Previous articles in this series:
Assaying Entropy II: Dying During Covid
Assaying Entropy III: Thinking about Covid
Assaying Entropy IV: Covid and America
Assaying Entropy VI: Democracy in America
Assaying Entropy VII: American democracy
Assaying Entropy VIII: Education in America
The validation of a personal, individualistic point of view in American culture to the exclusion of an objective, shared, and collective perspective constantly puts us at odds with one another because individuals normally disagree in judgement, interpretations, and opinions. How, then, do we deal with cases where one can be simply wrong, with mistakes and errors, or is everything individual opinion? For example, how do we explain that two plus two are not five?
Arithmetic
Pressed for an answer most people say that we are taught that two and two make four. That answer expresses all our individual experience of learning addition, but it doesn’t explain anything except that there was more rote memory than understanding in teaching and learning arithmetic.
Our collective understanding of arithmetic is quite different. Universally, as far as I know, people dealt with quantity by focusing on the units which make up a quantity and out of that focus invented counting. A counting system begins with “one” defined as the first of a sequence which is created by “adding” another one to it (and so on), that operation of adding being the counting or the progression along the sequence. The number system is created by these two definitions: of a unit and of an operation using that unit. Each number in the sequence is in turn defined by its place in that sequence. When you count up to two, following the definitions, you get two So 2+2 is 1+1+1+1, which is the definition of four, not five. It’s all definitional and rational (but there is no reason to it), and it all works in a rigid system once you accept the primary definitions of unity and the operation of adding as counting.
Because of American education’s turn towards subjectivity, we have had a flood of studies about student subjectivity regarding mathematics in an attempt to boost performance: whether students like or dislike mathematics depends on the public image of math as difficult, cold, abstract, etc. or depends on the anxiety and fear of being wrong or depends on family attitudes or depends on gender expectation etc. I’ve not found any study that suggests, as I am suggesting here, that educational theories themselves play a role in diminishing the understanding of mathematics. As a system, mathematics violates our mythology of the free individual. Its rigidity compromises our mistaken notion of democracy as an expression of individual will, and we too easily perceived it as authoritarian [metaphors are easily formed and mistaken for reality].
Writing
In contrast, language seems a totally open system. We can say opposite meanings with the very same words; for example, blacks use the word “nigger” in a positive sense, which is just a social example of our common use of irony to reverse meaning. Language use includes conditional speaking, that is, speaking “as if” in a non-real world, which is what all poetry, novels, fictions are. Words have associated meanings, public as well as private, that often undermine their literal meaning or their intended meaning. They have connotations that derive from historical meanings not even conscious to the user. Words are mostly metaphoric, transferring fluidly from one area of use to another and carrying always a load of implications. Language is so messy that a whole school of philosophy in England in the last century wanted rational discussion to use only symbolic logic, a mathematical language.
However, for several centuries, people using European languages have tried to rationalize language, first by discovering (inventing) grammatical structure in native languages and then by isolating words as nuggets of meaning and then trying to fix those meanings in dictionaries (Johnson’s dictionary on the English language being published only two decades before the American War of Independence). In American education, we taught this rationalized concept of language as writing. We generally ignored oral speech since we hegemonically assumed everyone spoke and understood English. The school’s task was reading and writing as a rational pursuit; that is, teaching universal spelling, standardized grammar, discursive paragraph formation (lead sentence and all that), and an outline form for over-all organization leading to a conclusion. And, its practical task was to make written language useful; so it taught a plain, functional, clear, univalent style.
But that idea of a rational written language recedes as we speak. Professional writing (business, law, science, academia, journalism, etc.) still adheres to those normal standards, but we are generally more and more going back (with variations) to an oral basis of writing. Subjectivity in the schools fed into the internet to produce forms more adaptable to quick, self-positioning utterances of opinion. Public discussions, even when conducted in standard language forms of writing, have become simply round-robin statements of opinions, having given up the engagement of discussions. Some comments to my postings clearly demonstrate the inability or the lack of desire to engage – that is to take into account what I say, my argument, reasons, examples, citations, etc. – and a propensity to proclaim a position, regardless of relevancy. This kind of writing, I think, produces a different kind of reading or a misreading, as texts are simply scanned for positions and filtered by a pro-or-con binary. This habit of misreading makes impossible the traditional use of writing to transmit knowledge.
