. Not that it matters because I am only commenting on this post.
I think you are right. At the same time, the risk that you may not be is sufficiently appreciable for the vaccine rollout policy to have been reckless, regardless of what eventually transpired.
Personally I strongly suspect that numerous respiratory viruses are currently circulating for reasons more related to lockdown policies and related reactions than to either Covid or the vaccines.
I hypothesise that people getting tested to exclude a Covid reinfection are mostly getting false positive PCRs due to the earlier infection. Is there any reason not to entertain this hypothesis?
I don’t believe the current “Covid” numbers at all.
Some points you may or may not be aware of. Vaccines meh at best. Clean drinking water and a proper sewage system fixes most of what vaccines purport to do without the side effects. Remember the guy with swollen balls? Known possible outcome of the mumps vaccine as it's protection wanes in young adult males. More properly known as the adult reaction to getting the mumps in young males. Mumps is nonlethal as is chicken pox. Smallpox outbreaks are tiny and overblown. Polio and Ebola are passed by feces. The HPV vaccine are causing cancer clusters in young girls.
HIV is a well documented scam. The mRNA virus appears in half the population randomly and is not harmful on its own. AIDS should more properly be called oxidation poisoning. As that was the cause of the initial few cases. The organ failure and death in non oxygen poisoned individuals is caused by the approved treatments. The tests to get you into treatment are entirely subjective.
I'm unvaccinated, so why am I not dead?
Obviously, you'll tell me that COVID really isn't that dangerous to people in my age category; in other words, you'll tell me that nothing the media or government said about COVID was true. Uh, so why should I trust what those same sources are saying about the vaccines?
Literally, your argument is that I should trust the vaccines because I should distrust everything the same sources told me about COVID.
My question, therefore, is were you lying then or are you lying now? Or were you merely stupid then, but now you've figured it out?
Look, the fact that I'm unvaccinated & alive means that SOMETHING you COVIDIOTS told me was wrong, either because you were idiots or because you were lying.
Neither explanation comforts me.
At this point, based solely on the evidence, I have to infer that you either don't know what you're talking about or you do, but you're lying. Either way, I have to presume you're wrong.
At the very least, you need some serious mea culpas here.
Having been wrong about EVERYTHING for 2 years now, a little modesty is in order.
Because just as you're now basically conceding that COVID was NEVER that dangerous, I don't want to be back here in a few years when you have to concede the vaccines were never as safe & effective as you claimed.
You've got to be careful with the UKHSA / SIREN reinfections data -- they specifically excluded BA.1 as being a reinfection candidate (ie, if they had a sample with BA.1 more than 20 days after BA.1 initial infection it was regarded as the test finding remnants of the original infection, not a reinfection). They didn't find much in the way of BA.2 because there wasn't much of it in the country at the time.
This isn't 'proof' -- just shows that it is necessary to do the investigations properly.
OAS is real and at play.
I’m sick of skimming long articles full of scientific jargon so I’m just going to assume you’re controlled opposition on the payroll of Pfizer. I guess we’ll know for certain once the vaccinated are decimated by OAS this winter.
Have you seen this (just published last week): https://rdcu.be/cLc7b ("SARS-CoV-2 antigen exposure history shapes phenotypes and specificity of memory CD8+ T cells")?
From the abstract: "Our findings suggest that breakthrough infections diversify the T cell memory repertoire and current vaccination protocols continue to expand and differentiate spike-specific memory."
It seems to me that these findings further refute the hypothesis of OAS (at least pre-omicron). Just wanted to call it to your attention.
I am happy you are giving your opinion, a different opinion than most people on the topic. THIS is good dialog. Much love
Hi Brian,
Long time reader, first time commenter here. I tend to agree with your take on OAS and your theory of innate immune suppression. It jibes with what G.V. Bossche says, plus it jibes with what I've been observing anecdotally. Two things:
1) Have you seen this most recent study out of Germany: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.04.01.486695v1. It's entitled "Omicron breakthrough infection drives cross-variant neutralization and memory B cell formation." They found that Omicron post-vaccination infection mediated a robust B-cell recall response, and primarily expanded preformed memory B-cells that recognized epitopes shared broadly by different variants, rather than inducing new B-cells against strictly Omicron-specific epitopes. Wouldn't this study be more evidence that OAS is not what is occurring?
2) Re: spike protein shedding of vaxxed onto unvaxxed. In the past you've discussed this phenomenon. I have observed (and experienced) it anecdotally. In light of our innate immune suppression theory, could it be that the unvaxxed who experience cold-like symptoms after being around the vaxxed are not having a reaction to shed spike protein, but rather are experiencing an innate immune response to omicron itself? If the vaxxed have suppressed innate immune systems, they could be infected (to varying degrees) with omicron but aren't experiencing the mucousal (innate) compartment response (i.e. no symptoms). Thus, the unvaxxed, especially one who had a previous infection and has innate immunity memory intact, would experience an innate immune response after having close/extended contact with an infected vaxxed individual (who is ignorant of it). I could elaborate more, but wanted to run it by you.
Thoughts?
So leaving all the acronyms aside, what do you project might happen if people got a measles vaccine every three months for a couple of years? Would the immune system stop recognizing measles as a threat? Maybe see it as part of the larger organism? Then what might happen if there were a slight mutation to the virus...nothing too obvious to the immune system but enough to make a significant impact to the organism?
