Feb 4, 2022·edited Feb 4, 2022Liked by Brian Mowrey
To mask or not to mask - that is the question.
But it is a policy question, not a veracity question. (I mean, how do you "falsify" a policy proposal?) A policy question may be certainly *informed*by evidence, which may be quite useful to help reckon up what actually goes into the "pro" column and what goes into the "con" column.
But at the end of the day, evidence *doesn't* care what we do with it, or about it, or in the teeth of it. Evidence just is.
It is people who care what we do. And we care what we do for reasons that have everything to do with our values, our interests, our worldviews, and (for sure) our less rational fears and desires, and very, very little to do with reason, logic or evidence.
We would all be much better to be as honest as we can about the values, interests, and fears/desires which prompt us to prefer one or another policy, and argue/negotiate/do politics, on that basis. Let the evidence help compile the most accurate reckonings of costs and benefits, and then let us set them to one side and begin negotiating what is the policy that we can all support and live with. The best policy will be that which most successfully reconciles the varied interests and values we each bring to the table. And there is no "right" (ie falsifiable) policy. There is only the best possible policy in the context of THIS or THAT current diverse set of values and interests. Which could be different tomorrow, when different people sit down to work out a deal.
The essential superficiality of all rhetoric certainly attracted Aristophanes' and Diogenes' notice. Humans use logic and evidence as a paint job to adorn whatever their interests are to begin with, including the interest corrupt / decadent societies seemingly inevitably develop of preying on the young.
Not to be macabre with the macaques, but the study is way too limited. What’s the biology of mRNA transfection with an Omicron protein vs a Wuhan protein to begin with, not in the context of a booster? And does mRNA + spike production + immune response on macaques really say anything about the outcomes for humans? The authors are in la-la-land when they say macaques have been well established as correlates for protection. Nothing is a correlate for protection for Omicron. Lastly, only eight test subjects? I look at the pre-boost antibody levels and those eight monkeys are already very skewed in antibody output. So did the high-pre-booster-antibody monkeys fall in the Wuhan booster or the Omicron booster set?
And what would the results of a non-boosted Omicron challenge? Oops, the study has no non-boosted macaques to work with, sorry. Geez, why couldn’t they just let these poor 8 monkeys go about their lives instead of pretending there was anything left to gain from infecting and sacrificing them without a large enough population to control for anything...
Thank you for the great article above. I have seen some other good articles recently. Maybe you have seen these? I found them scary to be frank. These idiots do not know what they are doing and are playing with fire.
The long-term spike (post-virus or post-vax) question is incredibly under-researched. I'm working through the Patterson / InCell Long Covid studies right now (the post-vaccine research previewed on Drbeen the other day).
I haven't looked at the full CMJ article but at a glance it seems to be confusing Test Negative design for a representative sample of a population.
There isn't any evidence for higher reinfection rate in the Covid-vaccinated yet, as far as I know; the Goldberg et al. study suggests that the vaxxed+infected only have a marginally higher reinfection rate at 4-8 months (https://unglossed.substack.com/p/darmok-and-the-spike-protein-at-tanagra#footnote-8). The N protein comment was dropped into the UKHSA report months ago and I'm still inclined to guess that it was based on out-of-date research on spring breakthrough infections (before infection efficacy dropped), which were predominately asymptomatic or low-symptoms; so, the comment is probably not relevant to why N protein seropositivity in blood donors is lagging, it is instead an artifact of infected+vaccinated not donating as much (see https://unglossed.substack.com/p/not-coming-up - note that N protein seropositivity has gone up quite a bit in the last two months anyway, possibly just due to more infected+vaccinated deciding to donate blood again).
I am seeing more and more people eschew masks in the supermarket. It makes my heart sing. I used to wear one but it only took 5 minutes sans mask to reduce unveiled nakedness embarrassment to zero.
I see the ongoing debacle as something that needs to be dealt with. Any time I compare something analogous to this debacle, however, my boosted housemate rolls their eyes and says "It's not all about the vaccine, you know?"
The psychological ploys inherent in the push for vax passports and boosters, etc, relies on so many innate "get it over and done with, get back to my more simple life" tenets that are innate to the human condition, I am sure. Dumb luck? Or conditioning? I have not taken the time to confirm.
As a child who experienced shit, I cannot legally express my desires when it comes to the adults inflicting this special kind of shit on of kids during this period.
I often find myself bemused yet fascinated by your blog posts, unable to pierce the subtlety and understand the points. The lack is mine, for preferring more straightforward discourse and having a distinct disinclination for philosophy. This is not a criticism!
So even though I can't quite grasp the forest, the trees offer a lot of food for thought. Or snide remarks.
• “What is the stopping rule?” How about, um, discovery that the mitigation doesn't work?
• "Nothing is more tragic than the preventable death of a child." I'll believe that when I see them outlaw transporting children in cars.
• "they insist that vaccines do not provide the kind of protection that could permit people to live anything akin to normal lives." The only thing preventing normal life is the bureaucracy's pandemic response.
• "The enhanced protection appears durable, remaining at 90% for at least 10 weeks, the longest monitoring to date." As with words like "vaccine" and "herd immunity", they must have redefined "durable" when I wasn't looking.
