Unrelated, at least specifically, to this latest post, but to the extent you'd be willing to oblige, I'd appreciate your thoughts/counsel, as I'm in the unfortunate circumstance where my employer (in 2022, this remains a thing) will no longer be granting/extending exemptions, and all those currently exempted will need to have at least 1 injection by Sept or be terminated. This is a publicly traded company that touts "diversity, inclusion and belonging".
All that aside, I'm weighing a number of options, including seeking another employer, though in my line of work almost all other employers have similar policies, however many no longer enforce them (at least not for existing employees; not so for inbound/new hires, in most cases).
As part of my attempts to stall/overturn policy, I managed to obtain approval to travel outside the U.S. for a more 'traditional' vaccine (specifically, Covaxin), so at the moment if I opt to proceed it'll be either Covaxin or J&J (only because it's a single shot, though I will likely only get 1 Covaxin shot regardless and do my best to stall/delay the 2nd shot as long as possible until, hopefully, these unethical mandates are lifted, sooner rather than later).
I reached out to the illuminating M.Luterra for his take, some time ago, and he provided very thoughtful/detailed breakdown of the pros/cons of Covaxin compared to the other available products.
Back to my question: if you were presented with this scenario and had to be injected, putting aside other options you may pursue (quitting to join an agrarian community, etc), which injection would you go with if you had a similar health/risk profile as mine? By way of some personal detail: I'm in my 40s, Male, active/outdoorsy; no history of health issues; taking no prescription meds. Already got covid back in December 2021, once; mild symptoms overall, for a few days, while taking vitamins/supplements/Ivermectin, though I did have a few irregular heartbeats for some time after initial flu-like symptoms waned, and occasional fatigue that lasted for a few months after that, along with some other mildly quirky issues that faded over time. I'm now largely back to my regular routine of keeping active several times a week and haven't felt any odd heart-related irregularities since early this year, though my reaction to natural infection, relatively mild overall, concerns me a bit that -- if I opt to go with one of the shots -- I may react negatively to it, more so than perhaps others. Covaxin seems to be the option with the least potential for harm given its description as a 'whole virion' inactivated spike product, but there isn't nearly as much data on it as there are with the other U.S.-based products.
Pardons for the long-winded rant, but would welcome comments/thoughts, by you (Brian M) and others.
Could you not seek a medical exemption because of the prior infection/irregular heartbeat afterwards?
Really sorry, incredible that people are still being shoved around like this. Best of luck with your lawsuit, and should you submit to any of the shots, praying you won't suffer for it.
Appreciate the words/sentiment. My employer will no longer be extending/granting exemptions (I currently have a 'religious' exemption), and I doubt most doctors will sign any note. They'd surely only recommend vaccination. This will eventually turn, but not in time to alter my circumstances.
It's worth adding here that my employer (a firm with thousands of employees, domestically and abroad) recently sent off an email blast from the HR dept offering to pay for any employee to travel to an 'abortion-friendly' state for abortions. I mention this merely as a clear-cut example of the blatant hypocrisy: overly-extending accommodations for one circumstance while blatantly discriminating against those with exemptions, and more recently, doubling down by removing exemptions outright.
(all those with exemptions are NOT permitted to enter a company office, attend any 'team' events, or travel for work. There is zero consideration for prior infection, nor any option for those with exemptions to test in advance).
Truly pathological, the mindsets that persist among these upper classes.
It will all eventually be broadly acknowledged as grotesque affronts to human rights, but for now those of us who have opted against inoculation continue to be treated as lepers.
The 'covid crisis' has exposed many for being frauds, cowards, and self-interested shills.
From where I sit, this sounds like a toxic organization. One of my sons works for John's Hopkins Applied Physics Lab and was able to get an ethical exemption. But treated like a disease vector: masks, testing etc. Despite Hopkins' being fully aware that the shots are crap, that vaxxed spread covid, get sick and die from it. This idiocy will have to taper off but I'm sorry you're caught in it now.
If mRNA is the baseline, the trope is that being infected is the precursor to worse reactions to injection. That might not necessarily apply to a December/possible-Omicron infection, as those are less immunogenic for natural infection in Rossler et al. Still it's been my opinion for a long time that even the Pfizer/BioNTech 2-shot course is overkill in and of itself. Compared to pseudouridine-promoted long term expression of spike from your own cells, it certainly seems like a bit of whole virus is less of a risk.
