Matthew, your analysis is brilliant and we need appropriately trained scientists to critique garbage studies. Else, we only have the headlines parroted in the media as certain truth. I do see the point Jeffry is making about the possibility of variants coming from the immune compromised or monoclonal antibody treatment. Both may provide non-sterile immunity with selective pressure. However, from a statistical point of view, the number of vaccinated far, far, far outweighs the very small population of Covid positive immunocompromised. It is more likely that variants now and in the future will arise from "leaky" vaccines aimed at a virus that mutates easily. The mechanism for immune escape is accepted and understood in the literature related to worsening of Marek's disease in poultry due to intense vaccination campaigns. The mechanism is also duly considered in Nature: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-95025-3. I would like also to point out that we cannot control natural immune escape, but we sure as hell can prevent manmade immune escape by halting our vaccine debacle. Immune escape, ADE, alarming safety signals, and waning effectiveness all lend to fact that we should quit now with a failed strategy. Dr. Kory and the other FLCCC docs have modeled the end of the pandemic with early treatment and prophylaxis. Most generic drug protocols are at least 50% or more effective at reducing hospitalization, and death- but more importantly, they reduce the spread by treating early and ending the disease before highly symptomatic and infective stages.
"I do see the point Jeffry is making about the possibility of variants coming from the immune compromised or monoclonal antibody treatment."
I agree that it should be studied, but I find him less than honest, and quite dodgy (it was him raising questions in our email exchange while ignoring all of mine, which reached to the fundamental roots) and don't want to deal with him, so I'll take the topic up elsewhere. The interesting thing is that this concern is real for the exact same general reason that mass vaccination is a real concern on that level, though the numeracy between those groups is overwhelming. Besides, the variants didn't pop up until after vaccine trials began, and in the geographies where they began, so one of these concerns vastly outweighs the other.
If a local variant that dodged an antibody class or two sprouted from one monoclonal antibody recipient, it would not have an advantage over other competing strains unless many in that area also received monoclonal antibodies. The odds that it would be like delta---completely taking over a viral pool---would be close to zero.
Note: I wrote 90% of a paper (and did all the stats work) on a paper on the single best early treatment results that will head to preprint soon. I absolutely follow the FLCCC's work and early treatment was the original topic of The Chloroquine Wars (hence the title). It was only three months ago, after the prodding of one of my former students, that I wrong on vaccine risks, and after conversations with a panicked vaccine manufacturer, started digging in to vaccine research. Until that point, I thought they were just a cash cow, not dangerous. They're both.
Agreed, and you are right that Jeffry's concern was... "real for the exact same general reason that mass vaccination is a real concern on that level, though the numeracy between those groups is overwhelming." How he could fail to see that is beyond me.
I have encounter many seriously smart scientists who are totally wrong. My point is that even the smartest and well trained scientists are invested in their own beliefs to the point where their own cognitive dissonance is extreme. You know who they are when they stop debating facts and resort to name calling, diversion, and witty quips. Not to waste anybody's time, but here is my example of a science writer gone bad. This "Science Duude" is smart, but his reasoning is so, so bad.
I'm not working directly with FLCCC, except that I point to their resources in some of my articles. I am in email threads with a few of them, so can contact them if necessary for any work, however. Hopefully everyone's work helps lead to the best possible outcome.
"...resort to name calling, diversion, and witty quips"
Actually, this is the normal state of affairs, most scientists and professionals will exhibit such irrationality when their fundamentals - their guiding paradigm(s) are challenged.
I consider myself perhaps as (a little) more philosopher than scientist, although the philosophy of science and Kuhn's ideas on paradigm shift and scientific revolution are the perfect playing field for me. The main difference this time is that, yes we are in a conflict of paradigms, but one of the paradigms - the one we are trying to overturn and supersede - is now become a totally bogus one that has actually been bent into its present shape by its profiteers. I'm afraid this will be a little long, but Michael Polanyi long ago captured the essence of the conflict we are witnessing. Hopefully this should give us some insight as to the nature of the problem and how to avoid getting trapped into mud-slinging, AND perhaps how to gain some ground:
"Scientists—that is creative scientists—spend their lives in trying to guess right. They are sustained and guided therein by their heuristic passion. We call their work creative because it changes the world as we see it, by deepening our understanding of it. The change is irrevocable. A problem that I have once solved can no longer puzzle me; I cannot guess what I already know. Having made a discovery, I shall never see the world again as before. My eyes have become different; I have made myself into a person seeing and thinking differently. I have crossed a gap, the heuristic gap which lies between problem and discovery.
"To the extent to which discovery changes our interpretive framework, it is logically impossible to arrive at it by the continued application of our previous interpretative framework. In other words, discovery is creative also in the sense that it is not to be achieved by the diligent application of any previously known and specifiable procedure. Its production requires originality. The application of existing rules can produce valuable surveys, but they can as little advance the principles of science as a poem can be written according to rule. We have to cross the logical gap between a problem and its solution by relying on the unspecifiable impulse of our heuristic passion, and must undergo as we do so a change of our intellectual personality. Like all ventures in which we comprehensively dispose of ourselves, such an intentional change of our personality requires a passionate motive to accomplish it. Originality must be passionate.
