
Scotland has just announced that they’re going to stop reporting the death rates of vaccinated versus unvaccinated COVID patients. Others have already covered this, so have a look at this:
Data about the vaccines is disappearing
Scotland will HIDE Vaccinated and Boosted Deaths
And so here you see the problem we’re dealing with. Any conversation I have on the vaccines tends to go like this:
Normie: “The data shows the vaccines are very effective.”
Me: “Well actually, the data here shows that it’s not.”
Normie: “Then those numbers must be wrong and misleading.”
You’re not supposed to be able to win, the game is rigged against you. This is a global experiment, you’re supposed to participate and if turns out later on that it didn’t work, then we’re just supposed not to notice it.
Scotland was the country that published the most useful numbers: Age standardized death rates, for different levels of vaccination. They’re now going to stop reporting those numbers, because they have grown too ugly. England is likely to be next, because their numbers are also embarrassing.
The main reason the numbers are becoming so embarrassing is because of the reality that viruses evolve to adapt to their host’s immune response. Omicron BA.2 is spreading faster than BA.1 and BA.1.1, because it has more immune evasive characteristics.
Delta mainly made use of the fact that vaccine induced antibodies rapidly wane, so it simply replicated faster than the antibodies could deal with in a handful of people. With Omicron, the situation is different. The spike protein has dramatically changed its appearance, so most antibodies that neutralized Delta, don’t neutralize Omicron. Protection is now dependent on a greatly diminished number of antibodies that continue to neutralize the virus. This also means that any individual single mutation to a single codon can now offer the virus a much greater advantage than before. That’s for example, why you see this:
BA1.1 can drive its ancestor into neigh extinction within a month.
What you’re going to see now is that BA.2 will grow globally dominant and through random chance you’ll see new mutations that happen to have a selective advantage. We can think of two types of selective advantages:
- Inherently increased transmissibility
- Transmissibility increased through evasion of the adaptive immune response
With type one, the inevitable question is: If these sort of mutations still exist, if there are still subtle tweaks left that can increase transmission, wouldn’t we expect them to have already grown dominant by now? A possible explanation can be a situation where a type 1 mutation is dependent on the presence of a type 2 mutation to deliver its advantage.
On the other hand, with type two, we can answer this question easily: These mutations only emerge now, because immune evasion only begins offering a substantial advantage by now. Type 1 mutations dependent on type 2 mutations to emerge can then also show up.
Evolutionary pressure to evade the adaptive immune response is now massive. In fact, the selective advantage of any additional antibody evading mutations is increasing. When ten neutralizing antibodies work, evading any single mutation eliminating one neutralizing antibody reduces the neutralizing antibody potential of your blood by just 10%. on the other hand, when there are just three neutralizing antibodies left doing the job, such a mutation now gets rid of 33% of the antibody response.
Because the impact on the antibody response is now so massive, mutations that once stood no chance of becoming successful now do have a chance to become dominant. Imagine a mutation to the Spike protein makes it slightly more difficult for a version of the virus to bind to your ACE2 receptor.
When twenty different antibodies can neutralize the virus, the fact that it evades one of them doesn’t weigh up against the difficulty it creates in binding to the ACE2 receptor. On the other hand, when just three different types of antibodies are responsible for 90% of the neutralizing potential, that same mutation may now suddenly offer a reproductive advantage that it previously didn’t offer.
Now apply this idea to the vaccines. You probably already know that all antibodies induced by the vaccines are against one protein (the spike protein) in one conformation (the open conformation). Imagine vaccinated people have 6 different types of antibodies responsible for 90% of neutralizing potential, whereas naturally immune people have 20 different types of antibodies, responsible for 90% of neutralizing potential.
Now imagine that every mutation that allows the virus to evade an antibody comes with the disadvantage of making it slightly more difficult to bind to the ACE2 receptor. Because every virus particle is in competition with other members of the swarm, this places these particles at a selective disadvantage. However, it’s easy to see that with more homogeneous immunity, antibody evading mutations that would have had no selective advantage in a naturally immune population, can now have a selective advantage in a vaccinated population.
If you understand the explanation I have outlined here, then you understand why highly vaccinated populations allow certain mutations to grow dominant, that could not have grown dominant in the absence of highly vaccinated populations. This means that the range of possible variants increases, because of the existence of populations where the vast majority of people have been vaccinated with non-sterilizing Spike directed vaccines.
Sometimes the viability of particular mutations will be dependent on the presence of other mutations. As an example, many of the mutations in Omicron can’t function independently, they require the presence of the other mutations in Omicron for their viability. With this realization in the back of our heads, we realize that the existence of highly vaccinated populations extends the range of possible variants that can evolve over time.