• "To Berenson, it cannot be acknowledged that the Covid vaccines reduce hospitalizations or death, because if they do, then no argument against them is morally sustainable." Morality considerations aside, I've been in these kinds of arguments and usually the other person ends up shrugging and saying they don't mind getting boosters two or three times a year. Argh.
• 'And that is the argument that needed to be made two years ago; and it is the argument that still needs to be made. If this virus kills more than the flu, well, so what? Does that mean it is actually “different” from the flu, or just that it is like flu, but more-so - as it was so allegedly “wrong” and “irresponsible” to say before Omicron? Is dying (being allowed to die) from the flu, or an equivalent virus, actually some moral crime to begin with - or isn’t it, in fact, the natural order of life?' Our culture has become almost completely anti-evolutionary. Say things like this and people look at you like you're some kind of empathyless psychopath. I get that reaction when I point out that almost all of humanity's problems are caused by the fact that there are too damn many of us on the planet. People jump to the conclusion that I'm advocating genocide or something.
• "grow up to imagine themselves as biologically nonfunctional, sans medical intervention." We already are. Elderly people, at least in the US, on average take something like 10 prescription pharmaceuticals every day. Never mind that a lot of these are to ameliorate the side effects of some of the others…
Right, on the last point I wondered if I was just fretting over overkill. But I think in reality the health of people entering adulthood after me (Americans in the post-NCVIA era) has been moving in both directions for the last two decades - rampant increases in medical dependency (including pot for "anxiety"), but also increases in fitness. But perhaps I see an excess of both trends, being in southern CA.
Will Covid Safetyism actually change how many American kids grow up thinking they require medication to "go about the work of being human beings"? I mean I'm pretty sure yes, but it's not a complete binary switch compared to how things were before.
For the penultimate point, when we embrace natural death, it ceases to be existentially terrifying. And when adults latch onto a fantasy of immortality, parasitization of the young follows. I always feel a connection to something sacred when I am sick (another reason I am hesitant about medicalizing the virus in my personal use), and also that the renewal of the "lease" on life that follows recovery is worth the journey in the first place. But perhaps that, itself, is an "antisocial" attitude (even if it actually leads to more pro-social attitudes about accepting risk).
"when adults latch onto a fantasy of immortality, parasitization of the young follows..." Oh, hear, hear! Yes!
People never seem to get it when I say that (as seems so obvious to me) to vanquish death means to abolish births.
I think you are the first person (I have seen) who has expressed a similar thought independently of me, but you have done it ever so much more eloquently. Have you ever done a post on this subject?
No - my thoughts on the subject never really even make it into the "unfinished draft" bin. And I still haven't got around to reading Illich. Sadly, Unglossed has drawn my thoughts away from the sacredness of illness and death overall. I am recalled back to the subject when Medical Nemesis drops new posts - https://medicalnemesis.substack.com
Your comment about health pushes some of my buttons. I came into this after 12 years of obsessively reading about the immune system and subcellular metabolic chemistry. I've become convinced that recommended lifestyles (read: diet) and the toxic environment in which we live cause about 80% of our problems, and are reversible without medication.
I am only a few months into my reading on the immune system, and whilst I have reached the same conclusions re: diet, I find the footnote style of "a healthy diet would curtail 20-40% of these diseases" in one book I am reading somewhat uninspiring.
Gut health must tie in so strongly and yet nothing in these books discusses - as far as I have seen - any methods of developing or enhancing that health vector.
Immunology study does not appear to be about health, but how we can manipulate the immune system artificially / from a lab / injection for effect.
You may find this paper interesting. tl;dr Victorians of the period 1850-1880 enjoyed enormously good health (in some ways better than today's). Authors put a good case that economic and political factors (for a time) led to a very healthy diet being widely available. A period that was succeeded by increasing exposures to poorer quality food, and industrial contamination. A "golden era" for health, if you will.
There were very, very few instances of what we now know as chronic, metabolic or autoimmune diseases, and, for a time very little of other kinds of morbidity. The authors give an example of a medical lecturer demonstrating a case of lung cancer to students saying something like "here is something you may see once in the whole of your medical career" (!!!) https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2672390/
Condensed milk seems to have been a disaster for childhood nutrition. I haven't done my own research on the subject, but Dissolving Illusions features a lot of childhood mortality from adulterated milk in the late 1800s. Photos of European soldiers in WWI are like midget conventions.
If they used condensed instead of mother's breast milk, the immunology factor would come into play - lots of IgG being passed on after kissing baby's face and generating Ab for all the nasties found thereon.
My instinct is that diet is marginal to exercise. Yes, processed foods all essentially turn themselves into poison - but as our environment is also full of toxins, it's not clear why "toxic food" is worse than toxic air. But, my beliefs are totally unsupported by the research, and always will be, since no one is ever going to research 40 minutes of exercise a day (what I consider minimum requirement) vs less.
This belief also makes the puzzle of "Long Covid" more challenging to grapple with, since exercise worsens symptoms . And yet when I was having two days of brain fog, exercise made it go away. And now I'm fine. Would there be any such thing as "Long Covid" if everyone exercised regularly to begin with? Really, I doubt it.