"But this passionate quest seeks no personal possession. Intellectual passions are not like appetites; they do not reach out to grab, but set out to enrich the world. Yet such a move is also an attack. It raises a claim and makes a tremendous demand on other men; first it asks that its gift—its gift of humanity—be accepted by all. In order to be satisfied, our intellectual passions must find response. This universal intent creates a tension. We suffer when a vision of reality to which we have committed ourselves is contemptuously ignored by others. For a general unbelief threatens to evoke a similar response in us which would imperil our own convictions. Our vision must conquer or die.
"Like the heuristic passion from which it flows, the persuasive passion too finds itself facing a logical gap. To the extent to which a discoverer has committed himself to a new vision of reality, he has separated himself from others who still think on the old lines. His persuasive passion spurs him now to cross this gap by converting everybody to his way of seeing things, even as his heuristic passion has spurred him to cross the heuristic gap which separated him from discovery.
"We can now see the great difficulty that may arise in the attempt to persuade others to accept a new idea in science. To the extent to which it represents a new way of reasoning, we cannot convince others of it by formal argument, for so long as we argue within their framework we can never induce them to abandon it. Demonstration must be supplemented therefore by forms of persuasion which can induce a conversion. The refusal to enter on the opponent's way of arguing must be justified by making it appear altogether unreasonable.
"Such comprehensive rejection cannot fail to discredit the opponent. He will be made to appear as thoroughly deluded, which in the heat of the battle will easily come to imply that he was a fool, a crank, or a fraud. And once we are out to establish such charges we shall readily go on to expose our opponent as a metaphysician, a Jesuit, a Jew, or a Bolshevik, as the case may be or—speaking from the other side of the Iron Curtain—as an 'objectivist,' and 'idealist,' and a 'cosmopolitan.' In a clash of intellectual passions each side must inevitably attack the opponent's person."
~~~~~~~~~~~~
The way I see it, is that slowly over the past decades the reigning paradigm of medicine has been corrupted by BigPharma, BigHealthCare, BigMedicalSchool et al., into something that has become very destructive of general health and welfare. A reading of Marcia Angell's muckraking examination of BigPharma, "The Truth About the Drug Companies" (New York Review of Books July 2004, a lengthy excerpt of key points in my substack post https://peterwebster.substack.com/p/pandemic-the-next-big-thing ) can be taken as a template of the wider, seen-everywhere corruption of ethics by profit-and-control principles so characteristic of the neoliberal market economy.
By contrast, our "new paradigm" is actually not new at all, but an attempt to restore the sanity and common sense that was once a main feature of Medicine long before the Gekko-Greed-Is-Good age.
Thanks for writing! A philosopher has a great advantage over the scientist when searching for truth... even in the empirical realm. As Polayni points out, the scientist is blinded by their "new vision of reality" (and the paycheck that comes with it). Philosophers engage in the art of extreme dialogue where every statement of ones "truths" are fair game. Call it banter or dialectic... philosophers are much more comfortable in discourse and are accustomed to studying conflicting points of view. Not to say they are not also blinded by their own pet theories, but as group they are better with the exchange of ideas and learn the academic ground rules for such.
My mother was a religious studies major when I was a teenager, so I remember her giving me excerpts of Hans Kung to read. I can't remember the exact phrasing, but in Eternal Life he acknowledges the atheist/materialist arguments for pages on end, then in one well crafted paragraph convinced me, and I'm assuming others too, that it was rational, intelligent, and compassionate to believe in God and the soul's evolution to the hereafter.
Authors like Kung, Lewis, and Merton impressed me, because although they were Catholics, they saw the truth in ones path of learning vs. adherence to dogma. They were perfectly OK in audiences that disagreed with them.
I think you found the problem with science today, in that its institutions are driven by profit motive, being so enmeshed with Tech and Pharma. I don't think Capitalism will ever make philosophers rich, so hopefully their art will stay pure in the pursuit of truth.
Ahhh... since I have apparently struck a chord that harmonizes well with the thinking of some others here, I should like to recommend the most important philosophy book ever written, in fact it is so important that I would dare to leave out the "philosophy" qualifier. I am now into my (actually I lost count) tenth reading and it just continues to gain in stature each time. As philosophy, it is seemingly quite easy to understand, especially compared to some of "the harder stuff".
Disarmingly so, for reading a page, one has the impression one has got the message, but then as the ideas cook a little, especially overnight, you find yourself going back to those few paragraphs and saying, "whoa!, I gotta think about this more carefully!"
Here's a review of the book by another of my fav philosophers, but don't think for a second that the book itself can be avoided, having read the review!
Mind & Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False
– September 26, 2012
by Thomas Nagel
Well OK, it takes time to read books, especially ones that can change the way you have so far understood the most basic of things. So, just a recommendation you can put on the back burner for now. But if you start to get bored during the next big lockdown...
True. :) "Leaky" is a euphemism used by virologists to describe an "imperfect vaccine." The SARS-COV-2 vaccines are more a disaster or debacle... leaky or imperfect paints a too serene picture. Biblical Flood is defiantly more appropriate!
Matthew, Your analysis is detailed and thorough and even a nonscientist like me can follow it, Thank you.
Here is a simple video that was shared with me that clearly explains the "vaccine" concerns for many of us unwilling to submit. Share with anyone you love.
I try to pick my moments writing about those topics, but I cover some of them in my Monetary Wars series---or at least a build-up that allows for greater understanding of the roots of the conversation.
