Re Feynman "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..."
They do this all the time through disingenuous use of statistics. For example, relative risk.
'“Transmission efficacy” is the ability of a vaccine to prevent a new infection leading to disease. This is a function of the level of infection expected in a vaccinated person (bacteremia for bacteria; viremia for viruses). When reading vaccine studies and reports (press releases) it’s important to know the actual definition of efficacy being used. Sometimes companies will initially report on prevention of transmission; then, as real-world studies are conducted, the focus will shift to prevention of death; then to prevention of hospitalization; then to prevention of serious symptoms. That’s when asymptomatic transmission can creep in.
'In the end-stage analyses, they may move to using “antibody production” (ideally neutralizing, but read carefully all reports), all the while the public is reading “efficacy” or “effectiveness” as one and the same. They are not. “Efficacy” is an estimate of the ability of a vaccine to do its job (whatever outcome measure is used) in an ideal population; that is, a sample group that is free of pre-existing infection or immunity, one free of comorbid conditions (for the disease), and, often unreported, one free from risk factors for serious adverse events.
'With a perfect antigen match, on an idealized population, Transmission Efficacy can look very high. Yet while that is not expected to translate to real-world high effectiveness, long-term large randomized trials including everyone to which the vaccine will be offered are rarely conducted. THE INCORRECT GENERALIZATION OF REAL-WORLD PERFORMANCE CHARACTERISTICS OF A VACCINE (IN TERMS OF SAFETY AND EFFECTIVENESS) FROM IDEAL CONDITIONS KNOWN TO LEAD TO FALSE HIGH EFFICACY ESTIMATES IS ONE OF THE GRAVEST EXAMPLES OF TRANSLATIONAL FAILURE SEEN IN BIOMEDICAL RESEARCH, AND IT OCCURS ON A ROUTINE BASIS IN VACCINE RESEARCH.'
Funny you should mention HIV. I just plowed my way through RFK Junior's book about Fauci, a good chunk of which goes into the history of HIV/AIDS. Apparently there was, and possibly still is, some controversy about whether HIV causes AIDS or not and he goes into the history of this pretty thoroughly, but very carefully does not draw a personal conclusion. It's an interesting fact, though, that Luc Montagnier, the first discoverer of HIV who won a Nobel prize for it, later decided HIV does not cause aids. Robert Gallo, who appropriated the discovery credit and who announced in 1985, prior to publishing any supportive evidence, that he had discovered the cause of AIDS, thereby hogging all the AIDS oxygen, in 1991 admitted guilt in court of that theft and was excluded from Nobel consideration.
BTW the decision that AIDS was a viral disease rather than a cancer allowed Fauci's NIAID (infectious disease agency) to wrest control of grant money from the National Cancer Institute; Gallo ended up partnering with Fauci. Imagine that.
Being older than dirt, I was alive in the 80s and remember it being in the news a lot but didn't pay a whole lot of attention. So this particular part of the RFK book was a great interest to me. Pretty revelatory about the bureaucratic infighting and nastiness and, of course, struggle for control of bajillions of dollars. I was already skeptical of the CDC thanks to my experience with Lyme disease, but the bureaucratic history laid out here, even if you ignore assumption of motives by RFK, explains a lot of our current situation.
For those who don't want to wade through the whole book, here's a review by someone who started out as skeptical as I about RFK's anti-VAX history, and he was equally struck by the HIV story, which he describes in depth in this review. https://www.unz.com/article/fauci-and-the-great-aids-swindle/
I still don't know what to make of the HIV connection; at the very least, it's not as cut-and-dried it as we've been led to believe. And as you alluded to in this post, a lot of the deaths ascribed to HIV could easily have been caused by the standard treatment with AZT. It's very disturbing.
I do recommend the RFK book and if you buy it, spend three bucks for the electronic version because it makes following up on footnotes so much easier. While he does use the occasional prejudicial adjective, the historical facts stand on their own and are pretty well sourced.
