This is a very odd comment because the trials themselves pegged the rate of serious reactions at between 10% and 20%. This feels about right given the comments I've heard from people I personally know who have taken it.
The last one was especially entertaining or aggravating depending on your perspective. I ended up arguing with an actual…
This is a very odd comment because the trials themselves pegged the rate of serious reactions at between 10% and 20%. This feels about right given the comments I've heard from people I personally know who have taken it.
The last one was especially entertaining or aggravating depending on your perspective. I ended up arguing with an actual immunologist I am remotely acquainted with, and he finished by giving a little speech about how the word pandemic means "all" and that we're in a society and all in it together etc. He told me to take the vaccine because it's "perfectly safe". Then he mentioned it made him so sick he'd been unable to move for a day. Ah yes: "makes me so sick I can't work" is indeed the dictionary definition of "perfectly safe".
Please. It's extremely clear at this point that severe reactions including deaths are not being reported. Look at the case of Simone Scott. The parents had to go to Alex Berenson, presumably none of the other outlets would touch the story at all:
They very clearly state that they had to push hard to get this event reported to the tracking systems at all. How many other cases like that are happening where people aren't strong-willed enough to go around their doctors?
"This is a very odd comment because the trials themselves pegged the rate of serious reactions at between 10% and 20%."
Nonsense: The incidence of serious adverse events was similar in the vaccine and placebo groups (0.6% and 0.5%, respectively).
The report on Pfizer's phase 3 trial is publicly available on the NEJM's web site. You can go read it for yourself. There's no need to simply make up bulls**t that only takes a few seconds to prove wrong. You look like an idiot.
That is a very interesting case, and I am so sorry for Simone and her parents. Moderna vax has mRNA w/ spike and an alpha virus RNA polymerase coded. The RNAp copies the mRNA, that is detected by RIG-1 & MDA5 intracell, TLR3 & TLR10 if it gets out. Those receptors cause interferon secretion, which is what kicks up feeling "sick". This is done to signal B-cell response to generate antibodies.
To be the cause myocarditis, one of several things must happen. A. So much mRNA secreted into blood that a pseudo viremia occurs. This would be accompanied by fever and malaise which Simone did not have.
B. Somehow dsRNA/mRNA was packaged into vesicles by the muscle at the shot site. This should be expected at a very low level.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41580-020-0251-y Then those extracellular vesicles disseminated to the heart and caused production of spike and dsRNA there. Even then, the cells should control it in not too long. Unless hers didn't for some reason.
C. The progression time suggests the possibility of autoimmunity being triggered. It would take about 30 days if that happened. I have seen a rare case of autoimmune hepatitis caused by halogen anesthetic in someone with Hashimotos. (Hashimotos is an autoimmune disorder. ) it appeared on that schedule, 3-4 weeks before liver cell destruction. Steroids help, which was accidentally discovered because patient took an oral steroid used to control Hashimotos. (Felt muddle headed from bilirubin and thought Hashimotos was back as well.)
But what cardiac antigen could it be?
D. She had a persistent infection already from her previous pneumonia. This happens. I directly interacted with a case. Caused periodic cardiac inflammation, pain, and patient couldn't do aerobic training. Patient 1st experienced it at 20. Army put him back in the field when it died down. Now, if Simone had such a condition, the interferon production could aggravate it.
E. She got a strep infection from one or both shots because of poor skin swabbing. (suggested by sore throat) But that's really a reach. Very unlikely.
F. Epstein-Barr virus caused myocarditis. It's very rare, but it happens. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7102541/ This is also suggested by tiredness and sore throat. There could be some exacerbation of symptoms from the vaccines dsRNA mechanism. Or, it could be unrelated. Mononucleosis is a common disease in college.
Best I can do now. Proving something would require access to preserved specimens from the case, a lot of money, at least 1-2 years, and may not be possible.
Brian, I am going to be harsh not because I have any particular beef with you - I have no idea who you are - but because scientists in general need to be treated far more harshly than they currently are. The culture in public health research has become completely corrupt, meaning you are not trustworthy and you are not trustworthy as a group.
You said, "To be the cause [of] myocarditis, one of several things must happen. A. So much mRNA secreted into blood that a pseudo viremia occurs. This would be accompanied by fever and malaise which Simone did not have."