Reading
I have in mind as an example of this misreading a submitted comment which I did not publish because it was off-topic, a source of misinformation, and simply a discussion of me rather than what I wrote. However, the writer wanted to demonstrate once again that he is right that the mRNA vaccines for Covid are dangerous by referencing a recently published study: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciimmunol.ade2798. The writer describes this study in this way: “It’s about multiple mRNA shots and how they basically destroy the immune system, permanently giving it the wrong tool for the job whenever it encounters a coronavirus.”
However, the 23 German researchers and authors of this study do not seem to agree with the comment writer. Their very first sentence (the theme sentence) upholds the use of the vaccine: “RNA vaccines are efficient preventive measures to combat the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic.” They nowhere suggest that the process they discovered “destroy[s] the immune system”; though, it is a study of a particular mechanism of the immune system, the antibody called immunoglobulin G4 (“IgG4,” subclass 4 of class G of the globs of proteins the immune system produces to float about the blood in order to capture all kinds of foreign matter or pathogens that can cause you harm).
Repeated encounters with the vaccine, and with the SARS-CoV-2 virus itself, seems to cause an increase of IgG4 in the blood (by a process called class switching), which both increases the avidity with which IgG4 counters the virus but also decreases the way in it can envelope the virus to inactivate it later during an infection. The specific mechanisms of how IgG4 functions are unknown, but the team concluded that their work on the levels of IgG4 over long periods of time and repeated encounters was important for the timing of boosters, for future development of mRNA vaccines for SARS-CoV-2 virus and other viruses.
Nothing in this study supports the thesis that mRNA vaccines destroy our immune system and should not be used. Just the opposite, it aimed to discover the mechanism by which the vaccine’s effectiveness wanes or does not wane over time and through interactions with the immune system. It furthers understanding of how the vaccine does its job, and it concludes that the findings will help time booster shots.
The commenter says he is qualified but doesn’t say what he is qualified to do. His misunderstanding of the study puts that qualification in doubt. What caused this misreading?
Misreading
First, I seriously doubt that the commenter’s misreading is his own thought because this article has been cited on the internet by anti-vaccine people as proof of a relation between mRNA vaccines and a new type of disease being studied called IgG4 related diseases. His mistaken understanding suggests that he took a position before he even heard of the study, found the reference in his biased reading, and cited it to me (possibly) without reading it. If what the commenter says is his personal understanding, then I wonder if the reason he misunderstands is that he hasn’t even read the article. Even if you skip large parts of the study, you can’t miss the first sentence or the conclusion, which are not written in an opaque, technical language. Either way, there is no indication that he actually read the study.
Second, the claim that mRNA vaccines are related to IgG4 related diseases is itself unreliable since, while high levels of IgG4 are one of the characteristics of these diseases, it has not been shown to be a cause. The association between vaccines and this disease, therefore, has yet to be established and then researched. Suggesting a possible relationship is reasonable, but claiming obliquely, as the commenter does, that it is a fact is nonsense.
We can’t tell if the nonsense originates with the commenter or with his irresponsible sources, but clearly, the study does not show the vaccine to destroy the immune system. In fact, the study shows some positive effects of an increase in IgG4 levels: increased avidity in binding competition with spike proteins thus reducing Covid infections and increased anti-inflammatory functions thus possibly reducing the cytocline storms that often strike patients of Covid. The immune system is complicated and works in mysterious ways we know very little about, and the commenter’s misreading (or non-reading) seems based on a simplistic, binary politicization of the vaccine and not on a rational reading of the text.
For a good, understandable review of this research article in the context of the vaccine controversy see https://medium.com/microbial-instincts/controversial-igg4-study-on-mrna-vaccine-efficacy-what-it-means-clinically-617a1c3b93d1. Compare this thorough, point by point, and competent reading of the research paper with our commenter’s aggressive, opinionated, accusative global assertion, all apparently based on an upside-down reading or a possible no-reading of his own source. The comparison will show the problem of entropy and loss that an overblown sense of individuality can engender in our culture and society. Every article this commenter has cited to make his point in the past has also been completely misread and mis-characterized; so, this seems to be his way of reading and understanding.
