So we’re going to have to cover SARS2 once more. I know most people have moved on by now, but the global slow-motion lobotomy continues:
These are test scores in young people. The obvious answer would be to blame the school closures. But that explanation would require test scores to bounce back by now, instead of continuing to decline. It’s similar to the surges in whooping cough and RSV. If the lockdowns are the reason, we should have caught up by now. Immune system damage better fits the pattern observed.
But the reason I want to go over the topic again, is to point out a problem I have addressed before: The antibodies don’t solve the problem. The literature used to be full of gloating infographics like this:
Neutralizing antibody concentrations are higher after vaccination! But if you now look at vaccinated healthcare workers, you see the problem I already warned about long ago: The quality of the immune response is poor. The IgG antibodies shifted to IgG4 and IgG2 (which can’t form cross-links and tell Natural Killer cells to ignore infected cells), have relatively poor affinity and bind to the wrong regions, including to regions where they enhance the ability of viral particles to infect cells.
This is confirmed by a new study in healthcare workers, where they found that higher concentrations of IgG antibodies to Spike, lead to repeated reinfections. On the other hand, higher levels of interferon gamma and interleukin 2, were found to lead to protection from reinfection. So this is why we’re stuck, with these endless waves of infections, including during the height of summer.
I have explained before, that vaccination results in a deficient interferon gamma response. I showed you this graph:
It’s interferon gamma, secreted by T cells and NK cells, that allows infected cells to clear an infection themselves, by synergizing with the interferon alpha produced by infected tissues. In its absence, the immune system is forced to kill infected cells instead. But if people were vaccinated before their first infection, which most people were, the body ends up stuck with low concentrations of interferon gamma.
People who were infected before being vaccinated, have an immune response that’s able to recognize various genes other than Spike and manages to produce interferon gamma in response to those genes. But when people were vaccinated before infection, the immune system is stuck with very high concentrations of antibodies to Spike and an inability to produce enough interferon gamma.
It’s worth sharing this graphic again, which offers some basic insight into what interferon gamma does:
As you can see, Interferon Gamma interferes in just about every step in the viral reproduction cycle. It’s the sort of mechanism the body evolved that works well for numerous viruses, instead of being specific for any particular type. Low interferon gamma levels have been found to lead to a massively increased risk of hospitalization. It allows you to predict who will be hospitalized upon infection: If you don’t see interferon gamma jump up, they’ll probably end up hospitalized.
As long as all of this continues, people just get sicker and sicker.
But I would have expected, that the people who perform these studies would open their mouths by now. I would expect that you don’t have to visit some obscure Dutch blog to hear about these problems.
If you do a study, where you find that:
-Antibodies have shifted to IgG4/IgG2
-Higher concentrations of antibodies lead to increased risk of constant reinfections
-Interferon gamma becomes absent when vaccinating naive people.
I would expect that you feel a responsibility, to warn that we can’t go on vaccinating people. More importantly, I would expect you to feel a responsibility, to warn that a big mistake has been made.
And there are a handful of people who actually do ring the alarm bells. In one study, they concluded:
Knowing that the mRNA vaccines do not prevent infections, the Omicron subvariants have been shown to be less pathogenic, and IgG4 levels have been associated with immunotolerance and numerous negative effects, the recommendations for the successive administration of booster vaccinations to people should be revised.
So it’s not just me, making stuff up or misinterpreting things.
But in general, the pattern seems to be that the vast majority of people just want to forget what happened.
But you can’t afford to ignore what’s going on. Your first infection reduces your IQ by 3 points, the second by 2. After the first infection, your immune system basically knows how to deal with this, so the third infection probably has an effect similar to the second.
And if you think these are just weak correlational studies, well, they actually went ahead and had healthy young people voluntarily infected by this virus and they found out those people were left with brain-damage that doesn’t go away.
How this managed to get through an ethics committee, I have no idea, but they went ahead and did this.
When I look around and talk to my friends, I notice their personalities are just changing. They’re becoming less social, more introverted, more anxious, more stuck with repetitive interests, less able to enjoy new things.
What do you think this is:
During the first phase of the pandemic (March to December 2020), personality was relatively stable, with only a small decline in neuroticism compared with pre-pandemic. This could be down to Covid “providing a reason” for feelings of anxiety and making it less likely for people to blame their own disposition, the authors suggested.
The reduction in neuroticism had disappeared by the second half of the pandemic (2021-2022), the study suggested, and was replaced by declines in extraversion, openness, agreeableness, and conscientiousness compared to pre-pandemic personality. The changes were about one-tenth of a standard deviation, equivalent to the size of fluctuation typically seen over a decade of life. Younger adults showed the biggest changes and the oldest group of adults had no significant changes in traits.
