When the vaccines came out, I was first in line, being 77 years old. My experience was good. I got the vaccine just before the delta variant became widespread.
But here’s the thing that will haunt public health for years. I read, over and over, in many places, that the goal was herd immunity. And extinction of the virus. That was the justification for vaccination mandates. Now we find out that that goal was impossible, and epidemiologists knew this all along. Or should have.
This is going to cause problems if mandates are ever again attempted.
Courtesy of Vincent Racianello. The problem is the definition of herd immunity. Also what vaccines can and cannot do.
No vaccine is actually sterilising, i.e. it cannot stop you becoming infected. Whether sterilising vaccines are achievable or desirable is open to debate. What vaccines aim to do is prevent serious illness or death.
Herd immunity is not the lack of infection but the lack of serious disease. For measles this requires around 95% of the population to be vaccinated.
My father was in public health when the OPV came out. He regarded shedding as a blessing. He said if you immunized an infant, you immunized the whole family. The problem, which emerged later, was occasional mutation back to a paralytic form.
I have read that self spreading vaccines are back on the menu. I’ve read that there was an attempt to develop a self spreading vaccine for bats, against coronavirus.
I am not hearing good things about these new, "safer" (only for the condition they are supposed to work for) acellular, "non-live" vaccines.
RFK Jr. echoes either the study mentioned by Christine Stabell Benn here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_d8PNlXHJ48 or a different one showing significantly higher (all-cause) mortality/poorer outcomes (over many years) for those receiving the new-fangled vaccines vs the live polio one.
As I stated above no vaccine is sterilising. They can reduce serious illness and death but not infection. The problem is that the number of people needed to be vaccinated has been reducing for some vaccines. It’s estimated that 95% of a population need to be vaccinated against measles to prevent a serious outbreak.
Yes. Injectables can't ever trigger mucosal immunity and that's why respiratory viruses can colonize the upper respiratory tract of the jabbed at same levels as the unjabbed.
UNDERSTOOD FROM THE BEGINNING by any medical school undergraduate, so scientists claiming otherwise should be suspect grifters.
I’ve found a discussed on herd immunity on YouTube, it’s a Q&A session with Vincent Racianello and Amy Rosenfeld from 31st May this year, starting at 9minutes 30 seconds.
complete manuscript: available at the link above...article is now 'peer reviewed'
ALL quotes below from the discussion section:
"The strengths of our study include its large sample size, and its conduct in a healthcare system
where a very early recognition of the critical importance of maintaining an effective workforce
during the pandemic led to devotion of resources to have an accurate accounting of who had
COVID-19, when COVID-19 was diagnosed, who received a COVID-19 vaccine, and when. The
study methodology, treating bivalent vaccination as a time-dependent covariate, allowed for
determining vaccine effectiveness in real time."
"our study was done in a healthcare population, and included no children and few elderly subjects, and the majority of study subjects would not have been immunocompromised."
"The association of increased risk of COVID-19 with higher numbers of prior vaccine doses was
unexpected. A simplistic explanation might be that those who received more doses were more
likely to be individuals at higher risk of COVID-19. A small proportion of individuals may have
fit this description. However, the majority of subjects in this study were generally young
individuals and all were eligible to have received at least 3 doses of vaccine by the study start date,
and which they had every opportunity to do. Therefore, those who received fewer than 3 doses
(46% of individuals in the study) were not those ineligible to receive the vaccine, but those who
chose not to follow the CDC’s recommendations on remaining updated with COVID-19
vaccination, and one could reasonably expect these individuals to have been more likely to have
exhibited higher risk-taking behavior. Despite this, their risk of acquiring COVID-19 was lower
than those who received a larger number of prior vaccine doses. This is not the only study to find
a possible association with more prior vaccine doses and higher risk of COVID-19."
