The Hyperlink Archipelago

That study does not say what the author says it said.

A new essay purports to overview the current research on natural immunity, and demonstrate why the Covid vaccine is “crucial” for everyone - even the already-infected. But does the author’s representation of various studies on immunity hold up?

Epilogue to The Natural Immunity Illusion Illusion.

Event 201 was a “tabletop exercise” with leaders from business, government and health care examining responses to a hypothetical pandemic. The Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security hosted the exercise in October 2019...¹

In the early aughts a certain author became notorious for his tendency to string arguments together from discrete disprovable elements, so much so that his name became a verb. The verb, however, refers to the art of the counter-essays which, taking advantage of the new ease of copying and pasting afforded by modern word processors and the freedom from word-count-limits afforded by the internet, would inevitably dissect the author’s latest documents, to attach a discrete disproof to each discrete disprovable element. The term lives on today, as does the practice.

But it could perish tomorrow, and no one would notice. It is and always has been a pointless exercise. By the time the counter-essay arrives, those who wished to believe the author’s original argument have already shared a link to it in a comment board to justify their belief in the midst of a debate, and moved on with life; moreover, those believers probably weren’t sincerely concerned whether the elements used to construct the argument were true to begin with. Once information becomes easily sharable, truth ceases to be a very relevant factor in the likelihood that it will spread. Thus the “falsehood-stringing” author was warning us, via demonstration, what all news would one day look like. And by the ascribing of the eponymous verb to the response to the author’s method, it was only made even less likely that the method could be articulated, discussed, and recognized for its potency. A google image search for the verb constructed by the author’s name today returns photographs of silhouetted men fishing in ponds. Thus even the disproof-fashioning art’s namesake has moved on from the verb which attempted to pin him down. That’s “truth” for you: Slippery as a fish.

In that later, but now-bygone epoch, the Trump Years, the demand for things that could be shared to evade debate and get on with one’s day expanded from the fringes and into the general population. Trump, by challenging “expert” orthodoxies left and right, continually tested the artificial consensus of reality constructed and maintained by the cosmopolitan coastal elite. The experts and elites intuited that these challenges to their construction of reality threatened their authority, and the everyday citizen who still trusted in that authority intuited that these challenges, by undermining the validity of the consensus, threatened to burden them with the arduous tax of having to actually parse what is true in the world for themselves.

The media, as intermediaries between these two entities, chased the new selection pressures created by these twin intuited threats, with the inevitable result (since the news now runs by metrics) that the most successful outlets would be those that default to what is shareable, with the inevitable result that the unnamed method created by the author whose name was given to the reaction to his method, would take over the (hyperreal) world. And now, at last, the method had been given a name, a name potent enough to define the entire era. The era of Trump became the era of the Fact Check, and the era of the Fact Check persists into and subsumes the era of the Pandemic™:

It’s false that it was a prediction, because they stated that it wasn’t a prediction.

²Thus the name-giving author’s unnamed method of stringing disprovable claim after disprovable claim not only manifests in the fact check, but becomes the very essence of journalism. The same key feature comes to define both arts: Chains of hyperlinked assertions about reality, from top to bottom of every post, with barely an unlinked sentence in between them. All at once online journalism transforms into an ocean stippled with Hyperlink Archipelagos. To read the Hyperlink Archipelago (though reading it is never the point, only sharing it) is like “learning Kung Fu” in The Matrix, each hyperlinked chain of words corresponding to several thousand other words, so that by the end of the article the “reader” has consumed an entire history book.

At which point, what does it even matter if the history is false? Disprovability, in fact, ceases to be a necessary feature of the method. The chain of claims about reality in the Hyperlink Archipelago might be true as often as false: All that matters is that the reader is freed to share the article to evade debate, and go on with her day. If Trump’s counter-expert expression is true, the string of claims in the resulting Hyperlink Archipelago are false; if his expression is false, the string of claims are true. The end result is that citizens who still trust the authority of our experts will continue believing whatever the experts say; the rest of us continue not to; and no one from either side has to ever talk to the other about anything. And why should they? The truth - what is real in the world - was never the point to begin with. Half of the country are either comfortable or actively invested in the power of cosmopolitanist elites to define what is true; the other half is actively hostile to that power. This is not a conflict which can be resolved by discussion. And that it cannot be resolved by discussion was already intuited by the half of the country that revolted, at least internally, against the elites’ Theatre of Governance before Trump ever arrived. When one at last becomes aware of this intuition, a more generous understanding of why Trump voters are unfazed by his occasional falsehoods and his petty corruption is possible. How could it not be so, when Trump’s ascendance revealed the coastal media to be precisely as willing to distort the truth, or even more-so, than he? When what passes for “reporting” on the world, in the Era of the Fact Check, is merely a chain of at-best truth-neutral expert assertions, buttressed by hyperlinks to sources that more than half the time don’t affirm what the journalist “reporting” the assertion says is affirmed?³