Yet the article says, "... she had a cough and stuffy nose and felt fatigued ... Kraimer noticed she seemed tired .... The next day, she had a low fever ... By Friday night she was suffering severe fatigue".
It's therefore very hard to believe you actually read the article before typing up your response, because your description of what a vaccine overdose would look like matches the description found in the article, yet somehow you ended up claiming that didn't happen.
This makes your claim to have debunked other such claims totally absurd. You can't even correctly summarize a bog standard news article, so god knows what your other "investigations" must have looked like.
This problem is completely unsurprising to me. I've read a lot of COVID-related scientific papers in the past year. Scientists very frequently cite data or papers they apparently haven't bothered to actually read, because the cited source will sometimes be about a different topic, or directly contradict them, or be long since obsoleted by better data, or have been retracted years ago, or contain the cited number but it will turn out to be a simulation output presented as if it is proven data (I saw one that was even a simulation input!).
Virology has turned out to be overrun with actual, 100% genuine honest-to-god conspiracies, like simply ignoring the government ban on GoF research, a ban explicitly intended to prevent what appears to have happened with SARS-CoV-2 in Wuhan. Then virologists clubbed together to quash all discussion of the lab leak hypothesis, which they managed to suppress for a year, by claiming expert consensus on a question they very obviously couldn't have known and for which they were hopelessly conflicted, a fact they covered up by lying AGAIN by claiming there were no conflicts of interest.
Epidemiology is as a field almost entirely atheoretical, with per-outbreak curve fitting and video game style simulations being used in place of a genuine understanding of disease. They present predictions as if the underlying (non-existent) theory is proven beyond doubt decades ago and ignore all data that shows they were wrong.
How can anyone trust scientists, vaccines, new drugs or even basic claims about COVID itself when the mechanisms for truth finding are so hopelessly broken that the only scientist to surface in this thread apparently reads "she was tired and had fever" as "she didn't have malaise or fever"?
Thank you, Mike. Brian must have a deep economic interest here; as you say, may virologists do, because they're doing irresponsible, dangerous research.
..."... she had a cough and stuffy nose and felt fatigued ... Kraimer noticed she seemed tired .... The next day, she had a low fever ... By Friday night she was suffering severe fatigue"....
I read it. What I knew is that high doses of dsRNA in the bloodstream cause fulminating fever, not a low fever. It's a standard method.
Tiredness can be a sign of many things including myocarditis. In this case, given the death, it signaled that her heart was having trouble pumping blood.
The cough and stuffy nose could be allergies, could be mononucleosis, could be a cold, could be a number of things.
But do you see what's happened here? If you're going to assert your expertise then making an argument that claims a fatigued person with fever didn't have fatigue or fever will seriously harm your credibility. Now you're claiming that the distinction between two types of fever (that her parents almost certainly don't distinguish between) is definitive proof that the vaccine is innocent - or are you? It's getting a bit unclear what you really believe about this case now.
What I said. "fulminating fever, not a low fever". Yes, they would differentiate those.
You are talking to yourself, not to me. Go back and read the whole thing. Don't pretend to me that one little thing that I explained throws out everything.
"Virology has turned out to be overrun with actual, 100% genuine honest-to-god conspiracies, like simply ignoring the government ban on GoF research..." That shoe is on your foot.
GOF research is done to find out what evolution is likely to throw at us next! It's a primary tool we have to figure that out! Yes, the most knowledgeable virologists support GOF because without it WE ARE BLIND! Nature does not stand still! Nature is still the greatest terrorist. With GOF research we can figure out how to deal with it by designing vaccines ahead of time. It won't be perfect by a long shot, but it will help.
But! We WILL see a real bioweapon set loose. We know that our enemies are working on it. They want them badly. When that happens, COVID-19 will be a child's tea party by comparison.
GoF research was banned because it is dangerous. Virologists just ignored the ban, this is well documented in this article by Vanity Fair using FOIA released emails:
The views of virologists are completely irrelevant here because it wasn't your decision to make. When normal people systematically evade the law there are serious punishments. But for scientists, there are none. Hence the trust problem.
BTW it appears GoF research has told us nothing about how to combat COVID. Defunding it seems like the right call.