I would just use accumulation of novel disease or episodic systemic pain. Anything from diabetes to headaches. Just tally it up, see which group has more health problems come "out of nowhere."
"Worsening" of pre-existing conditions would be very messy. There's a lot of negative feedback with disease, and worsening with exercise is part of that, as seen with "Long Covid." Once you have something autoimmune going on, including potentially any injury (which leads to inflammation and always has a potential for cyclical sensitization) "exercising your way out of it" can be a really, really, long term process. Same for pain. There's a lot of sand-traps in biology.
I think diet is paramount, though exercise is also important. Our bodies are made of what we put into them. How can that not make a difference?
I'm not talking so much about toxic food in terms of pesticides or whatever, though I'm sure those are bad. I'm talking about non-evolutionarily-compatible amounts of things like polyunsaturated fats, sugars, and stuff like that. Our metabolic machinery is wonderfully resilient, but it does have limits.
Right, so the issue with being made of "what is put in" is that some of what is put in is bad, or just that the metabolites are bad - there's no escaping waste product. Stuff needs to be cleaned out, or there will be disease, it doesn't matter how well you eat. Is non-kinetically assisted circulation of blood to your spleen, liver, kidneys really enough to purge the metabolic waste of literally every cell in your body, or are the these organs just a siphon that skims off the top?
In my intuition, our entire body is functionally a series of streams that can get blocked up. Poor diet adds more conglomerates to the water, and obviously increases blockage. While exercise is the difference between running a daily power-hose in every kink of the stream, or not. I'll take the daily power-hose over hoping that "clean" water (still full of smaller conglomerates) can run through the stream for years on end without blockage.
Feb 5, 2022·edited Feb 5, 2022Liked by Brian Mowrey
The word that springs to mind re: diet + exercise is "synergistic".
I like looking at / hypothesising about pre-modern man in particular.
eg: it makes sense to me that exercising (hunting) fasted for a couple of days leading to enhanced efficiency of exercise (ie via angiogenesis / increased mitochondrial density) when food was scarce or randomly gained would still be a possibility now, given the 1000s of years of evolution that drove those sorts of biological process developments. The bodies that allowed that process would outcompete the ones that simply petered out (and did not enhance efficiency / ultimately died).
I think way way way back when (ie at the single cell stage of live), the first thing we did was divide, then eat (for energy) to then move (get somewhere with more food / away from death/enemies). So they are inextricably linked.
I'd like to see an exposition of your hypothesis. I can live without exercise but not without food. I wonder if the lymphatic reliance on muscle movement for flow is part of it, which as we know is intrinsic to robust immune response.
Yes, I would like to see your hypothesis expounded, when you have time.
40 minutes of exercise a day sounds eminently doable.
Feb 2, 2022·edited Feb 2, 2022Liked by Brian Mowrey
More thoughts:
* exercise modulates / ameliorates stress
* exercise is more likely to oxygenate the blood / associated internal structures
Exercise physiology has been a hobby of mine for quite some years now, but I never associated it with immune function.
One thing I am noticing is the same receptors / ligands / pathways (and esp things like mitochondrial function) being mentioned between immune system functions and exercise-induced adaptations, however my understanding of the field is somewhat limited and I will need to cross reference to find the commonalities.
One thing that stood out immediately was mTOR - and a quick google shows links (unread, possibly spurious):
mTOR inhibition in COVID-19: A commentary and review of efficacy in RNA viruses
In the UK, things were going back to normal, masks coming off etc. A few cases is all it took and straight back on again, including for school children.
Brilliant essay! Delightfully thought provoking and as Jen Swann Downey says, this essay deserves wider readership.
Ultimately perhaps we who appreciate and value normality were living in a delusion all along that normality was truly normal? Yes some people snap out of the psychosis but it seems that maybe just maybe we were living in a twilight era between two mass religious fervours and that perhaps this religious fervour is the true normal state of mankind in anything but some of the tiniest groups? We've gone from violating the sanctity that woman being generally more vulnerable should be protected (burning witches at the stake) to all but ritually sacrificing children to our new Virus-God as you so aptly put it. Just like with previous moments of religious fervour that spread far and wide with Christianity and Islam and arguably 1700s-1900s imperialism and 1930s nationalism we see this 2010s-2020s religious progressivism (now expressed with medical progressivism) adopting religious themes ("belief in science or rather scientism/belief in vaccines"), slogans ("blessings of X"), religious type mantras only loosely connected with reality ("flatten the curve", "Two weeks to flatten the curve", "safe and effective"), rituals (wearing a mask as a sign of a believer, taking your soon-to-be quarterly or even monthly "vaccine" booster shot as a sacrament) and an obsession with death/eternal life and persecuting the out-groups (as happened to infidels, heretics and untermenschen and various other "inferior" peoples).