⁴But let us disregard what I have offered as the immediate causality between Trump’s voicing of expert taboos in the “platform” of the Theatre of Governance, and the transformation of coastal news media into an echo-chamber of self-reflecting strings of hyperlinks to things that do not say what the author says they say, and merely accept the current state of journalism as a given fact. The chamber exists. It is observable everywhere by the strings of hyperlinked assertions, that link to things that do not say what the author says they say. And it is within this chamber that the illusion that natural immunity to SARS-CoV-2 is itself an illusion is housed.

With this in mind, let us behold the first two paragraphs of the recently arrived anti-natural immunity virtual dossier, “Covid-19 vaccine is crucial in the fight against delta variant,” authored by Jennifer T. Grier and published in The Conversation and Quartz:⁵

Hyperlink Archipelago.

In six short sentences, the reader has already been bombarded by seven links to agency websites or academic studies that would each require a half-hour or more for a layperson to accurately verify as representing what the author asserts is represented. If in the first paragraph the author is merely over-accrediting an otherwise anodyne introductory review of current-events, by the second matters have already been carried too far: The core thesis of the essay, “the Covid-19 vaccine is crucial,” is here being litigated by hyperlinked assertions. This is already looking less like a sincere attempt to provide a lay audience the known facts and openly-stated uncertainties which are - what’s the word - crucial - to important medical decisions, and more like a package of assertions that “readers” can post to a comment board somewhere where they have been upset by an encounter with someone who is thinking for herself.

But - ah, maybe we are rushing to judgement. Perhaps - perhaps the rest of the essay is a more thorough examination of the incredibly fraught concerns and well-reasoned hesitations people might have about the novel Covid vaccines - grounded in concrete facts, acknowledgment of uncertainties, and open-minded discussion?

Or, not.

As up-front and honest medical communication goes, this wall of hyperlinked assertions simply does not cut it.

But to be charitable to the author, she is an academic. What comports itself as a Hyperlink Archipelago on Steroids can also be interpreted merely as the stylistic peculiarities of research literature - particularly of the “background” section, typically more or less an elaborate ceremonial rain dance which seeks to narrativize the semi-arbitrary statistical modeling-decisions that will follow in the rest of the paper. Here, thus, this esoteric stylization finds itself unintentionally applied to a context that demands more transparency; there is likely no intentional misleadingness, only accidental.

But the fact remains; the links do not say what the author says they say. And in the context of lay-facing public health messaging, the essay takes its place among the avalanche of alarmist and misleading assertions which the handmaidens of “science journalism” have unleashed on their fellow-citizens during the last eighteen months. It adds one more thundering voice to the chorus of, “Don’t ask questions, we have the facts!”

The Hyperlink Archipelago forces us to address it on its own terms - line by line. But let us not, as the opponents of the writer whose name as a verb when fed through an image search-engine algorithm means “silhouette of a fishing-man” did, go through the whole piece. It will accomplish nothing. The damage is already done; it is of no great import if our autopsy is terse and half-hearted. In fact, let’s limit the whole thing to two sentences.

Vaccine immunity and natural immunity for SARS–CoV–2 can differ in terms of the strength of the immune response or the length of time that the protection lasts. Additionally, not everyone will get the same level of immunity from infection, while immune responses to the vaccines are very consistent. 

The author has only just begun, and already terms are being misused. In a sentence ostensibly offering a fact about “immunity,” two papers are hyperlinked which merely address antibody levels.

In Part 1 of The Natural Immunity Illusion Illusion, we grounded our inquiry in the concretes of “what should have been expected about SARS-CoV-2’s ability to evade immunity, based on the observation of how immunity normally works,” and “what was observed in real life.” We found the two to be in accordance, in so far as that either scoring positive on a PCR test or scoring above a threshold on a sufficiently-selective ELISA antibody test, at any arbitrary point, indicates strong and lasting unlikeliness of scoring positive later for reinfection. We, and the OUH antibody study we evaluated, avoided the question of how fast the antibodies fade, because “immunity” is not defined by “levels of neutralizing antibodies”: It is defined by not getting sick again. The sentences above are nonetheless eliding the two concepts, albeit to varying degrees in the four contained assertions. We may now break down the first three of those.