They were trying. Not hard enough. And the best people in the USA weren't able to touch it. We knew it was likely to become a problem. The question is when. We weren't monitoring enough. We don't monitor much.
That we don't monitor enough could be bring down western civilization. No exaggeration.
One more curious statement from Ebright. He has said that it's not important if do or don't discover, uncover how the virus escape. He said what's crucial is that we do everything we can to prevent this from occurring again. If I had to guess, he believes it was lab escape in wuhan, not nature. But his primary aim, I surmise, is to stop GOF research.
I am glad you see the problem that nature is not the ultimate bioterrorist. That would be humans who could take down Western civilization. The only defense that is reliable against that is rapid rollout (1-2 weeks) of vaccines against the threat.
Here I'm going to have to correct you on few things. First, while many virologists advocate for and support gain-of-function, many more are against it. Some, like Richard Ebright, vehemently against it. The opponents of GOF say that the dangers of GOF lab research exponentially outway any perceived benefits that we might derive from the research.
Read an interview with him from the link below. His brief wikipedia cv is below. I sometimes follow him on twitter. He is very circumspect and careful in his comments but he often coyly hints that he believes it's a lab escape. He state that it is certainly possible. Doesn't say it but hints at it. He also has said that evidence can be found outside of china and the wuhan lab that amply demonstrates how the virus escaped, and the viruses origin. While not a virologist, Ebright is one of the world's leading experts on GOF research. Well worth a read.
"....Richard H. Ebright is an American molecular biologist. He is the Board of Governors Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Rutgers University and Laboratory Director at the Waksman Institute of Microbiology...."
"Epidemiology is as a field almost entirely atheoretical" No. Just wrong. I have published in epidemiology, and data is central. Lloyd-Smith's paper on the last SARS1 outbreak is entirely about data. That outbreak was unique because we had virtually every human case, and traced back how they got it. It is an excellent paper. It proved some things beyond a shadow of a doubt that a few had been saying for years.
Superspreading and the effect of individual variation on disease emergence. (2005)
Well that's novel. Note that Ferguson et al, supposedly some of the best epidemiologists in the world, drove lockdown with models that hardly include individual variation, which that paper says is critical. In fact that paper says clearly:
"individual-specific control measures outperform population-wide measures"
and it talks about "the dramatic improvements achieved through targeted control policies"
Yet by the time SARS 2 rolled around nobody cares about this paper, it's all about population wide control measures and the Great Barrington Declaration is being dismissed as a bunch of crazies that don't represent the epidemiological consensus.
This is what I mean by lack of theory. What theory has epidemiology produced that all epidemiologists actually agree on? Apparently nothing beyond a few tautological definitions, e.g. the "basic reproductive number" which is just a derivative of the case curve, or the SEIR concept, which is just an ordinary description of infectious disease - one that any medieval sailor would have recognized.
Epidemiologists just seem to fit models to individual outbreaks. Their models don't try to predict when epidemics start. They don't seem to include seasons (at least not the ones the governments are using). Almost nothing generalizable is produced by this field, and the few claims that do generalize (like the one you link) don't seem to be adopted. There is no epidemiological equivalent of E=MC².
Models do predict some. That's how the flu vaccine is made every year, and mostly gets it pretty good. But successes like that get buried. Only something like COVID-19, which was made vastly worse by Trump getting rid of the CDC pandemic response group, gets attention.
20 years ago I worked on trying to bring to market a cell-phone attachable multi-organism diagnostic device. The technology wasn't there yet, but the market was. ~17 million mothers of toddlers. That would provide us with a big, hard-numbers dataset. But, we don't have star trek yet.
There is, mostly, very little data to go on. These days it is HIPAA protected in the USA which makes it worse. There is enough to make decent predictions over the next few weeks, and seasonally. (I you recall, a fall wave was predicted in June of 2020.
Virologists didn't "club together to quash" the lab leak idea. There is no evidence for it. None. It's a story based entirely on speculations about things (like Chinese government paranoia) that have NOTHING to do with the science. Virus sequence data (and there's a lot of it) doesn't support it. Period. Full stop.