I've oft reflected on my experience that most people don't seem able to properly handle the concept that we are just another form of life on this piece of rock in space and that magical thinking isn't likely to determine anything in the real world (so for example the toxic positivity we see sometimes in modern thought where people now conflate the fact that having a positive attitude can help you to better cope with and manage difficult situations and will more readily attract persons to you who will offer you things that will be of benefit with the idea that thinking positive will mean that for instance things will always work out in your favour somehow - spoiler alert: life never works like for most living creatures). What is all of this covid theatre performed against the backdrop of the emergent mass psychosis than magical thinking taken to absurd heights not seen in decades, if not centuries?
As an ardent critic of the old normal before March 2020, I certainly have mixed feelings. But the amount of "discounting the positive" that was being committed at the beginning of the lockdowns was staggering. Yeah, public schools are toxic swamps of cultural nihilism - but at least they provide daily meals! I've since moved toward abolitionism. But even if I'm agnostic about the continued use of the institution of "school," I'm aghast at the notion of turning that institution into an adult-on-child torture chamber.
Humans in the secular west are the same species we were before Darwin and the Big Bang, with the same psychological needs - we've simply been deprived of the prior, functioning outlet for our angst over death and sin. So the secular world has to be transformed to accommodate and coddle the arrested-in-childhood anxieties of adults - that includes our own biology. Obviously society would be better off going back to regular church, but that can only happen on a local level. Wherever the coastal media defines the culture (amplified by social media posturing), western society is a lost cause.
As well as the missing outlet for angst over death and sin, IMO humans lost any cohesive raison d'etre. Women were / are sold the lie that it was career and prestige availed from exalted positions in a company, except depression rates are higher and growing faster in the female cohort.
I blame central control and the diminution of personal responsibility / accountability, working hand in hand to create this fustercluck.
Such a rare opportunity to completely bypass human subjects IRB. And such big N! Unheard of. We'll be doing longitudinal studies on this cohort for decades.
Kline MD says children's lives are at stake. All evidence says no, they're not. Which children is he worried about? If he has patients who are immunocompromised, they might have better risk with the vax. Most kids are safer without. Or do his fees rely on a steady stream of vax patients? Vax advocates all seem to need the business. They're not interested in anybody health, just our sickness. It's a very sick industry.
"Over in the Endless Ethical Posturing Olympics arena complex that is epidemiology / medical twitter, a pathetically low bar of common sense regarding “children and Covid” was only recently offered for credentialed fear-mongerers to competitively vault over; they obliged." Bingpot! Thank you for speaking to the absurdity of that low bar even as you deconstruct the arguments of the "urgency tool-kit" critics. This piece deserves much wider readership. Hope people find it.
Tyler Black's complaint was that the toolkit's claim about child suicide was "as awful as it gets". But, American Institute for Economic Research says that all indications are that the suicide rate for youth has skyrocketed, although exact figures aren't yet available. The quote about "greater suicides than deaths from COVID" is straight from CDC Director Robert Redfield, in July 2020.
In the end, I didn't include any criticism of Black, since even though his rhetoric is unhinged and his "markup style" a bit psycho-killer-y (https://twitter.com/tylerblack32/status/1486111697601540105), he's right that the 2020 figures are still lower than 2017/18.
There's more to child mental health than any metrics can capture, and people should depend on common sense rather than the consensus of politically infected psychological fields.
Fantastic essay! I was hopeful that maybe my own blue region of crazy might snap out of it but after reading your piece maybe not. I can't tolerate this much longer... Perhaps will have to move.
Feb 1, 2022·edited Feb 1, 2022Liked by Brian Mowrey
One of the biggest problems in turning the tide of progressivism (and yes, I believe covid hysteria is an aspect of progressivism) is that progressives control the media, and the media always gets the last word. The opposing viewpoint is always framed as fringe or minority and that creates that impression that it really is a minority viewpoint and makes people afraid to admit that they agree with it.
And in the US, at least, there are regions where people have understood for decades that the media sees them as subhuman / "deplorables" - these places were insulated from the media trance. It is ironic that the cosmopolitanist / globalist media culture created in the US has more of a stranglehold on the politics in other countries (like Canada) than it does here.
Thank you. I am glad to know that I should not get too excited about it.
To mask or not to mask - that is the question.
But it is a policy question, not a veracity question. (I mean, how do you "falsify" a policy proposal?) A policy question may be certainly *informed*by evidence, which may be quite useful to help reckon up what actually goes into the "pro" column and what goes into the "con" column.
But at the end of the day, evidence *doesn't* care what we do with it, or about it, or in the teeth of it. Evidence just is.
It is people who care what we do. And we care what we do for reasons that have everything to do with our values, our interests, our worldviews, and (for sure) our less rational fears and desires, and very, very little to do with reason, logic or evidence.
We would all be much better to be as honest as we can about the values, interests, and fears/desires which prompt us to prefer one or another policy, and argue/negotiate/do politics, on that basis. Let the evidence help compile the most accurate reckonings of costs and benefits, and then let us set them to one side and begin negotiating what is the policy that we can all support and live with. The best policy will be that which most successfully reconciles the varied interests and values we each bring to the table. And there is no "right" (ie falsifiable) policy. There is only the best possible policy in the context of THIS or THAT current diverse set of values and interests. Which could be different tomorrow, when different people sit down to work out a deal.