With a little research I knew this before the covid vaccines came out. Why didn't the public health experts know this? I also knew my immune system placed me in a favorable group for getting a mild infection. (the average age if death in early Italy studies was 82 - and a smoker)
Dr Fauci told us this in 2020, for those who were paying attention. If we had acted quickly we could very likely have nipped this thing in the bud. Our politicians were in denial and dawdled around until the horse was out of the barn, never to be caught.
Fauci is a clown...he knew the data early on...hard to take that guy seriously based on his track record...the hysteria never matched the actual outcomes of COVID...lockdowns, false reports of death, masks, and the actual shots(neither prevented the disease or stopped the spread) were ineffective and caused major economic(crushed small business but not big business) and social issues(education loss, anxiety, and depression, esp in children)
Can we eliminate COVID? This article doesn't answer the question. It only addresses one of the ten tools we have in the Swiss cheese model applied to COVID-19. In order to answer the question we would have to look at all ten tools being used in combination.
Defining it in terms of a putative virus is self referential and ludicrous.
Using indirect methods such as PCR as "gold standard" to establish the presence of said virus is doubly sloppy.
The very high rate of asymptomatic and mild cases in the positive "infected" is further clue that focusing on the virus is a red herring. (Majority handle it with none or minor issue, as with the countless other bacteria and virii we are exposed to daily. Are we gonna vaccinate everybody against all those too?!?)
The clotting/vascular issues are due to the presence of the spike, so exposing people to that antigen is about as stupid an approach as anybody can come up with.
Dr Offit, what are your thoughts on the findings of IgG4 class switch with repeat mRNA vaccinations, and the implications this has for immune suppression - promoting cancer growth and autoimmune myocarditis in particular?
I notice that these findings have now been replicated in numerous peer reviewed studies.
Neither Vincent Racianello or Brianne Barker don’t seem to be concerned about this class switch.
Please don’t take offence if I am being too simplistic in my explanation as I don’t know you or your experience.
Also this is my own interpretation and understanding.
Antibodies can be envisaged as a Y.
The ends of the two angled arms are what bind to the antigen protein.
Whilst the angle where they meet and the top part of the vertical line is called the hinge.
The bottom of the vertical line is the common region.
There are families of antibodies which are defined by differences in the common region, i.e. the common region is only common across the same family, for example IgG all have the same common region.
An antibody can only bind to one antigen using the tips of the arms of the Y, thus all antibodies created in response to a vaccine are effectively clones of each other.
IgG is the family involved in preventing viruses from infecting host cells by physically attaching to the part of the virus that is used to bind to a receptor on the host cell, for SARS-CoV-2 this is the spike protein that attaches to the ACE2 receptor on the host cell.
Within each IgG family group there are four different classes that can develop IgG1, IgG2, IgG3, IgG4
Each of these classes have the same common region as they are all IgG. They all have the same binding regions as they are part of the same group against a specific antigen. The difference is in the length of the hinge region.
Thus if IgG1 binds to the spike protein then an IgG4 that has arisen through class switching from that IgG1 will still bind to the spike protein.
The difference between IgG1 and IgG4 therefore is more subtle in that it doesn’t affect the action of the antibody itself but it does affect the general immune response. IgG1 tends to be inflammatory whilst IgG4 appears to be anti inflammatory. Inflammation is good for a short period of time, however long term inflammation is not good. This suggests that IgG1 class switching to IgG4 is a mechanism to prevent hyper inflammation.
The symptoms associated with SARS-CoV-2 or influenza infection are in the upper respiratory tract, where IgA antibodies dominate, whilst the vaccine generates an IgG antibody response which predominates in the lower respiratory tract. Thus a short incubation period pathogen that enters via the upper respiratory tract must always produce symptoms as the vaccine induced immune response requires infection in the lower respiratory tract. Or am I mistaken?
Does infection in the upper respiratory tract trigger an IgA immune response with associated memory cells?
Measles infection is a persistent infection, I still have active antibodies 50 years after the disease.