Logistically, it seems like the Covaxin course has a significant risk of future-you not following through. If future-you does experience some worrying effects, even imagined, will future-you not be willing to travel again for the second shot? Will future-you cut your losses, meaning that current-you got the first shot for no employment benefit? Obviously the mRNA shot has the same hazard, if not more-so - but I tend to think in these type of fatalistic terms when it comes to "bargaining" against risk. Everything is a gamble, even risk reduction.
So that's the answer to the scenario as phrased. Bear in mind potential futility. Obviously a personal recommendation would be to either lawyer up out of spite for their stupid policy, or grab a copy of Who Moved My Cheese for life change advice.
Indeed; thoughtful observations largely affirming my ruminations on this. I have already consulted with attorneys and initiated a discrimination claim as a formality. It is quite stupid, the policy. Due to my dependent count I may comply near-term, otherwise I'd be fine switching to work as a tradesman or bicycle repair man. Though quitting outright remains an increasingly appealing option. As you allude, there is other 'cheese' out there in the wild.
"A year ago I learned I was being fired for refusing the vaccine. I was only in the ER a week after a year laid off. Now I'm in Florida and I still can't work in the ER. No, I'm not better for it. I gained no insight. My life was ripped apart. That's it. That was the entire point."
And one of the replies:
"@Badboysofbleec1
·
Replying to @CodyElijah1
I know how you feel. My husband & I lost our jobs and careers over NYC’s private sector vaccine mandate & are now packing up to move to Nashville. What’s worse is that virtually all NYers applaud these mandates and enjoy punishing those who they perceive as their political foes"
I applaud your "redu" of figure 1. Unlike you, I do not have a "superhuman hatred of all things OAS" (I am a work in progress) and I gave up trying to understand the HCW portion of the study (particularly after viewing diagram S1). It's frustrating how they can have centralized healthcare (so they should have loads of useful data), but this convoluted and confounding garbage is what they publish. It makes me wonder if it's just Imperial College of London providing more fodder for the fear-mongers (and I am disappointed in Dr. Malone's "well, this seems troubling" assessment of the study as well).
Kudos to you & Mod Discontent for taking the time to assess these studies without the hysteria.
Thank you - I would note that there is some slight oversimplification in mine, as Week 94-96 results for non-Omi-infected appear to be thrown in in "modules" 1 and 2. It's my best effort. Fig S1 might as well be some kook's diagram proving time travel is real. No infection + symptomatic, what? The only way to make sense of things is Table S17. So that was a gift from the authors at least.
I'm always wondering the same thing with these OAS/imprinting studies - but leaning more to the theory that OAS attracts interest due to being an unprovable paradox.
We argue that science has been captured by those who want science to seem flashy and attractive, not science based on truths that may come off super boring. So in some sense OAS is a consequence of flashy science who wants science to seem attractive even if it ends up being convoluted and really not substantiated.
As of now both sides are arguing that immune imprinting is occurring, but for different reasons. That should probably raise some eyebrows and cast some doubt.
Indeed. I can't even tell you how many cult child sacrifice parties in the Hollywood hills I've been invited to ever since last week's pro-imprinting post. This is the life.
It would seem as if Malone truly only read the abstract and conclusions of the paper, and maybe was half awake while reading the rest of it. But then he goes on to cite from the various sections and draw conclusions from those without probing the methods used.
I'm not sure what may have happened. I genuinely don't mind mistakes if those mistakes are corrected. The biggest problem is that his use of the excerpts skips over one paragraph, and in doing so he completely changes the interpretations since he is introducing two variables.
As Brian pointed out, the paper does take a good deal of reading and parsing to figure out. I think I looked at the paper over two or three days, usually looking at Brian's comment in Malone's post and thinking to myself, "what's Brian seeing that I'm missing?"
I've seen a few people comment that they weren't quite sure what Malone was alluding to in his post, but such a mistake should probably not have happened, and certainly someone of his stature should have been more careful. But that's also a consequence of what's going on where I think many people have kind of been picking studies and extrapolating things that are either not true or are not viable interpretations.
He has described his study reading style in a previous post and, imo, it is way too abstract-centric - https://rwmalonemd.substack.com/p/peer-review-example-effectiveness. As I've said before I often start with the supplemental material. Take all the authors' synthesis away and let me see what they actually recorded. There's no value to authors' description of things they can just let me look at for myself, and if they had to use statistics to find something I won't trust it anyway.