I have been disabled from responding on twitter. Will you please respond to @MartinKuldorff where posted as I think you could support as well as respond to some of the naysayers.
1. Part of the reason I'm writing The Chloroquine Wars series (I state this in the pinned article) is so that other people can paste the links to my arguments. It is better for me to spend my time organizing the evidence and writing than to jump into every twitter conversation (though I jump into a few). Maybe you can start another Twitter account using a protonmail email, and then drop links to these (and other) articles on those who are either shills or honestly misunderstand (and need better information).
I am running a group that compiles hundreds of pages of links to educational topics to leverage all of our time spent in the process. Reach out to me privately if you'd like to participate.
Otoh, it doesn’t reflect when novelty is introduced. The loss of safety also occurs with a country’s magical thinking that vaccination allows opening the economy, which opens it to more international travel.
I'm not a maths person but I do know what selective pressure is. My BA in Anthropology taught me that much. So it seems to me that these leaky vaccines could easily create the same kind of problem that antibiotic overuse does. Only it's viruses becoming adapted to leaky vaccines, rather than bacteria becoming adapted to misused antibiotics. But if so, then why are most of the scientists denying the possibility of such a well-understood problem (that we have been warned about for decades with antibiotics) existing also in this situation with the highly mutagenic coronaviruses? Everything seems to be upside-down these days and it's very disorienting.
My comment was not meant to imply that population level natural selection was driven by long Covid in immunocompromised treated long term with monoclonal antibodies or convalescent plasma. It was that this setting will drive accelerated mutation and natural selection within a person at a level you don't see in the typical infected person. There are many documented reports of this, some published -- here is one (this one is based on convalescent plasma) and you can find a number of others if you search: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03291-y
These studies that take longitudinal samples from the same patient have demonstrated the rapid mutation and selection on a micro level -- a perfect incubator for variants to develop. The major driver is immunocompromised -- their own immune system cannot generate any response so the externally introduced Abs from monoclonal or convalescent treatments drive the selection. I have not seen a single longitudinal study in a vaccinated person documenting this phenomenon in that setting -- given its purported importance, it would be a great idea of those who strongly believe this dynamic to do such a study to convince the skeptical scientific world that they are right, and it is not mere speculation.
I agree with the principle that on a macro level the vaccines will drive selective pressure towards variants with immune escape to the spike underlying the formulation -- that is a known basic principle I do not dispute.
But if we look at all the documented variants to date, the ones with the greatest immune escape properties (beta, gamma, mu and others, with 8-12x reduction of neutralizing antibody response to vaccine) have not dominated -- in the macro global competition they have lost out to other variants with very mild immune escape properties (~2-3x reduction in nAbs) but with MUCH higher transmission capabilities that have dominated.
The initial Wuhan strain was quickly supplanted by D614G that emerged in Italy and came to USA through NYC and drove the initial USA surge.
The next truly dominant variant was Alpha that emerged in UK and quickly supplanted all other variants, and in many other places when Alpha arrived it dominated, including in Israel (from whom we have extensive data) and USA where we are. Alpha's key property is mutations that increase transmissibility by 50% over the previous dominant variants.
But then Delta that originated in India supplanted Alpha. Alarmingly fast -- you can see in Italy and UK it took less than 6 weeks to go from near 100% alpha to near 100% delta based on extensive sequencing, and in USA and other places as well. Delta's dominant characteristic is increasing transmissibility by 50% more than Alpha, 2.25x more than D614G and possibly 2.5x more than the original Wuhan strain. It is also documented to come at higher viral loads than previous variants and replicate faster once in our bodies. All of this makes it a much more formidable foe. The 2-3x reduction in Nabs doesn't help, but is not the predominant reason why it is spreading so.
BTW If you look immunologically how vaccines work and how the virus spreads, it is not surprising to see Delta presenting more of a challenge than previous variants. But that is another argument for another day.
So, it is plausible that vaccines might eventually drive natural selection towards an immune escape variant that more completely evades the immune protection offered by vaccines, but it isn't close to happening yet. Even the worst immune escape variant to date, beta, that reduces Nabs from Pfizer vaccine by 8-12x or more, still demonstrated 75% effectiveness for Pfizer vaccinated, a level that is predicted by this paper that demonstrates how reduction on Nabs relates to vaccine efficacy for vaccines and variants: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-021-01377-8
So far, the natural selection has clearly been driven by transmissibility properties, not immune escape to antibodies.
I posted a short comment here two or three days ago, which is no longer visible. It wasn't off topic or disrespectful, in my opinion, so I'm wondering why it was deleted.
Haven't looked closely, I have to admit that statistics wasn't my best subject at university. I am a lowly chemist who has to "hum" any equation that comes along.
Before our email conversation devolved, that is the point I was trying to make -- that I think you have a strong burden of proof if you want to make the GVB argument that the variants ORIGINATED in the vaccinated hosts.
Conflating #1 and #2 muddles the discussion.
Another point I have not seen you consider (I admit I haven't read all your posts so let me know if discussed elsewhere) is the potential for variants to emerge in unusual circumstances such as immunocompromised individuals with long Covid treated with monoclonal antibodies, e.g. This has been documented to produce an accumulation of selected mutations within that person, which some have hypothesized as potential origin of major variants (especially ones for which there is a huge jump in the phylogenetic tree in which the variant differs substantially from previously documented variant).