The essential superficiality of all rhetoric certainly attracted Aristophanes' and Diogenes' notice. Humans use logic and evidence as a paint job to adorn whatever their interests are to begin with, including the interest corrupt / decadent societies seemingly inevitably develop of preying on the young.
I knew this was the case, but it is still amazing to read about it. These 5 Studies Reveal a Disturbing Trend — Researchers Presenting Conclusions That Don’t Match the Data https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/researchers-covid-conclusions/?
Right, that's the conclusion of basically all of my study review posts - the authors just say their results show the opposite of whatever they show.
What do you think about the Omicron vaccine producing way less antibodies? https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.02.03.479037v1?
This is grotesque. https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/manipulation-guilt-shame-vaccine-compliance/?
and this is interesting about Israel's vaccine problems. https://www.theblaze.com/op-ed/horowitz-the-country-the-covid-cultists-dont-want-to-discuss?
Not to be macabre with the macaques, but the study is way too limited. What’s the biology of mRNA transfection with an Omicron protein vs a Wuhan protein to begin with, not in the context of a booster? And does mRNA + spike production + immune response on macaques really say anything about the outcomes for humans? The authors are in la-la-land when they say macaques have been well established as correlates for protection. Nothing is a correlate for protection for Omicron. Lastly, only eight test subjects? I look at the pre-boost antibody levels and those eight monkeys are already very skewed in antibody output. So did the high-pre-booster-antibody monkeys fall in the Wuhan booster or the Omicron booster set?
And what would the results of a non-boosted Omicron challenge? Oops, the study has no non-boosted macaques to work with, sorry. Geez, why couldn’t they just let these poor 8 monkeys go about their lives instead of pretending there was anything left to gain from infecting and sacrificing them without a large enough population to control for anything...
Thank you for the great article above. I have seen some other good articles recently. Maybe you have seen these? I found them scary to be frank. These idiots do not know what they are doing and are playing with fire.
https://www.science.org/content/article/rare-cases-coronavirus-vaccines-may-cause-long-covid-symptoms
https://www.nejm.org/doi/pdf/10.1056/NEJMcibr2113694?articleTools=true
https://trialsitenews.com/is-chinas-sinopharm-inactivated-covid-19-vaccine-compromising-healthy-peoples-immune-system/
https://chrismasterjohnphd.com/covid-19/2022/01/27/the-pandemic-of-pcr-negative-c-word-like-illness
The long-term spike (post-virus or post-vax) question is incredibly under-researched. I'm working through the Patterson / InCell Long Covid studies right now (the post-vaccine research previewed on Drbeen the other day).
I haven't looked at the full CMJ article but at a glance it seems to be confusing Test Negative design for a representative sample of a population.
There isn't any evidence for higher reinfection rate in the Covid-vaccinated yet, as far as I know; the Goldberg et al. study suggests that the vaxxed+infected only have a marginally higher reinfection rate at 4-8 months (https://unglossed.substack.com/p/darmok-and-the-spike-protein-at-tanagra#footnote-8). The N protein comment was dropped into the UKHSA report months ago and I'm still inclined to guess that it was based on out-of-date research on spring breakthrough infections (before infection efficacy dropped), which were predominately asymptomatic or low-symptoms; so, the comment is probably not relevant to why N protein seropositivity in blood donors is lagging, it is instead an artifact of infected+vaccinated not donating as much (see https://unglossed.substack.com/p/not-coming-up - note that N protein seropositivity has gone up quite a bit in the last two months anyway, possibly just due to more infected+vaccinated deciding to donate blood again).
Thanks Brian for taking the time to write a very thoughtful and comprehensive response. Much appreciated and have a great day.
Forgot one about infection after vaccination and the lack of N antibody production. https://igorchudov.substack.com/p/ukhsa-explains-endless-reinfections?
I am seeing more and more people eschew masks in the supermarket. It makes my heart sing. I used to wear one but it only took 5 minutes sans mask to reduce unveiled nakedness embarrassment to zero.
I see the ongoing debacle as something that needs to be dealt with. Any time I compare something analogous to this debacle, however, my boosted housemate rolls their eyes and says "It's not all about the vaccine, you know?"
The psychological ploys inherent in the push for vax passports and boosters, etc, relies on so many innate "get it over and done with, get back to my more simple life" tenets that are innate to the human condition, I am sure. Dumb luck? Or conditioning? I have not taken the time to confirm.
As a child who experienced shit, I cannot legally express my desires when it comes to the adults inflicting this special kind of shit on of kids during this period.
For almost two years officials have been completely ignoring innate natural immunity.
Now papers are starting to come out that finally talk about it:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41590-021-01114-w
Lakshmi is a woman's name.
Correct...
I often find myself bemused yet fascinated by your blog posts, unable to pierce the subtlety and understand the points. The lack is mine, for preferring more straightforward discourse and having a distinct disinclination for philosophy. This is not a criticism!
So even though I can't quite grasp the forest, the trees offer a lot of food for thought. Or snide remarks.
• “What is the stopping rule?” How about, um, discovery that the mitigation doesn't work?
• "Nothing is more tragic than the preventable death of a child." I'll believe that when I see them outlaw transporting children in cars.