The letter in Nature, which started the "conspiracy theory" meme, was written by Peter Daszak, who funded the research at Wuhan - but his name was obscured. Fraud and conflict of interest.
Evidence: Wuhan is a thousand miles from the bat caves in Yunnan, far southern China, that the near relatives of Covid came from - but there is no chain of infections. There is, however, a known vector: the scientists who collected virus specimens in Yunnan, then took them back, sealed, to Wuhan to...experiment on. And there are papers proving they were doing Gain of Function studies on them.
Since they are the only know vector, they are the likely candidates; this is known, EVERYTHING ELSE is speculation.
The only known - actually KNOWN - vector is, pending further discoveries, always the likeliest. Excluding evidence you don't like is a classic fallacy.
This is a very odd comment because the trials themselves pegged the rate of serious reactions at between 10% and 20%. This feels about right given the comments I've heard from people I personally know who have taken it.
The last one was especially entertaining or aggravating depending on your perspective. I ended up arguing with an actual immunologist I am remotely acquainted with, and he finished by giving a little speech about how the word pandemic means "all" and that we're in a society and all in it together etc. He told me to take the vaccine because it's "perfectly safe". Then he mentioned it made him so sick he'd been unable to move for a day. Ah yes: "makes me so sick I can't work" is indeed the dictionary definition of "perfectly safe".
Please. It's extremely clear at this point that severe reactions including deaths are not being reported. Look at the case of Simone Scott. The parents had to go to Alex Berenson, presumably none of the other outlets would touch the story at all:
https://alexberenson.substack.com/p/simone-scott-oct-7-2001-june-11-2021
They very clearly state that they had to push hard to get this event reported to the tracking systems at all. How many other cases like that are happening where people aren't strong-willed enough to go around their doctors?
"This is a very odd comment because the trials themselves pegged the rate of serious reactions at between 10% and 20%."
Nonsense: The incidence of serious adverse events was similar in the vaccine and placebo groups (0.6% and 0.5%, respectively).
The report on Pfizer's phase 3 trial is publicly available on the NEJM's web site. You can go read it for yourself. There's no need to simply make up bulls**t that only takes a few seconds to prove wrong. You look like an idiot.
That is a very interesting case, and I am so sorry for Simone and her parents. Moderna vax has mRNA w/ spike and an alpha virus RNA polymerase coded. The RNAp copies the mRNA, that is detected by RIG-1 & MDA5 intracell, TLR3 & TLR10 if it gets out. Those receptors cause interferon secretion, which is what kicks up feeling "sick". This is done to signal B-cell response to generate antibodies.
To be the cause myocarditis, one of several things must happen. A. So much mRNA secreted into blood that a pseudo viremia occurs. This would be accompanied by fever and malaise which Simone did not have.
B. Somehow dsRNA/mRNA was packaged into vesicles by the muscle at the shot site. This should be expected at a very low level.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41580-020-0251-y Then those extracellular vesicles disseminated to the heart and caused production of spike and dsRNA there. Even then, the cells should control it in not too long. Unless hers didn't for some reason.
C. The progression time suggests the possibility of autoimmunity being triggered. It would take about 30 days if that happened. I have seen a rare case of autoimmune hepatitis caused by halogen anesthetic in someone with Hashimotos. (Hashimotos is an autoimmune disorder. ) it appeared on that schedule, 3-4 weeks before liver cell destruction. Steroids help, which was accidentally discovered because patient took an oral steroid used to control Hashimotos. (Felt muddle headed from bilirubin and thought Hashimotos was back as well.)
But what cardiac antigen could it be?
D. She had a persistent infection already from her previous pneumonia. This happens. I directly interacted with a case. Caused periodic cardiac inflammation, pain, and patient couldn't do aerobic training. Patient 1st experienced it at 20. Army put him back in the field when it died down. Now, if Simone had such a condition, the interferon production could aggravate it.
E. She got a strep infection from one or both shots because of poor skin swabbing. (suggested by sore throat) But that's really a reach. Very unlikely.
F. Epstein-Barr virus caused myocarditis. It's very rare, but it happens. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7102541/ This is also suggested by tiredness and sore throat. There could be some exacerbation of symptoms from the vaccines dsRNA mechanism. Or, it could be unrelated. Mononucleosis is a common disease in college.