How are you so confident that the temporal/geographic connection of variant origins with vaccine trials implies causation? How can you be sure there was not origin in some other way, e.g. as in the example above, and that it was from those in the vaccine trials?
Sorry the first part of my post got cut off when I pasted in -- read this first:
It would be useful to distinguish between:
1. Selective pressure among existing variants provided by certain conditions such as widespread vaccination.
2. Origin of the variants.
I never questioned #1 that follows basic evolutionary principles, but questioned your confident assertions about #2 that the variants ORIGINATED in vaccinated individuals (one of the key arguments made by GVB), and in particular the small subset of individuals in Brazil/South Africa/UK/India that participated in vaccine trials.
There is a big difference between stating a hypothesis and providing some rationale for how this COULD have happened, and rigorously demonstrating it DID happen that way (or even that it is very likely to have emerged that way), and ruling out other possibilities. This requires a big leap, and a specific series of assertations/assumptions that need to be laid out, and appropriate accounting for uncertainty.
Before our email conversation devolved, that is the point I was trying to make -- that I think you have a strong burden of proof if you want to make the GVB argument that the variants ORIGINATED in the vaccinated hosts.
Conflating #1 and #2 muddles the discussion.
Another point I have not seen you consider (I admit I haven't read all your posts so let me know if discussed elsewhere) is the potential for variants to emerge in unusual circumstances such as immunocompromised individuals with long Covid treated with monoclonal antibodies, e.g., there are documented cases of this producing an accumulation of selected mutations within that person. Some have hypothesized this as the potential most likely origin of major variants (especially ones for which there is a huge jump in the phylogenetic tree in which the variant differs substantially from previously documented variant). I mentioned this to you in our email discussion without response.
How are you so confident that the temporal/geographic connection of variant origins with vaccine trials implies causation? How can you be sure there was not origin in some other way, e.g. as in the example above, and that it was from those in the vaccine trials?
Jeffrey, I could certainly spend time answering your questions, but you never answered mine from our first email, and disrespected the two hours I spent reframing that whole conversation to make it productive. But even your questions here demonstrate that you never read all of what I wrote.
"I think you have a strong burden of proof if you want to make the..."
You consistently flip the precautionary principle. You have many burdens on a more fundamental level, so I take this as going to extraordinary and absurd lengths to keep up appearances as an intellectual. But if you want to go down this road publicly, begin with the questions you never answered, and describe where those burdens lie. Present the whole story, not the one designed after the mistake as a dressing on the conversation.
And please let me know which statements you think I have made for which you think I have a burden of proof and I’ll be glad to provide support for them
"I’m not talking about safety and precautionary principle."
Yes, I know! That was the conversation we began having, and that you dodged by changing the subject in our email exchange.
"Most certainly the burden of proof is on the person making the confident assertion not the person questioning it."
Um...you just described the entire problem of the vaccine campaign in a nutshell. Safe and effective.
Of course, after I kept getting your spam in my inbox while you dodged the primary questions with a string of your own that routed around the topic in which we were presumably engaging (safety), I asked you to stop emailing me. You continued, and now follow me here long after I gave up on a good faith conversation with you. This feels a bit like harassment at this point.
But for what it's worth...the idea of immuno-compromised people...people whose immune systems exhibit less selection pressure...being the source of selection pressure...which would almost certainly be necessary for a variant to not simply appear as a singular virion, but win out...is absurd.
In our discussion you are the one who brought up the idea of variants starting from vaccinated, not me. I was responding. And this post is about the variants not safety — let’s stick to one topic at a time.
I am sure you will write another post on safety soon and I can respond to that if I have time.
And the idea is not immunocompromised providing selective pressure. The immunocompromised with long covid have an over abundance of mutations. It is their monoclonal antibody treatment that provides aggressive and narrow selective pressure because it is not their immune system producing a response to the present virus but the artificially injected fixed monoclonal antibodies that will produce selection, right?
Matthew, your analysis is brilliant and we need appropriately trained scientists to critique garbage studies. Else, we only have the headlines parroted in the media as certain truth. I do see the point Jeffry is making about the possibility of variants coming from the immune compromised or monoclonal antibody treatment. Both may provide non-sterile immunity with selective pressure. However, from a statistical point of view, the number of vaccinated far, far, far outweighs the very small population of Covid positive immunocompromised. It is more likely that variants now and in the future will arise from "leaky" vaccines aimed at a virus that mutates easily. The mechanism for immune escape is accepted and understood in the literature related to worsening of Marek's disease in poultry due to intense vaccination campaigns. The mechanism is also duly considered in Nature: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-95025-3. I would like also to point out that we cannot control natural immune escape, but we sure as hell can prevent manmade immune escape by halting our vaccine debacle. Immune escape, ADE, alarming safety signals, and waning effectiveness all lend to fact that we should quit now with a failed strategy. Dr. Kory and the other FLCCC docs have modeled the end of the pandemic with early treatment and prophylaxis. Most generic drug protocols are at least 50% or more effective at reducing hospitalization, and death- but more importantly, they reduce the spread by treating early and ending the disease before highly symptomatic and infective stages.
"I do see the point Jeffry is making about the possibility of variants coming from the immune compromised or monoclonal antibody treatment."