• "they insist that vaccines do not provide the kind of protection that could permit people to live anything akin to normal lives." The only thing preventing normal life is the bureaucracy's pandemic response.
• "The enhanced protection appears durable, remaining at 90% for at least 10 weeks, the longest monitoring to date." As with words like "vaccine" and "herd immunity", they must have redefined "durable" when I wasn't looking.
• "To Berenson, it cannot be acknowledged that the Covid vaccines reduce hospitalizations or death, because if they do, then no argument against them is morally sustainable." Morality considerations aside, I've been in these kinds of arguments and usually the other person ends up shrugging and saying they don't mind getting boosters two or three times a year. Argh.
• 'And that is the argument that needed to be made two years ago; and it is the argument that still needs to be made. If this virus kills more than the flu, well, so what? Does that mean it is actually “different” from the flu, or just that it is like flu, but more-so - as it was so allegedly “wrong” and “irresponsible” to say before Omicron? Is dying (being allowed to die) from the flu, or an equivalent virus, actually some moral crime to begin with - or isn’t it, in fact, the natural order of life?' Our culture has become almost completely anti-evolutionary. Say things like this and people look at you like you're some kind of empathyless psychopath. I get that reaction when I point out that almost all of humanity's problems are caused by the fact that there are too damn many of us on the planet. People jump to the conclusion that I'm advocating genocide or something.
• "grow up to imagine themselves as biologically nonfunctional, sans medical intervention." We already are. Elderly people, at least in the US, on average take something like 10 prescription pharmaceuticals every day. Never mind that a lot of these are to ameliorate the side effects of some of the others…
Right, on the last point I wondered if I was just fretting over overkill. But I think in reality the health of people entering adulthood after me (Americans in the post-NCVIA era) has been moving in both directions for the last two decades - rampant increases in medical dependency (including pot for "anxiety"), but also increases in fitness. But perhaps I see an excess of both trends, being in southern CA.
Will Covid Safetyism actually change how many American kids grow up thinking they require medication to "go about the work of being human beings"? I mean I'm pretty sure yes, but it's not a complete binary switch compared to how things were before.
For the penultimate point, when we embrace natural death, it ceases to be existentially terrifying. And when adults latch onto a fantasy of immortality, parasitization of the young follows. I always feel a connection to something sacred when I am sick (another reason I am hesitant about medicalizing the virus in my personal use), and also that the renewal of the "lease" on life that follows recovery is worth the journey in the first place. But perhaps that, itself, is an "antisocial" attitude (even if it actually leads to more pro-social attitudes about accepting risk).
"when adults latch onto a fantasy of immortality, parasitization of the young follows..." Oh, hear, hear! Yes!
People never seem to get it when I say that (as seems so obvious to me) to vanquish death means to abolish births.
I think you are the first person (I have seen) who has expressed a similar thought independently of me, but you have done it ever so much more eloquently. Have you ever done a post on this subject?
No - my thoughts on the subject never really even make it into the "unfinished draft" bin. And I still haven't got around to reading Illich. Sadly, Unglossed has drawn my thoughts away from the sacredness of illness and death overall. I am recalled back to the subject when Medical Nemesis drops new posts - https://medicalnemesis.substack.com
Your comment about health pushes some of my buttons. I came into this after 12 years of obsessively reading about the immune system and subcellular metabolic chemistry. I've become convinced that recommended lifestyles (read: diet) and the toxic environment in which we live cause about 80% of our problems, and are reversible without medication.
I am only a few months into my reading on the immune system, and whilst I have reached the same conclusions re: diet, I find the footnote style of "a healthy diet would curtail 20-40% of these diseases" in one book I am reading somewhat uninspiring.
Gut health must tie in so strongly and yet nothing in these books discusses - as far as I have seen - any methods of developing or enhancing that health vector.
Immunology study does not appear to be about health, but how we can manipulate the immune system artificially / from a lab / injection for effect.
You may find this paper interesting. tl;dr Victorians of the period 1850-1880 enjoyed enormously good health (in some ways better than today's). Authors put a good case that economic and political factors (for a time) led to a very healthy diet being widely available. A period that was succeeded by increasing exposures to poorer quality food, and industrial contamination. A "golden era" for health, if you will.
There were very, very few instances of what we now know as chronic, metabolic or autoimmune diseases, and, for a time very little of other kinds of morbidity. The authors give an example of a medical lecturer demonstrating a case of lung cancer to students saying something like "here is something you may see once in the whole of your medical career" (!!!) https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2672390/
I bet the men had higher testosterone too - a leading alleged cause of PSA / cancer.
Limited access to tobacco - bingo! Ugghhhhh
I do wonder if chronic cannabis inhalation would match tobacco in terms of damage.
Fantastic study and I am only 2 sentences into the abstract. Thanks again.
Sounds plausible (clean water + clearner air?)
Thanks for the link, will check it out.
Interesting. Late 1800s adult life expectancy (age 20 or higher) was also near-modern in the US, despite the conditions in New York https://mappinghistory.uoregon.edu/english/US/US39-01.html
Condensed milk seems to have been a disaster for childhood nutrition. I haven't done my own research on the subject, but Dissolving Illusions features a lot of childhood mortality from adulterated milk in the late 1800s. Photos of European soldiers in WWI are like midget conventions.