Non-reading and non-writing
Can it be that the conjunction of all three forces we have been thinking about (capitalism, militarism, and subjectivity in the classroom) – whatever their inherent value – has brought us to a place where, in fact, one need not read something to feel that one has the right to discourse on it? When I started teaching, plagiarism was being commercialized by the sale of crib books, short summaries of long books that gave students who couldn’t and didn’t read primary texts enough information to write passing essays on them. Today, that business not only is much, much larger, much, much more commonly used by students, and more invasive (in that it is not confined to crib books but expanded on the internet to other “aids” including the writing of complete papers or software for generating your own “personalized” essays). But what if the crib writer also doesn’t read the primary text?
The internet makes research so much easier and accessible that it has made “experts” of us all. But while democratizing knowledge, it is also a machine of replication – like every corporate enterprise. As a result, our individual knowledge that is internet based is an illusory crib that is the same as everyone else’s individual crib because that knowledge is based on hear-says circulating in the culture. Our only escape is to read primary documents ourselves and think about what we read.
Now that computers write essays, those essays are independent of reading and analyzing primary texts but are dependent wholly on scanning what is said about any topic and using artificial intelligence to piece together words on the basis of their probability of use in writings about that subject, that is, dependent on hear-say. In using an AI based software program for writing, you can choose not just your topic, but the position you take on that topic, the style of writing, etc., but the product comes from massive compilations of what other people have written on the topic, other people’s styles, other people’s viewpoints, and not on thought. So, the writing program gives you “choice,” that feeling of individual liberation, all the time that it is substituting other people’s words for your thought, and, of course, there is no guarantee that those people know what they are talking about. The next step, of course, is to imitate the machine imitating people and also write without thinking (“non-writing”). That seems to be where we are.
I keep asking whether a collective consciousness can survive in this environment.
It’s a relief to find Kyle joining the discussion by demonstrating that he has read the report on antibodies and giving his reasons for his interpretation of it.
Yes, we do disagree. The passage he quotes does not translate to “this is bad and we need to look into it.” The authors of the study make no judgments. Not knowing exactly how the increase in this type of antibody functions in the very complex and largely unknown immune system, they merely say that there is a decrease in a certain function of that system (the enveloping of the virus by phagocytes). But they and we do not know if that decrease is harmful to the person. I mention this decrease when I said that the increased levels of the antibody under investigation both increase and decrease the anti-pathogenic activity, and I associated this phenomenon with the waning of the vaccine’s effectiveness.
This is only to say that the researchers report an objective finding: that this particular antibody is increased in the blood under certain conditions of repetition. They do not attribute “good” or “bad” to the phenomenon, and their continued support of vaccination suggests they are hardly alarmed by their findings.
Kyle leaps to judgment, and this article does not form a base for that leap.
As for his suggestion that there is an issue about science itself, he is right that the subject needs introduction. I had already prepared the next installment to be about science, and I will post that essay this evening or tomorrow.
By the way, memory T cells do not last very long individually; though T cells as a collective have long memories.
I need to make a second reply to Kyle because I do not want to leave the reader with his misrepresentations of everything he reads. He seems extremely fanciful in embellishment. His little historical account of the religious persecution of the 17th century scientist Otto von Guericke for his invention of the vacuum pump is shorn of all reality. First, von Guericke was a devout Christian. Second, the problem of nothingness was much discussed at the time and before (e.g., Shakespeare’s little joke title “Much Ado About Nothing”), and he was preceded in the vacuum studies by Pascal in France and Torricelli in Italy. Third, the idea that nature abhorred a vacuum and that the creation was of “plenitude,” i.e., filled with something rather than nothing, was Aristotle’s, and it dominated European thinking for thousands of years, long before Christianity. Fourth, far from being censored, von Guericke was promoted by an Archbishop and published first in an appendix to a book on hydraulics and pneumatics by the Friar Gaspar Schott who taught at the Jesuit college of Wuerburg, and von Guericke himself published a retrospective of all his works a few years later.
So much for the tale Kyle tells of suppression and censorship. I don’t doubt at all that von Guericke met with opposition among both Catholics and Protestants (this was during the Thirty Years War), but von Guericke did not get suppressed. Nor do I doubt that the Church (both Catholic and Protestant) censored. But that does not make this tale any more truthful. It’s all like a Walt Disney version of history.
As for censorship of objective science today, Kyle refers us to Twitter. I assume he refers to the fact that he was banned from posting on Twitter. Since everything he has submitted to the Citizen has been full of misinformation, I assume that the Twitter ban was an objection to that. But I don’t know. I know only that what Kyle writes, at least to the Citizen, is not science, so I fail to see that ban as an example of scientific discussion being censored.