Dec 31, 2021·edited Dec 31, 2021Liked by Brian Mowrey
There are several good reasons to question the effectiveness of the inoculations for reducing severity / mortality risk.
In the US at least, persons don't count as "vaccinated" until weeks after the 2nd injection. Meanwhile, any deaths due directly to injection adverse events get counted as "unvaccinated" and most of those deaths are falsely attributed to covid. Furthermore, the immune system is weakened by the shots, resulting in increased rates of severe covid which are also counted as "unvaccinated" covid cases.
In addition to making "unvaccinated" statistics much worse than they would be otherwise, these effects presumably create a survivor bias. That is, the weakest individuals are most likely to perish immediately after their jabs, leaving a stronger surviving population of "vaccinated" who were unlikely to get severe covid in any case.
Matt Crawford and 'el gato malo' have been writing about this for months, most recently in gato's post this morning about negative VE against Omicron in German data: https://boriquagato.substack.com/p/german-omicron-data
One other aspect which I haven't seen anyone else cover, is the phenomenon of "covid-like illness". It turns out that there are lots of "fully vaccinated" people hospitalized with something with symptoms more or less similar to covid-19, but they tested negative. In the US, there has been a policy that "vaccinated" are only tested for coronavirus when they get hospitalized (typically, a week or two after they got sick) and even then at a low cycle threshold. So maybe some of those "covid like illnesses" are covid with a false negative test.
Also, consider that the vast majority of the highly vulnerable population (old, or with comorbidities) were inoculated early in 2021, yet overall death rates from covid-19 have hardly been reduced at all since 2020. How can that be, if the shots have any effectiveness at all towards cutting the risk of death?
I don't think anyone on Substack is saying that there's proof of zero or negative VE against severe illness or death. But the evidence is not nearly as solid as proponents would have you think. And it's not up to the critics to demonstrate whether or not the jabs are working in that regard.
Very interesting thanks. It seems clear that the vaccines do substantially reduce severity / mortality risk of covid. This is extremely helpful for at risk individuals. There are also potential negative side effects of course, the magnitude and frequency of which seems to be debated. How do you personally weigh up these two countervailing forces? Or is it too early to make a definitive judgement? Of course the maths differs greatly depending on the risk status of the individual being vaccinated. Perhaps a simpler way of asking this - if you were in charge of public health policy what would be your vaccination strategy?
Though to be honest the theories aren't mutually exclusive.
However the first theory I think has a potential dating issue since phylogenetic analyses have shown that HIV (which isn't really just one virus but has HIV-1 with 4 lineages: M, N, O and P and HIV-2) has crossed into human populations at multiple times with the earliest time estimated as being in the 1910s-1920s (from chimps, likely as bushmeat, with the chimps in turn likely getting it from a recombination event following multiple infections of at least two SIVs from two different genera of monkeys that they hunted as prey).
Perhaps the polio vaccine/ADE theory might explain why an already established HIV-1 M (which as you note might not have been inherently aggressive in nature, as seems to be the case with the other 3 lineages of HIV-1 and particularly with HIV-2) might have caused the development of new strains of the M lineage of HIV-1 that eventually caused AIDS if persons in the Belgian Congo who got the contaminated polio vaccines also got a dose of the SIVs from monkeys that is most closely related to HIV-1 M and developed antibodies thereto and then subsequently got exposed to (presumably benign) these older strains of HIV-1 M.
So you get an early form of AIDS, which isn't identified as such and perhaps the whole procedure results in the evolution of more aggressive strains of HIV-1 M that are more successful at invading immune cells in hosts who already exhibit homologous HIV antibodies (thus ensuring these newer strains displace the pre-existing strains for persons in the Congo and Cameroon and heading to the rest of the world in the 1960s as pretty much the only strains and infecting persons sufficiently well to cause disease regardless of whether or not they had pre-existing HIV antibodies that helped to cause ADE - this would possibly help account for the earliest known retrospective cases of AIDS being in the mid-to-late 1960s; 1966 in a Norwegian man and 1966-1969 in the US).