I’m a little confused about measles and rubella, again the immune response to the vaccine is in the bloodstream and associated areas whereas the primary site of infection is the URT. Even allowing for the long incubation period surely there can still be URT symptoms. I know that children are infectious two or three days prior to the measles rash developing, although they feel and look unwell which I presume is indicative of an inflammatory response. Does this apply to children who are vaccinated and are exposed to the virus?
All these puzzles and contradictions (including the fact that going through the full course of diseases like measles chicken pox and mumps *unvaccinated* tend to confer several benefits later in life) leads me to speculate that the germ theory model is not quite the right lens to view these conditions with.
Our conception of what virii are is due for revision in the next few years. Thinking of them in the same vein as bacteria is a sloppy and unjustified carryover of 19th century germ theory concepts.
It doesn't look measles will ever be eradicated by vaccines https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8053748/ and worse, the incomplete, TEMPORARY, humoral response only 'immunity' the vaccines give is compromising herd immunity.
Be a responsible scientist for once and stop regurgitating TV biology.
If you factor in possible iatrogenesis in people who have bad long term outcomes from vaccinations, they only sane policy must be to make them OPTIONAL and NEVER MANDATED.
Having a diverse, multi- rather than monoculture of both vaxed and unvaxxed is also great for both control studies and herd protection.
Calls to jab every last person are neither scientifically nor ethically justified. This is simply a remnant of mid-20th century medical paternalism which has more into something far worse in the 21st: medical fascism in service of corporate agendas.
I’m reading that China is experiencing a massive wave of Covid infections after dropping their zero covid policies. It would be interesting to have a model that shows the difference between “getting it over with” vs stretching it out over years. It should incorporate the cost of the lockdown policies. I have no opinion as to what would be shown, but it seems that just about everyone has had it. And it continues. I just had a long planned dinner party cancelled due to covid.
They dropped zero covid _LITERALLY_ overnight because it simply didn't work and made things worse.
It tells you this was all a cynical ploy by the CCP to justify increased control and surveillance of the population. Similarly minded control freaks in western countries jumped on China's example to indulge in the same power tripping exercises.
Wouldn't it be more accurate to talk about the latent period (the period from the time of infection to the time of becoming infectious) instead of the incubation period (the period between exposure to an infection and the appearance of the first symptoms)?
You mention diseases we could eliminate by vaccination, however, I think this would mean that most of the population would have to be vaccinated to become immune.
Based on what we have learned from COVID, when the next novel virus emerges will we be equipped to recognize and limit the spread before it becomes a pandemic?
Unfortunately if it’s another respiratory virus then limiting the spread maybe difficult. Don’t forget that the influenza pandemics in the middle of last century occurred despite the lack of mass air travel.
The 1918 pandemic was spread by returning soldiers from WWI. This was known at the time, but it was politically impossible to stop. I’m pretty sure politics played a role in the worldwide spread of covid. My thoughts on Chinese behavior border on conspiracy theory, so I’ll keep quiet until more is known.
Suffice to say, there’s evidence they hid the problem for several months. In their defense, there’s no evidence they knew what they were dealing with the first couple of months. But they definitely withheld reporting for at least a month after they sequences the bug. And punished whistleblowers.
When the vaccines came out, I was first in line, being 77 years old. My experience was good. I got the vaccine just before the delta variant became widespread.
But here’s the thing that will haunt public health for years. I read, over and over, in many places, that the goal was herd immunity. And extinction of the virus. That was the justification for vaccination mandates. Now we find out that that goal was impossible, and epidemiologists knew this all along. Or should have.
This is going to cause problems if mandates are ever again attempted.
Courtesy of Vincent Racianello. The problem is the definition of herd immunity. Also what vaccines can and cannot do.
No vaccine is actually sterilising, i.e. it cannot stop you becoming infected. Whether sterilising vaccines are achievable or desirable is open to debate. What vaccines aim to do is prevent serious illness or death.
Herd immunity is not the lack of infection but the lack of serious disease. For measles this requires around 95% of the population to be vaccinated.