Kyle seems to have a commendable appreciation of science, yet he violates science’s basic premise, that one finds out what is what empirically, i.e., through experiments. I doubt that Kyle has run experiments with vaccinated and unvaccinated people to ascertain empirically the effects of the vaccine. If he has, he has not shared the data. Scientifically, that is the only way of knowing. Instead, he misreads and then misrepresents scientific articles. He seems to have reverted to the pre-science days of philosophical argument; except he doesn’t even sustain an argument, asserting his misreadings as truths.
His method of what I called “non-writing” is again evident in this comment when he gratuitously references the article in Time Magazine reporting Dr. Paul Offit’s opinion piece in the New England Journal of Medicine. Dr. Offit’s article is a reasonable suggestion that we use the original vaccine rather than the new bivalent booster because the bivalent booster is not demonstrably much better than the vaccine in preventing infection and more importantly in preventing serious Covid illness and death. He makes a sound argument that the vaccine companies should stop chasing and never being able to catch up with new variants of the virus. How this article support’s Kyle’s thesis that vaccines are “bad” for us, is unclear to me since Kyle keeps on with his “non-writing,” never arguing but just asserting truths. This is not discussion.
In your reply you quote a sentence – RNA vaccines are efficient preventative measures to combat the SARS-CoV—2 pandemic.
Yet
Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Germany, France, Iceland and India all have some sort of restriction w/Moderna or Pfizer vaccine.
Astra Zeneca Covid2 vaccine was completely taken off the market.
The African continent barely has any RNA vaccines and amazingly enough it barely has any cases or deaths from Covid2
Countries are presently saying there are issues and we have to stop and look at it – yet the United States is blindly following the advice of our corrupted healthcare system
The sentence you quoted and the reality of our world contradict one another
Janine Small, (Pfizer representative) told the EU parliament in October 2022 that Pfizer had never done any studies at all to see whether or not the vaccine prevented transmission.
And
The only testing done with the boosters is on less than 10 mice
In other words there have been no tests on humans – there is no way to know whether or not these vaccines are good for us or not or whether they actually help people recover from Covid.
For anyone to make a declarative statement in any way whatsoever is misinformation
And this also includes you Max.
Thanks, Susan, for commenting and continuing the discussion. But I don’t know if I understand you. I did declare that the authors of the study that I was discussing wrote the sentence I quoted. Are you saying my saying that they said that is misinformation? If you follow the link to that article, you will see that my quote was accurate. It is what they wrote. So I don’t know how I misinformed you. If you mean that those authors, 23 German immunologists, misinformed you, then that is something you will have to take up with them.
Misinformation is an important issue in public discourse. Let me look at your declarations to see if they are useful information or misinformation.
Your statement about restrictions of vaccine use in the Nordic countries, Germany and France is partly true and partly false. The restrictions were specifically about the Moderna vaccine and not about the Pfizer vaccine: https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/sweden-pauses-use-moderna-covid-vaccine-cites-rare-side-effects-2021-10-06/. And, after the announcement in Denmark, the government said they made a mistake in the announcement: https://www.cnbc.com/2021/10/08/nordic-countries-are-restricting-the-use-of-modernas-covid-vaccine.html. All those countries, in fact, changed from Moderna to Pfizer, and Denmark said that they favored using Pfizer anyway. So the restrictions had to do with Moderna’s vaccine — and not mRNA vaccines generally — possibly harming young people. A couple of months later (and you have to always keep up with scientific research), the European Medicine Agency, which handles all the permitting for the EU, looked over all the studies these countries submitted and reported on Moderna’s safety issue: https://www.ema.europa.eu/en/documents/covid-19-vaccine-safety-update/covid-19-vaccine-safety-update-spikevax-previously-covid-19-vaccine-moderna-9-december-2021_en.pdf. And last month the Agency cleared Moderna for use with children above the age of 6 years: https://www.ema.europa.eu/en/medicines/human/EPAR/spikevax. The risk among young males (the affected group) of heart problems having been found to be about 1 in 10,000, and those problems more recently having been found to clear themselves within months. Long term effects are, of course, still a problem. But I think the way you claim that your information is fact is not a picture of reality but a picture of everyone’s concern for safety which is constantly being addressed and worked on.