You can illustrate the process as following. Imagine a river, with a number of stones. You want to get to certain islands, but to get to those islands, you need to follow certain paths. The landscape looks as following:
Here you can see a map. Yellow is a man, grey are different stones laying in the water, brown are floating boxes someone threw into the water. The man can only jump about two to three times his own width. If nobody had thrown the brown boxes into the water, two of the three green islands would be inaccessible to him. Although most intermediate steps to all islands are accessible naturally (through the rocks), the two brown boxes increase the number of accessible islands (a metaphor for variants) threefold.
As an alternative example, consider a scrabble-like game where you’re tasked with creating a word, based off six letters you randomly picked from a bag. If you were allowed to pick a seventh letter, it would dramatically increase the number of potential words you can form. When certain mutations can only emerge in the context of a vaccinated population this is very problematic, even if such mutations are a small minority of mutations that can emerge, because such variants may prove to be stepping stones towards other variants, or stepping stones into animal populations.
If it were hypothetically the case that most new variants don’t emerge due to vaccination, but emerge from immunocompromised cancer or HIV patients, it could still mean that vaccination dramatically increases the range of possible variants that can emerge, for the reason illustrated above.
Also keep in mind that the evolutionary relevance of the vaccinated population increases over time: The total number of vaccinated people increases over time, the share of those people with waning immunity increases over time and the total number of different types of antibodies that still neutralize the virus declines over time (every antibody evading mutation makes the advantage derived from additional antibody evading mutations even more useful).
Delta most likely didn’t evolve due to the vaccination campaign. It looked for a while as if Delta had walked into a dead alley, where no real useful new mutations were left for it to pick up. Even Omicron does not seem to have evolved because of the vaccination campaign. However, Omicron has had evolutionary paths opened up for it by the vaccine, paths that would have been inaccessible to it otherwise, because the intermediate steps would not have had a fitness advantage. If you really want to understand this concept better, I would recommend viewing this video where Richard Dawkins explains the problem with intermediate steps in evolution.
BA.2 with the Spike R346K mutation (found in BA.1.1 and Mu) is an unusual combination.
It appears to be gaining some recent traction in Israel.
It is still very low frequency – now 106 samples globally, +40 in the last day.
? pic.twitter.com/XDReoCvyuH— Mike Honey ??? (@Mike_Honey_) February 17, 2022
And that’s why the whole process of immune evasion accelerates itself. We already see a version of BA.2 in Israel (of course it’s Israel), where it has picked up the exact immune evading mutation that gave BA.1.1 its advantage over BA.1. This one now appears to be rapidly spreading.
Take a look at this interesting graph, of BA.1.1 in South Africa:
We see BA1.1 show up in November, but then it never grows dominant, South Africa skips straight to the radically different BA.2. Why is this? Just a quarter of the population has been vaccinated and they had overwhelmingly been vaccinated recently, so they’re still mostly protected from infection. In other words, Omicron is not subject to vaccine related evolutionary pressure in South Africa.
Now compare this to the United States, a highly vaccinated population with a lot of waning vaccine induced immunity:
Here BA.1.1 rapidly takes over from BA.1, because that one little antibody evading mutation (R346K) has a much bigger fitness advantage when you’re dealing with people whose immunity depends on just a handful of different kinds of antibodies against the Spike protein.
Once BA.1 has burned through the American population and the immunity it induces becomes an obstacle to itself, it’s BA.2’s turn to grow dominant. Once BA.2 and its inevitable subvariants take over, you’ll start to see the vaccines really begin to backfire. To illustrate what I mean, take a look at Denmark, which is a little ahead of everyone else, as BA.2 grew dominant there first.
Yesterday Denmark had 1604 people with COVID in the hospital. They also had a new record high in admissions, 480 admissions. You can compare this to last winter, when they always had fewer than 1000 people in the hospital, despite having no vaccines. It looks unlikely to get better anytime soon, because the boosters the elderly received are now beginning to wane.
It’s also worth noting by the way, that the seasons are becoming irrelevant. After all, here you can see cases in Australia in the summer:
The vaccines have so far failed to work and that’s why politicians are now so eager to return to normal, without reporting what’s going on in the hospitals anymore. They’re now under the impression that the vaccines can’t solve it and merely make it “manageable” and so they’re eager to get the population to go along with going back to normal. They’re also going to painstakingly insist that the problem is over, even when it proves to be far worse than last winter, as in Denmark right now.