I thought the ORAL polio vaccine was sterilizing (maybe because it works to trigger mucosal immunity) whereas the injected one isn't.
The problem with the OPV is that recipients shed the active virus in their faeces. Also it can cause paralysis.
My father was in public health when the OPV came out. He regarded shedding as a blessing. He said if you immunized an infant, you immunized the whole family. The problem, which emerged later, was occasional mutation back to a paralytic form.
I have read that self spreading vaccines are back on the menu. I’ve read that there was an attempt to develop a self spreading vaccine for bats, against coronavirus.
I am not hearing good things about these new, "safer" (only for the condition they are supposed to work for) acellular, "non-live" vaccines.
RFK Jr. echoes either the study mentioned by Christine Stabell Benn here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_d8PNlXHJ48 or a different one showing significantly higher (all-cause) mortality/poorer outcomes (over many years) for those receiving the new-fangled vaccines vs the live polio one.
Even the DTaP acellular Pertussis vaccine, precisely because it is non-sterilizing, has been pinpointed as the cause of an epidemic -> https://www.bu.edu/articles/2018/whooping-cough-on-the-rise/
As I stated above no vaccine is sterilising. They can reduce serious illness and death but not infection. The problem is that the number of people needed to be vaccinated has been reducing for some vaccines. It’s estimated that 95% of a population need to be vaccinated against measles to prevent a serious outbreak.
Yes. Injectables can't ever trigger mucosal immunity and that's why respiratory viruses can colonize the upper respiratory tract of the jabbed at same levels as the unjabbed.
UNDERSTOOD FROM THE BEGINNING by any medical school undergraduate, so scientists claiming otherwise should be suspect grifters.
I’ve found a discussed on herd immunity on YouTube, it’s a Q&A session with Vincent Racianello and Amy Rosenfeld from 31st May this year, starting at 9minutes 30 seconds.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xXT-tKsCK_4&t=560s
any comments about the cleveland clinic study? more covid jabs more covid infections...
https://academic.oup.com/ofid/advance-article/doi/10.1093/ofid/ofad209/7131292?login=false
complete manuscript: available at the link above...article is now 'peer reviewed'
ALL quotes below from the discussion section:
"The strengths of our study include its large sample size, and its conduct in a healthcare system
where a very early recognition of the critical importance of maintaining an effective workforce
during the pandemic led to devotion of resources to have an accurate accounting of who had
COVID-19, when COVID-19 was diagnosed, who received a COVID-19 vaccine, and when. The
study methodology, treating bivalent vaccination as a time-dependent covariate, allowed for
determining vaccine effectiveness in real time."
"our study was done in a healthcare population, and included no children and few elderly subjects, and the majority of study subjects would not have been immunocompromised."
"The association of increased risk of COVID-19 with higher numbers of prior vaccine doses was
unexpected. A simplistic explanation might be that those who received more doses were more
likely to be individuals at higher risk of COVID-19. A small proportion of individuals may have
fit this description. However, the majority of subjects in this study were generally young
individuals and all were eligible to have received at least 3 doses of vaccine by the study start date,
and which they had every opportunity to do. Therefore, those who received fewer than 3 doses
(46% of individuals in the study) were not those ineligible to receive the vaccine, but those who
chose not to follow the CDC’s recommendations on remaining updated with COVID-19
vaccination, and one could reasonably expect these individuals to have been more likely to have
exhibited higher risk-taking behavior. Despite this, their risk of acquiring COVID-19 was lower
than those who received a larger number of prior vaccine doses. This is not the only study to find
a possible association with more prior vaccine doses and higher risk of COVID-19."
With a little research I knew this before the covid vaccines came out. Why didn't the public health experts know this? I also knew my immune system placed me in a favorable group for getting a mild infection. (the average age if death in early Italy studies was 82 - and a smoker)
We should have had you instead of Fauci at CDC in 2020-2022, Dr. O.! Hope you are well...
