b/w: Crackpot Corner: HIV Origins Spitballing Edition
Truth Bombs
The Israel Ministry of Health dashboard is poised to provide a window into “negative (infection) efficacy” in the coming days, as Omicron ostensibly overtakes Delta. If the Covid-vaccinated are truly being infected more often than the unvaccinated, this is where it should show in real-time.
For those unfamiliar with the Israel dashboard, this app provides daily per-100k infection and hospitalization rates based on vaccination status - calculated using what seem to be far more reliable denominators than the UK data. It told the embarrassing story of the failure of infection efficacy of the Pfizer/BioNTech Covid vaccine during the summer Delta wave, as well as the forgotten story of resilient severe outcome efficacy.
It also has “sticky” buttons in Chrome, which is why I use an untranslated version in most screenshots. Currently:
So far, “infection efficacy” appears back at zero - exactly where it was for the double-dosed in July, before the rollout of triple-dosing.1 Nothing can really be made of the severe case rates at the moment - preceding background case rates were so low that most hospitalizations might be incidental to the positive PCR test. But they certainly don’t make the Covid vaccines look bad.
The dashboard’s graphs for current admissions, and absolute counts instead of per-100k values, hint that the green bars may begin to rise soon. We will see how high they get. My prediction: Just as in the summer, the Covid-vaccinated will not be hospitalized “for Covid” at as high a per-100k rate as the unvaccinated. (There is also an interesting new section for “Recurrent morbidity,” which I believe means reinfections, by Covid-vaccination status. This may provide a window into “post-breakthrough immune correction.”2)
If you’re wondering why you don’t see the Israel dashboard severe outcome rates from the summer more often, it’s that the neither the Believers nor the skeptics of the Covid vaccines have much appetite for acknowledging this reality.
For example, in a review of a large study yesterday, Alex Berenson headlined a finding of 56.6% efficacy against severe outcomes as “Vaccines don’t stop Covid hospitalizations or deaths”3 - yes, they do - and added in the subhead that they “never have” - yes, they have. The study, though poor in multiple respects, affirmed that they have. In reply to pushback from a tiny sliver of comments to exactly that effect, Berenson clarified that “stop hospitalizations or deaths” is meant to be read as “stop all hospitalizations and deaths.”
Readers may take a moment to remind themselves of the title of his blog.
A traveler at the beach, stopping in for coffee and a bit of wifi today, had the misfortune to ask what it is I work on. The discussion led, eventually, to the tendency of the scientific community at large to portray researcher-consensus hypothesis and evidence-based observation as one-and-the-same, never disclosing to the lay audience the limits of their knowledge.
Cargo Cult Science, in other words.
I would like to add something that’s not essential to the science, but something I kind of believe, which is that you should not fool the layman when you’re talking as a scientist. […]
I’m talking about a specific, extra type of integrity that is not lying, but bending over backwards to show how you’re maybe wrong, that you ought to do when acting as a scientist. And this is our responsibility as scientists, certainly to other scientists, and I think to laymen.4
As I was bringing up Feynman’s speech I was immediately struck at the parallel to the decay in Covid vaccine-critical substack’s relationship with the truth these last few weeks. Perhaps this promising, exciting “alt-science” movement is at its own Cargo Cult Speech moment, wherein the lay demand for easy answers (“These experimental toxins that will likely kill millions do not have a minor up-side!”) and the echo chamber of authoritative voices are set to veer the cart off the hillside.
Given that Feynman’s words proved not to be a prescient warning to correct course, but a dire prophesy of the last four decades of science’s dysfunctional relation to man, this does not represent a “good thing.”
In either case, the mission of Unglossed will remain to provide those who read it an improved understanding of reality, rather than an affirmation of prior belief.
Like so many others, I am new to the wonderful world of anti-vaccine thought, having only been thrust on this path when the mad rush to mass-dose the entire world with an experimental toxin that will likely kill millions, and the anecdotal reports of adverse events described by Steve Kirsch in the “How to Save the World” podcast, set off my alarms over the summer.6
But my approach into this realm of thought is deliberately backward and circular. First, I researched enough of the basics of immunology and genetics to set my own intuition for “The Answer” on the page.7 With this done, I began to read what so many others who have questioned the history of vaccines have found.