Your second piece of information seems to me to have nothing to do, however, with the safety of mRNA vaccines. AstraZeneca pulled out of the market because it could not compete with Moderna and Pfizer: https://www.fiercepharma.com/pharma/astrazeneca-withdraws-us-covid-vaccine-application-focus-shifts-antibody-treatments.
Your third declaration, about Africa, doesn’t seem to me to relate to the truth of the quoted statement. The statement doesn’t say that vaccination is the only way to combat the SAR CoV 2 virus. Africa use Chinese vaccines, which are not mRNA, and it uses quarantine, social distancing, masking, etc., none of which we seem to want to use; so, for us, the vaccine is the most efficient thing to do, and while there are always concerns, as there always are, thousands of researchers work all the time on them. I think their work deserves some consideration, like the words of the immunologists I quoted.
You next say that Pfizer never tested their vaccine for transmission. That seems true. But you seem to think that is a failing and shows that the vaccine is dangerous or undesirable. I think you miss what we all wanted at that time, which is to stop the serious cases of Covid and the deaths. The vaccine was formulated to address that need, and it was approved to serve those ends. It was an emergency, and transmission was not an aim. Once, the vaccine was rolled out, however, studies almost immediately showed that transmission was reduced: https://www.reuters.com/article/factcheck-pfizer-vaccine-transmission/fact-check-preventing-transmission-never-required-for-covid-vaccines-initial-approval-pfizer-vax-did-reduce-transmission-of-early-variants-idUSL1N31F20E.
You lastly declare that the booster was authorized without testing in humans. That seems to be a terrible thing, but it is common practice. For example, we have flu vaccines every year for a new variant. They are never tested on people because the basic vaccine has been tested and the new vaccine only changes the target. This time-saving procedure turns out to be safe. Therefore, new mRNA booster booster, which was identical to an earlier booster that had been tested on humans except for the target, was thought not to need time consuming testing. That decision seems to have been correct since monitoring after effects continue and boosters have a relatively low risk factor for serious complications: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9345177/.
I agree that declarations need to be judged as to their level of reality, but I also think that the reality is more complicated and more changing than the reality you are declaring.
Thanks.
:
Thank you, Kyle for clarifying what you said earlier. I understand your first sentence to say that your translation of the sentence from that article about decreased phagocytic activity as “bad” was, as I claimed, a leap. And you think that leap is justified by your other readings. I called this a misreading since you admit that what you said was not what authors said. You added to what they said, introduced a value judgment which was not theirs. You then attributed your version to them. It’s this attribution that I object to because it disrespects them as researchers who know what they can and cannot conclude. If you made an argument that the vaccine was “bad,” using this study as evidence of increased IgG4 and then other articles to relate that elevation to actual mechanisms of harm, then that would be properly using their findings, but saying that the authors were saying “this is bad,” is a misrepresentation of their work.
I think you and I have a different idea of what “understanding” means. I think to understand some text is, among other things, figuring out what the author intends. There are other understandings too that the text says but the author does not intend but is unaware of. Further, there are texts that can be construed to represent an era or a class point of view. All these are essentially external and objective readings. You seem to think understand is your private take on the text’s meaning; that is, you pull it out of the objective world into your own orbit of experience and feelings and attitudes. You use this text to affirm some ideological position about the vaccine, which is not the intent of the article. As I pointed out several times, the authors want the text to validate proper vaccine usage, not to get rid of vaccines. I will be discussing the difference in “reading” and “understanding” in an essay.
As for qualifications, I said several times in my essays that I don’t think one needs qualifications to participate in a public discussion about public policy. I already said that I am not qualified to meddle in an experts’ debate about Ivermectin. I will extend that to say that I am not qualified to meddle in experts’ debates about most medical subjects. That doesn’t mean I’m not qualified to talk about medicine. The issue in discussion is always how you use your knowledge to make sense. That has nothing to do with whether you are qualified to practice some public activity. You obviously have a lot more knowledge than I about Covid, but so far you’ve not made a single effort to use that knowledge to formulate an argument. Why have you never critiqued the articles I link to, as I have yours? That is, I engage with what you say, and you seem to ignore what I say except to disagree. Disagreement is not helpful. If you cannot critically read an article that disputes your evidence, you’ve not considered the value of your own evidence. If you cannot analyze and respond point by point reasonably some text your read, you will be unable to do the same objectification on your own thoughts and writing, which means you are not being responsible for your writing. In all your thinking about the vaccine, do you not test your ideas against what the experts say? Or, do you just look for agreement by misrepresenting what experts actually say by only hearing your own voice in their place?