Dr Fauci told us this in 2020, for those who were paying attention. If we had acted quickly we could very likely have nipped this thing in the bud. Our politicians were in denial and dawdled around until the horse was out of the barn, never to be caught.
Fauci is a clown...he knew the data early on...hard to take that guy seriously based on his track record...the hysteria never matched the actual outcomes of COVID...lockdowns, false reports of death, masks, and the actual shots(neither prevented the disease or stopped the spread) were ineffective and caused major economic(crushed small business but not big business) and social issues(education loss, anxiety, and depression, esp in children)
Can we eliminate COVID? This article doesn't answer the question. It only addresses one of the ten tools we have in the Swiss cheese model applied to COVID-19. In order to answer the question we would have to look at all ten tools being used in combination.
First, you have to define covid properly.
Defining it in terms of a putative virus is self referential and ludicrous.
Using indirect methods such as PCR as "gold standard" to establish the presence of said virus is doubly sloppy.
The very high rate of asymptomatic and mild cases in the positive "infected" is further clue that focusing on the virus is a red herring. (Majority handle it with none or minor issue, as with the countless other bacteria and virii we are exposed to daily. Are we gonna vaccinate everybody against all those too?!?)
The ARDS can be simply addressed with antihistamines and off the shelf meds (https://youtu.be/yAvpxgCnDx0).
The clotting/vascular issues are due to the presence of the spike, so exposing people to that antigen is about as stupid an approach as anybody can come up with.
Dr Offit, what are your thoughts on the findings of IgG4 class switch with repeat mRNA vaccinations, and the implications this has for immune suppression - promoting cancer growth and autoimmune myocarditis in particular?
I notice that these findings have now been replicated in numerous peer reviewed studies.
https://www.mdpi.com/2076-393X/11/5/991#
Neither Vincent Racianello or Brianne Barker don’t seem to be concerned about this class switch.
Please don’t take offence if I am being too simplistic in my explanation as I don’t know you or your experience.
Also this is my own interpretation and understanding.
Antibodies can be envisaged as a Y.
The ends of the two angled arms are what bind to the antigen protein.
Whilst the angle where they meet and the top part of the vertical line is called the hinge.
The bottom of the vertical line is the common region.
There are families of antibodies which are defined by differences in the common region, i.e. the common region is only common across the same family, for example IgG all have the same common region.
An antibody can only bind to one antigen using the tips of the arms of the Y, thus all antibodies created in response to a vaccine are effectively clones of each other.
IgG is the family involved in preventing viruses from infecting host cells by physically attaching to the part of the virus that is used to bind to a receptor on the host cell, for SARS-CoV-2 this is the spike protein that attaches to the ACE2 receptor on the host cell.
Within each IgG family group there are four different classes that can develop IgG1, IgG2, IgG3, IgG4
Each of these classes have the same common region as they are all IgG. They all have the same binding regions as they are part of the same group against a specific antigen. The difference is in the length of the hinge region.
Thus if IgG1 binds to the spike protein then an IgG4 that has arisen through class switching from that IgG1 will still bind to the spike protein.
The difference between IgG1 and IgG4 therefore is more subtle in that it doesn’t affect the action of the antibody itself but it does affect the general immune response. IgG1 tends to be inflammatory whilst IgG4 appears to be anti inflammatory. Inflammation is good for a short period of time, however long term inflammation is not good. This suggests that IgG1 class switching to IgG4 is a mechanism to prevent hyper inflammation.
The symptoms associated with SARS-CoV-2 or influenza infection are in the upper respiratory tract, where IgA antibodies dominate, whilst the vaccine generates an IgG antibody response which predominates in the lower respiratory tract. Thus a short incubation period pathogen that enters via the upper respiratory tract must always produce symptoms as the vaccine induced immune response requires infection in the lower respiratory tract. Or am I mistaken?
Does infection in the upper respiratory tract trigger an IgA immune response with associated memory cells?