I agree that it should be studied, but I find him less than honest, and quite dodgy (it was him raising questions in our email exchange while ignoring all of mine, which reached to the fundamental roots) and don't want to deal with him, so I'll take the topic up elsewhere. The interesting thing is that this concern is real for the exact same general reason that mass vaccination is a real concern on that level, though the numeracy between those groups is overwhelming. Besides, the variants didn't pop up until after vaccine trials began, and in the geographies where they began, so one of these concerns vastly outweighs the other.
If a local variant that dodged an antibody class or two sprouted from one monoclonal antibody recipient, it would not have an advantage over other competing strains unless many in that area also received monoclonal antibodies. The odds that it would be like delta---completely taking over a viral pool---would be close to zero.
Note: I wrote 90% of a paper (and did all the stats work) on a paper on the single best early treatment results that will head to preprint soon. I absolutely follow the FLCCC's work and early treatment was the original topic of The Chloroquine Wars (hence the title). It was only three months ago, after the prodding of one of my former students, that I wrong on vaccine risks, and after conversations with a panicked vaccine manufacturer, started digging in to vaccine research. Until that point, I thought they were just a cash cow, not dangerous. They're both.
Agreed, and you are right that Jeffry's concern was... "real for the exact same general reason that mass vaccination is a real concern on that level, though the numeracy between those groups is overwhelming." How he could fail to see that is beyond me.
I have encounter many seriously smart scientists who are totally wrong. My point is that even the smartest and well trained scientists are invested in their own beliefs to the point where their own cognitive dissonance is extreme. You know who they are when they stop debating facts and resort to name calling, diversion, and witty quips. Not to waste anybody's time, but here is my example of a science writer gone bad. This "Science Duude" is smart, but his reasoning is so, so bad.
https://medika.life/debunking-nicholas-wades-origin-of-covid-conspiracy-theory/
Also, thank you for the work you are doing for FLCCC. Seriously you are saving lives and are the only antidote to our sociopathic health agencies.
I'm not working directly with FLCCC, except that I point to their resources in some of my articles. I am in email threads with a few of them, so can contact them if necessary for any work, however. Hopefully everyone's work helps lead to the best possible outcome.
"...resort to name calling, diversion, and witty quips"
Actually, this is the normal state of affairs, most scientists and professionals will exhibit such irrationality when their fundamentals - their guiding paradigm(s) are challenged.
I consider myself perhaps as (a little) more philosopher than scientist, although the philosophy of science and Kuhn's ideas on paradigm shift and scientific revolution are the perfect playing field for me. The main difference this time is that, yes we are in a conflict of paradigms, but one of the paradigms - the one we are trying to overturn and supersede - is now become a totally bogus one that has actually been bent into its present shape by its profiteers. I'm afraid this will be a little long, but Michael Polanyi long ago captured the essence of the conflict we are witnessing. Hopefully this should give us some insight as to the nature of the problem and how to avoid getting trapped into mud-slinging, AND perhaps how to gain some ground:
"Scientists—that is creative scientists—spend their lives in trying to guess right. They are sustained and guided therein by their heuristic passion. We call their work creative because it changes the world as we see it, by deepening our understanding of it. The change is irrevocable. A problem that I have once solved can no longer puzzle me; I cannot guess what I already know. Having made a discovery, I shall never see the world again as before. My eyes have become different; I have made myself into a person seeing and thinking differently. I have crossed a gap, the heuristic gap which lies between problem and discovery.
"To the extent to which discovery changes our interpretive framework, it is logically impossible to arrive at it by the continued application of our previous interpretative framework. In other words, discovery is creative also in the sense that it is not to be achieved by the diligent application of any previously known and specifiable procedure. Its production requires originality. The application of existing rules can produce valuable surveys, but they can as little advance the principles of science as a poem can be written according to rule. We have to cross the logical gap between a problem and its solution by relying on the unspecifiable impulse of our heuristic passion, and must undergo as we do so a change of our intellectual personality. Like all ventures in which we comprehensively dispose of ourselves, such an intentional change of our personality requires a passionate motive to accomplish it. Originality must be passionate.
"But this passionate quest seeks no personal possession. Intellectual passions are not like appetites; they do not reach out to grab, but set out to enrich the world. Yet such a move is also an attack. It raises a claim and makes a tremendous demand on other men; first it asks that its gift—its gift of humanity—be accepted by all. In order to be satisfied, our intellectual passions must find response. This universal intent creates a tension. We suffer when a vision of reality to which we have committed ourselves is contemptuously ignored by others. For a general unbelief threatens to evoke a similar response in us which would imperil our own convictions. Our vision must conquer or die.
"Like the heuristic passion from which it flows, the persuasive passion too finds itself facing a logical gap. To the extent to which a discoverer has committed himself to a new vision of reality, he has separated himself from others who still think on the old lines. His persuasive passion spurs him now to cross this gap by converting everybody to his way of seeing things, even as his heuristic passion has spurred him to cross the heuristic gap which separated him from discovery.
"We can now see the great difficulty that may arise in the attempt to persuade others to accept a new idea in science. To the extent to which it represents a new way of reasoning, we cannot convince others of it by formal argument, for so long as we argue within their framework we can never induce them to abandon it. Demonstration must be supplemented therefore by forms of persuasion which can induce a conversion. The refusal to enter on the opponent's way of arguing must be justified by making it appear altogether unreasonable.