Best I can do now. Proving something would require access to preserved specimens from the case, a lot of money, at least 1-2 years, and may not be possible.
Brian, I am going to be harsh not because I have any particular beef with you - I have no idea who you are - but because scientists in general need to be treated far more harshly than they currently are. The culture in public health research has become completely corrupt, meaning you are not trustworthy and you are not trustworthy as a group.
You said, "To be the cause [of] myocarditis, one of several things must happen. A. So much mRNA secreted into blood that a pseudo viremia occurs. This would be accompanied by fever and malaise which Simone did not have."
Yet the article says, "... she had a cough and stuffy nose and felt fatigued ... Kraimer noticed she seemed tired .... The next day, she had a low fever ... By Friday night she was suffering severe fatigue".
It's therefore very hard to believe you actually read the article before typing up your response, because your description of what a vaccine overdose would look like matches the description found in the article, yet somehow you ended up claiming that didn't happen.
This makes your claim to have debunked other such claims totally absurd. You can't even correctly summarize a bog standard news article, so god knows what your other "investigations" must have looked like.
This problem is completely unsurprising to me. I've read a lot of COVID-related scientific papers in the past year. Scientists very frequently cite data or papers they apparently haven't bothered to actually read, because the cited source will sometimes be about a different topic, or directly contradict them, or be long since obsoleted by better data, or have been retracted years ago, or contain the cited number but it will turn out to be a simulation output presented as if it is proven data (I saw one that was even a simulation input!).
Virology has turned out to be overrun with actual, 100% genuine honest-to-god conspiracies, like simply ignoring the government ban on GoF research, a ban explicitly intended to prevent what appears to have happened with SARS-CoV-2 in Wuhan. Then virologists clubbed together to quash all discussion of the lab leak hypothesis, which they managed to suppress for a year, by claiming expert consensus on a question they very obviously couldn't have known and for which they were hopelessly conflicted, a fact they covered up by lying AGAIN by claiming there were no conflicts of interest.
Epidemiology is as a field almost entirely atheoretical, with per-outbreak curve fitting and video game style simulations being used in place of a genuine understanding of disease. They present predictions as if the underlying (non-existent) theory is proven beyond doubt decades ago and ignore all data that shows they were wrong.
How can anyone trust scientists, vaccines, new drugs or even basic claims about COVID itself when the mechanisms for truth finding are so hopelessly broken that the only scientist to surface in this thread apparently reads "she was tired and had fever" as "she didn't have malaise or fever"?
Thank you, Mike. Brian must have a deep economic interest here; as you say, may virologists do, because they're doing irresponsible, dangerous research.
But they ain't gonna show up on substack, of that I can assure you.
So instead we should trust you here?
BTW - Here is my critique of R0.
https://brianhanley.medium.com/r0-basic-reproduction-number-for-a-disease-is-a-fiction-it-does-not-exist-2b389a0478a8
..."... she had a cough and stuffy nose and felt fatigued ... Kraimer noticed she seemed tired .... The next day, she had a low fever ... By Friday night she was suffering severe fatigue"....
I read it. What I knew is that high doses of dsRNA in the bloodstream cause fulminating fever, not a low fever. It's a standard method.
Tiredness can be a sign of many things including myocarditis. In this case, given the death, it signaled that her heart was having trouble pumping blood.
The cough and stuffy nose could be allergies, could be mononucleosis, could be a cold, could be a number of things.
But do you see what's happened here? If you're going to assert your expertise then making an argument that claims a fatigued person with fever didn't have fatigue or fever will seriously harm your credibility. Now you're claiming that the distinction between two types of fever (that her parents almost certainly don't distinguish between) is definitive proof that the vaccine is innocent - or are you? It's getting a bit unclear what you really believe about this case now.
What I said. "fulminating fever, not a low fever". Yes, they would differentiate those.
You are talking to yourself, not to me. Go back and read the whole thing. Don't pretend to me that one little thing that I explained throws out everything.
I am glad to be able to read some foreign language, and found very early on articles and interviews form the virologist Prof. Christian Drosten who actually sequenced Covid 19. I do trust him and the institute where he works, they are doing great research. https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/04/how-pandemic-made-virologist-unlikely-cult-figure
"Virology has turned out to be overrun with actual, 100% genuine honest-to-god conspiracies, like simply ignoring the government ban on GoF research..." That shoe is on your foot.