The fact that apparently single use needles were reused (unsterile at that!) for mass vaccination, antibiotic and anti-malaria campaigns in colonial Africa in the 1950s would support theory 1 (and help to explain how even just a few vaccines contaminated with SIV or persons who had been vaccinated with the same needle used to vaccinate just one other person who picked up an SIV and then been vaccinated with the polio vaccine could spread the problem far and wide).
The measles eradication campaign in the late 1960s then basically cleared the way for HIV-1 M to become the New Measles.
Brian you have so much information, but it is hard to digest in one shot. Can you break into smaller posts? Thank you and not a negative, but we are overwhelmed these days. You have incisive clarity but many heads are spinning.....
Dec 31, 2021·edited Dec 31, 2021Liked by Brian Mowrey
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.
More brilliant theories. Thanks. Curious about the graphs at the top. Over 60, looks like more are severely ill (28, unvaxed) than are infected (17, unvaxed). Did they miss a decimal point? Or different denominators? Looks like the similar under 60 charts have a much smaller number in the ordinate, with fractional values, for seriously ill. Over 60 has larger numbers with no fractions.
Either way, it looks like the overwhelming majority at any age are not identified infected, and not sick. Same everywhere. We find in every survey that many more have been previously infected, but not reported, probably not noticed. It's beyond amazing that we continue to obsess over weakness in a tiny portion of every society, and averaged statistics, as if everyone is equally at risk. We're not. Competent medical industry would be focused on why a few are vulnerable while most are mostly unaffected, not trying to terrorize the healthy.
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
Re Feynman "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..."
They do this all the time through disingenuous use of statistics. For example, relative risk.
In the context of vaccines, there's this (emphasis added) from https://popularrationalism.substack.com/p/the-vaccine-lifecycle-lead-to-vaccine
'“Transmission efficacy” is the ability of a vaccine to prevent a new infection leading to disease. This is a function of the level of infection expected in a vaccinated person (bacteremia for bacteria; viremia for viruses). When reading vaccine studies and reports (press releases) it’s important to know the actual definition of efficacy being used. Sometimes companies will initially report on prevention of transmission; then, as real-world studies are conducted, the focus will shift to prevention of death; then to prevention of hospitalization; then to prevention of serious symptoms. That’s when asymptomatic transmission can creep in.
'In the end-stage analyses, they may move to using “antibody production” (ideally neutralizing, but read carefully all reports), all the while the public is reading “efficacy” or “effectiveness” as one and the same. They are not. “Efficacy” is an estimate of the ability of a vaccine to do its job (whatever outcome measure is used) in an ideal population; that is, a sample group that is free of pre-existing infection or immunity, one free of comorbid conditions (for the disease), and, often unreported, one free from risk factors for serious adverse events.
'With a perfect antigen match, on an idealized population, Transmission Efficacy can look very high. Yet while that is not expected to translate to real-world high effectiveness, long-term large randomized trials including everyone to which the vaccine will be offered are rarely conducted. THE INCORRECT GENERALIZATION OF REAL-WORLD PERFORMANCE CHARACTERISTICS OF A VACCINE (IN TERMS OF SAFETY AND EFFECTIVENESS) FROM IDEAL CONDITIONS KNOWN TO LEAD TO FALSE HIGH EFFICACY ESTIMATES IS ONE OF THE GRAVEST EXAMPLES OF TRANSLATIONAL FAILURE SEEN IN BIOMEDICAL RESEARCH, AND IT OCCURS ON A ROUTINE BASIS IN VACCINE RESEARCH.'
Funny you should mention HIV. I just plowed my way through RFK Junior's book about Fauci, a good chunk of which goes into the history of HIV/AIDS. Apparently there was, and possibly still is, some controversy about whether HIV causes AIDS or not and he goes into the history of this pretty thoroughly, but very carefully does not draw a personal conclusion. It's an interesting fact, though, that Luc Montagnier, the first discoverer of HIV who won a Nobel prize for it, later decided HIV does not cause aids. Robert Gallo, who appropriated the discovery credit and who announced in 1985, prior to publishing any supportive evidence, that he had discovered the cause of AIDS, thereby hogging all the AIDS oxygen, in 1991 admitted guilt in court of that theft and was excluded from Nobel consideration.