However, unfortunately for everyone, this is just not where it stops. Vaccine efficacy doesn’t decline to zero, it declines below zero, as the virus gradually evolves to use your vaccine induced immune response to its own advantage. This eventually leads to the dreaded antibody dependent enhancement. The zero point is merely the point where governments stop reporting the data (because clearly there must be some issue with the data when it shows the vaccines don’t work, even if said issue wasn’t there before Omicron and even if we don’t have a clue what the issue might be!), it’s not the point where the numbers stop getting worse.
Our failed vaccine experiment that leads to antibody dependent enhancement is different from the failed Dengue vaccine experiment in the Philippines that killed children through antibody dependent enhancement, for a simple reason: Our vaccines have been distributed to so many people that they have created evolutionary relevant selective pressure for antibody dependent enhancement.
The reason you haven’t seen anything that sounds like antibody dependent enhancement yet is not because it’s not happening at a molecular level. However, it’s happening in a context of a wide variety of neutralizing antibodies that still prevent infection. As the virus mutates to overcome those antibodies, it is eventually just left with the antibodies that enhance infection.
There are a number of different paths towards enhancement of infection by these antibodies. Some enhancing antibodies bind to the Receptor Binding Domain. In other cases, enhancing antibodies bind to the N-Terminal Domain. It’s a subject that hasn’t been explored much, but we know this is a problem that’s going on. Hardly anyone seems to care however, because right now the enhancement is still being masked by the antibodies that do still work.
Antibody dependent enhancement may be playing a role in a strange phenomenon we observe: People get Omicron, they get sick and then they take an unusually long time to die from it. If infection triggers the rise in antibodies that merely make the infection worse, it would explain the delay in death.
And so this is how the vaccination experiment resolves. It’s not so much that the vaccines fail to protect people. That would be bad enough on its own, considering the numerous deadly side-effects they are clearly having. Rather, by inducing homogeneous narrow Spike directed non-sterilizing immunity, they expand the evolutionary landscape of novel variants that can emerge and create a population that turns into sitting ducks for variants that are evolving, that use this artificially induced immunity to their own advantage.
Because of the mass vaccination campaign, we become more susceptible to infection, more susceptible to rapid reinfection and in the long run, the vaccines also cause the individual infections themselves to become more severe.
You should expect to see the first signs of this process begin to emerge and lead to disturbingly high levels of hospitalizations in Israel and Denmark in the weeks ahead. Denmark will be first and then followed by Israel, as Israel has again decided to kick the can down the hall by giving people a fourth injection with the exact same vaccine, based on an extinct old variant.
Vaccinating elderly with a fourth dose temporarily works (with the cost of the usual risk of severe side-effects), but it merely sets you up for a worse situation, as you give the virus some time to further adjust to its vaccinated host, before jumping into the elderly. BA.2 is more severe than BA.1 and skipping out on BA.1 with a fourth shot merely sets you up to get BA.2 instead of BA.1.
As it takes longer for the elderly to get BA.2, their chances just increase that the BA.2 that ends up infecting them is a tweaked version capable of evading more antibodies. Ask yourself this: Is Omicron looking as mild to you as it did in December, when I warned you it probably wasn’t going to be mild? Catching it later just sets people up for a nastier version.
Worse, the breadth of the immune response declines with every booster, so it degrades the quality of the immune response, which is masked by the temporary increase in quantity. In other words, if you got off the booster train after the third shot and faced a 2% risk of death upon infection, you might for example face a 3% risk of death upon infection if you decided to get off the booster train after the fourth.
I’ll ask you this question: With the rise of Omicron it became apparent that Moderna and Pfizer would have to give people new specific booster doses. Why then, has Moderna’s stock price dropped by half since the emergence of Omicron? It seems to me, that the stock market is beginning to fear the potential risk of legal liability for these companies. If you committed fraud, the contracts you pushed on everyone rendering you immune from liability no longer apply. It’s not just interest rates or the usual shenanigans, as Moderna is clearly worse affected than Pfizer. The stock market is beginning to signal that these companies did something wrong.
Excellent article, but the answer to this question:
“Ask yourself this: Is Omicron looking as mild to you as it did in December, when I warned you it probably wasn’t going to be mild?”
… is still yes. Omicron seems to be very mild for healthy people under 65 or so, regardless of vaccination status, and it seems to be milder than prior variants for the elderly. The people dying from Omicron seem to be the same people who’ve always been dying of Covid: The very old, the very sick, and the very obese, with a very, very few unlucky others mixed in.
>Omicron seems to be very mild for healthy people under 65 or so, regardless of vaccination status, and it seems to be milder than prior variants for the elderly. The people dying from Omicron seem to be the same people who’ve always been dying of Covid: The very old, the very sick, and the very obese, with a very, very few unlucky others mixed in.