"Such comprehensive rejection cannot fail to discredit the opponent. He will be made to appear as thoroughly deluded, which in the heat of the battle will easily come to imply that he was a fool, a crank, or a fraud. And once we are out to establish such charges we shall readily go on to expose our opponent as a metaphysician, a Jesuit, a Jew, or a Bolshevik, as the case may be or—speaking from the other side of the Iron Curtain—as an 'objectivist,' and 'idealist,' and a 'cosmopolitan.' In a clash of intellectual passions each side must inevitably attack the opponent's person."
~~~~~~~~~~~~
The way I see it, is that slowly over the past decades the reigning paradigm of medicine has been corrupted by BigPharma, BigHealthCare, BigMedicalSchool et al., into something that has become very destructive of general health and welfare. A reading of Marcia Angell's muckraking examination of BigPharma, "The Truth About the Drug Companies" (New York Review of Books July 2004, a lengthy excerpt of key points in my substack post https://peterwebster.substack.com/p/pandemic-the-next-big-thing ) can be taken as a template of the wider, seen-everywhere corruption of ethics by profit-and-control principles so characteristic of the neoliberal market economy.
By contrast, our "new paradigm" is actually not new at all, but an attempt to restore the sanity and common sense that was once a main feature of Medicine long before the Gekko-Greed-Is-Good age.
Thanks for reading!
Thanks for writing! A philosopher has a great advantage over the scientist when searching for truth... even in the empirical realm. As Polayni points out, the scientist is blinded by their "new vision of reality" (and the paycheck that comes with it). Philosophers engage in the art of extreme dialogue where every statement of ones "truths" are fair game. Call it banter or dialectic... philosophers are much more comfortable in discourse and are accustomed to studying conflicting points of view. Not to say they are not also blinded by their own pet theories, but as group they are better with the exchange of ideas and learn the academic ground rules for such.
My mother was a religious studies major when I was a teenager, so I remember her giving me excerpts of Hans Kung to read. I can't remember the exact phrasing, but in Eternal Life he acknowledges the atheist/materialist arguments for pages on end, then in one well crafted paragraph convinced me, and I'm assuming others too, that it was rational, intelligent, and compassionate to believe in God and the soul's evolution to the hereafter.
Authors like Kung, Lewis, and Merton impressed me, because although they were Catholics, they saw the truth in ones path of learning vs. adherence to dogma. They were perfectly OK in audiences that disagreed with them.
I think you found the problem with science today, in that its institutions are driven by profit motive, being so enmeshed with Tech and Pharma. I don't think Capitalism will ever make philosophers rich, so hopefully their art will stay pure in the pursuit of truth.
Ahhh... since I have apparently struck a chord that harmonizes well with the thinking of some others here, I should like to recommend the most important philosophy book ever written, in fact it is so important that I would dare to leave out the "philosophy" qualifier. I am now into my (actually I lost count) tenth reading and it just continues to gain in stature each time. As philosophy, it is seemingly quite easy to understand, especially compared to some of "the harder stuff".
Disarmingly so, for reading a page, one has the impression one has got the message, but then as the ideas cook a little, especially overnight, you find yourself going back to those few paragraphs and saying, "whoa!, I gotta think about this more carefully!"
Here's a review of the book by another of my fav philosophers, but don't think for a second that the book itself can be avoided, having read the review!
Bringing Mind to Matter
Raymond Tallis
https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/bringing-mind-to-matter
The BOOK:
Mind & Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False
– September 26, 2012
by Thomas Nagel
Well OK, it takes time to read books, especially ones that can change the way you have so far understood the most basic of things. So, just a recommendation you can put on the back burner for now. But if you start to get bored during the next big lockdown...
Will read it!
True. :) "Leaky" is a euphemism used by virologists to describe an "imperfect vaccine." The SARS-COV-2 vaccines are more a disaster or debacle... leaky or imperfect paints a too serene picture. Biblical Flood is defiantly more appropriate!
Matthew, Your analysis is detailed and thorough and even a nonscientist like me can follow it, Thank you.
Here is a simple video that was shared with me that clearly explains the "vaccine" concerns for many of us unwilling to submit. Share with anyone you love.
https://videopress.com/v/p8R7ebPy
Pick a side, and live with it.
https://cjhopkins.substack.com/p/the-road-to-totalitarianism?r=nbl2d&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&utm_source=copy
I try to pick my moments writing about those topics, but I cover some of them in my Monetary Wars series---or at least a build-up that allows for greater understanding of the roots of the conversation.
That was a good read. Thank you for the pointer.
Is Monetary Wars another stack?
Everything I write is where. You'll find them on the pinned article.
Thanks muc. I found it all after I scrolled down to your older posts. I am new to substack, Great content.
Thank you for linking this. He is brilliant and I’m afraid completely correct. I subscribed immediately.
He has been scary prescient.
Thanks for what you do. The collusive media. Maddening.
https://www.bitchute.com/video/TsdTTHJteilw/
We need autopsies.
They say the only thing harder than brainwashing people is to convince them they have been brainwashed. This study shows our tough road ahead.
https://fee.org/articles/americans-are-wildly-misinformed-about-the-risk-of-hospitalization-from-covid-19-survey-shows-here-s-why/
I am giving up blogging and will simply repost your incredible work... Credited, of course!
