The elephant in the room: They don’t want to vaccinate anymore

One of the most important skills for intelligent people to develop, one that I sadly never managed to master myself, is to never show the back of your tongue. It’s a skill that academics and people working within government bureaucracies tend to be good at. Testosterone causes honesty in men. A honest man will show you the back of his tongue, he’ll tell you what he truly thinks is going on.

One of the tendencies you’ll find on the left is that the smarter people don’t speak out against their own side’s pet projects, they just silently don’t go along with them: They don’t neuter their children, they don’t live in “vibrant” neighborhoods, etc. There’s a general absence of hypermasculinity among the modern left, so doing one thing and saying another is the norm.

And if you wonder how the vaccination project comes to an end, it happens in the same manner. There’s no honest admission that this was a mistake. There’s not enough testosterone circulating in decision making circles for that. The people in academia and government bureaucracies tend to have the digit ratios indicative of low testosterone exposure in the womb. The classical male pattern of high prenatal testosterone exposure doesn’t get you very far in modern Western society outside sportsball, the military and the drug trade.

Consider Monica Gandhi, as the typical example of an academic who just won’t show the back of her tongue. She knows more than she is telling you. A few months ago, she called for extending the delay between the first shot of the COVID vaccine. It goes without saying, this is kind of pointless: You won’t find anyone who is still unvaccinated and dumb enough to sign up for these shots.

It’s indicative however of what she comprehends: If you got these first two shots and the period between them is relatively short, your body ends up stuck with decreased breadth of the immune response, meaning it sucks at dealing with the Omicron variants. How long are you going to be stuck with this poor immune response? Heaven knows. What’s clear is that she is worried. She is worried that a mistake was made.

And now Monica Gandhi is back, with a new recommendation. If you remember that smart successful academics don’t show the back of their tongue, then what she is saying is pretty easy to translate: Stop vaccinating. She doesn’t explicitly say “stop vaccinating”, she has to say it in a manner that doesn’t contradict the narrative. So what she says is: “Wait six months after the most recent booster or infection.”

It doesn’t take a genius to understand what this means: It means you stop vaccinating. It’s a way of no longer vaccinating, without saying that you’re no longer vaccinating. With the exception of some total shut ins perhaps, there’s nobody out there who has had three or four shots of these vaccines, who manages to go six months without getting infected. If you stop vaccinating within six months of infection, you stop vaccinating. It’s as simple as that.

The six months rule would give every Twitter blue check the perfect valid reason not to get another dose of science-juice, without suffering cognitive dissonance. “No, the reason I’m not getting my next shot is not because of those side-effects that knocked me out last time, it’s because I’m following CDC guidelines!“

Right now, about 1.5% of eligible Americans have had their bivalent booster. COVID is not over, about 450 Americans are still dying every day according to official statistics. In reality, if you’re not an idiot and understand that the waves of excess mortality coincide with the COVID death toll, you realize many more are still dying of COVID. So why aren’t people getting the booster? Because they realize it’s a bad vaccine. That realization has dawned on everyone, not just the working class, but the blue check class as well.

At this point, the demographic that still gets the bivalent booster is now the exact same demographic that would sign their depressed insecure gay hentai addicted autistic teenage daughter up for the surgery to get a fake penis made from forearm skin. It’s the wokest of the woke, the true believers, the extremely naive people who really believe the narrative and don’t just cynically pretend to believe in it so they can function in society.

In Denmark they’re less subtly backpedaling: You’re not getting this shot if you’re under fifty and they even admit that vaccinating children was a mistake. If they thought they could get away with it, I think they would stop science-juicing altogether, but that would cause a meltdown among the elderly.

It’s right now dawning on a lot of people simultaneously that they have made a mistake. You can go to Twitter to find Anthony Leonardi pondering whether the sort of nightmare that happened with the Dengue vaccines could happen with the SARS-COV-2 vaccines. What he’s missing is as following: Every time we’ve observed antibody dependent enhancement with a virus, it looked differently. It’s a mechanism that can work through various pathways.

What they should have realized before they began this vaccination campaign is that just because you haven’t seen it yet in your Petri dish doesn’t mean the virus can’t evolve to start displaying that exact behavior. There are the known unknowns: Things that you know exist because you can witness them in your Petri dish, but where you don’t know whether they could ever be relevant in the real world.

There are also however, the unknown unknowns: Mechanisms you’ve never seen before, problems that aren’t even on your radar. There are now cryptic lineages of SARS-COV-2 showing up in sewage, so different from the other ones that they defy classification. Some have large insertion mutations, of similar size to the original mysterious furin cleavage site. How do those interact with your antibodies? When you roll the dice often enough, things that are extremely unusual will eventually start to happen.

There are animal reservoirs we know of and there are animal reservoirs we don’t know of. We know the deer in the United States carry Delta variants to this day, despite their extinction in humans. What sort of variants are the monkeys running wild in India harboring? Nobody knows, because it hasn’t been studied. How often do you need to roll the dice to get a hopeful monster, that no longer depends on the ACE2 receptor altogether?

This is why the argument that convinced so many scientists that these vaccines are safe, namely, that we had seen no antibody dependent enhancement for SARS-COV-2, didn’t convince me back in mid 2021. If it does evolve some useful ADE mechanism, the fact that the mechanism works in almost everyone due to homogenization of the human immune response means it would deliver it a tremendous advantage. By now it’s clear they completely underestimated the ADE risk: Even Delta had changes that used ADE to its advantage.