GOF research is done to find out what evolution is likely to throw at us next! It's a primary tool we have to figure that out! Yes, the most knowledgeable virologists support GOF because without it WE ARE BLIND! Nature does not stand still! Nature is still the greatest terrorist. With GOF research we can figure out how to deal with it by designing vaccines ahead of time. It won't be perfect by a long shot, but it will help.
But! We WILL see a real bioweapon set loose. We know that our enemies are working on it. They want them badly. When that happens, COVID-19 will be a child's tea party by comparison.
You seem to be missing the point here, badly.
GoF research was banned because it is dangerous. Virologists just ignored the ban, this is well documented in this article by Vanity Fair using FOIA released emails:
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/06/the-lab-leak-theory-inside-the-fight-to-uncover-covid-19s-origins
The views of virologists are completely irrelevant here because it wasn't your decision to make. When normal people systematically evade the law there are serious punishments. But for scientists, there are none. Hence the trust problem.
BTW it appears GoF research has told us nothing about how to combat COVID. Defunding it seems like the right call.
Here is a 2015 article on GOF and SARS bat coronaviruses. https://www.virology.ws/2015/11/19/bat-sars-like-coronavirus-its-not-sars-2-0/
They were trying. Not hard enough. And the best people in the USA weren't able to touch it. We knew it was likely to become a problem. The question is when. We weren't monitoring enough. We don't monitor much.
That we don't monitor enough could be bring down western civilization. No exaggeration.
One more curious statement from Ebright. He has said that it's not important if do or don't discover, uncover how the virus escape. He said what's crucial is that we do everything we can to prevent this from occurring again. If I had to guess, he believes it was lab escape in wuhan, not nature. But his primary aim, I surmise, is to stop GOF research.
He is wrong. Period. Full stop. On all counts.
Ahhh - your personal stake is showing.
Just wrong. GOF was paused for years after some papers were flagged by the idiotic NSABB. It was not restarted until it was approved.
My paper on the idiocy of the NSABB. It accomplishes one thing - shouting in the ears of our enemies exactly what scientists are worried about.
https://www.omicsonline.org/security-in-a-goldfish-bowl-the-nsabbs-exacerbation-of-the-bioterrorism-threat-2157-2526.S3-013.php?aid=11953
“Nature is still the greatest terrorist” lol enough said. You present like a CIA agent, not a scientist.
The CIA "folks in the basement" did pay attention to some things I wrote. I do have a chapter on biodefense in a West Point sponsored book. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/200112458_Bioterrorism_and_Biodefense_for_America%27s_Public_Spaces_and_Cities
I am glad you see the problem that nature is not the ultimate bioterrorist. That would be humans who could take down Western civilization. The only defense that is reliable against that is rapid rollout (1-2 weeks) of vaccines against the threat.
Here I'm going to have to correct you on few things. First, while many virologists advocate for and support gain-of-function, many more are against it. Some, like Richard Ebright, vehemently against it. The opponents of GOF say that the dangers of GOF lab research exponentially outway any perceived benefits that we might derive from the research.
Read an interview with him from the link below. His brief wikipedia cv is below. I sometimes follow him on twitter. He is very circumspect and careful in his comments but he often coyly hints that he believes it's a lab escape. He state that it is certainly possible. Doesn't say it but hints at it. He also has said that evidence can be found outside of china and the wuhan lab that amply demonstrates how the virus escaped, and the viruses origin. While not a virologist, Ebright is one of the world's leading experts on GOF research. Well worth a read.
https://www.independentsciencenews.org/commentaries/an-interview-with-richard-ebright-anthony-fauci-francis-collins-systematically-thwarted/
"....Richard H. Ebright is an American molecular biologist. He is the Board of Governors Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Rutgers University and Laboratory Director at the Waksman Institute of Microbiology...."
"Epidemiology is as a field almost entirely atheoretical" No. Just wrong. I have published in epidemiology, and data is central. Lloyd-Smith's paper on the last SARS1 outbreak is entirely about data. That outbreak was unique because we had virtually every human case, and traced back how they got it. It is an excellent paper. It proved some things beyond a shadow of a doubt that a few had been saying for years.