While I agree with most of your concerns about the validity of the N seropositivity data (it would be better to get a more explicitly uniform sample), I would also point out that the higher seropositivity by age tracks very well with the lower vaccine uptake by age. For example, the 17-30 age group is probably around 65% vaxed, and the uptake has risen fairly recently - so the lower uptake combined with the odds that they were infected prior to vax would seem to comport with the data on N positivity. At this point, as it appears that 10% of the UK population seem to have C19 at any given time, isn't it surprising that N positivity still remains down under 40%?
As for why UK seems worse than New England - I think the high vax rates in New England are biased along socioeconomic lines - in the highest density areas, higher likelihood of vax corresponds with higher likelihood of remote work. In my workplace it's got to be close to 99% (myself being the only refusenik I'm aware of) and the office is probably 20% occupancy on a busy day. These people don't live in the denser areas - and most of the poor folk who do already got infected last year, and are on balance less likely to take the vax (hey - they aren't overeducated idiots after all!)
The UK is overall 3.5x more densely populated than New England, and NE may have a bias in vax uptake to more wealthy suburban, zoom class populations. Some other differences include UK having a more homogenous population, substantially higher latitude, and a different mix of vax types, with higher prevalence of Astrazenica. I would also point out that while less dramatic, the Mass. new case rate has not hit 0 since July 2021, the lowest new case rate since then has been 30/100K after Omicron swept through. So basically the problem does exist there too.
Your point about the network effect is very important. I think this is also an important factor in your disagreement with the "worry window" concept. You point out that the worry window / immune suppression is a small effect. This is true. But it does exist - and I submit that this small effect, when combined with the network effect, leads rollouts to create outbreaks. This produces the very obvious signal in the data that people latch onto, and sometimes then want to over-estimate the actual effect of the immune suppression.
BTW have you read this: https://rwmalonemd.substack.com/p/when-is-mrna-not-really-mrna?s=r
it was a good intro to the impact of pseudouridine which I found very enlightening. I still need to read the source papers to understand it more fully. One thing I remain puzzled about though - the effect described here seems like an intra-cellular effect as a result of the transfection - so once those cells get killed off in the immune response, why would this effect persist for longer? Maybe the answer is, it doesn't persist. But then why do we seem to continue to see signs of long term immune suppression? Psuedouridine does not seem to explain the whole story here.
Hi Brian. I just woke up (will go back to sleep asap) and saw your article! Love the controversy and your, as always, politely stated and carefully argued opinion.
This is what the debate should always be, as opposed to abuse or attempts to "cancel" their opponents.
That said, you make two statements:
1) OAS is not real
2) The UK's endless Covid is "immune suppression" driven, saying that there is a network of immune suppressed persons, that is big enough to drive a wave of endless cases.
I want to leave 1) aside for now because I need to go back to sleep.
However, regarding 2), you are likely to be completely right and spot-on in identifying ANOTHER problem in the UK: a critical mass of generally immune suppressed people having colds from hell, endless covids, and soon everything else, and endlessly infecting each other.
It is not just the UK's (or "the isles") problem. In Germany, the endless covid is even worse than in the UK, or perhaps the Germans do more tests, but clearly Germany has a endless covid problem also. Israel's graph of cases this year is similar to UK's. The only no-longer-important difference between UK and Israel is last November.
The US seems to be the exception. It may be so because the US is especially bad at keeping national statistics, but it could also be for other important reasons. We'll explore it later.
The bottom line is your immune suppression story is not something I am objecting to, and in fact I support it 100%. There is immune suppression indeed and we are seeing it. After three vax doses and three covids, the immune systems of such unlucky people will likely be severely suppressed, which is kind of what I kept on saying and screaming about too comparing Covid with AIDS.
Not sure how many spike protein transfections (vax or Covid illness) is enough to cause immune suppression, it could depend on luck of specific persons, but clearly, the more the worse, and the effect is cumulative, leaving people worse off after every episode.
We have a health emergency that is likely real and likely will end up badly, and we need to warn as many people as we can about it.
More about OAS later.
Thank you, I really appreciate it when substackers give a different views from one another. It keeps my mind open, and we all get better information. 👍🏽💕
There's a lot to say about the constant re-iteration of OAS. Just like I have said previous (and you have mentioned) it's like those ardent supporters of OAS are stuck within their own proverbial OAS. It just feels like something I've been increasingly concerned about where it feels like people are collecting information but generalizing further than they are allowed based on the evidence presented. It also doesn't quite make sense why OAS keeps being used to argue the immunological effects of targeting a completely different antigen.
One thing for people to keep in mind is that the concept of the N line being flat is "relative" and is likely affected by the scaling to accommodate the S curve- if you compare it from the start of measures you can see that it doubles.
The higher increase within the younger demographics is also to be reflective of older people being vaccinated first and the younger group not having it available for several months. All this suggests to me that, because the N protein is sequestered within the virus, it may be that the host is not experience the full exposure of the virus' antigens such that the anti-S spike may be removing the virus before the N protein can make itself known.
And quite frankly, I'm getting rather tired of the seeing this large dependency on case numbers. I thought many people have, rightfully, criticized the veracity and accuracy of these tests. Why do these people then rely so much on this as evidence for their narrative or ideas? Either PCR tests are faulty and we don't rely on them or they are accurate and we can trust their results. They can't have it both ways.