⁶

“Vaccine immunity and natural immunity for SARS–CoV–2 can differ in terms of the strength of the immune response”

The study by Seow, J. et al.,⁷ hyperlinked to the clause “strength of immune response,” almost supports the statement in so far as it is limited to “immune response.” Variations in initial antibody response during natural encounter with SARS-CoV-2, as described in that paper, have been observed universally, both when patients in the early and mid stages of infection are compared with each other, and when recovered patients are compared with each other - and, of course, comparing people side-by-side, on an infection-relative schedule, is important, if the intent is to show meaningful “differences in response” between people, as this study does. From these differences, perhaps one could infer that the “immune response” of the vaccines is more… consistent? Because, of course, this study, from October, 2020 is not measuring responses to vaccines at all, and therefor cannot compare them to natural immune responses.

Yet when we admit of the limited scope within which the statement is… possibly narrowly supported by the linked study… the statement ceases to imply anything relevant to the thesis of the essay. Immunity to SARS-CoV-2 has been found to be consistent regardless of initial antibody response, if one scores positive on a PCR test or for antibodies on a sufficiently high-specificity antibody test (at any point).

“or the length of time that the protection lasts.”

But with the second clause, we veer from a narrow pass to a hard fail. The linked study does not say what the author says it says.

The study, by Gudbjartsson, D. et al.,⁸ is strictly about “humoral immune response,” i.e. antibody levels, not “protection” from reinfection - not even, if we are to try to rescue the sentence again with a strict interpretation of the response qualifier, “protection conferred by baseline antibodies alone.”

What’s worse, the study does not even observe any decline in antibodies to SARS-CoV-2!

IgG antibodies - the class of antibody that are meant to hang around, as opposed to the shorter-term IgM and IgA antibodies which appear mid-infection - did not drop in the study’s subjects:

The authors, for some strange reason, were able to observe this fact within their own results. The conclusion they reached appears at the front of the paper, in the Abstract:

CONCLUSIONS
Our results indicate that antiviral antibodies against SARS-CoV-2 did not decline within 4 months after diagnosis.

The first linked study, additionally, finds the same thing.⁹ As the sentence we are deconstructing only supports the thesis of the paper - “why vaccines are crucial” - if, in this clause, the difference in the duration of the antibody presence observed after infection compared to vaccines is somehow unfavorable, both linked studies, by failing to observe drops in antibody levels post-infection in their short observation windows, either flatly contradict that clause or the clause flatly disputes the thesis.

¹⁰

“Additionally, not everyone will get the same level of immunity from infection”

And there goes the first narrow pass out the window. This clause simultaneously confirms our strict interpretation of the response qualifier, and tosses it aside, in favor of a misleading direct equivalence between “antibody level” and “level of immunity.” This equivalence demands that the hyperlinked study this time address actual immunity, and therefor actual reinfection - and as we reviewed in Part 1, there are studies that address those things! - and, predictably, this paper does not. But good luck finding that out!

The paper, by Robbiani, D. et al, “Convergent antibody responses to SARS-CoV-2 in convalescent individuals,”¹¹ is a miniature Manhattan Project of experimentation with mid- and post-infection antibodies, which sought to run the prevalent early assumptions about which proteins were being targeted by convalescent (post-infection) antibodies through the wringer. Now, again - this is still only six sentences into the essay, and we already have to parse a paper that contains 13,000 words, 23 pages, 120 charts and 6 illustrations, clocks 9.1 MB in PDF, involved 46 authors, and includes 47 citations - to verify whether it somehow substantiates the vague and ominous statement “not everyone will get the same level of immunity from infection”?! God, someone just send the storm troopers to raid our bedrooms and vaxx us at gunpoint already! This is ridiculous!

Yes, the paper observes differences in antibody binding among the 147 included subjects, and observes differences in “neutralization” performance in challenge tests against “HIV-1-based virions that carried either the SARS-CoV-2 or SARS-CoV S protein on the surface.”

But critically, unlike other antibody-based studies from mid-2020, including the two reviewed above, neither of these tests in “Convergence” were in service of an attempt to peer into the “crystal ball” of functional natural immunity to SARS-CoV-2. Instead, the authors here were interested in common themes among the antibody protein-targeting “decisions” made by the immune systems of the participants - the whole thing a sort of gigantic, statisticalized marketing survey to inform the future digital design-language of the future artificial antigen produced by the future artificial “vaccines.” Hence the “convergence” in the title: they wanted to know which sequences the patients’ antibodies converged upon.¹²

And it is this goal, which made non-schedule-adherence of the participant sample collection helpful, as opposed to harmful, to the results the authors sought.

…

That’s right.