I remember reading that post. Maybe I skimmed it? Honestly, remembering this post kind of makes the situation worse. It makes it an issue when one prides themselves in being able to read articles and, well, doesn't take their own advice. I think that's why there's a lot more humility needed in our circles and it's kind of a shame that it's not happening as often as it should.
In general it really is strange how such studies are being used almost like reading tea leaves and predicting. Yeah, Wuhan spike vaccines will boost Wuhan more than Omicron, which we know is already a pretty big escape variant and yet we are shocked. I think the biggest problem with these types of studies is that it muddies the waters even further. It's another example of trying to extrapolate and argue in favor of OAS but in a manner that's super messy, and in the end just makes you scratch your head more than understand how the researchers came to such conclusions.
Thanks once again Brian! I hate bullshit, whether it comes from the pro mRNA vax side or from the opponents. It's so destructive. It's actually stunning how shoddy is the thinking on so many publications.
Well, here, the authors have a vehicle for sample and data collection that has been in place since early 2020. And thanks to reemployment of that vehicle they have tiny little updates to a spreadsheet for October and January. And so they trawl the spreadsheet and look for secret patterns in the tiny updates. And then they write that they found some. So the logical structure of “if you wanted to show X causes Y, ***compare with not-X***” isn’t even brought into it. It is just fabulation based on noise in a spreadsheet. As far as I can tell the intervals between dosing and sample collection in modules 1 and 2 are pure assumptions but there isn’t enough raw data for that part.
The irony is that shoddy work has always been there, but researchers have an obligation of highlighting the strength and the limitations of their work. We then expect peer review to assess the information and see if it matches, mostly if the researcher's conclusions can be drawn out from their actual evidence. Here, the methodology leaves so much to be desired that one has to sort of question how the researchers came to their conclusions. I wrote mostly about the T-cell arm of the study and Clarisse in my comments added even further information. I think with many of these journals being rushed to be pushed online many laypeople have essentially become the peer reviewers, but that requires some level of scientific literacy, which not many people will have and therefore it's easy to get one over on readers at times.
I've reviewed papers submitted to refereed journals in my own field of electro-optics and some were about as sloppy/slapdash/incoherent as this one Brian reviewed. They got a thumbs-down from me, unfit to print and incapable of meaningful revision. It's disturbing that this one was accepted by Science. Maybe the best service anyone can do is what Brian did here: analyze the methods and conclusions, since the paper is already out there and going to be waved around by guys like Malone who really ought know better. Thanks again Brian. I hope you'll do more of this.
I think a lot of this comes from lack of scientific literacy to be quite honest, with the best solution being able to read studies. I'll personally comment that I'm still learning a to read into studies greater- I think Brian has done that far better. However, I think many people may still find science intimidating, and thus may take people's words on studies rather than read them. And so there are issues such as the immune imprinting study in which many people may not have read it, but may take other people's interpretations to be factual. Then, that information gets carried over and someone may quote someone's interpretations as being factual, even though that's not the case. Continue on for a bit and eventually falsities have been solidified as fact through pure repetition. I believe that's what happened with OAS and the repeat of N-protein somehow telling us that OAS is occurring.
It's the responsibility of the reviewers and the editor to do exactly what Brian reports he did here. You really have to look at every detail (such as the labels on axes of graphs and data points), and if something seems a bit confusing, assuming you're a reviewer competent in the same field as the authors it's probably the fault of the authors.
Don't mean to thrash Malone here but his post on this paper is baffling. My guess is he looked hard enough just to see what he's already been convinced of and then stopped questioning. The trouble is as you point out, the errors get picked up and propagated by people who wouldn't know where to start with a paper that bad. And so it goes.
When I was writing my post, I was going to write this sappy section about looking at dots and asking what those people's stories are. Why did blue dot just not respond to any vaccinations? Why did two red Deltas do so well but one just seemed completely shot? It's kind of like House staring at a whiteboard and trying to figure it out, but I'm nowhere near that last minute "aha!" moment on everything going on. I'm probably somewhere around the "it's sarcoidosis/lupus" part of the episode so to speak...
Unrelated, at least specifically, to this latest post, but to the extent you'd be willing to oblige, I'd appreciate your thoughts/counsel, as I'm in the unfortunate circumstance where my employer (in 2022, this remains a thing) will no longer be granting/extending exemptions, and all those currently exempted will need to have at least 1 injection by Sept or be terminated. This is a publicly traded company that touts "diversity, inclusion and belonging".