It is unfortunate you misunderstood my comment.
As you were explaining how and why I am misinformed you very clearly explained various changes Nordic countries have enacted regarding mRNA vaccines – which was exactly my point – other countries are re-evaluating their guidelines – whether it is Moderna OR Pfizer.
Research is presently being done regarding myocarditis in males, increased blood clotting/strokes in 65+ yo’s, changing menstruation with females and possible connections to miscarriages – even if each and every negative side effect clears itself up within months everyone effected now has a preexisting condition.
As you point out time will tell, for now we have no idea how these issues will be effecting them or any of us in 2 years, 10 years or 50 years.
When President Donald J Trump chose to fast track the mRNA technology for a Covid vaccine it had never been done successfully before. There is no prior hx of mRNA vaccines being safe to rely upon – without President Trump fast tracking this technology we would more then likely not be using it today.
The technology we use for the flu vaccine has been used for over a century. In the past new vaccines would take anywhere from 5 to 10 years and sometimes longer to assess whether a vaccine is safe and efficacious in clinical trials. And, yes human trials were part of the process until President Trump decided it was unnecessary.
Prior to President Trumps decision to bypass over a century of knowledge and understanding our country defined a vaccine as;
a product that stimulates a person’s immune system to produce immunity to a specific disease, protecting the person from that disease
To;
A preparation that is used to stimulate the body’s immune response against diseases.
Prior to President Trump’s administration choosing to bypass our well worn, tried and true methods we NEVER had an mRNA vaccine make it through the entire FDA approval process – Never Ever.
You state we never expected this vaccine to stop transmission yet there are many examples of representatives of our government, media persons and Dr Fauci himself stating vaccinated people become dead ends for COVID-19.
I believe we did expect this vaccine to stop transmission especially since we were told we had to take it to protect others.
But my main point in my original comment was:
Declarative statements such as
RNA vaccines are efficient preventative measures to combat the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic –
should not be made, in my opinion.
Too much information is contradictory, too many scientists and doctors are disagreeing with Pfizer & Moderna’s assertions to make the declaration the authors of the article made and you repeat.
And that was the one and only point and I thank you for making it for me.
Yes, I did misunderstand your point. Thanks, for explaining. There is and has been a disconnect between the people who are working on the Covid problems (all sorts) and the public. Since every medical journal has opened up its publications to the public, there is a flood of scientific information (too much for us to digest, as you say). Furthermore, since we are eager to learn what is happening many of us read too much without considering that the nature of scientific investigation is through very narrowly focused experiments with pretty small aims. We, on the other hand, want answers to larger questions.
But finding out about something entirely new requires that kind of tiny and tentative steps. And, as I tried to say in “Assaying Entropy X,” science confronting the unknown is always, necessarily, controversial, argued over, and tentative. But this problem is not entirely of our choosing, since the virus is new. It’s messy, but it has to be that way to have empirical credibiity.
As for the newness of the RNA virus, it is true that we’ve never had a commercial version in use, but it has been worked on for forty years. I agree with you that choosing to depend on technology to solve the pandemic was a fateful decision. I think it was done because as a culture we (Trump included) believe that technical innovation will always save the day, no matter what the problem is. That is a corporate mindset we all adopt.
Still, that is the solution we took, and although there are constant concerns and although people will be harmed by it (we already know that, and it is readily admitted by all–we just don’t know how or why or to what extent), still all the statistics show that the NRA vaccines have saved many, many lives, many more than have been harmed. There are many studies that show that benefit, but you can just go back to when we were spiking up the big spike a few years ago and see how the rollout of the vaccine brought that spike dramatically down. What is concerning for me, is that for whatever reason, we are getting way over 100,000 deaths a year. While the research goes on about all kinds of causes for that, I don’t see the people generally taking very many precautions or trying to reduce those deaths in their individual lives. What I do see is a lot of people knocking what has been relatively successful.