I have been disabled from responding on twitter. Will you please respond to @MartinKuldorff where posted as I think you could support as well as respond to some of the naysayers.
“Scientists speaking up against the official pandemic narrative are not doing it for personal or financial gains. Such accusations are nuts; as that would be nuts. We do it for public health.“ https://twitter.com/martinkulldorff/status/1426665937630076934?s=21
1. Part of the reason I'm writing The Chloroquine Wars series (I state this in the pinned article) is so that other people can paste the links to my arguments. It is better for me to spend my time organizing the evidence and writing than to jump into every twitter conversation (though I jump into a few). Maybe you can start another Twitter account using a protonmail email, and then drop links to these (and other) articles on those who are either shills or honestly misunderstand (and need better information).
I am running a group that compiles hundreds of pages of links to educational topics to leverage all of our time spent in the process. Reach out to me privately if you'd like to participate.
Also, join this:
https://t.me/joinchat/_9Ura70PvgI2NWRh
As always,THANK YOU for your wealth of information and Humor! I can pull off one liners once in a while, but nothing like you. ;-)
Thank you for your analysis. Very important.
It would be interesting to correlate vaccination rates with safety of visiting the country.
Highest vaccination rates in Malta, UAE, Iceland, Seychelles, Uruguay, Chile, Bahrain and they are level 4.
Only Singapore is still level 2
https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/vaccines/international
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/travelers/map-and-travel-notices.html
Can you tell me what you're wondering in other words. I am not sure I understand.
The safety of visiting appears to be inversely correlated with vaccination rate.
Otoh, it doesn’t reflect when novelty is introduced. The loss of safety also occurs with a country’s magical thinking that vaccination allows opening the economy, which opens it to more international travel.
I'm not a maths person but I do know what selective pressure is. My BA in Anthropology taught me that much. So it seems to me that these leaky vaccines could easily create the same kind of problem that antibiotic overuse does. Only it's viruses becoming adapted to leaky vaccines, rather than bacteria becoming adapted to misused antibiotics. But if so, then why are most of the scientists denying the possibility of such a well-understood problem (that we have been warned about for decades with antibiotics) existing also in this situation with the highly mutagenic coronaviruses? Everything seems to be upside-down these days and it's very disorienting.
My comment was not meant to imply that population level natural selection was driven by long Covid in immunocompromised treated long term with monoclonal antibodies or convalescent plasma. It was that this setting will drive accelerated mutation and natural selection within a person at a level you don't see in the typical infected person. There are many documented reports of this, some published -- here is one (this one is based on convalescent plasma) and you can find a number of others if you search: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03291-y
These studies that take longitudinal samples from the same patient have demonstrated the rapid mutation and selection on a micro level -- a perfect incubator for variants to develop. The major driver is immunocompromised -- their own immune system cannot generate any response so the externally introduced Abs from monoclonal or convalescent treatments drive the selection. I have not seen a single longitudinal study in a vaccinated person documenting this phenomenon in that setting -- given its purported importance, it would be a great idea of those who strongly believe this dynamic to do such a study to convince the skeptical scientific world that they are right, and it is not mere speculation.
I agree with the principle that on a macro level the vaccines will drive selective pressure towards variants with immune escape to the spike underlying the formulation -- that is a known basic principle I do not dispute.
But if we look at all the documented variants to date, the ones with the greatest immune escape properties (beta, gamma, mu and others, with 8-12x reduction of neutralizing antibody response to vaccine) have not dominated -- in the macro global competition they have lost out to other variants with very mild immune escape properties (~2-3x reduction in nAbs) but with MUCH higher transmission capabilities that have dominated.
The initial Wuhan strain was quickly supplanted by D614G that emerged in Italy and came to USA through NYC and drove the initial USA surge.
The next truly dominant variant was Alpha that emerged in UK and quickly supplanted all other variants, and in many other places when Alpha arrived it dominated, including in Israel (from whom we have extensive data) and USA where we are. Alpha's key property is mutations that increase transmissibility by 50% over the previous dominant variants.
But then Delta that originated in India supplanted Alpha. Alarmingly fast -- you can see in Italy and UK it took less than 6 weeks to go from near 100% alpha to near 100% delta based on extensive sequencing, and in USA and other places as well. Delta's dominant characteristic is increasing transmissibility by 50% more than Alpha, 2.25x more than D614G and possibly 2.5x more than the original Wuhan strain. It is also documented to come at higher viral loads than previous variants and replicate faster once in our bodies. All of this makes it a much more formidable foe. The 2-3x reduction in Nabs doesn't help, but is not the predominant reason why it is spreading so.
BTW If you look immunologically how vaccines work and how the virus spreads, it is not surprising to see Delta presenting more of a challenge than previous variants. But that is another argument for another day.
So, it is plausible that vaccines might eventually drive natural selection towards an immune escape variant that more completely evades the immune protection offered by vaccines, but it isn't close to happening yet. Even the worst immune escape variant to date, beta, that reduces Nabs from Pfizer vaccine by 8-12x or more, still demonstrated 75% effectiveness for Pfizer vaccinated, a level that is predicted by this paper that demonstrates how reduction on Nabs relates to vaccine efficacy for vaccines and variants: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-021-01377-8
So far, the natural selection has clearly been driven by transmissibility properties, not immune escape to antibodies.