All that aside, I'm weighing a number of options, including seeking another employer, though in my line of work almost all other employers have similar policies, however many no longer enforce them (at least not for existing employees; not so for inbound/new hires, in most cases).
As part of my attempts to stall/overturn policy, I managed to obtain approval to travel outside the U.S. for a more 'traditional' vaccine (specifically, Covaxin), so at the moment if I opt to proceed it'll be either Covaxin or J&J (only because it's a single shot, though I will likely only get 1 Covaxin shot regardless and do my best to stall/delay the 2nd shot as long as possible until, hopefully, these unethical mandates are lifted, sooner rather than later).
I reached out to the illuminating M.Luterra for his take, some time ago, and he provided very thoughtful/detailed breakdown of the pros/cons of Covaxin compared to the other available products.
Back to my question: if you were presented with this scenario and had to be injected, putting aside other options you may pursue (quitting to join an agrarian community, etc), which injection would you go with if you had a similar health/risk profile as mine? By way of some personal detail: I'm in my 40s, Male, active/outdoorsy; no history of health issues; taking no prescription meds. Already got covid back in December 2021, once; mild symptoms overall, for a few days, while taking vitamins/supplements/Ivermectin, though I did have a few irregular heartbeats for some time after initial flu-like symptoms waned, and occasional fatigue that lasted for a few months after that, along with some other mildly quirky issues that faded over time. I'm now largely back to my regular routine of keeping active several times a week and haven't felt any odd heart-related irregularities since early this year, though my reaction to natural infection, relatively mild overall, concerns me a bit that -- if I opt to go with one of the shots -- I may react negatively to it, more so than perhaps others. Covaxin seems to be the option with the least potential for harm given its description as a 'whole virion' inactivated spike product, but there isn't nearly as much data on it as there are with the other U.S.-based products.
Pardons for the long-winded rant, but would welcome comments/thoughts, by you (Brian M) and others.
Could you not seek a medical exemption because of the prior infection/irregular heartbeat afterwards?
Really sorry, incredible that people are still being shoved around like this. Best of luck with your lawsuit, and should you submit to any of the shots, praying you won't suffer for it.
Appreciate the words/sentiment. My employer will no longer be extending/granting exemptions (I currently have a 'religious' exemption), and I doubt most doctors will sign any note. They'd surely only recommend vaccination. This will eventually turn, but not in time to alter my circumstances.
It's worth adding here that my employer (a firm with thousands of employees, domestically and abroad) recently sent off an email blast from the HR dept offering to pay for any employee to travel to an 'abortion-friendly' state for abortions. I mention this merely as a clear-cut example of the blatant hypocrisy: overly-extending accommodations for one circumstance while blatantly discriminating against those with exemptions, and more recently, doubling down by removing exemptions outright.
(all those with exemptions are NOT permitted to enter a company office, attend any 'team' events, or travel for work. There is zero consideration for prior infection, nor any option for those with exemptions to test in advance).
Truly pathological, the mindsets that persist among these upper classes.
It will all eventually be broadly acknowledged as grotesque affronts to human rights, but for now those of us who have opted against inoculation continue to be treated as lepers.
The 'covid crisis' has exposed many for being frauds, cowards, and self-interested shills.
From where I sit, this sounds like a toxic organization. One of my sons works for John's Hopkins Applied Physics Lab and was able to get an ethical exemption. But treated like a disease vector: masks, testing etc. Despite Hopkins' being fully aware that the shots are crap, that vaxxed spread covid, get sick and die from it. This idiocy will have to taper off but I'm sorry you're caught in it now.
If mRNA is the baseline, the trope is that being infected is the precursor to worse reactions to injection. That might not necessarily apply to a December/possible-Omicron infection, as those are less immunogenic for natural infection in Rossler et al. Still it's been my opinion for a long time that even the Pfizer/BioNTech 2-shot course is overkill in and of itself. Compared to pseudouridine-promoted long term expression of spike from your own cells, it certainly seems like a bit of whole virus is less of a risk.
Logistically, it seems like the Covaxin course has a significant risk of future-you not following through. If future-you does experience some worrying effects, even imagined, will future-you not be willing to travel again for the second shot? Will future-you cut your losses, meaning that current-you got the first shot for no employment benefit? Obviously the mRNA shot has the same hazard, if not more-so - but I tend to think in these type of fatalistic terms when it comes to "bargaining" against risk. Everything is a gamble, even risk reduction.