As for transmission, I don’t remember what the pundits were saying. I only remember that all the studies I read was about effectiveness in preventing serious illness and death. It always seemed to me that transmission would take place to some extent after vaccination, and I wrote a piece about that in the Sun. But, you are right that many people thought that vaccination would prevent transmission, since I was criticized for saying that the vaccinated would be getting ill and would be carrying. But that was not logical to me. Just think: if the vaccine is not 100% effective in preventing contagion (and it is far from it), then there will be lots of vaccinated people catching Covid and thereby transmitting it. On transmission, you also have to consider that the vaccine did reduce transmission, so that it is true that getting vaccinated prevented other people from dying.
I agree with your statement science confronting the unknown is always necessarily controversial, argued over and tentative.
Except this time there is an abundance of evidence that while President Trump was attempting to deal with the newness of COVID-19 people within his administration/our government and multinational corporations took the opportunity to quash dissenting voices and force consent of the masses.
The Great Barrington Declaration was blacklisted, the GBD was written by well-known scientist, doctors and experts in various fields, including Dr. Robert Malone, the Nobel prize winner who discovered mRNA technology, Dr. Robert Malone and others felt strongly mRNA technology was not appropriate to use for a vaccine against COVID-19.
This paper also strongly advised against lockdowns.
People who put their name to the Great Barrington Declaration and peoples who were brave enough to give alternative suggestions were mocked and ridiculed – some lost their jobs, their good names were attacked, their years of knowledge and work discarded.
People were mandated to take a vaccine that has a questionable origin story, the pharmaceutical companies developing it either have no history in the development of vaccines (Moderna) or have a history of deceiving the public and paying massive fines (Pfizer).
People lost their jobs, lost their homes, some people had to stop their education, hospitals fired medical personnel, our military discharged people, w/o benefits – All of these people lost because they were questioning the narrative and the efficacy surrounding COVID-19 and the vaccines.
The fourth estate is expected to keep an eye on government and corporations to bring a light to the dirty dark secrets.
Now we have a fourth estate that can’t remember Rachel Maddow declaring forcefully and repeatedly that because of the vaccine Covid-19 would be stopped dead in its tracks.
Or President Biden saying it will be a pandemic of the unvaccinated.
They can’t remember the many times Dr Fauci changed his mind about masks, changed his mind about how many people would have to be vaccinated for herd immunity, and they especially can’t remember that he said the vaccine would stop the spread.
In order for our country and our world to move forward we must start holding those in power accountable.
I have seen people working for various news agencies – newspapers, social media, MSM, Etc – people in positions of authority go out of their way to prove a random person wrong about something they said regarding COVID-19 – yet they cannot look back and see what those in positions of actual authority said and did.
Information about the vaccines, the Wuhan lab, our NIH, CDC, and the FDA and their actions is changing daily, new information is always being added, old information is frequently contradicted.
We need somebody in the fourth estate actually willing to do their job which is to hold those accountable to account.
It seems somehow or another some people thought that might be you. Who knows maybe it is, at this point it is up to you.
The fourth estate should be doing what you say, Susan, but unfortunately it has its own agenda in its relation to power and its own economic needs. In general, that is part of the problem I’ve been talking about so abstractly: our conflicted and ambiguous culture. Can I address, though, just one of the issues you bring up, the Great Barrington Declaration (GBD)?
The GBD was issued in October, 2020, only about seven months into the epidemic here. Its authors were Drs. Martin Kolldorff, Sunetra Gupta, and Jay Bhattacharya. [I don’t see Dr. Robert Malone’s name on the document, though he may have been one of the almost a million co-signers.] At that time, we (collectively) knew very little about the disease. We had no really tested medicine. We had no vaccines. Our only means of avoiding huge numbers of deaths was some form of isolation (masks, keeping away from others, isolation, quarantine) with unknown degrees of effectiveness. Furthermore, the health system seemed to be in shambles because of mistakes made even before the existence of the SARS CoV-2 virus.
[Among these errors of judgment is Trump’s public health transition team’s failure even to appear at their scheduled meeting with Obama’s public health transition team in order to be briefed on the state of the system. Another mistake was our apparent dismissal of the World Health Organization’s warning to all national health services to prepare for the probable appearance of a new virus. This was a few months before the discovery of the SARS CoV-2 virus, and it was accompanied with a check list of administrative restructurings that would allow rapid identification, testing, remediation, etc. We, apparently, did nothing. These mistakes include, disastrously, the strange delay in testing in this country: while China had publicly described the virus’s genetic code so that Germany almost immediately was able to create a RT-PCR test that was used world-wide, we insisted on taking several weeks to re-discover that genetic code and re-invent another RT-PCR test for it. My only hunch for why we did this is that we wanted private property rights over it. Another mistake of public health was the State Department’s insistence (against the objection of public health officials) on bringing Americans home from hot spots around the world. Instead of protecting the borders, we imported the virus deliberately and spread it geographically so that it could not be spatially contained. Some of the first cases in California, Utah, and Hawaii were traced back to the cruise ship Grand Princess.]