This is personality change, from brain damage and an immune system forced to constantly be on high alert. All the inflammation depletes your brain of serotonin. You can’t blame the lockdowns for this, as it only emerged from 2021 onwards.
This is the main area where people’s brains are being damaged:
This is the easiest part of the brain to get to for this virus, from the nerves in the nose. When this part of the brain is damaged, we’re not properly able to change our behavior when we no longer receive the same reward for what we’re doing anymore.
There is no more extinction of the association in our minds of a particular action with reward: If you once made a thousand bucks on a slot machine, but this part of the brain is damaged, then you’re going to keep pulling that lever. The same is true for unfulfilling jobs, unfulfilling relationships andsoforth. People get “stuck”, they’re no longer able to change to new patterns of behavior.
This is just really happening. It’s happening because everyone is constantly getting reinfected by this virus. Everyone is constantly getting reinfected by this virus, because of the poor quality immune response you’re left with after vaccination.
But if your body fails to deploy a proper inflammatory immune response to this virus, then you won’t even notice this is going on. Your small blood vessels in your brain become covered in amyloid, without you noticing anything is wrong. It becomes a stealth lobotomy.
The end result, is that basically everyone ends up with long COVID. Risk of long COVID goes up linearly with every reinfection, it does not decline during reinfections.
There are things you can do of course. Taurine and vitamin C seem to help the immune system recover. Natto and serrapeptase break down the fibrin clots that form, psilocybe mushrooms help repair the blood vessels.
But most people don’t seem to want to see any of this. They ignore the fact that they can’t smell anything, ignore that they’re constantly coughing, ignore that they’re rapidly out of breath.
And they’re self-medicating, without realizing it.
Why do you think the United States now has an Adderall shortage? Prescriptions of Adderall in the US doubled between 2020 and 2022. It’s an amphetamine drug, that causes your brain to release more dopamine and serotonin, but you rapidly develop a tolerance to it.
What is long COVID? It makes you feel depressed, tired, unable to concentrate and anxious. All problems that are reduced, when you use ADHD medication, to flood the brain with serotonin and dopamine. The American population is simply self-medicating their long COVID epidemic.
But it’s not a solution. The reduction in serotonin is a normal part of the brain’s innate immune response to a viral infection. If you start treating that with amphetamines, you’re just masking the underlying problem.
i haven’t finished your article but the premise is flawed: it’s in no way true that test scores should have recovered by now at all. the kids taking these tests last year had their high school experience basically cut in half so of course they couldn’t have caught up in 2 years. also, just because kids are physically in school doesn’t mean it’s like it was before COVID. a lot of the stupid political policies that were implemented to game the metrics but actually hurt learning are permanent now, so schooling in general has somehow, improbably, gotten worse. now i’ll read the rest of your article after running my mouth off.
If it’s school closures, you would expect Sweden’s ranking to improve compared to the rest of the world.
What we see is that Sweden’s ranking declined:
https://www.thelocal.se/20231205/swedish-students-maths-and-reading-scores-plunge-in-pisa-world-rankings
>School closures during the Covid-19 pandemic were one factor behind the unprecedented decrease across the OECD, with Pisa finding that “students in systems that spared more students from longer closures scored higher in mathematics and reported a greater sense of belonging at school”.
>Fifteen percent of students in Sweden reported that their school building was closed for more than three months during the pandemic, compared to 51 percent of OECD students on average.
>But school closures don’t appear to have been a decisive factor, with Sweden’s results falling more sharply than the OECD average (maths -15, reading -10, and no significant change in science).
It’s brain damage.
okay, that’s way more compelling than the us act scores. score one for the home team.
also, i think it’s a stretch to say all the personality problems are due to brain damage. the lockdowns shattered many people’s naive illusions (mine included) about the amount of freedom they have in their nominally “democratic” governments. having their entire worldview so comprehensively disproven has to have done some damage to peoples’ psyches, conscious or not.
This?
My reply posted with an Emoji. Some time today the Emoji transmogrified into a question mark. Creepy man.
You’re wrong about this. Test scores are much more a function of IQ than of school attendance. And U.S. schools are mostly terrible anyway. A year of online school instead of in-person school should not have had lasting effects like this.