There was no infection- or recovery-relative schedule. Individual participants were not, as might appear for the first two hours of digesting the mammoth text of the paper, sampled at multiple points: Each was only sampled once, at whatever date post-onset of symptoms they happened to be when they “visited” for the sample - resulting in a range of sampling post-symptom-onset-day values, from 17 to 67.

Many patients, therefor, were still awaiting or in the midst of “seroconversion” - the arrival, and then dominance of IgG antibodies, and subsequent dwindling of IgM and IgA antibodies - when their samples were taken. Thus, you have patients who are still early-along showing higher binding in IgM, and at the same time, many who do not yet even exceed the lower limits of the binding test for IgG:

These were the “differences” that the “Convergence” study observed in “immunity.”

It is therefor not even possible that this study supports the text to which it is hyperlinked.

Comparison of patients who are still “getting” their immunity to patients who have already “got” it, cannot support the statement “Not everyone will get the same level of immunity.”

But, I mean, this error really is just the icing on a cake of garbage. Again, as with the S-Fuse Challenge from France, the authors’ “neutralization” challenge is not a valid way to measure “immunity,” and neither neutralization challenges nor antibody tests alone can provide a foundation to void the normal expectations for functional natural immunity - especially not in the face of the numerous studies finding robust natural immunity in the real world, which have been released in the wake of this (misinterpreted) paper - which is from June, 2020!

And what possible valid justification is there, to skip the actual studies of functional consistency of post-infection immunity and link, instead, to this miniature textbook of a report which does not measure functional consistency of natural immunity - except on the basis of the inconvenient fact that none of the real-world studies support the assertion about reality in question? This maneuver is disingenuous and propagandistic. And the - there’s no other word for it - hubris of doing so with such a large paper, it boggles the mind: The only thing that would prevent the impression that the author doesn’t seem to have even read the paper, is the reader’s not going through the incredible hassle of reading it either!

Well, I went through that hassle!

None of these discovered contradictions between the hyperlinked assertions, and the studies actually lying at the other end of them, should be surprising. Most studies have ambiguous or nuanced results, that do not lend to their being cited in support of a three-word binary description of the intricacies of the immune system - even if that description is purporting to add fabricated “nuance” to the fabricated “uncertainty” of natural immunity to SARS-CoV-2. But what on Earth is gained by engaging in such nuance-erasing hyperlinked assertions over and over and over and over, throughout the entirety of an essay - just lay up, already! Our experts might as well stop citing anything they assert to us at all, and just leave the assertion, so that their “advice” may stand on the page as the naked medical-intervention propaganda that it functionally is!

But hasn't that been the pattern of this Reign of Expert Terror from the start?

A billion apocalyptic assertions in a row, gestures to studies and models that either don't say what the speaker says they say or are founded on arbitrary assumptions, and no details to back any of it up.¹³ All in the service of scaring the citizens of the liberal West into taking part in the largest mass- medical experiment ever conducted in history.

Continued in Conclusion...

1. Timberlake, I. “Coronavirus was not staged by philanthropists to control people.” (2021 June 17.) AFP Fact Check.

2. ibid. Note the deliciously open-ended title: “This is not to claim that it wasn’t staged by philanthropists for some other reason…” The entire exercise of “fact checking” what is by its nature epistemically unfalsifiable - a conspiracy theory - rings of farce. What possible direct knowledge of reality could an AFP author possess about the workings of shadowy global foundations infested with technoutopianist billionaires? So the author phones the shadowy global foundation for a formal rejection of an inference made from its own extremely damning documents - documents which cannot be made any less damning without insider knowledge? What does that achieve, in terms of making reality known? At a certain point the Fact Check must become a parody of itself, and cease to have any potency for sharing-in-order-to-evade-debate - but, in practice, it’s incredibly hard to call when.

3. When this is coupled with the pressure to churn out multiple articles a day, the journalist often finds himself compositing (we might say composting) his own prior content into each new update on “reality,” complete with hyperlinks to prior posts themselves replete with links to prior posts, as if the news was merely one static document under a state of constant editing - and yet even these end-points, comprised of the journalist’s own writing, often do not say what the journalist is now saying they say. “Journalist,” in the Era of the Fact Check, is merely a synonym for the host to a loose collection of perpetually repeating and degrading strings of data; a child locked in the vault at the basement of hyperreality, stuck in an endless game of telephone with himself.

4. (index link anchor)

5. Grier, J. “Covid-19 vaccine is crucial in the fight against delta variant.” (2021 July 15.) Quartz.

6. (index link anchor)

7. Seow, J. “Longitudinal observation and decline of neutralizing antibody responses in the three months following SARS-CoV-2 infection in humans.” Nature.