Well no I disagree. It mainly looks milder, because it’s able to infect a broader swathe of the population, including people who already have pre-existing immunity.
Do you think there are still a lot of people left in the United States who haven’t been exposed to this virus? If the answer is no, then how did the US have the third deadliest month in january?
Isn’t Australia a good country to study? They’ve had almost no original Wuhan virus, or Alpha or Delta variants. They are highly vaccinated, most of the population hasn’t been exposed to the virus, so the only antibodies they have are vaccine-based.
They reach peak Omicron infections on Jan 13 (150K) and peak deaths 2 weeks later (Jan 28). Both cases and death are dropping pretty rapidly.
Yes, Radagast has his head in his rear end. Not sure how he’s able to write on such a technical level but then whiff on basic and obvious conclusions.
Exactly what someone who got the vax would say.
> Well no I disagree. It mainly looks milder, because it’s able to infect a broader swathe of the population, including people who already have pre-existing immunity.
If Omicron is infecting far more people but a lower percentage are dying, including in the highest-risk groups, then Omicron is definitionally milder.
I am looking at the UK — I am eyeballing the case/deaths data here.
Jan 2021 (Alpha variant), 7 day average:
– peak cases, Jan 10 2021, 62500 cases / day
– peak deaths, Jan 27, 2021, 1250 deaths / day
Jan 2022 (Omicron variant), 7 day average:
– peak cases, Jan 6, 2022, 190000 cases / day
– peak deaths, Jan 22, 2022, 272 deaths / day
So, in 2022: 3X number of cases and 1/4 of deaths (ie, for every Omicron
death we have 12 Delta deaths).
These comparisons are tricky and in my opinion not fair:
– most vulnerable have probably died before Omicron hit
– treatment has become better
– we have been exposed to the virus for almost two years (so, our bodies
have surely adapted a little bit to the virus)
Funny that we can’t even agree on something relatively simple:
how dangerous is Omicron?
We should be able to just (g)uesstimate IFR:
https://dailysceptic.org/2022/01/13/finnish-epidemiologist-the-ifr-of-the-omicron-variant-is-0-04-about-half-that-of-seasonal-flu/
While B.A.1 seems more mild on the surface, it is still doing the job of exhausting the t-cells of the vaccinated and reducing the diversity of the immune response. There wont be much fight left in much of the populations immune system with the 1-2 punch and the remaining antibodies left over will only trigger the evolution the Pi variant (I predict that will be the big whopper)
Yeah exactly. In the absence of trained innate immunity and a strong broad antibody response, the T cells are left to do the job.
The T cells take a hit whenever they have to deal with this virus and so under the sort of conditions of high constant exposure we now live under, you’re at increased risk of getting infected again, which then means another hit to your T cells.
These reinfections are typically not counted in the official numbers when they’re rapid enough. The hits to your T cells also put you at increased risk of other health problems, because the T cells have more jobs besides dealing with SARS-COV-2.
It’s a positive feedback loop.
That’s for example, why we see massive amounts of viral RNA in sewage here in the Netherlands, much bigger than during any of the previous waves. People stopped getting constantly tested, but the positivity rate of those who do get tested remains the same.
What we’re seeing suggests that there’s just no real durable immunity emerging in the population. It’s the same thing in Israel, people stop getting tested, but the positivity rate among those who do get tested remains the same.
We are clearly not witnessing a dangerous pandemic at this point. Virtually everybody will tell you anecdotally they haven’t been sick with covid beyond an ordinary cold and they know barely anyone who has. Remember we live in clown world and the Intel media lie constantly for all kinds of petty and ridiculous reasons. It’s embarrassing at this point. I don’t know what the point is: I’m not a 666th degree Freemason or whatever. But everyone with a solid brain cell knows it is all bollocks at this point.
Meanwhile, back in the real world, the Israeli government has just announced the rescinding of the vaccine passport policy, and the trend for both cases and hospitalizations in that country have moved sharply downward.
All of your wild, doomer death wishes have been spoiled. The only time you were ever correct was when you were cribbing Alex Berenson and Joe Rogan. Why you decided to make an about-face last year, I still can’t figure out.
The question we should really be pondering is, why are you making the same errors again and again?
For someone who accuses others of being out-of-touch with reality, you seem to have little grip on it, yourself. Maybe it’s time you questioned your own “mental constructs” and gotten a reality check of your own.
https://www.voiceforscienceand solidarity.org/scientific-blog/omicron-a-wolf-in-sheeps-clothing (remove the space in the link)
Also today’s post at NakedCapitalism, supporting most of what Radagast has been writing for the past few months:
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2022/02/new-data-omicron-ba-2-more-contagious-and-severe-than-ba-1-yet-officials-committed-to-relaxing-protections.html
Thanks for the links guys, I hadn’t seen this yet.