If they used condensed instead of mother's breast milk, the immunology factor would come into play - lots of IgG being passed on after kissing baby's face and generating Ab for all the nasties found thereon.
It's why formula by Nestle is also doubly bad :-/
My instinct is that diet is marginal to exercise. Yes, processed foods all essentially turn themselves into poison - but as our environment is also full of toxins, it's not clear why "toxic food" is worse than toxic air. But, my beliefs are totally unsupported by the research, and always will be, since no one is ever going to research 40 minutes of exercise a day (what I consider minimum requirement) vs less.
This belief also makes the puzzle of "Long Covid" more challenging to grapple with, since exercise worsens symptoms . And yet when I was having two days of brain fog, exercise made it go away. And now I'm fine. Would there be any such thing as "Long Covid" if everyone exercised regularly to begin with? Really, I doubt it.
What biomarkers would you suggest for your 40 mins vs no daily exercise study?
I would just use accumulation of novel disease or episodic systemic pain. Anything from diabetes to headaches. Just tally it up, see which group has more health problems come "out of nowhere."
"Worsening" of pre-existing conditions would be very messy. There's a lot of negative feedback with disease, and worsening with exercise is part of that, as seen with "Long Covid." Once you have something autoimmune going on, including potentially any injury (which leads to inflammation and always has a potential for cyclical sensitization) "exercising your way out of it" can be a really, really, long term process. Same for pain. There's a lot of sand-traps in biology.
I think diet is paramount, though exercise is also important. Our bodies are made of what we put into them. How can that not make a difference?
I'm not talking so much about toxic food in terms of pesticides or whatever, though I'm sure those are bad. I'm talking about non-evolutionarily-compatible amounts of things like polyunsaturated fats, sugars, and stuff like that. Our metabolic machinery is wonderfully resilient, but it does have limits.
Right, so the issue with being made of "what is put in" is that some of what is put in is bad, or just that the metabolites are bad - there's no escaping waste product. Stuff needs to be cleaned out, or there will be disease, it doesn't matter how well you eat. Is non-kinetically assisted circulation of blood to your spleen, liver, kidneys really enough to purge the metabolic waste of literally every cell in your body, or are the these organs just a siphon that skims off the top?
In my intuition, our entire body is functionally a series of streams that can get blocked up. Poor diet adds more conglomerates to the water, and obviously increases blockage. While exercise is the difference between running a daily power-hose in every kink of the stream, or not. I'll take the daily power-hose over hoping that "clean" water (still full of smaller conglomerates) can run through the stream for years on end without blockage.
The word that springs to mind re: diet + exercise is "synergistic".
I like looking at / hypothesising about pre-modern man in particular.
eg: it makes sense to me that exercising (hunting) fasted for a couple of days leading to enhanced efficiency of exercise (ie via angiogenesis / increased mitochondrial density) when food was scarce or randomly gained would still be a possibility now, given the 1000s of years of evolution that drove those sorts of biological process developments. The bodies that allowed that process would outcompete the ones that simply petered out (and did not enhance efficiency / ultimately died).
I think way way way back when (ie at the single cell stage of live), the first thing we did was divide, then eat (for energy) to then move (get somewhere with more food / away from death/enemies). So they are inextricably linked.
I'd like to see an exposition of your hypothesis. I can live without exercise but not without food. I wonder if the lymphatic reliance on muscle movement for flow is part of it, which as we know is intrinsic to robust immune response.
Yes, I would like to see your hypothesis expounded, when you have time.
40 minutes of exercise a day sounds eminently doable.
More thoughts:
* exercise modulates / ameliorates stress
* exercise is more likely to oxygenate the blood / associated internal structures
Exercise physiology has been a hobby of mine for quite some years now, but I never associated it with immune function.
One thing I am noticing is the same receptors / ligands / pathways (and esp things like mitochondrial function) being mentioned between immune system functions and exercise-induced adaptations, however my understanding of the field is somewhat limited and I will need to cross reference to find the commonalities.
One thing that stood out immediately was mTOR - and a quick google shows links (unread, possibly spurious):
mTOR inhibition in COVID-19: A commentary and review of efficacy in RNA viruses
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33314219/
mTOR and the health benefits of exercise
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25218794/
In the UK, things were going back to normal, masks coming off etc. A few cases is all it took and straight back on again, including for school children.
https://nakedemperor.substack.com/
Really? They need to get off this obsession with "cases" aka "positive tests".
Brilliant essay! Delightfully thought provoking and as Jen Swann Downey says, this essay deserves wider readership.