So that's the answer to the scenario as phrased. Bear in mind potential futility. Obviously a personal recommendation would be to either lawyer up out of spite for their stupid policy, or grab a copy of Who Moved My Cheese for life change advice.
Indeed; thoughtful observations largely affirming my ruminations on this. I have already consulted with attorneys and initiated a discrimination claim as a formality. It is quite stupid, the policy. Due to my dependent count I may comply near-term, otherwise I'd be fine switching to work as a tradesman or bicycle repair man. Though quitting outright remains an increasingly appealing option. As you allude, there is other 'cheese' out there in the wild.
That said, unfortunate scenarios like this remain all too common:
https://twitter.com/CodyElijah1/status/1557430330080071681?s=20&t=avfG6w2fYduJCi0Jqbls1g
"A year ago I learned I was being fired for refusing the vaccine. I was only in the ER a week after a year laid off. Now I'm in Florida and I still can't work in the ER. No, I'm not better for it. I gained no insight. My life was ripped apart. That's it. That was the entire point."
And one of the replies:
"@Badboysofbleec1
·
Replying to @CodyElijah1
I know how you feel. My husband & I lost our jobs and careers over NYC’s private sector vaccine mandate & are now packing up to move to Nashville. What’s worse is that virtually all NYers applaud these mandates and enjoy punishing those who they perceive as their political foes"
Thank you for breaking down this study and pointing to the real designed and printing study. This is so important. 👍🏽💕
I applaud your "redu" of figure 1. Unlike you, I do not have a "superhuman hatred of all things OAS" (I am a work in progress) and I gave up trying to understand the HCW portion of the study (particularly after viewing diagram S1). It's frustrating how they can have centralized healthcare (so they should have loads of useful data), but this convoluted and confounding garbage is what they publish. It makes me wonder if it's just Imperial College of London providing more fodder for the fear-mongers (and I am disappointed in Dr. Malone's "well, this seems troubling" assessment of the study as well).
Kudos to you & Mod Discontent for taking the time to assess these studies without the hysteria.
Thank you - I would note that there is some slight oversimplification in mine, as Week 94-96 results for non-Omi-infected appear to be thrown in in "modules" 1 and 2. It's my best effort. Fig S1 might as well be some kook's diagram proving time travel is real. No infection + symptomatic, what? The only way to make sense of things is Table S17. So that was a gift from the authors at least.
I'm always wondering the same thing with these OAS/imprinting studies - but leaning more to the theory that OAS attracts interest due to being an unprovable paradox.
We argue that science has been captured by those who want science to seem flashy and attractive, not science based on truths that may come off super boring. So in some sense OAS is a consequence of flashy science who wants science to seem attractive even if it ends up being convoluted and really not substantiated.
As of now both sides are arguing that immune imprinting is occurring, but for different reasons. That should probably raise some eyebrows and cast some doubt.
Indeed. I can't even tell you how many cult child sacrifice parties in the Hollywood hills I've been invited to ever since last week's pro-imprinting post. This is the life.
Oh boy, will imprinting precede grooming? I wonder if Ezra Miller will coin a new term while in prison? 🤔
It would seem as if Malone truly only read the abstract and conclusions of the paper, and maybe was half awake while reading the rest of it. But then he goes on to cite from the various sections and draw conclusions from those without probing the methods used.
I'm not sure what may have happened. I genuinely don't mind mistakes if those mistakes are corrected. The biggest problem is that his use of the excerpts skips over one paragraph, and in doing so he completely changes the interpretations since he is introducing two variables.
As Brian pointed out, the paper does take a good deal of reading and parsing to figure out. I think I looked at the paper over two or three days, usually looking at Brian's comment in Malone's post and thinking to myself, "what's Brian seeing that I'm missing?"
I've seen a few people comment that they weren't quite sure what Malone was alluding to in his post, but such a mistake should probably not have happened, and certainly someone of his stature should have been more careful. But that's also a consequence of what's going on where I think many people have kind of been picking studies and extrapolating things that are either not true or are not viable interpretations.