Maybe the author is right about the virus causing this. Other hypothetical contributors could include general depression and malaise and lack of motivation as fallout from the “countermeasures,” or changes in the demographics of those taking these tests (non-trivial with tens of millions of new illegal immigrants coming to the U.S. in recent years). But I’m quite skeptical of your hypothesis, meh, that being temporarily deprived of exposure to American public school teachers had a lasting detrimental effect on tested academic performance.
our host has already demolished me with the swedish data, but i will stick up for myself in principle. i agree public schools were worse than useless in US–my kids are in private school–and that the tests are g-loaded. but, if you never learned to read you would fail even with a 130 iq. more to the point, if you never learned geometry or algebra 2 because of school closures, well, you will tank the math part of the tests (the verbal parts are more arguable).
what a world where i’m taking the pro side of the more schooling the argument. meh indeed.
Kids are also missing school because they are always sick.
e.g. https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/political/529214/can-t-keep-ignoring-the-truancy-crisis-government-announces-new-school-attendance-system
The teachers are always sick too. Classes getting cancelled. . . Relief teachers. . .
Parents are sick too, so there goes that support. The same for admin and maintenance staff, etc. The care factor for sending kids to school may be low as well, especially if they might get sick there.
Everything seems just that little bit more gorked now, right across the board. It’s hard to stay motivated.
Always entertaining to read your comments over at Gail’s site by the way. I lurk there all the time, have for years.
Thanks for another update.
> But if your body fails to deploy a proper inflammatory immune response to this virus, then you won’t even notice this is going on. Your small blood vessels in your brain become covered in amyloid, without you noticing anything is wrong. It becomes a stealth lobotomy.
This is something that I’ve been thinking about lately. The vaccine-induced IgG4 antibodies against the RBD are anti-inflammatory, meaning that they reduce symptoms of an infection in the vaccinated.
But, you’ve also written before that IgG antibodies can’t cross the blood brain barrier. I was asking ChatGPT about this, and “it” told me that under certain circumstances, IgG antibodies can indeed cross the BBB.
So, presumably this must be happening to some extent. Because otherwise, the vaccinated would be complaining about constant headaches.
And you’ve also written how the CD8+ killer T cells are also playing a role in the vaccinated immune response, but this is bad because it kills the brain cells. But if the IgG4 antibodies are crossing the BBB, and they shut down ADCC, then presumably these killer T cells are no longer doing their job? Which would be “good” (in the sense that these T cells are no longer “trigger happy”) but “bad” (in the sense that it could be causing persistent infections in the brain).
So, perhaps up until now, the unvaccinated have suffered more brain damage than the vaccinated, but this trend will reverse in the future once more fusogenic variants start disseminating. Very complex and difficult to predict what exactly is going to happen over the next several years, and terrifying to think about.
However, because XEC seems to be outcompeting KP, it seems that there is still room for the virus to further increase its ACE2 affinity, which is good, because it will outcompete more glycosylated variants, meaning that it should further delay the arrival of HIVICRON. I was really worried that it would happen this Winter. Not that this Winter won’t be bad, but hopefully the hospitals will be able to cope.
>And you’ve also written how the CD8+ killer T cells are also playing a role in the vaccinated immune response, but this is bad because it kills the brain cells. But if the IgG4 antibodies are crossing the BBB, and they shut down ADCC, then presumably these killer T cells are no longer doing their job?
ADCC is NK cells, not the CD8 T cells.
A CD8 Killer T cell just look at whether the MHC molecule of the cell is expressing its antigen. This is easy to avoid, by a virus just reducing expression of the MHC molecule altogether.
This is why it’s questionable whether the CD8+ T cells really do anything useful at all when it comes to this virus, some argue they just make matters worse.
>However, because XEC seems to be outcompeting KP, it seems that there is still room for the virus to further increase its ACE2 affinity,
No, XEC seems to beat KP through internal genetic differences, rather than due to Spike changes.
See Ryan Hissner’s recent posts on this, on Twitter.
>I was really worried that it would happen this Winter. Not that this Winter won’t be bad, but hopefully the hospitals will be able to cope.
Honestly, we don’t really know and can’t really know.
All we know is that these antibodies that target the NTD are unsustainable and easily avoided through multiple routes.
-Glycans
-Cysteine pair changes, to change how the protein is folded
-Increased fusogenicity
-Decreased immunogenicity (mutate to resemble our own proteins more)
We’re seeing all of these to some degree. We mostly see glycans, but also a new cysteine popping up suddenly.
And there’s apparently also a way to avoid NTD antibodies by binding heme metabolites:
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abg7607
Because the NTD doesn’t have to be able to bind to the ACE2 receptor, there are far more routes available for it to avoid the antibodies.
So how long it’s going to take it, to make the antibodies useless and what that’s going to look like, is really hard to guess, but for now it mostly seems to be happening mostly through more and more glycans being added.