As recently as three months ago, I imagined that the link between vaccines and autism was, like so much else in medicine, a quagmire of countervailing associations - akin to the million contradictory “links” between food and disease. No; it turns out that injecting metal into the body just literally causes autism, and everyone involved in denying this knows it is true and doesn’t care.8
There are probably many other speculations I hold about vaccines that will be just as easily dispelled in the coming months.
So, as a festive end-of-year time capsule in my ongoing journey, I wanted to jot down my current top two loose theories for the potential role of vaccines in the implausibly sudden existential conflict between humanity and the virus named HIV.
Feel free to demolish these illusions in the comments, now that they have been set to ink. Change is life.
Theory 1: Antibody Dependent Enhancement (Salk Polio Vaccine)
Rolling Stone, if you can believe it, published an article in 1992 which floated the idea that the HIV crisis was the result of polio vaccines used in Africa.9 A mainstream magazine questioning a vaccine? What a crazy world we lived in!
Specifically, the article speculated that Hilary Koprowski transferred HIV from monkeys into humans in a 1950s polio vaccine trial involving one million recipients in the Belgian Congo.
An Atlantic Monthly article appearing 8 years later would go further, implicating the Salk vaccines in the modern cancer epidemic and prompting a (fruitless) Congressional hearing.10 Here the allegation centered on one of the literally countless11 simian viruses - “SV40” - that had been quietly discovered by vaccine developers from the very beginning of the Salk vaccine’s deployment.12 These viruses were derived from the monkey kidney tissue used to culture the polio virus, and were not reliably “inactivated” by the formaldehyde stage. More stringent standards for reducing simian virus contamination, or improving inactivation, were finally applied in 1963, after millions of American children had been exposed.
Theory: Antibodies to HIV induced by polio vaccines primed recipients to experience ADE against antigenically homologous strains (as with secondary Dengue Virus infection). ADE not only led to more extensive infection (HIV is not an aggressive virus by default), but to increased attack rates for secondary transmission, until a critical mass was reached where multiple strains were in sustained circulation at once. By the time the HIV virus was proposed as the cause of AIDS, circulating strains were so prevalent in affected populations that detectable HIV antibody was a good proxy for exposure and vulnerability (assays for antibody with a high enough selectivity would exclude individuals primed by polio vaccination but not recently exposed to HIV).
Theory 2: Niche Abandonment (Enders Measles Vaccine)
The measles virus life cycle involves ingestion by respiratory immune cells (macrophages and dendritic cells), transit to the lymph nodes, and infection of B and T cells. From here, the virus passes back into the respiratory tract. There may also be a long term dormancy pathway in the natural measles cycle, helping to account for its ability to vanish and reappear in seasonal patterns.13
Before the moronic “Measles Eradication” campaign was launched by the CDC in 1967, measles and humans enjoyed a harmonious co-existence wherever childhood nutrition was adequate, and mortality in the US was near-zero.14 The infiltration of immune cells by the measles virus was a rite of passage experienced by most, or perhaps all, humans ever born.
With the vaccine, measles ceased to be a seasonal visitor to human children. Unvaccinated Americans did not encounter measles until their teens. With more extensive school vaccination mandates (in reply, of course, to the failure of the vaccine to eradicate the virus), these encounters ceased entirely. Eventually we arrived at the current state of affairs, where almost all adults are walking around susceptible to the virus, but outbreaks are artificially suppressed by the continual (needless!) vaccination of children.
Measles is not the only virus to occupy the niche whose very existence is given as the “cause” for AIDS (ah! it’s a super-virus from Africa that infects immune cells! we’re doomed!) but it appears to be the most prominent and ancient - it is thus likely the most well-coevolved to the human immune system. Given that cases of rubella rose immediately after the deployment of the measles vaccine in 196315 - hence the need to quickly include both mumps and rubella in the same vaccine that prevents childhood encounter with measles - it seems that clearing the measles niche leaves a vacuum which must be filled by other viruses.
Theory: HIV is a poorly co-evolved virus exploiting the niche that should be occupied by measles.
Both these theories are intended to account for the ephemeral nature of the association between the virus and AIDS, but not dismiss the association entirely. As with SARS-CoV-2, Fauci was open with his efforts to exacerbate the death toll of AIDS via promotion of toxic treatment protocol, likely killing thousands in plain sight - yet the discovery of the disease still preceded the protocol. The AIDS epidemic may all be a combination of hysterically exaggerated ailment and poisonous cure, or not.