BTW the decision that AIDS was a viral disease rather than a cancer allowed Fauci's NIAID (infectious disease agency) to wrest control of grant money from the National Cancer Institute; Gallo ended up partnering with Fauci. Imagine that.
Being older than dirt, I was alive in the 80s and remember it being in the news a lot but didn't pay a whole lot of attention. So this particular part of the RFK book was a great interest to me. Pretty revelatory about the bureaucratic infighting and nastiness and, of course, struggle for control of bajillions of dollars. I was already skeptical of the CDC thanks to my experience with Lyme disease, but the bureaucratic history laid out here, even if you ignore assumption of motives by RFK, explains a lot of our current situation.
For those who don't want to wade through the whole book, here's a review by someone who started out as skeptical as I about RFK's anti-VAX history, and he was equally struck by the HIV story, which he describes in depth in this review. https://www.unz.com/article/fauci-and-the-great-aids-swindle/
I still don't know what to make of the HIV connection; at the very least, it's not as cut-and-dried it as we've been led to believe. And as you alluded to in this post, a lot of the deaths ascribed to HIV could easily have been caused by the standard treatment with AZT. It's very disturbing.
I do recommend the RFK book and if you buy it, spend three bucks for the electronic version because it makes following up on footnotes so much easier. While he does use the occasional prejudicial adjective, the historical facts stand on their own and are pretty well sourced.
There are several good reasons to question the effectiveness of the inoculations for reducing severity / mortality risk.
In the US at least, persons don't count as "vaccinated" until weeks after the 2nd injection. Meanwhile, any deaths due directly to injection adverse events get counted as "unvaccinated" and most of those deaths are falsely attributed to covid. Furthermore, the immune system is weakened by the shots, resulting in increased rates of severe covid which are also counted as "unvaccinated" covid cases.
In addition to making "unvaccinated" statistics much worse than they would be otherwise, these effects presumably create a survivor bias. That is, the weakest individuals are most likely to perish immediately after their jabs, leaving a stronger surviving population of "vaccinated" who were unlikely to get severe covid in any case.
Matt Crawford and 'el gato malo' have been writing about this for months, most recently in gato's post this morning about negative VE against Omicron in German data: https://boriquagato.substack.com/p/german-omicron-data
One other aspect which I haven't seen anyone else cover, is the phenomenon of "covid-like illness". It turns out that there are lots of "fully vaccinated" people hospitalized with something with symptoms more or less similar to covid-19, but they tested negative. In the US, there has been a policy that "vaccinated" are only tested for coronavirus when they get hospitalized (typically, a week or two after they got sick) and even then at a low cycle threshold. So maybe some of those "covid like illnesses" are covid with a false negative test.
Also, consider that the vast majority of the highly vulnerable population (old, or with comorbidities) were inoculated early in 2021, yet overall death rates from covid-19 have hardly been reduced at all since 2020. How can that be, if the shots have any effectiveness at all towards cutting the risk of death?
I don't think anyone on Substack is saying that there's proof of zero or negative VE against severe illness or death. But the evidence is not nearly as solid as proponents would have you think. And it's not up to the critics to demonstrate whether or not the jabs are working in that regard.
Great post, thanks :-)
If you haven't seen it, vaccinepapers.org has a cogent explanation of how aluminum adjuvant can cause autism. Lots of other good stuff as well.
Very interesting thanks. It seems clear that the vaccines do substantially reduce severity / mortality risk of covid. This is extremely helpful for at risk individuals. There are also potential negative side effects of course, the magnitude and frequency of which seems to be debated. How do you personally weigh up these two countervailing forces? Or is it too early to make a definitive judgement? Of course the maths differs greatly depending on the risk status of the individual being vaccinated. Perhaps a simpler way of asking this - if you were in charge of public health policy what would be your vaccination strategy?