He has described his study reading style in a previous post and, imo, it is way too abstract-centric - https://rwmalonemd.substack.com/p/peer-review-example-effectiveness. As I've said before I often start with the supplemental material. Take all the authors' synthesis away and let me see what they actually recorded. There's no value to authors' description of things they can just let me look at for myself, and if they had to use statistics to find something I won't trust it anyway.
I remember reading that post. Maybe I skimmed it? Honestly, remembering this post kind of makes the situation worse. It makes it an issue when one prides themselves in being able to read articles and, well, doesn't take their own advice. I think that's why there's a lot more humility needed in our circles and it's kind of a shame that it's not happening as often as it should.
In general it really is strange how such studies are being used almost like reading tea leaves and predicting. Yeah, Wuhan spike vaccines will boost Wuhan more than Omicron, which we know is already a pretty big escape variant and yet we are shocked. I think the biggest problem with these types of studies is that it muddies the waters even further. It's another example of trying to extrapolate and argue in favor of OAS but in a manner that's super messy, and in the end just makes you scratch your head more than understand how the researchers came to such conclusions.
Thanks once again Brian! I hate bullshit, whether it comes from the pro mRNA vax side or from the opponents. It's so destructive. It's actually stunning how shoddy is the thinking on so many publications.
Well, here, the authors have a vehicle for sample and data collection that has been in place since early 2020. And thanks to reemployment of that vehicle they have tiny little updates to a spreadsheet for October and January. And so they trawl the spreadsheet and look for secret patterns in the tiny updates. And then they write that they found some. So the logical structure of “if you wanted to show X causes Y, ***compare with not-X***” isn’t even brought into it. It is just fabulation based on noise in a spreadsheet. As far as I can tell the intervals between dosing and sample collection in modules 1 and 2 are pure assumptions but there isn’t enough raw data for that part.
The irony is that shoddy work has always been there, but researchers have an obligation of highlighting the strength and the limitations of their work. We then expect peer review to assess the information and see if it matches, mostly if the researcher's conclusions can be drawn out from their actual evidence. Here, the methodology leaves so much to be desired that one has to sort of question how the researchers came to their conclusions. I wrote mostly about the T-cell arm of the study and Clarisse in my comments added even further information. I think with many of these journals being rushed to be pushed online many laypeople have essentially become the peer reviewers, but that requires some level of scientific literacy, which not many people will have and therefore it's easy to get one over on readers at times.
I've reviewed papers submitted to refereed journals in my own field of electro-optics and some were about as sloppy/slapdash/incoherent as this one Brian reviewed. They got a thumbs-down from me, unfit to print and incapable of meaningful revision. It's disturbing that this one was accepted by Science. Maybe the best service anyone can do is what Brian did here: analyze the methods and conclusions, since the paper is already out there and going to be waved around by guys like Malone who really ought know better. Thanks again Brian. I hope you'll do more of this.
I think a lot of this comes from lack of scientific literacy to be quite honest, with the best solution being able to read studies. I'll personally comment that I'm still learning a to read into studies greater- I think Brian has done that far better. However, I think many people may still find science intimidating, and thus may take people's words on studies rather than read them. And so there are issues such as the immune imprinting study in which many people may not have read it, but may take other people's interpretations to be factual. Then, that information gets carried over and someone may quote someone's interpretations as being factual, even though that's not the case. Continue on for a bit and eventually falsities have been solidified as fact through pure repetition. I believe that's what happened with OAS and the repeat of N-protein somehow telling us that OAS is occurring.
It's the responsibility of the reviewers and the editor to do exactly what Brian reports he did here. You really have to look at every detail (such as the labels on axes of graphs and data points), and if something seems a bit confusing, assuming you're a reviewer competent in the same field as the authors it's probably the fault of the authors.
Don't mean to thrash Malone here but his post on this paper is baffling. My guess is he looked hard enough just to see what he's already been convinced of and then stopped questioning. The trouble is as you point out, the errors get picked up and propagated by people who wouldn't know where to start with a paper that bad. And so it goes.
Chances are good. Adding the missing labels to figures - who are these dots? when were they sampled? - is my favorite game these days.
When I was writing my post, I was going to write this sappy section about looking at dots and asking what those people's stories are. Why did blue dot just not respond to any vaccinations? Why did two red Deltas do so well but one just seemed completely shot? It's kind of like House staring at a whiteboard and trying to figure it out, but I'm nowhere near that last minute "aha!" moment on everything going on. I'm probably somewhere around the "it's sarcoidosis/lupus" part of the episode so to speak...