Radagast, it appears that Bossche (in the linked article above) is laying out the immunological details of the scenario that you’re outlining.
Yes, I agree. The basic scenario he outlines here is what I arrive at too when I read the literature.
Basically the points he makes are as following:
-These vaccines can’t bring us to herd immunity, they merely buy you a couple of months of protection, while making the long term outcome worse.
-For most people, protection has to consist of trained innate immunity. The vaccines can’t help accomplish this, in fact, they merely seem to undermine innate immunity.
-The only real solution we have right now, as long as we don’t have genuinely effective vaccines, is promoting healthy nutrition and chemical prophylaxis in the high risk demographics.
-It’s relatively speaking much easier for Omicron to now take steps to start using our vaccine induced immune response to its own advantage, than it was for previous variants that still resembled the Wuhan spike protein more closely.
This all makes sense to me and the evidence I’ve seen backs it up.
He makes another point here:
>Any mutation that changes the physicochemical properties of the virus’ N-terminal domain in ways that strengthen the latter’s interaction with lipid rafts on respiratory epithelial cells would readily facilitate adsorption of viral particles to these cells and mediate fusion of the viral envelope with the target cell membrane such as to allow an alternative route of viral entry into the cell. It is reasonable to assume that the fitness cost of such a change in physicochemical properties is much lower than the one the virus would incur upon selecting and breeding a variant that incorporates a number of immune escape mutations sufficient to avoid neutralization by anti-(O)S Abs while not causing steric hindrance of RBD-ACE-2 receptor interactions.
This one is hard for me to judge, but time will tell. It’s clear that Omicron has much more capacity to rapidly come up with new tricks than previous variants, but what those tricks are going to look like is beyond my level of comprehension.
Honestly, I’m surprised by how accurate Geert has been in his predictions.
He warned that:
-The protection from the vaccines would rapidly wade and we would start seeing breakthrough infections.
-The virus would jump into animal hosts, before jumping back into humans in a radically changed form (seems to have happened with Omicron, it’s a likelier explanation than an HIV patient).
-The long term impact of the vaccines would be to make the pandemic much more severe and longer lasting, by merely delaying herd immunity further into the future.
He was already laying all of this out around spring 2021, back when Fauci and co were saying that these vaccines would enable herd immunity once most people have been vaccinated.
Sadly, nothing has been done with his warnings, so now we get to enjoy the consequences.
The people who develop these vaccines and the people who approve them are not the sort of people who look at the evolutionary dynamics of this virus.
Vaccines can’t get us to herd immunity, just the opposite.
And if vaccines have damaged and reprogrammed our immune system (for at least some time), it seems that herd immunity will not be possible for a long while.
Maybe the non-solution that many governments are offering now is best:
– pretend the virus is under control
– convince people that all is well and that we must learn how to live with the virus
– stop testing and stop counting cases
So, basically what they should have done in February 2020.
>Maybe the non-solution that many governments are offering now is best:
>– pretend the virus is under control
>– convince people that all is well and that we must learn how to live with the virus
>– stop testing and stop counting cases
>So, basically what they should have done in February 2020.
Yep. But, irony alert, the situation is now far worse than it ever was.
All the measures they took in an effort to solve it, ended up making it worse.
Most people don’t realize this, because they’re looking at the wrong indicators.
Example, the Netherlands has about six times more viral RNA in sewage right now than a year ago.
People are constantly getting reinfected, which simply wasn’t the case a year ago, before we had these vaccines.
Instead of SARS-COV-2 being outcompeted by fitter RNA respiratory viruses, those viruses were knocked out during the lockdowns, SARS-COV-2 evolved to adapt better to us and now these other RNA viruses are struggling to compete with SARS-COV-2.
SARS-COV-2 was already everywhere by December, but it was a background pathogen causing no real issues until march, when we started this idiotic lockdown experiment that pushed all the other RNA respiratory pathogens into near extinction.
Lockdowns are perhaps the most catastrophic medical experiment human beings have ever attempted. It’s the equivalent of a guy who has gut problems and rather than solving his gut problems, he decides to eat an all-meat diet because that’s the thing his gut now tolerates best. The bacteria that helped him digest plants now start dying out, so returning to a normal diet without suffering gut problems merely becomes more difficult.
So, as much as I still favor returning to normal, everything humans are doing is making it increasingly more difficult. Denmark is eager to be done with this, but the question to ponder is: Will they get cold feet when the hospitals can no longer cope, or will they continue?