If you look at the mutations popping up in the NTD, it’s almost all like this:
[letter]->N
[letter]->S
[letter]->T
All of that suggests new glycans being added.
> The same is true for unfulfilling jobs
That may be an interesting explanation to what has been happening in the job market: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/JTSQUR
Bad news for the human race but fantastically interesting.
So much to ponder and the mainstream media still refuses to discuss any of it.
I like the way you post critically important graphs and charts over and over. They need to be seen!
check out
“SARS-CoV-2-specific plasma cells are not durably established in the bone marrow long-lived compartment after mRNA vaccination” published in ‘Nature Medicine’ (2024), lead author Doan C. Nguyen.
More bad news.
Eh that’s good news. It makes it easier to get rid of the faulty immune response.
This short response is very important.
If only health care authorities decided to conduct experiments to help them out, e.g. with therapeutical cannabis, as you have suggested.
*help the vaccinated out
Adderall XR is gay.
Real men take Vyvanse.
Unless you love the 2nd Ammendment, then you take SSRI’s.
Real men take dextroamphetamine. Time release is lame.
The standards and rigor in my son’s school(s) deteriorated during and after the closure. Expectations for student performance decreased. These have recovered somewhat, but remain significantly lower than pre-closure. This is a very highly rated (public) school district. The students are performing as one would expect.
Also check out Vejon Health for a couple days ago, “the truth about Covid vaccine immunity.” Video is of a live session on YouTube. 14:44 minutes. And it ended suddenly without the analysis he was going to give. From the comments of those who watched it live, it was much longer. I went to Vejon Health website and there it was, 26 minutes, and super interesting. Curious.
So, at a loss of 2 IQ points per infection, how many years to go before the average person is gorked?
Some unfortunate people are catching the virus a few times a year. Those people would want to have an IQ that’s well above average, or they may only have a handful of years left before they’re into problematic territory.
And how long until people will start failing the daily ‘IQ tests’ involved in the ordinary performance of their duties?
Then what? System failure?
The thing is that most jobs don’t require you to be very smart, you’re required to be smart to get the job, but even that’s not really important anymore as everyone just uses chatGPT to do their college essays for them now.
It’s in the young people, who still have to learn things, where you really notice the problem. Test scores are crashing, kids are going to kindergarten unable to talk, many just stay home constantly sick.
This just continues, as long as we have this huge demographic of vaccinated elderly and obese people, who are constantly shedding this virus into the air.
Once the antibodies become useless and no new functional antibody response can be produced due to new glycans, that’s when this ends. There isn’t some point when it spontaneously ceases to be neurovirulent, as the antibodies just select for greater neurovirulence.
If that variant were to somehow never emerge, then this is just how civilization ends, a gradual lobotomy as AI starts doing everything for us.
That last part is impossible.
For each MW hydro, there has to be one human working at full capacity year round. Two if it is in the alps. These are the worker immediately occupied with the generation itself. Not the worker who deliver the spare parts in a truck, e.g. Not to speak of npps. There it is four to five iirc.
Yes, if this is all true it means some npps will explode, leak, harm. But AI wont take off at all since bit&bytes are not real.
The other side of the age pyramid/coin of fate is that capital formation is now rapidly declining. This kind of entropy killed other societies with much higher resilience and much lower fragility.
But AI wont be a problem. Phew!
People in the U.S. are still having their kids vaccinated for covid; it is a sign of political virtue among people who support Harris. I’m not saying this to be obnoxious; it is really the case. I know a number of such people. So it is not just the elderly and the obese who will be shedding; little kids will be too.
As people age, in my observation, they mostly become insanely optimistic, and develop an extraordinarily sunny outlook on life, and they firmly believe that any problem that is mentioned will be readily resolved. Maybe that is the amyloid deposits, and maybe brain aging from covid and the shots will lead to our having a lot of very optimistic young people. In that case the birth rate will increase.
Hi Rintrah,
Thought you’d appreciate this reminder from 2017 that immunity to any coronavirus is only ever short lived. It was and is never going to be otherwise. Not taking this into consideration was a key mistake, but then that would have meant conceding vaccination was and is a non-starter for any worthwhile protection.
‘Why Don’t We Ever Develop Immunity Against the Common Cold?’
https://www.technologynetworks.com/immunology/news/why-dont-we-ever-develop-immunity-against-the-common-cold-294551
The establishment continues to work on mRNA poisons. Beautiful report from an “anti-vaxxer” medical professional that managed to infiltrate a mRNA conference:
https://mariagutschi.substack.com/p/the-ribo-club-conference-and-rna