(I have significantly edited the analysis of this study in the context of the author’s claim to which it was linked, as I initially fell into the trap of thinking that the “differences” represented in the study were the same “differences” referred to in the essay. The latter, however, is about differences between vaccine and natural infection “immune response,” which are not the differences represented in the study! However, the study does offer an opinion from the authors that their findings somehow “[have] important implications when considering protection against reinfection with SARS-CoV-2 and the durability of vaccine protection,” or “may suggest” that for people who experience less severe outcomes from infection from SARS-CoV-2 “vaccine boosters are required to provide long-lasting protection.” Therefor I still gave this hyperlink a narrow pass for supporting the attached claim.)

It should be noted that the lay reader would have a profoundly difficult time immediately parsing why this study supports the clause, “strength of immune response,” and not “time that protection lasts.” However, differences in antibody concentrations are indeed observed in the study, as well as some measure of relationship between those differences and the intensity of outcome of infection. Critically, as regards to the “decline” mentioned in the study title, it is only of the short-term types of antibody (IgM and IgA) that follow a viral infection, not the type that is meant to stick around afterward (IgG). Indeed, post-infection levels of IgG were found to be quite resilient 3 months-out, declining only mildly on the authors’ high-specificity custom ELISA test (test specificity is described in the Discussion section of their earlier paper), with some IgG readings even trending toward higher:

Additionally, in so far as this paper finds “difference” in antibody response it observes what so many other infection-relative-schedule-matched antibody studies did in 2020 and afterward, which is: prominent early-infection arrival of SARS-CoV-2 protein-binding IgG, suggesting some level of prominent prior natural immunity (based on prior encounters with coronaviruses). As linked to before, an early review of these observations in seroconversion variability and IgG-earliness is provided in Bauer, G. “The variability of the serological response to SARS corona virus‐2: Potential resolution of ambiguity through determination of avidity (functional affinity).”

8. Gudbjartsson, D. “Humoral Immune Response to SARS-CoV-2 in Iceland.” New England Journal of Medicine.

9. See footnote 7.

10. (index link anchor)

11. Robbiani, D. et al. “Convergent antibody responses to SARS-CoV-2 in convalescent individuals.” Nature.

Let us not fail to observe the irony of citing a study whose central premise, upon our review, turns out to be: “This Natural Immunity stuff - let’s get the scoop on what it’s doing, so we know how best to imitate it!” in an essay elevating Covid vaccine-induced “immunity” over post-infection immunity.

12. The authors (as nearly as I can make out from their incredibly complicated design) only plotted antibody binding and “Neutralization” for patients and contacts of patients who were symptomatic. Nonetheless, the broad low scores - and apparent favoring of IgM, early-seroconversion patients - on the “Neutralization” trial are interesting in an abstract sense.

The authors’ sera “Neutralization” challenge trial was based on measuring cellular lysis - the mess made when a virus begins work inside a cell - with a spiffy Nano-Glo Luciferase Assay System, and finding the breaking-point dilutions of various donors, similar to the S-Fuse Challenge reviewed in Part 2 - as well as to the “neutralization” results in the paper hyperlinked for “very consistent,” by Doria-Rose, N. et al., titled “Antibody Persistence through 6 Months after the Second Dose of mRNA-1273 Vaccine for Covid-19,” nejm.com.

However, unlike the S-Fuse challenge, the “Convergence” authors were not testing the sera against actual SARS-CoV-2, but rather a Frankenstein HIV virus with the spike protein added on. It should be noted that “Persistence” provides one narrowly possible supportive interpretation for the use of the “Convergent” study in the hyperlink for “different levels of immunity,” which would be a comparison of the Pseudovirus Neutralization performance. However, since “Persistence” is merely a pre-release “letter,” with very narrowly-presented results, it only represents the “difference” in Pseudovirus Neutralization performance in statistical formula, not granular results. Therefor, no such comparison would be valid even if “Convergent” had used a sample schedule.

Moreover, “Persistence” also includes antibody binding results, which, if compared to the other hyperlinked studies regarding duration of antibody “protection,” render those other links non-supportive of the thesis of the essay. For although these plots, from Figure 1 of “Persistence,” are also mean values, comparison with the image linked in “Declined” and “Iceland” renders the “Length of time that the protection lasts” clause, once again, as either false or unsupportive of the thesis (compare with IgG levels in footnote 5):

13. In fact, though it is hard to imagine so from the composite image offered above, the essay does manage to squeeze in a handful of actual details near the end, between all the hyperlinked assertions - but they all broadly undermine the alarmism the study endeavors to spread about natural immunity. "As many as 9% of infected people do not have detectable antibodies," for example - that's not even high!