We have had periods in history before, flu pandemics during which the hospitals couldn’t cope. It sucks, you have to hope you survive it at home with your own treatment, but that’s the way this should have been handled back in march 2020.
The fact that we did not bite through the pain back then means the pain we’ll have to bite through now will be much worse.
Bossche also claims vaccine-induced antibodies to the ancestral Spike protein are recalled upon infection with Omicron in the vaccinated via antigenic imprinting. Hence, infection with Omicron functions as a kind of booster that replenishes vaccine-induced antibodies. Unfortunately, these (recalled) vaccine-induced antibodies “have the capacity to compete with relevant innate Abs for binding to Omicron” so that training of the innate immune defense runs the risk of being “too little” and arriving “too late” in the vaccinated. In this way “innate immune effector capacity in vaccinees becomes more and more eroded” following an Omicron infection. (Admittedly, I’m slightly reorganizing Bossche’s remarks in a way that makes more sense to me.)
As someone not trained in this science I find this analysis to be plausible, but still theoretical. It’s an open question whether Omicron mutates in ways that further erode the remaining protection afforded by vaccine-induced antibodies, or if it adopts some other strategy altogether. And whether vaccinated individuals are subject to multiple waves of (re)infection this year at much higher rates than the unvaccinated beyond anecdotal testimony on social media. However, it’s horrific to consider the above as a live possibility going forward — continued erosion of innate immune defense followed by antibody dependent enhancement in the vaccinated!
>Meanwhile, back in the real world, the Israeli government has just announced the rescinding of the vaccine passport policy, and the trend for both cases and hospitalizations in that country have moved sharply downward.
Of course, they gave all the elderly a fourth shot in January so then they enjoyed the happy vaccine valley again and hospitalizations went down, until it too wanes. Once it wanes, you’ll find that you have further eroded the quality of the immune response, so then they’re back to the previous situation or worse.
But keep this in mind: Tests for COVID have gone down massively, but the positivity rate is the same as a month ago: 24%. The virus didn’t disappear, it continues to circulate among the rest of the population.
>Why you decided to make an about-face last year, I still can’t figure out.
Very easy. What was true in march 2020 simply isn’t true today. Alpha became deadlier than Wuhan, Delta became deadlier than Alpha, now Omicron is capable of reinfecting a significant number of people who got any of the previous variants.
All of that is bad enough on its own. But here’s the big problem: When naturally recovered people are vaccinated, they LOSE their natural immunity, as I have shown earlier. In other words, this transitions from a virus where herd immunity can be reached, to a virus where herd immunity is impossible. You’re now stuck with billions of people worldwide, exerting strong selective immune pressure for antibody evading variants.
If you fool billions of people’s immune systems, into targeting a version of the Spike protein that no longer circulates, then you’re setting yourself up for a disaster. Everything we have done in this pandemic has been a self-inflicted wound, starting with the original birth in Wuhan, but the biggest self-inflicted wound of all has been the vaccine.
This is not even so much a problem because the virus is special. It would have been a bad idea with any other sort of virus. You buy yourself a few months of peace with these vaccines, in exchange for much bigger trouble down the road.
Most important to keep in mind: Every new variant that spreads gets to spin the lethality wheel of roulette. There’s no clear rule that states a new variant must inevitably be less deadly. For Alpha it went up, for Delta it went up, now for BA.1 it was slightly down, about 33% if I’m not mistaken. What matters more than anything else now is that these new variants evade the adaptive immune response. That can have a side-effect of increased lethality.
And I will readily admit that I have continued to read over the past two years. Something I wasn’t aware of at first, is that human beings have evidence of genetic selection in our genome, by coronaviruses, suggesting that parts of Asia were decimated by a coronavirus outbreak thousands of years ago, which has made them less vulnerable during this pandemic.
When you understand that, then you understand that the long term range of possibilities is very big.
And so you need to be asking yourself: What happens when people are constantly reinfected? The naturally immune go through this once and then they’re good for years. But billions of people were injected worldwide, with vaccines that have been shown to destroy natural immunity. We’re seeing people who are getting reinfected within a month, with each infection eroding the T cells on which they now depend for their immunity. How sustainable do you think this is?
Oh brother. Your brain lives in small timeframes. You are WAY to early to make any calls. The average normie only thinks about a year ahead. His or her life is the entire cycle.
We are in a revolution t hat is part of a cycle WAY bigger than your puny one.
If you think that thus was it… well. Just wait. We are in ‘the decade of action’ bud. It is like the last 30 minutes of an action movie. After 5 minutes of pure action, this pandemic and accompanying policies, you need to let the audience breathe a little bit.
The stupid ones are always surprised when it kicks back up. I have no clue how you can write so well AND think this is over haha. Buddy. We have only just begun. And you will see that before the end of the year :).