My immediate thought re: Israel dashboard is they muck around with the data. See twitter threads like this as an example: https://twitter.com/prof_shahar/status/1437793969992306693
Or substack articles like this: https://stephenc.substack.com/p/the-israeli-moh-caught-red-handed
Granted, it may not have any bearing on the analysis.
Interesting HIV/AIDS theories.
Though to be honest the theories aren't mutually exclusive.
However the first theory I think has a potential dating issue since phylogenetic analyses have shown that HIV (which isn't really just one virus but has HIV-1 with 4 lineages: M, N, O and P and HIV-2) has crossed into human populations at multiple times with the earliest time estimated as being in the 1910s-1920s (from chimps, likely as bushmeat, with the chimps in turn likely getting it from a recombination event following multiple infections of at least two SIVs from two different genera of monkeys that they hunted as prey).
Perhaps the polio vaccine/ADE theory might explain why an already established HIV-1 M (which as you note might not have been inherently aggressive in nature, as seems to be the case with the other 3 lineages of HIV-1 and particularly with HIV-2) might have caused the development of new strains of the M lineage of HIV-1 that eventually caused AIDS if persons in the Belgian Congo who got the contaminated polio vaccines also got a dose of the SIVs from monkeys that is most closely related to HIV-1 M and developed antibodies thereto and then subsequently got exposed to (presumably benign) these older strains of HIV-1 M.
So you get an early form of AIDS, which isn't identified as such and perhaps the whole procedure results in the evolution of more aggressive strains of HIV-1 M that are more successful at invading immune cells in hosts who already exhibit homologous HIV antibodies (thus ensuring these newer strains displace the pre-existing strains for persons in the Congo and Cameroon and heading to the rest of the world in the 1960s as pretty much the only strains and infecting persons sufficiently well to cause disease regardless of whether or not they had pre-existing HIV antibodies that helped to cause ADE - this would possibly help account for the earliest known retrospective cases of AIDS being in the mid-to-late 1960s; 1966 in a Norwegian man and 1966-1969 in the US).
The fact that apparently single use needles were reused (unsterile at that!) for mass vaccination, antibiotic and anti-malaria campaigns in colonial Africa in the 1950s would support theory 1 (and help to explain how even just a few vaccines contaminated with SIV or persons who had been vaccinated with the same needle used to vaccinate just one other person who picked up an SIV and then been vaccinated with the polio vaccine could spread the problem far and wide).
The measles eradication campaign in the late 1960s then basically cleared the way for HIV-1 M to become the New Measles.
Brian you have so much information, but it is hard to digest in one shot. Can you break into smaller posts? Thank you and not a negative, but we are overwhelmed these days. You have incisive clarity but many heads are spinning.....
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
Yep. Currently wondering which vaccination causes Type 2.
All vaccinations are shit is the position that I've arrived at.
More brilliant theories. Thanks. Curious about the graphs at the top. Over 60, looks like more are severely ill (28, unvaxed) than are infected (17, unvaxed). Did they miss a decimal point? Or different denominators? Looks like the similar under 60 charts have a much smaller number in the ordinate, with fractional values, for seriously ill. Over 60 has larger numbers with no fractions.
Either way, it looks like the overwhelming majority at any age are not identified infected, and not sick. Same everywhere. We find in every survey that many more have been previously infected, but not reported, probably not noticed. It's beyond amazing that we continue to obsess over weakness in a tiny portion of every society, and averaged statistics, as if everyone is equally at risk. We're not. Competent medical industry would be focused on why a few are vulnerable while most are mostly unaffected, not trying to terrorize the healthy.
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
On autism, the metal makes it worse but it is the milk proteins in the vaccine that cause it.
Cow's milk protein contaminated vaccines cause 75% of autism cases
https://vinuarumugham.substack.com/p/cows-milk-protein-contaminated-vaccines