Fundamentally, the vaccination campaign represented a bet on SARS-COV-2 getting stuck in an evolutionary dead end. You can see a Moderna employee who blocked me on Twitter reveal that thought process here in the screenshot. The whole fitness landscape available to this virus can be thought of as a giant maze. If you trapped it in a particular corner, then it stands no chance to explore the rest of the maze. But that clearly failed, so now all bets are off. They forced vaccine evasive variants to come into existence, those variants had through pleiotropy the ability to jump into other species, how it behaves in those other species is something hardly anyone studies.

There is one thing that characterizes coronaviruses: They’re versatile. In pigs they cause diarrhea, in chickens they cause kidney failure and infertility, in mice they cause liver disease and a brain disease similar to multiple sclerosis. They can evolve in many different directions to affect many different tissues and they can enter your cells through many different mechanisms. In our case, we got a virus that originally caused respiratory disease, but now mainly seems to be causing cardiovascular disease and brain damage by damaging our endothelial cells that line our blood vessels.

Some coronaviruses jump into our species and cause a few nasty flu seasons for the elderly. Others seem to have decimated our primate ancestors over multiple generations. SARS-COV-2 looks like it plans on behaving more like the latter than the prior. It has something no coronavirus has ever had before: Millions of immunocompromised people, who function as human incubators where very rare strains can come into existence, strains that can then be spread around the globe within days.

I honestly believe this is probably the worst mistake in human history: The conviction of the vaccine manufacturers that they could trap SARS-COV-2 in a corner in the maze, by summoning a narrow range of high affinity IgG antibodies against a handful of epitopes of the Wuhan spike protein. You accomplish the exact opposite: You create new routes on the fitness landscape, from one destination to another. That’s what narrow immunity does: It makes variants viable that would otherwise be selected against because they can’t compete with the other variants.

When it comes to viruses like this, the human immune system has at least three jobs:

1. Prevent you from dying or becoming permanently injured.
2. Prevent you from injuring or killing other people by infecting them.
3. Prevent you from giving rise to new variants that could kill or infect others.

Just as sometimes entire villages in Africa are wiped out by an Ebola outbreak, whatever tribe of primates would get infected with a zoonotic virus would have an evolutionary advantage if the infected primates did not breed fitter variants that wouldn’t harm the infected primate but would spread like wildfire through the tribe.

If you’re vaccinating people, you don’t just need to make sure the vaccine protects them: You need to prove that you’re not intervening in a harmful way in whatever mechanisms our body uses to make sure it’s not giving birth to fitter variants.

Why do our bodies deploy IgM against SARS-COV-2 upon infection, long before they deploy IgG? Get that viral load down massively with high avidity antibodies that remain effective after mutation, before you start deploying high affinity antibodies that are rendered useless by mutation. The vaccine causes a massive surge in IgG, without being preceded by a massive surge in IgM. That’s how you turn people into variant factories.

Look at the data and you’ll notice the first major variants tended to emerge within a few weeks after the vaccines trials were held, in the places where these trials were held. You first have a window of negative efficacy for the first few weeks, then you have the surge in IgG antibodies against a handful of Spike epitopes that will then select for strange novel variants in some people.

The more of its awful repertoire it gets to perform, the bigger the chances it ends up stumbling on one terrible song or another that makes the blood drip from our eardrums. And perhaps you’ll wonder why this is a concern for SARS-COV-2, but not for other viruses. The simplest answer would be to point out that there’s a LOT of SARS-COV-2 RNA circulating around the world right now, but not a lot of other viruses. In other words, SARS-COV-2 gets to roll the dice a lot more often than other viruses do.

The other problem is that it’s just intrinsically more virulent than any other respiratory virus you encounter. In 8 months it has now hospitalized as many people in the UK as it did last year, with an autumn wave still ahead of us. That’s in a context where everyone already has some degree of immunity. You can pretend these are just hospitalizations “with” SARS-COV-2, but then you’re left with mysterious ever-growing waiting lists and ambulances that can no longer show up in time to people’s doorstep.

We’re biased by the anthropic principle: We see four coronaviruses in our species and assume that this is how coronaviruses behave after a while. But if one had come along that had behaved like a SARS coronavirus, we would not have developed industrial civilization. And what about the corona viruses that didn’t manage to develop a permanent presence in our population? They only reveal themselves through the fingerprints they left behind on our genome, from an era long before the Neolithic revolution, when viruses like this would go extinct because tribes lived isolated from each other.

And I have to emphasize again, that this is all your own damn fault. Once you started vaccinating, herd immunity became out of the question. The genetic evidence is pretty clear: Our immune systems are fine-tuned by evolution, to be good at dealing with coronavirus outbreaks. The immune response the population now produces is inadequate compared to what we would have been capable of. On the other hand, the virus suffers no such limitations, it has a massive sandbox in which it can discover its most potent forms.

The smart ones among the usual suspects realize they made a mistake. You don’t come out a year later like Monica Gandhi to proclaim that people need to space the first two shots, if you’re not worried that you made a mistake. That’s just a simple example of Monica not showing the back of her tongue. These are the sort of people who mean well, but maneuver themselves within the invisible barriers of acceptable thought set in academic discourse.

Leonardi is an example of someone who succumbs to the same academic habit but is at least aware of it, he recently complained that ADE was a kind of taboo subject and that being accused of believing in it, was the equivalent of being called a crank. And so in recent weeks, he had to come to the conclusion that it’s a lot more plausible than he had originally anticipated.

But the elephant in the room can’t be named. This is how the vaccination campaign dies: Not with a bang, but with a whimper. With countries gradually raising the minimum age, with academics insisting that you really don’t have to get it if you got an infection in the past six months, but with nobody ever saying the quiet part out loud: We meddled with the prime forces of nature. We intervened in something we didn’t understand.