Thank you for another great article! I know it’s hard to make recommendations for other people since we are all in different situations.
But would you please consider writing an article highlighting what types of choices you will be making in response to your insights? Everything from health, to living, to travel choices etc. I have my own plans, but always get ideas from others knowledgable in the field.
Keep up the great work
Thanks for the suggestion, I’ll look into that.
Interested in your thoughts here as well. Good read.
The intentional obfuscation of data was the worst side of the pandemic since the beginning, now it is only getting worse.
As for the Moderna stock, I do not think that liability is behind the collapse in price. It is only that the market does not expect that we will have universal, compulsory, half-yearly re-vaccination forever, which was the only scenario under which Moderna was a viable independent company.
Now Moderna is probably only valuable as the target of a merger.
Thank you for an excellent review. Kudos, sir.
Good post, thanks!
Small comment, mainly semantics:
– I wouldn’t exactly say that Biontech/Moderna committed fraud. They may have developped
bad vaccine, but it’s ultimately FDA/EMA which approved it and the governments that
pushed this onto population.
You make a great observation that most governments are eager to go to “normal”
while some data doesn’t look that great (especially Denmark).
A couple of questions:
1. How does natural infection come into play now? Lots of vaccinated (and unvaccinated)
people are being infected with Omicron. These people (even if vaccinated) should now have bit broader spectrum of antibodies.
2. Deaths in the UK didn’t have such a huge spike like in Denmark and Israel or Sweden.
There are countries like Italy/Spain/Belgium/Portugal that have had increased death toll
(due to Omicron), but many other (Netherlands) not much.
Why such differences?
>Deaths in the UK didn’t have such a huge spike like in Denmark and Israel or Sweden.
There are countries like Italy/Spain/Belgium/Portugal that have had increased death toll
(due to Omicron), but many other (Netherlands) not much.
The Netherlands was late with boosting elderly, so the boosters are still more effective right now.
The UK had an absolutely massive wave last winter, so that probably plays a big role.
>How does natural infection come into play now? Lots of vaccinated (and unvaccinated)
people are being infected with Omicron. These people (even if vaccinated) should now have bit broader spectrum of antibodies.
Omicron very much seems to be a pandemic of the vaccinated. Most unvaccinated people already have natural immunity from previous variants at this point, meaning they’re protected from infection, or infections are very mild and aborted early.
” Most unvaccinated people already have natural immunity from previous variants at this point, meaning they’re protected from infection, or infections are very mild and aborted early.”
Do you assume that most unvaccinated have actually been ill and that’s what is required to get immunity? Or as Vanden Bossche has said before, can one obtain trained innate immunity through multiple subclinical exposures as long as you are basically healthy? And if fact, you should seek out small exposures over time to accomplish this.
My son had delta last summer and the rest of us took the dewormer, used nose spray took vit D, zinc, etc. even ran a HEPA filter, and didn’t get anywhere near sick (I assumed we would get sick anyway and was quite surprised that something we were doing really worked). I assume we had exposure, and I like to think that the measures we took kept us from getting sick but still allowed for immunity-building exposure.
Almost everyone in the Western world has had some degree of exposure now.
>Or as Vanden Bossche has said before, can one obtain trained innate immunity through multiple subclinical exposures as long as you are basically healthy?
Yeah this is correct. T cells proliferate too in response to subclinical exposures.
https://dailysceptic.org/2022/02/17/why-are-deaths-in-highly-vaccinated-denmark-approaching-a-record-high/
This is starting to feel slightly ominous. If any of this is true people will be absolutely baying for blood. Will the vaxxed, when their health starts to fall off a cliff, just blame the unvaxxed out of sheer tribalistic spite and envy even though it makes no logical sense? That was what they were doing a month or so ago. Or will they turn on governments? Perhaps this explains the rollback from the vaccine programme and restrictions from governments around the world. They now know the vaccines are not only useless but likely dangerous and have shat themselves. The philosophical implications are massive too as it will completely destroy the western world’s faith in science/progress
“Will the vaxxed, when their health starts to fall off a cliff, just blame the unvaxxed out of sheer tribalistic spite and envy even though it makes no logical sense?”
Very good point. The unvaxxed are to blame! There will be blood. The other part of the mass murder.
“Or will they turn on governments?”
Of course, not! Governments are the last hope of the vaxxed. (I’m not Cassandra – I’m just cynical, sorry.)
Why would a new variant, that evolves, and outcompetes current variants, be more deadly? If it evades vax immunity completely why would it not use this to spread faster? Why injure the host, why kill it?