Superspreading and the effect of individual variation on disease emergence. (2005)
https://www.nature.com/articles/nature04153
Well that's novel. Note that Ferguson et al, supposedly some of the best epidemiologists in the world, drove lockdown with models that hardly include individual variation, which that paper says is critical. In fact that paper says clearly:
"individual-specific control measures outperform population-wide measures"
and it talks about "the dramatic improvements achieved through targeted control policies"
Yet by the time SARS 2 rolled around nobody cares about this paper, it's all about population wide control measures and the Great Barrington Declaration is being dismissed as a bunch of crazies that don't represent the epidemiological consensus.
This is what I mean by lack of theory. What theory has epidemiology produced that all epidemiologists actually agree on? Apparently nothing beyond a few tautological definitions, e.g. the "basic reproductive number" which is just a derivative of the case curve, or the SEIR concept, which is just an ordinary description of infectious disease - one that any medieval sailor would have recognized.
Epidemiologists just seem to fit models to individual outbreaks. Their models don't try to predict when epidemics start. They don't seem to include seasons (at least not the ones the governments are using). Almost nothing generalizable is produced by this field, and the few claims that do generalize (like the one you link) don't seem to be adopted. There is no epidemiological equivalent of E=MC².
Models do predict some. That's how the flu vaccine is made every year, and mostly gets it pretty good. But successes like that get buried. Only something like COVID-19, which was made vastly worse by Trump getting rid of the CDC pandemic response group, gets attention.
https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/10.1089/rej.2020.2363
This was an academic editorial from August of 2020 (which got delayed from April of 2020 because of politics).
20 years ago I worked on trying to bring to market a cell-phone attachable multi-organism diagnostic device. The technology wasn't there yet, but the market was. ~17 million mothers of toddlers. That would provide us with a big, hard-numbers dataset. But, we don't have star trek yet.
I tend to agree about lockdown. That was done in imitation of China. It can work. Here it pushed us toward civil war.
There is, mostly, very little data to go on. These days it is HIPAA protected in the USA which makes it worse. There is enough to make decent predictions over the next few weeks, and seasonally. (I you recall, a fall wave was predicted in June of 2020.
The vanity fair piece Mike links to is also well worth the read.
Virologists didn't "club together to quash" the lab leak idea. There is no evidence for it. None. It's a story based entirely on speculations about things (like Chinese government paranoia) that have NOTHING to do with the science. Virus sequence data (and there's a lot of it) doesn't support it. Period. Full stop.
https://brianhanley.medium.com/the-covid-19-sars2-lab-origin-story-zombies-back-from-the-dead-c6d987344cee
The letter in Nature, which started the "conspiracy theory" meme, was written by Peter Daszak, who funded the research at Wuhan - but his name was obscured. Fraud and conflict of interest.
Evidence: Wuhan is a thousand miles from the bat caves in Yunnan, far southern China, that the near relatives of Covid came from - but there is no chain of infections. There is, however, a known vector: the scientists who collected virus specimens in Yunnan, then took them back, sealed, to Wuhan to...experiment on. And there are papers proving they were doing Gain of Function studies on them.
Since they are the only know vector, they are the likely candidates; this is known, EVERYTHING ELSE is speculation.
You're trying to give science a bad name.
Read this. In it I explain why that doesn't hold water. https://brianhanley.medium.com/the-covid-19-sars2-lab-origin-story-zombies-back-from-the-dead-c6d987344cee
You don't know what evidence is. Evidence is here. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/datasets/coronavirus/genomes/
The only known - actually KNOWN - vector is, pending further discoveries, always the likeliest. Excluding evidence you don't like is a classic fallacy.
Genomics: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9629563/Chinese-scientists-created-COVID-19-lab-tried-cover-tracks-new-study-claims.html. I know it's the Daily Mail, but they have the key pieces of the actual paper. Yes, there is evidence.
Translation from Brian: (1) Nobody knows what's going on, because it's an experimental drug; (2) it's f'ing dangerous.
New careers as a guinea pig, going cheap.
Hey Brian,
You’re “sorry” alright.
Alex Berenson? insert eyeroll