All this is to say that the authors of the GBD were operating mostly in the dark and in a chaotic emergency situation. Their suggestions, which I considered appropriate scientific exploration, must be understood to be essentially hypothetical and theoretical. At the time, I thought their ideas were hopelessly flawed. The base idea was to accelerate the epidemic through to its final stage of herd immunity. This idea sounds reasonable. But since we had at that time no medicine and no vaccines, accelerating the epidemic only meant accelerating the deaths because you get through to herd immunity only by going through herd infection unless you can prevent infection.
The authors knew that, too; thus, their subsidiary idea was to isolate the vulnerable. This, too, sounds reasonable. But think about it: who are the vulnerable? Individually, we have no idea who they are. We only know that statistically certain groups are more at risk. Now, the GBD suggests that we isolate the elderly. The authors even suggest that food be delivered to the isolated (imprisoned?) elderly. Is this some kind of joke? There are over 65 million people in the US over 65, and they do not all live in one city (like Wuhan). We are going to lock-down 65 million people in an area the size of the US and provide them with food, drink, health services, etc.,? Then there are the homeless. We will build housing for them to quarantine in? I like that, but then they aren’t free to wander about. That’s not the half of the impossibility of this reasonable idea because we have other groups that are vulnerable (and they crisscross each other), the already sick, the economically disadvantaged, racial groups, etc. They all get isolated? Is there anyone else? Only the white, prosperous, healthy young are left. The GBD was an attempt to avoid lockdown, but it turns out to be super-lockdown.
And finally there is the power problem, isn’t there? Who has the power to draw the boundaries of these isolated (locked down) groups? Who is to say that the risk (since vulnerability in this declaration is all statistical and not individually real) of a 65 year old person is greater than a person born 24 hours later? Why, the white, prosperous, healthy young will say.
The GBD was flawed as a policy recommendation and, I think, rightly rejected. But it had very positive influences. It brought collateral damage to table of policy discussion; that is, it established a wide range of physical and mental and economic and educational damage that were inevitable consequences of lockdown. But it’s all history.
Its authors have moved on since the vaccine, and all support the use of vaccines. Vaccines have done the acceleration they wanted, even if the vaccine’s immunity wanes faster than natural immunity. You can hear Dr. Martin Kulldorff on vaccines beginning about halfway through this interview: https://www.ihmc.us/stemtalk/episode-132/. And Dr. Sunetra Gupta, who works on vaccines, here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rbXxvK1j_DA. Dr. Gupta says that while the vaccine does not stop transmission (which we know), the protection that the vaccine provides against death and serious illness makes moot the issue of transmission. Dr. Jay Bhattacharya said that the initial safety studies for the mRNA vaccines were impeccable and showed effectiveness but were insufficient in size. That was true and a valid criticism. However, now that over a hundred million shots have been given, the evidence should suffice.
Yes, it has been a trying and confusing time, but I don’t think we could have expected anything other than that.
Addendum (1/28/2023): As for Dr. Robert Malone, he seems to be a bit of a chameleon. His website used to say that he was the inventor of mRNA vaccines. Now it uses scare quotes and claims only that he is the “inventor” of mRNA vaccines. He keeps on his website his initial Global Covid Summit Declaration (which has been falsely marketed as being signed by 17,000 doctors who are against using the vaccine), which is not anti-vaccine. It makes only three statements: 1) that children should not be required to be vaccinated; 2) that those who have had Covid should not be required to be vaccinated; and 3) doctors be allowed to use off-label drugs. These are not anti-vaccine statements. However, his most recent update to this Declaration (less easily found on his site) is rabid anti-vaccination and without the accompanying references that the original Declaration had.
I have no idea what he thinks. Here is an article about him:
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2021/08/robert-malone-vaccine-inventor-vaccine-skeptic/619734/. He, by the way, was vaccinated.