Measles infection is a persistent infection, I still have active antibodies 50 years after the disease.
I’m a little confused about measles and rubella, again the immune response to the vaccine is in the bloodstream and associated areas whereas the primary site of infection is the URT. Even allowing for the long incubation period surely there can still be URT symptoms. I know that children are infectious two or three days prior to the measles rash developing, although they feel and look unwell which I presume is indicative of an inflammatory response. Does this apply to children who are vaccinated and are exposed to the virus?
All these puzzles and contradictions (including the fact that going through the full course of diseases like measles chicken pox and mumps *unvaccinated* tend to confer several benefits later in life) leads me to speculate that the germ theory model is not quite the right lens to view these conditions with.
Our conception of what virii are is due for revision in the next few years. Thinking of them in the same vein as bacteria is a sloppy and unjustified carryover of 19th century germ theory concepts.
Another reason for elimiantion being highly unlikely is the virus having been found in non-human reservoirs, namely farm and wild mammals.
check: https://doi.org/10.2903/j.efsa.2023.7822
It doesn't look measles will ever be eradicated by vaccines https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8053748/ and worse, the incomplete, TEMPORARY, humoral response only 'immunity' the vaccines give is compromising herd immunity.
Be a responsible scientist for once and stop regurgitating TV biology.
If you factor in possible iatrogenesis in people who have bad long term outcomes from vaccinations, they only sane policy must be to make them OPTIONAL and NEVER MANDATED.
Having a diverse, multi- rather than monoculture of both vaxed and unvaxxed is also great for both control studies and herd protection.
Calls to jab every last person are neither scientifically nor ethically justified. This is simply a remnant of mid-20th century medical paternalism which has more into something far worse in the 21st: medical fascism in service of corporate agendas.
I’m reading that China is experiencing a massive wave of Covid infections after dropping their zero covid policies. It would be interesting to have a model that shows the difference between “getting it over with” vs stretching it out over years. It should incorporate the cost of the lockdown policies. I have no opinion as to what would be shown, but it seems that just about everyone has had it. And it continues. I just had a long planned dinner party cancelled due to covid.
They dropped zero covid _LITERALLY_ overnight because it simply didn't work and made things worse.
It tells you this was all a cynical ploy by the CCP to justify increased control and surveillance of the population. Similarly minded control freaks in western countries jumped on China's example to indulge in the same power tripping exercises.
excellent discussion of the efficacy of Ab for prevention viral infections
Paul,
I know it is in you, come on. Just say it - https://outsidein51.substack.com/p/pro-vaccine-safety-in-2023-where
Medical Calculus is real.
Wouldn't it be more accurate to talk about the latent period (the period from the time of infection to the time of becoming infectious) instead of the incubation period (the period between exposure to an infection and the appearance of the first symptoms)?
So complicated, yet considering incubation period as the prime driver of eradication dynamics is elegantly simple. Thanks.
You mention diseases we could eliminate by vaccination, however, I think this would mean that most of the population would have to be vaccinated to become immune.
Based on what we have learned from COVID, when the next novel virus emerges will we be equipped to recognize and limit the spread before it becomes a pandemic?
Unfortunately if it’s another respiratory virus then limiting the spread maybe difficult. Don’t forget that the influenza pandemics in the middle of last century occurred despite the lack of mass air travel.
The 1918 pandemic was spread by returning soldiers from WWI. This was known at the time, but it was politically impossible to stop. I’m pretty sure politics played a role in the worldwide spread of covid. My thoughts on Chinese behavior border on conspiracy theory, so I’ll keep quiet until more is known.
Suffice to say, there’s evidence they hid the problem for several months. In their defense, there’s no evidence they knew what they were dealing with the first couple of months. But they definitely withheld reporting for at least a month after they sequences the bug. And punished whistleblowers.
The name Spanish flu was used, but it wasn’t Spain that was the source, that was a redirection.