Neither of these theories is meant to displace the “made in a lab” theory; however, I don’t find it convincing that even a lab-made super-virus gifted to freemasons by aliens could cause AIDS, outside of some prior disturbance to the immune system.
Again, I haven’t researched any of these subjects yet, and won’t be surprised if they are easily refuted. But I hope these theories have nonetheless provided the reader enjoyment or intrigue. Perhaps they will inspire others to research the topic of why a virus should suddenly create a totally unknown medical condition out of the blue in the late 20th century, or to form far better theories.
Happy New Year, and thank you for subscribing to Unglossed!
First, the authors examined outcomes by National COVID Cohort Collaborative event code for 664,722 individuals who were recorded as both Covid-vaccinated and positive “for Covid” in the same database. Their aim was to compare performance - hospitalization, severe outcome codes, etc. - for the (non- and) immunosuppressed. As a sort of afterthought, outcome rates for pre-Covid-vaccine “Covid positives” in the same database were compared as well:
The results for “hospitalization efficacy” obviously appear hideous. But “Hospitalization” is defined as four different event-codes occurring 15 days before to 45 days after a positive PCR test or an event-code for clinically diagnosed “Covid 19.”
As poor a proxy for actual infection outcomes as one could get.
“Severe” outcomes (codes for ventilation, oxygenation, or death) are more likely to be causally related to actual infection with SARS-CoV-2. And since “infection efficacy” turned out to be 0, severe-outcomes-per-positive are a good proxy for real-life severe-outcome efficacy.
However, since whether the unvaccinated + positive population is healthier or unhealthier than the Covid-vaccinated is unknowable, even a 100% “severe outcome” efficacy finding would not have been very convincing. The reader may use their own judgement as to whether this potentially distorted results one direction or the other:
Severe outcome rate per “Covid positive”, Covid-vaccinated
In either case Rogers’ argument for excluding “diagnostic expansion,” the common-placeness of rapid onset, and the history of suppression, provide impressive evidence in favor of a direct association.
All of this is tucked at the end of the final chapter of David Oshinsky’s frustratingly thorough but uncritical Polio: An American Story, “Celebrities and Survivors.”
I appreciate you pointing out that many people who quote these stats seem to forget to observe that there is and has been a reduction in case severity for the vaccines. It is a shame because it's kind of disingenuous, yet there are legitimate counter factors: when you take into account vaccine injury, "partial" vaccinees, and in many places failure to offer early treatment.
It means that these severe case stats are correct, but may still be a losing proposition when net effect is compared to early treatment. Unfortunately it's a difficult or impossible analysis to make, and this forms a difficult wedge in discussions of efficacy.. and it makes it too easy to discount many authors like alex
Yup. I think I might be becoming an old timey anti-vaxxer. It’s a weird thing. I feel like I’m admitting to being a Nazi.
This idea that you are 4 times more likely to be infected with omicron if you have been vaccinated ( Denmark)…how about you are just 4 times more likely to be infected with anything ? I’m thinking about the vaccines as they apply to the immune system generally and not as they apply specifically to covid. Just a thought.
Also I really like your cool headed-ness. You’ve a nice anti-hysteria quality about your outlook. It’s needed.
I appreciate you pointing out that many people who quote these stats seem to forget to observe that there is and has been a reduction in case severity for the vaccines. It is a shame because it's kind of disingenuous, yet there are legitimate counter factors: when you take into account vaccine injury, "partial" vaccinees, and in many places failure to offer early treatment.
It means that these severe case stats are correct, but may still be a losing proposition when net effect is compared to early treatment. Unfortunately it's a difficult or impossible analysis to make, and this forms a difficult wedge in discussions of efficacy.. and it makes it too easy to discount many authors like alex
Yup. I think I might be becoming an old timey anti-vaxxer. It’s a weird thing. I feel like I’m admitting to being a Nazi.
This idea that you are 4 times more likely to be infected with omicron if you have been vaccinated ( Denmark)…how about you are just 4 times more likely to be infected with anything ? I’m thinking about the vaccines as they apply to the immune system generally and not as they apply specifically to covid. Just a thought.
Also I really like your cool headed-ness. You’ve a nice anti-hysteria quality about your outlook. It’s needed.
Many thanks,
Ryk