I posted a short comment here two or three days ago, which is no longer visible. It wasn't off topic or disrespectful, in my opinion, so I'm wondering why it was deleted.
Salut Matt,
These may be of interest,
https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/health/causes-death/provisional-mortality-statistics/latest-release
https://cairnsnews.org/2021/08/16/government-stats-discredit-national-premiers-covid-panic-misinformation/
Haven't looked closely, I have to admit that statistics wasn't my best subject at university. I am a lowly chemist who has to "hum" any equation that comes along.
Before our email conversation devolved, that is the point I was trying to make -- that I think you have a strong burden of proof if you want to make the GVB argument that the variants ORIGINATED in the vaccinated hosts.
Conflating #1 and #2 muddles the discussion.
Another point I have not seen you consider (I admit I haven't read all your posts so let me know if discussed elsewhere) is the potential for variants to emerge in unusual circumstances such as immunocompromised individuals with long Covid treated with monoclonal antibodies, e.g. This has been documented to produce an accumulation of selected mutations within that person, which some have hypothesized as potential origin of major variants (especially ones for which there is a huge jump in the phylogenetic tree in which the variant differs substantially from previously documented variant).
How are you so confident that the temporal/geographic connection of variant origins with vaccine trials implies causation? How can you be sure there was not origin in some other way, e.g. as in the example above, and that it was from those in the vaccine trials?
Sorry the first part of my post got cut off when I pasted in -- read this first:
It would be useful to distinguish between:
1. Selective pressure among existing variants provided by certain conditions such as widespread vaccination.
2. Origin of the variants.
I never questioned #1 that follows basic evolutionary principles, but questioned your confident assertions about #2 that the variants ORIGINATED in vaccinated individuals (one of the key arguments made by GVB), and in particular the small subset of individuals in Brazil/South Africa/UK/India that participated in vaccine trials.
There is a big difference between stating a hypothesis and providing some rationale for how this COULD have happened, and rigorously demonstrating it DID happen that way (or even that it is very likely to have emerged that way), and ruling out other possibilities. This requires a big leap, and a specific series of assertations/assumptions that need to be laid out, and appropriate accounting for uncertainty.
Before our email conversation devolved, that is the point I was trying to make -- that I think you have a strong burden of proof if you want to make the GVB argument that the variants ORIGINATED in the vaccinated hosts.
Conflating #1 and #2 muddles the discussion.
Another point I have not seen you consider (I admit I haven't read all your posts so let me know if discussed elsewhere) is the potential for variants to emerge in unusual circumstances such as immunocompromised individuals with long Covid treated with monoclonal antibodies, e.g., there are documented cases of this producing an accumulation of selected mutations within that person. Some have hypothesized this as the potential most likely origin of major variants (especially ones for which there is a huge jump in the phylogenetic tree in which the variant differs substantially from previously documented variant). I mentioned this to you in our email discussion without response.
How are you so confident that the temporal/geographic connection of variant origins with vaccine trials implies causation? How can you be sure there was not origin in some other way, e.g. as in the example above, and that it was from those in the vaccine trials?
Jeffrey, I could certainly spend time answering your questions, but you never answered mine from our first email, and disrespected the two hours I spent reframing that whole conversation to make it productive. But even your questions here demonstrate that you never read all of what I wrote.
"I think you have a strong burden of proof if you want to make the..."
You consistently flip the precautionary principle. You have many burdens on a more fundamental level, so I take this as going to extraordinary and absurd lengths to keep up appearances as an intellectual. But if you want to go down this road publicly, begin with the questions you never answered, and describe where those burdens lie. Present the whole story, not the one designed after the mistake as a dressing on the conversation.
And please let me know which statements you think I have made for which you think I have a burden of proof and I’ll be glad to provide support for them
I’m not talking about safety and precautionary principle.
I’m talking about your assertion that the variants originated from vaccinated individuals.
Most certainly the burden of proof is on the person making the confident assertion not the person questioning it.
"I’m not talking about safety and precautionary principle."
Yes, I know! That was the conversation we began having, and that you dodged by changing the subject in our email exchange.
"Most certainly the burden of proof is on the person making the confident assertion not the person questioning it."
Um...you just described the entire problem of the vaccine campaign in a nutshell. Safe and effective.
Of course, after I kept getting your spam in my inbox while you dodged the primary questions with a string of your own that routed around the topic in which we were presumably engaging (safety), I asked you to stop emailing me. You continued, and now follow me here long after I gave up on a good faith conversation with you. This feels a bit like harassment at this point.
But for what it's worth...the idea of immuno-compromised people...people whose immune systems exhibit less selection pressure...being the source of selection pressure...which would almost certainly be necessary for a variant to not simply appear as a singular virion, but win out...is absurd.
In our discussion you are the one who brought up the idea of variants starting from vaccinated, not me. I was responding. And this post is about the variants not safety — let’s stick to one topic at a time.
I am sure you will write another post on safety soon and I can respond to that if I have time.
And the idea is not immunocompromised providing selective pressure. The immunocompromised with long covid have an over abundance of mutations. It is their monoclonal antibody treatment that provides aggressive and narrow selective pressure because it is not their immune system producing a response to the present virus but the artificially injected fixed monoclonal antibodies that will produce selection, right?