I think it is more likely that immunodeficiency will kill from continuous re-infections and t cell exhaustion. This will look like cancer, tuberculosis, bacterial infections.
There’s no selection for lethality itself, it carries no fitness benefit. However, increased or decreased lethality can be a side-effect of selective pressure for other traits. As an example, lethality can decrease if the virus begins to adapt to your upper respiratory tract.
If this virus has to evolve to overcome your antibody response to spread, because everyone has antibodies, then you’re effectively making a factor that used to restrain lethality obsolete.
Hence why you want the people who have antibodies, to also have sterilizing immunity (ie natural immunity). When you have people with antibodies, but without sterilizing immunity, then you’re creating the situation where we start seeing antibody evading mutations accumulate and severe breakthrough infections.
What does all this evolutionary pressure towards spike protein evasion mean for the unvaccinated? Will covid increasingly evolve in ways that mean the unvaccinated are less likely to catch covid, and/or have far less severe bouts of it? Or will the unvaccinated be caught up in some sort of Marek’s disease scenario where they are going to be hit harder and harder by the new variants until the only way to survive at all is to be constantly vaccinated?
>What does all this evolutionary pressure towards spike protein evasion mean for the unvaccinated? Will covid increasingly evolve in ways that mean the unvaccinated are less likely to catch covid, and/or have far less severe bouts of it?
Coronaviruses are surprisingly flexible, most people get regularly reinfected every year or every few years.
However, SARS-COV-2 is somewhat different from the other ones in that there’s an original antigenic sin aspect, affecting the majority of the world’s population now. We’re thus going to see a degree of adaptation to the antibody response of vaccinated people, at the cost of adaptation to unvaccinated people’s immune response.
This is a gradual process that’s only really beginning to emerge now with Omicron, as can be seen in the massive discrepancy that Omicron has had in the highly vaccinated Western world compared to the few remaining mostly unvaccinated nations. Mutations that never really took off in the past because they have a fitness disadvantage in the absence of a strong Wuhan Spike directed antibody response are now becoming more widespread, but the fitness disadvantage that it carries in the unvaccinated will remain.
>Or will the unvaccinated be caught up in some sort of Marek’s disease scenario where they are going to be hit harder and harder by the new variants until the only way to survive at all is to be constantly vaccinated?
All evidence we have right now suggests the opposite is happening. The evolutionary dynamics are different, as Marek’s disease is a herpesvirus that any bird essentially carries forever upon getting infected. With SARS-COV-2, healthy people get infected and then eliminate the virus. If you’re unvaccinated, get sick and recover it’s then very difficult for the virus to reinfect you for at least a year. The handful of people who constantly carry it and allow mutations to accumulate tend to be HIV patients but we see no evidence that those variants grow more virulent.
If a Marek’s disease type scenario were emerging, you would expect to see some signs of that by now in Africa, but you see the opposite. The real threat we face is the virus adapting to the vaccine induced non-sterilizing antibody response.
Maybe it isn’t a majority of the population when you consider the tradvaxxes used in China?
It looks like China and a few of its clients will be the only industrial nations spared this catastrophe.
Great article. Just one comment though: Do not call those people “normies”. The word “normal” implies a moral approval. They are the majority and they are fools, and “normality” is completely unrelated.
It is not “abnormal” to not want the vax, knowing what you and I know.
It is stupid not to want all facts before accepting an experimental treatment in a very unusual situation where censorship is involved.
Some of them — and us – are “normal people” in some narrow sense of this word, but that is a very amorphous and meaningless term.
What is truly “abnormal” is the entire Covid pandemic, the response, and the major players.
Putting a new spin on the phrase “better late than never”, the New York Times “reveals” that the CDC is withholding Covid data:
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/20/health/covid-cdc-data.html
The party really must be over for vaccines, if even “the newspaper of broken record” is forced to admit the obvious.
Yep. The amount of data they’re forced to stop publishing because it would lead to “antivaxxers spreadng misinformation” increases on a daily basis.
If the vaccines were safe and effective, it wouldn’t require so much effort to convince people that they are safe and effective.
I think we’re just exiting foreplay in the grand scheme of things, also I want to stress that there has been an assumption of total co-operation amongst the involved parties. There is this insistent idea that a global group that is solely in charge of this situation, I would expect there are at least several players unless one group has somehow managed to achieve ultimate power and absorb or wipe out any other long surviving power structures.
Lots of conversation going on about this incident, but have not found many writers exploring what motives and power structures are behind the curtain.
We’re far from Kansas at this point.
Can you point to the data used to create the Genome Sequencing chart? I went to the two places mentioned in the title but could not find the data. I thought the chart was great and I would like to replicate its function.
Thanks
dave