Ultimately perhaps we who appreciate and value normality were living in a delusion all along that normality was truly normal? Yes some people snap out of the psychosis but it seems that maybe just maybe we were living in a twilight era between two mass religious fervours and that perhaps this religious fervour is the true normal state of mankind in anything but some of the tiniest groups? We've gone from violating the sanctity that woman being generally more vulnerable should be protected (burning witches at the stake) to all but ritually sacrificing children to our new Virus-God as you so aptly put it. Just like with previous moments of religious fervour that spread far and wide with Christianity and Islam and arguably 1700s-1900s imperialism and 1930s nationalism we see this 2010s-2020s religious progressivism (now expressed with medical progressivism) adopting religious themes ("belief in science or rather scientism/belief in vaccines"), slogans ("blessings of X"), religious type mantras only loosely connected with reality ("flatten the curve", "Two weeks to flatten the curve", "safe and effective"), rituals (wearing a mask as a sign of a believer, taking your soon-to-be quarterly or even monthly "vaccine" booster shot as a sacrament) and an obsession with death/eternal life and persecuting the out-groups (as happened to infidels, heretics and untermenschen and various other "inferior" peoples).
I've oft reflected on my experience that most people don't seem able to properly handle the concept that we are just another form of life on this piece of rock in space and that magical thinking isn't likely to determine anything in the real world (so for example the toxic positivity we see sometimes in modern thought where people now conflate the fact that having a positive attitude can help you to better cope with and manage difficult situations and will more readily attract persons to you who will offer you things that will be of benefit with the idea that thinking positive will mean that for instance things will always work out in your favour somehow - spoiler alert: life never works like for most living creatures). What is all of this covid theatre performed against the backdrop of the emergent mass psychosis than magical thinking taken to absurd heights not seen in decades, if not centuries?
As an ardent critic of the old normal before March 2020, I certainly have mixed feelings. But the amount of "discounting the positive" that was being committed at the beginning of the lockdowns was staggering. Yeah, public schools are toxic swamps of cultural nihilism - but at least they provide daily meals! I've since moved toward abolitionism. But even if I'm agnostic about the continued use of the institution of "school," I'm aghast at the notion of turning that institution into an adult-on-child torture chamber.
Humans in the secular west are the same species we were before Darwin and the Big Bang, with the same psychological needs - we've simply been deprived of the prior, functioning outlet for our angst over death and sin. So the secular world has to be transformed to accommodate and coddle the arrested-in-childhood anxieties of adults - that includes our own biology. Obviously society would be better off going back to regular church, but that can only happen on a local level. Wherever the coastal media defines the culture (amplified by social media posturing), western society is a lost cause.
As well as the missing outlet for angst over death and sin, IMO humans lost any cohesive raison d'etre. Women were / are sold the lie that it was career and prestige availed from exalted positions in a company, except depression rates are higher and growing faster in the female cohort.
I blame central control and the diminution of personal responsibility / accountability, working hand in hand to create this fustercluck.
Such a rare opportunity to completely bypass human subjects IRB. And such big N! Unheard of. We'll be doing longitudinal studies on this cohort for decades.
Kline MD says children's lives are at stake. All evidence says no, they're not. Which children is he worried about? If he has patients who are immunocompromised, they might have better risk with the vax. Most kids are safer without. Or do his fees rely on a steady stream of vax patients? Vax advocates all seem to need the business. They're not interested in anybody health, just our sickness. It's a very sick industry.
Like he says, "Nothing is more tragic" than a child not yet mystery-injured by an experimental vaccine.
"Over in the Endless Ethical Posturing Olympics arena complex that is epidemiology / medical twitter, a pathetically low bar of common sense regarding “children and Covid” was only recently offered for credentialed fear-mongerers to competitively vault over; they obliged." Bingpot! Thank you for speaking to the absurdity of that low bar even as you deconstruct the arguments of the "urgency tool-kit" critics. This piece deserves much wider readership. Hope people find it.
Thank you for the flattering remarks
Tyler Black's complaint was that the toolkit's claim about child suicide was "as awful as it gets". But, American Institute for Economic Research says that all indications are that the suicide rate for youth has skyrocketed, although exact figures aren't yet available. The quote about "greater suicides than deaths from COVID" is straight from CDC Director Robert Redfield, in July 2020.
https://www.aier.org/article/more-covid-suicides-than-covid-deaths-in-kids/
https://www.buckinstitute.org/covid-webinar-series-transcript-robert-redfield-md/
In the end, I didn't include any criticism of Black, since even though his rhetoric is unhinged and his "markup style" a bit psycho-killer-y (https://twitter.com/tylerblack32/status/1486111697601540105), he's right that the 2020 figures are still lower than 2017/18.
There's more to child mental health than any metrics can capture, and people should depend on common sense rather than the consensus of politically infected psychological fields.
Fantastic essay! I was hopeful that maybe my own blue region of crazy might snap out of it but after reading your piece maybe not. I can't tolerate this much longer... Perhaps will have to move.
One of the biggest problems in turning the tide of progressivism (and yes, I believe covid hysteria is an aspect of progressivism) is that progressives control the media, and the media always gets the last word. The opposing viewpoint is always framed as fringe or minority and that creates that impression that it really is a minority viewpoint and makes people afraid to admit that they agree with it.
And in the US, at least, there are regions where people have understood for decades that the media sees them as subhuman / "deplorables" - these places were insulated from the media trance. It is ironic that the cosmopolitanist / globalist media culture created in the US has more of a stranglehold on the politics in other countries (like Canada) than it does here.